two page essay

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PART TH R E E

TESTING THE NEW NATION

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1820–1877

The Civil War of 1861 to1865 was the awesome trial by fire of American nationhood, and of the American soul. All Ameri- cans knew, said Abraham Lincoln, that slavery “was somehow the cause of this war.” The war tested, in Lincoln’s ringing phrase at Gettysburg, whether any nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal . . . can long endure.” How did this great and bloody conflict come about? And what were its results?

American slavery was by any measure a “peculiar institution.” Slavery was rooted in both racism and economic exploitation, and depended for its survival on brutal repression. Yet the American slave population was the only enslaved population in history that grew by means

of its own biological repro- duction—a fact that sug- gests to many historians that conditions under slav- ery in the United States were somehow less puni- tive than those in other slave societies. Indeed a distinctive and durable African-American culture managed to flourish under slavery, further suggesting that the slave regime pro- vided some “space” for African-American cultural development. But how- ever benignly it might be painted, slavery still remained a cancer in the

heart of American democracy, a moral outrage that mocked the nation’s claim to be a model of social and political enlightenment. As time went on, more and more voices called more and more stridently for its abolition.

The nation lived uneasily with slavery from the outset. Thomas Jefferson was only one among many in the founding generation who felt acutely the conflict between the high princi- ple of equality and the ugly reality of slavery. The federal government in the early Republic took several steps to check the growth of slavery. It banned slavery in the Old Northwest in 1787, prohibited the further importation of slaves after 1808, and declared in the Missouri Compro- mise of 1820 that the vast western territories secured in the Louisiana Purchase were forever closed to slavery north of the state of Missouri. Antislavery sentiment even abounded in the South in the immediate post-Revolutionary years. But as time progressed, and especially after Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s, the south- ern planter class became increasingly dependent on slave labor to wring profits from the sprawling plan- tations that carpeted the South. As cotton cultivation spread westward, the South’s stake in slavery grew deeper, and the abolitionist outcry grew louder.

The controversy over slavery significantly inten- sified following the war with Mexico in the 1840s. “Mexico will poison us,” predicted the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he proved distressingly prophetic. The lands acquired from Mexico—most of the present-day American Southwest, from Texas to California—reopened the question of extending slavery into the western territories. The decade and a half following the Mexican War—from 1846 to

1861—witnessed a series of ultimately ineffec- tive efforts to come to grips with that question, including the ill-starred Compromise of 1850, the conflict-breeding Kansas- Nebraska Act of 1854, and the Supreme Court’s inflammatory decision in the Dred Scott case of 1857. Ultimately, the slavery question was set- tled by force of arms, in the Civil War itself.

The Civil War, as Lincoln observed, was assuredly about slavery. But as Lincoln also repeatedly insisted, the war was about the viabil- ity of the Union as well and about the strength of democracy itself. Could a democratic government, built on the principle of

popular consent, rightfully deny some of its citizens the same right to independence that the American revolutionaries had exercised in seceding from the British Empire in 1776? Southern rebels, calling the conflict “The War for Southern Independence,” asked that question forcefully, but ultimately it, too, was answered not in the law courts or in the legisla- tive halls but on the battlefield.

The Civil War unarguably established the supremacy of the Union, and it ended slavery as well. But as the victorious Union set about the task of “reconstruction” after the war’s end in 1865, a combination of weak northern will and residual southern power frustrated the goal of making the emancipated blacks full-fledged American citizens. The Civil War in the end brought nothing but free- dom—but over time, freedom proved a powerful tool indeed.

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350

16

The South and the Slavery Controversy

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1793–1860

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1841

A t the dawn of the Republic, slavery faced anuncertain future. Touched by Revolutionary idealism, some southern leaders, including Thomas Jefferson, were talking openly of freeing their slaves. Others predicted that the iron logic of economics would eventually expose slavery’s unprofitability, speeding its demise.

But the introduction of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1793 scrambled all those predictions. Whitney’s invention made possible the wide-scale cultivation of short-staple cotton. The white fiber rapidly became the dominant southern crop, eclipsing tobacco, rice, and sugar. The explosion of cotton cultivation created an insatiable demand for labor, chaining the slave to the gin, and the planter to the slave. As the nineteenth century opened, the rein- vigoration of southern slavery carried fateful impli- cations for blacks and whites alike—and threatened the survival of the nation itself.

“Cotton Is King!’’

As time passed, the Cotton Kingdom developed into a huge agricultural factory, pouring out avalanches of the fluffy fiber. Quick profits drew planters to the vir- gin bottomlands of the Gulf states. As long as the soil was still vigorous, the yield was bountiful and the rewards were high. Caught up in an economic spiral, the planters bought more slaves and land to grow more cotton, so as to buy still more slaves and land.

Northern shippers reaped a large part of the profits from the cotton trade. They would load bulging bales of cotton at southern ports, transport them to England, sell their fleecy cargo for pounds sterling, and buy needed manufactured goods for sale in the United States. To a large degree, the pros- perity of both North and South rested on the bent backs of southern slaves.

The Cotton Empire 351

Cotton accounted for half the value of all Ameri- can exports after 1840. The South produced more than half of the entire world’s supply of cotton—a fact that held foreign nations in partial bondage. Britain was then the leading industrial power. Its most important single manufacture in the 1850s was cotton cloth, from which about one-fifth of its population, directly or indirectly, drew its liveli- hood. About 75 percent of this precious supply of fiber came from the white-carpeted acres of the South.

Southern leaders were fully aware that Britain was tied to them by cotton threads, and this depend- ence gave them a heady sense of power. In their eyes “Cotton was King,’’ the gin was his throne, and the black bondsmen were his henchmen. If war should ever break out between North and South, northern warships would presumably cut off the outflow of cotton. Fiber-famished British factories would then close their gates, starving mobs would force the London government to break the block-

ade, and the South would triumph. Cotton was a powerful monarch indeed.

The Planter “Aristocracy’’

Before the Civil War, the South was in some respects not so much a democracy as an oligarchy—or a gov- ernment by the few, in this case heavily influenced by a planter aristocracy. In 1850 only 1,733 families owned more than 100 slaves each, and this select group provided the cream of the political and social leadership of the section and nation. Here was the mint-julep South of the tall-columned and white- painted plantation mansion—the “big house,’’ where dwelt the “cottonocracy.’’

The planter aristocrats, with their blooded horses and Chippendale chairs, enjoyed a lion’s share of southern wealth. They could educate their children in the finest schools, often in the North or abroad. Their money provided the leisure for study, reflection, and statecraft, as was notably true of men like John C. Calhoun (a Yale graduate) and Jefferson Davis (a West Point graduate). They felt a keen sense of obligation to serve the public. It was no accident that Virginia and the other southern states pro- duced a higher proportion of front-rank statesmen before 1860 than the “dollar-grubbing’’ North.

But even in its best light, dominance by a favored aristocracy was basically undemocratic. It widened the gap between rich and poor. It ham- pered tax-supported public education, because the

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) wrote in 1782,

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the . . . most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. . . . Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.’’

Unlike Washington, Jefferson did not free his slaves in his will; he had fallen upon distressful times.

rich planters could and did send their children to private institutions.

A favorite author of elite southerners was Sir Walter Scott, whose manors and castles, graced by brave Ivanhoes and fair Rowenas, helped them idealize a feudal society, even when many of their economic activities were undeniably capitalistic. Southern aristocrats, who sometimes staged joust- ing tournaments, strove to perpetuate a type of medievalism that had died out in Europe—or was rapidly dying out.* Mark Twain later accused Sir Walter Scott of having had a hand in starting the Civil War. The British novelist, Twain said, aroused the southerners to fight for a decaying social struc- ture—“a sham civilization.’’

The plantation system also shaped the lives of southern women. The mistress of a great plantation commanded a sizable household staff of mostly female slaves. She gave daily orders to cooks, maids, seamstresses, laundresses, and body servants. Rela- tionships between mistresses and slaves ranged from affectionate to atrocious. Some mistresses showed tender regard for their bondswomen, and some slave women took pride in their status as “members’’ of the household. But slavery strained even the bonds of womanhood. Virtually no slave- holding women believed in abolition, and relatively

few protested when the husbands and children of their slaves were sold. One plantation mistress har- bored a special affection for her slave Annica but noted in her diary that “I whipt Annica’’ for insolence.

Slaves of the Slave System

Unhappily, the moonlight-and-magnolia tradition concealed much that was worrisome, distasteful, and sordid. Plantation agriculture was wasteful, largely because King Cotton and his money-hungry subjects despoiled the good earth. Quick profits led to excessive cultivation, or “land butchery,’’ which in turn caused a heavy leakage of population to the West and Northwest.

The economic structure of the South became increasingly monopolistic. As the land wore thin, many small farmers sold their holdings to more prosperous neighbors and went north or west. The big got bigger and the small smaller. When the Civil War finally erupted, a large percentage of southern farms had passed from the hands of the families that had originally cleared them.

Another cancer in the bosom of the South was the financial instability of the plantation system. The temptation to overspeculate in land and slaves caused many planters, including Andrew Jackson in

352 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

*Oddly enough, by legislative enactment, jousting became the official state sport of Maryland in 1962.

his later years, to plunge in beyond their depth. Although the black slaves might in extreme cases be fed for as little as ten cents a day, there were other expenses. The slaves represented a heavy invest- ment of capital, perhaps $1,200 each in the case of prime field hands, and they might deliberately injure themselves or run away. An entire slave quar- ter might be wiped out by disease or even by light- ning, as happened in one instance to twenty ill-fated blacks.

Dominance by King Cotton likewise led to a dan- gerous dependence on a one-crop economy, whose price level was at the mercy of world conditions. The whole system discouraged a healthy diversification of agriculture and particularly of manufacturing.

Southern planters resented watching the North grow fat at their expense. They were pained by the heavy outward flow of commissions and interest to northern middlemen, bankers, agents, and shippers.

True souls of the South, especially by the 1850s, deplored the fact that when born, they were wrapped in Yankee-made swaddling clothes and that they spent the rest of their lives in servitude to Yankee manufacturing. When they died, they were laid in coffins held together with Yankee nails and were buried in graves dug with Yankee shovels. The South furnished the corpse and the hole in the ground.

The Cotton Kingdom also repelled large-scale European immigration, which added so richly to the manpower and wealth of the North. In 1860 only 4.4 percent of the southern population were foreign- born, as compared with 18.7 percent for the North. German and Irish immigration to the South was generally discouraged by the competition of slave labor, by the high cost of fertile land, and by Euro- pean ignorance of cotton growing. The diverting of non-British immigration to the North caused the white South to become the most Anglo-Saxon sec- tion of the nation.

The White Majority

Only a handful of southern whites lived in Grecian- pillared mansions. Below those 1,733 families in 1850 who owned a hundred or more slaves were the less wealthy slaveowners. They totaled in 1850 some 345,000 families, representing about 1,725,000 white persons. Over two-thirds of these families— 255,268 in all—owned fewer than ten slaves each. All told, only about one-fourth of white southerners owned slaves or belonged to a slaveowning family.

The smaller slaveowners did not own a majority of the slaves, but they made up a majority of the masters. These lesser masters were typically small

Problems in the Cotton South 353

Basil Hall (1788–1844), an Englishman, visited part of the cotton belt on a river steamer (1827–1828). Noting the preoccupation with cotton, he wrote,

“All day and almost all night long, the captain, pilot, crew, and passengers were talking of nothing else; and sometimes our ears were so wearied with the sound of cotton! cotton! cotton! that we gladly hailed a fresh inundation of company in hopes of some change—but alas! . . . ‘What’s cotton at?’ was the first eager inquiry. ‘Ten cents [a pound ],’ ‘Oh, that will never do!’”

1,733 own 100 or more slaves

6,196 own 50–99

29,733 own 20–49

54,595 own 10 –19

80,765 own 5–9

105,683 own 2– 4

68,820 own 1 each

Slaveowning Families, 1850 More than half of all slaveholding families owned fewer than four slaves. In contrast, 2 percent of slaveowners owned more than fifty slaves each. A tiny slaveholding elite held a majority of slave property in the South. The great majority of white southerners owned no slaves at all.

farmers. With the striking exception that their household contained a slave or two, or perhaps an entire slave family, the style of their lives probably resembled that of small farmers in the North more than it did that of the southern planter aristocracy.

They lived in modest farmhouses and sweated beside their bondsmen in the cotton fields, laboring callus for callus just as hard as their slaves.

Beneath the slaveowners on the population pyra- mid was the great body of whites who owned no

354 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

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slaves at all. By 1860 their numbers had swelled to 6,120,825—three-quarters of all southern whites. Shouldered off the richest bottomlands by the mighty planters, they scratched a simple living from the thin- ner soils of the backcountry and the mountain val-

leys. To them, the riches of the Cotton Kingdom were a distant dream, and they often sneered at the lordly pretensions of the cotton “snobocracy.’’ These red- necked farmers participated in the market economy scarcely at all. As subsistence farmers, they raised

The Spread of the Slave Power 355

Distribution of Slaves, 1820 The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, a New Englander, declared in 1856, “I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute a state. I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom.’’

Distribution of Slaves, 1860

corn and hogs, not cotton, and often lived isolated lives, punctuated periodically by extended socializ- ing and sermonizing at religious camp meetings.

Some of the least prosperous nonslaveholding whites were scorned even by slaves as “poor white trash.’’ Known also as “hillbillies,’’ “crackers,’’ or “clay eaters,’’ they were often described as listless, shiftless, and misshapen. Later investigations have revealed that many of them were not simply lazy but sick, suffering from malnutrition and parasites, especially hookworm.

All these whites without slaves had no direct stake in the preservation of slavery, yet they were among the stoutest defenders of the slave system. Why? The answer is not far to seek.

The carrot on the stick ever dangling before their eyes was the hope of buying a slave or two and of parlaying their paltry holdings into riches—all in accord with the “American dream’’ of upward social mobility. They also took fierce pride in their pre- sumed racial superiority, which would be watered down if the slaves were freed. Many of the poorer whites were hardly better off economically than the slaves; some, indeed, were not so well-off. But even the most wretched whites could take perverse comfort from the knowledge that they outranked someone in status: the still more wretched African- American slave. Thus did the logic of economics join with the illogic of racism in buttressing the slave system.

In a special category among white southerners were the mountain whites, more or less marooned in the valleys of the Appalachian range that stretched from western Virginia to northern Georgia and Alabama. Civilization had largely passed them by, and they still lived under spartan frontier condi- tions. They were a kind of living ancestry, for some of them retained Elizabethan speech forms and habits that had long since died out in Britain.

As independent small farmers, hundreds of miles distant from the heart of the Cotton Kingdom and rarely if ever in sight of a slave, these mountain whites had little in common with the whites of the flatlands. Many of them, including future president Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, hated both the haughty planters and their gangs of blacks. They looked upon the impending strife between North and South as “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.’’

When the war came, the tough-fibered moun- tain whites constituted a vitally important penin- sula of Unionism jutting down into the secessionist

Southern sea. They ultimately played a significant role in crippling the Confederacy. Their attachment to the Union party of Abraham Lincoln was such that for generations after the Civil War, the only con- centrated Republican strength in the solid South was to be found in the southern highlands.

Free Blacks: Slaves Without Masters

Precarious in the extreme was the standing of the South’s free blacks, who numbered about 250,000 by 1860. In the upper South, the free black population traced its origins to a wavelet of emancipation inspired by the idealism of Revolutionary days. In the deeper South, many free blacks were mulattoes, usually the emancipated children of a white planter and his black mistress. Throughout the South were some free blacks who had purchased their freedom with earnings from labor after hours. Many free blacks owned property, especially in New Orleans, where a sizable mulatto community prospered. Some, such as William T. Johnson, the “barber of Natchez,’’ even owned slaves. He was the master of fifteen bondsmen; his diary records that in June 1848 he flogged two slaves and a mule.

The free blacks in the South were a kind of “third race.’’ These people were prohibited from working in certain occupations and forbidden from testifying against whites in court. They were always vulnerable to being highjacked back into slavery by unscrupulous slave traders. As free men and women, they were walking examples of what might be achieved by emancipation and hence were

356 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

“Arthur Lee, Freeman,” petitioned the General Assembly of Virginia in 1835 for permission to remain in the state despite a law against the residency of free blacks. After asserting his upstanding moral character, he implored,

“He therefore most respectfully and earnestly prays that you will pass a law permitting him on the score of long and meritorious service to remain in the State, together with his wife and four children, and not force him in his old age to seek a livelihood in a new Country.”

Free Blacks and Enslaved Blacks 357

resented and detested by defenders of the slave system.

Free blacks were also unpopular in the North, where about another 250,000 of them lived. Several states forbade their entrance, most denied them the right to vote, and some barred blacks from public schools. In 1835 New Hampshire farmers hitched their oxen to a small schoolhouse that had dared to enroll fourteen black children and dragged it into a swamp. Northern blacks were especially hated by the pick-and-shovel Irish immigrants, with whom they competed for menial jobs. Much of the agita- tion in the North against the spread of slavery into the new territories in the 1840s and 1850s grew out of race prejudice, not humanitarianism.

Antiblack feeling was in fact frequently stronger in the North than in the South. The gifted and elo- quent former slave Frederick Douglass, an aboli- tionist and self-educated orator of rare power, was several times mobbed and beaten by northern row- dies. It was sometimes observed that white south- erners, who were often suckled and reared by black nurses, liked the black as an individual but despised the race. The white northerner, on the other hand, often professed to like the race but disliked individ- ual blacks.

Plantation Slavery

In society’s basement in the South of 1860 were nearly 4 million black human chattels. Their num- bers had quadrupled since the dawn of the century, as the booming cotton economy created a seem- ingly unquenchable demand for slave labor. Legal importation of African slaves into America ended in 1808, when Congress outlawed slave imports. But the price of “black ivory’’ was so high in the years before the Civil War that uncounted thousands of blacks were smuggled into the South, despite the death penalty for slavers. Although several were captured, southern juries repeatedly acquitted them. Only one slave trader was ever executed, N. P. Gordon, and this took place in New York in 1862, the second year of the Civil War. Yet the huge bulk of the increase in the slave population came not from imports but instead from natural reproduction—a fact that distinguished slavery in America from other New World societies and that implied much about the tenor of the slave regime and the condi- tions of family life under slavery.

Above all, the planters regarded the slaves as investments, into which they had sunk nearly

$2 billion of their capital by 1860. Slaves were the primary form of wealth in the South, and as such they were cared for as any asset is cared for by a pru- dent capitalist. Accordingly, they were sometimes, though by no means always, spared dangerous work, like putting a roof on a house. If a neck was going to be broken, the master preferred it to be that of a wage-earning Irish laborer rather than that of a prime field hand, worth $1,800 by 1860 (a price that had quintupled since 1800). Tunnel blasting and swamp draining were often consigned to itinerant gangs of expendable Irishmen because those per- ilous tasks were “death on niggers and mules.’’

Slavery was profitable for the great planters, though it hobbled the economic development of the region as a whole. The profits from the cotton boom sucked ever more slaves from the upper to the lower South, so that by 1860 the Deep South states of South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana each had a majority or near-majority of blacks and accounted for about half of all slaves in the South.

Breeding slaves in the way that cattle are bred was not openly encouraged. But thousands of blacks from the soil-exhausted slave states of the Old South, especially tobacco-depleted Virginia, were “sold down the river’’ to toil as field-gang laborers on the cotton frontier of the lower Missis- sippi Valley. Women who bore thirteen or fourteen babies were prized as “rattlin’ good breeders,’’ and some of these fecund females were promised their freedom when they had produced ten. White mas- ters all too frequently would force their attentions on female slaves, fathering a sizable mulatto popu- lation, most of which remained enchained.

Slave auctions were brutal sights. The open sell- ing of human flesh under the hammer, sometimes

358 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

with cattle and horses, was among the most revolt- ing aspects of slavery. On the auction block, families were separated with distressing frequency, usually for economic reasons such as bankruptcy or the division of “property’’ among heirs. The sundering of families in this fashion was perhaps slavery’s greatest psychological horror. Abolitionists de- cried the practice, and Harriet Beecher Stowe seized on the emotional power of this theme by putting it at the heart of the plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Life Under the Lash

White southerners often romanticized about the happy life of their singing, dancing, banjo- strumming, joyful “darkies.’’ But how did the slaves actually live? There is no simple answer to this ques- tion. Conditions varied greatly from region to

region, from large plantation to small farm, and from master to master. Everywhere, of course, slav- ery meant hard work, ignorance, and oppression. The slaves—both men and women—usually toiled from dawn to dusk in the fields, under the watchful eyes and ready whip-hand of a white overseer or black “driver.’’ They had no civil or political rights, other than minimal protection from arbitrary mur- der or unusually cruel punishment. Some states offered further protections, such as banning the sale of a child under the age of ten away from his or her mother. But all such laws were difficult to enforce, since slaves were forbidden to testify in court or even to have their marriages legally recognized.

Floggings were common, for the whip was the substitute for the wage-incentive system and the most visible symbol of the planter’s mastery. Strong- willed slaves were sometimes sent to “breakers,’’ whose technique consisted mostly in lavish laying

Life Under Slavery 359

In 1852, Maria Perkins, a woman enslaved in Virginia, wrote plaintively to her husband about the disruption that the commercial traffic in slaves was visiting upon their family:

“I write you a letter to let you know of my distress my master has sold albert to a trader on Monday court day and myself and other child is for sale also and I want you to let hear from you very soon before next cort if you can I dont know when I dont want you to wait till Christmas I want you to tell Dr Hamelton and your master if either will buy me they can attend to it know and then I can go after-wards I dont want a trader to get me they asked me if I had got any person to buy me and I told them no they took me to the court houste too they never put me up a man buy the name of brady bought albert and is gone I dont know whare they say he lives in Scottesville my things is in several places some is in staunton and if I should be sold I dont know what will become of them I dont expect to meet with the luck to get that way till I am quite heart sick nothing more I am and ever will be your kind wife Maria Perkins.”

on of the lash. As an abolitionist song of the 1850s lamented,

To-night the bond man, Lord Is bleeding in his chains; And loud the falling lash is heard On Carolina’s plains!

But savage beatings made sullen laborers, and lash marks hurt resale values. There are, to be sure, sadistic monsters in any population, and the planter class contained its share. But the typical planter had too much of his own prosperity riding on the backs of his slaves to beat them bloody on a regular basis.

By 1860 most slaves were concentrated in the “black belt’’ of the Deep South that stretched from South Carolina and Georgia into the new southwest states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. This was the region of the southern frontier, into which the explosively growing Cotton Kingdom had burst in a few short decades. As on all frontiers, life was

often rough and raw, and in general the lot of the slave was harder here than in the more settled areas of the Old South.

A majority of blacks lived on larger plantations that harbored communities of twenty or more slaves. In some counties of the Deep South, espe- cially along the lower Mississippi River, blacks accounted for more than 75 percent of the popula- tion. There the family life of slaves tended to be rela- tively stable, and a distinctive African-American slave culture developed. Forced separations of spouses, parents, and children were evidently more common on smaller plantations and in the Upper South. Slave marriage vows sometimes proclaimed, “Until death or distance do you part.’’

With impressive resilience, blacks managed to sustain family life in slavery, and most slaves were raised in stable two-parent households. Continuity of family identity across generations was evidenced in the widespread practice of naming children for grandparents or adopting the surname not of a current master, but of a forebear’s master. African- Americans also displayed their African cultural roots when they avoided marriage between first cousins, in contrast to the frequent intermarriage of close rel- atives among the ingrown planter aristocracy.

360 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

Examining the Evidence 361

Bellegrove Plantation, Donaldsville, Louisiana, Built 1857 The sugar-growing Bellegrove Planta- tion—on the banks of the Mississippi River ninety- five miles north of New Orleans—was laid out on a grander scale than many southern plantations. In this rendering from an advertisement for Belle- grove’s sale in 1867, the planter John Orr’s home was identified as a “mansion” and quarters for his field hands proved extensive: twenty double- cabins built for slaves, now for “Negroes,” and a dormitory, described in the ad but not pictured here, housing one hundred and fifty laborers. Because of the unhealthy work involved in cultivat- ing sugar cane, such as constant digging of drainage canals to keep the cane from rotting in standing water, many planters hired immigrant— usually Irish—labor to keep their valuable slaves out of physical danger. The presence of a hospital between the slave cabins and the mansion indi-

cates the very real threat to health. The layout of Bellegrove reflects the organization of production as well as the social relations on a sugar plantation. The storehouse where preserved sugar awaited shipping stood closest to the Mississippi River, the principal transportation route, whereas the sugar house, the most important building on the planta- tion with its mill, boilers, and cooking vats for con- verting syrup into sugar, dominated the cane fields. Although the “big house” and slave quarters stood in close proximity, hedges surrounding the planter’s home shut out views of both sugar pro- duction and labor. Within the slave quarters, the overseer’s larger house signified his superior status, while the arrangement of cabins ensured his super- vision of domestic as well as work life. What else does the physical layout of the plantation reveal about settlement patterns, sugar cultivation, and social relationships along the Mississippi?

African roots were also visible in the slaves’ reli- gious practices. Though heavily Christianized by the itinerant evangelists of the Second Great Awaken- ing, blacks in slavery molded their own distinctive religious forms from a mixture of Christian and African elements. They emphasized those aspects of the Christian heritage that seemed most pertinent to their own situation—especially the captivity of the Israelites in Egypt. One of their most haunting spirituals implored,

Tell old Pharaoh “Let my people go.’’

And another lamented,

Nobody knows de trouble I’ve had Nobody knows but Jesus

African practices also persisted in the “responsorial’’ style of preaching, in which the congregation fre- quently punctuates the minister’s remarks with assents and amens—an adaptation of the give-and- take between caller and dancers in the African ring- shout dance.

The Burdens of Bondage

Slavery was intolerably degrading to the victims. They were deprived of the dignity and sense of responsibility that come from independence and the right to make choices. They were denied an edu- cation, because reading brought ideas, and ideas brought discontent. Many states passed laws for- bidding their instruction, and perhaps nine-tenths of adult slaves at the beginning of the Civil War were totally illiterate. For all slaves—indeed for virtually all blacks, slave or free—the “American dream’’ of bettering one’s lot through study and hard work was a cruel and empty mockery.

Not surprisingly, victims of the “peculiar institu- tion’’ devised countless ways to throw sand in its gears. When workers are not voluntarily hired and adequately compensated, they can hardly be expected to work with alacrity. Accordingly, slaves often slowed the pace of their labor to the barest minimum that would spare them the lash, thus fos- tering the myth of black “laziness’’ in the minds of whites. They filched food from the “big house’’ and pilfered other goods that had been produced or purchased by their labor. They sabotaged expensive

equipment, stopping the work routine altogether until repairs were accomplished. Occasionally they even poisoned their master’s food.

The slaves also universally pined for freedom. Many took to their heels as runaways, frequently in search of a separated family member. A black girl, asked if her mother was dead, replied, “Yassah, mas- sah, she is daid, but she’s free.’’ Others rebelled, though never successfully. In 1800 an armed insur- rection led by a slave named Gabriel in Richmond, Virginia, was foiled by informers, and its leaders were hanged. Denmark Vesey, a free black, led another ill-fated rebellion in Charleston in 1822. Also betrayed by informers, Vesey and more than thirty followers were publicly strung from the gal- lows. In 1831 the semiliterate Nat Turner, a visionary black preacher, led an uprising that slaughtered about sixty Virginians, mostly women and children. Reprisals were swift and bloody.

The dark taint of slavery also left its mark on the whites. It fostered the brutality of the whip, the bloodhound, and the branding iron. White south- erners increasingly lived in a state of imagined siege, surrounded by potentially rebellious blacks inflamed by abolitionist propaganda from the North. Their fears bolstered an intoxicating theory of biological racial superiority and turned the South into a reactionary backwater in an era of progress— one of the last bastions of slavery in the Western world. The defenders of slavery were forced to degrade themselves, along with their victims. As Booker T. Washington, a distinguished black leader and former slave, later observed, whites could not hold blacks in a ditch without getting down there with them.

Early Abolitionism

The inhumanity of the “peculiar institution’’ gradually caused antislavery societies to sprout forth. Abolition- ist sentiment first stirred at the time of the Revolution, especially among Quakers. Because of the widespread loathing of blacks, some of the earliest abolitionist efforts focused on transporting the blacks bodily back to Africa. The American Colonization Society was founded for this purpose in 1817, and in 1822 the Republic of Liberia, on the fever-stricken West African coast, was established for former slaves. Its capital, Monrovia, was named after President Monroe. Some

362 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

fifteen thousand freed blacks were transported there over the next four decades. But most blacks had no wish to be transplanted into a strange civilization after having become partially Americanized. By 1860 virtually all southern slaves were no longer Africans, but native-born African-Americans, with their own distinctive history and culture. Yet the colonization idea appealed to some antislaveryites, including Abraham Lincoln, until the time of the Civil War.

In the 1830s the abolitionist movement took on new energy and momentum, mounting to the pro- portions of a crusade. American abolitionists took heart in 1833 when their British counterparts unchained the slaves in the West Indies. Most impor- tant, the religious spirit of the Second Great Awaken- ing now inflamed the hearts of many abolitionists against the sin of slavery. Prominent among them was lanky, tousle-haired Theodore Dwight Weld, who had been evangelized by Charles Grandison Finney in New York’s Burned-Over District in the 1820s. Self- educated and simple in manner and speech, Weld appealed with special power and directness to his rural audiences of untutored farmers.

Spiritually inspired by Finney, Weld was materi- ally aided by two wealthy and devout New York mer- chants, the brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan. In 1832 they paid his way to Lane Theological Semi- nary in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was presided over by the formidable Lyman Beecher, father of a remarkable brood, including novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, reformer Catharine Beecher, and preacher-abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher. Expelled along with several other students in 1834 for organ- izing an eighteen-day debate on slavery, Weld and his fellow “Lane Rebels’’—full of the energy and ide- alism of youth—fanned out across the Old North- west preaching the antislavery gospel. Humorless and deadly earnest, Weld also assembled a potent propaganda pamphlet, American Slavery As It Is (1839). Its compelling arguments made it among the most effective abolitionist tracts and greatly influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Ardent Abolitionists 363

(Slavery prohibited by Ordinance of 1787)

OLD NORTHWEST

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE, 1803

SLAVE STATES

PA. 1780 N.J.

1804

N.Y. 1799

N.H. 1783

MASS. 1780

MASS. 1780

CONN. 1784

R.I. 1784

1777 VT.

By state constitution

By state statutes in force (gradual emancipation)

Early Emancipation in the North

Radical Abolitionism

On New Year’s Day, 1831, a shattering abolitionist blast came from the bugle of William Lloyd Garri- son, a mild-looking reformer of twenty-six. The emotionally high-strung son of a drunken father and a spiritual child of the Second Great Awakening, Garrison published in Boston the first issue of his militantly antislavery newspaper The Liberator. With this mighty paper broadside, Garrison triggered a thirty-year war of words and in a sense fired one of the opening barrages of the Civil War.

Stern and uncompromising, Garrison nailed his colors to the masthead of his weekly. He proclaimed in strident tones that under no circumstances would he tolerate the poisonous weed of slavery but would stamp it out at once, root and branch:

I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompro- mising as justice. . . . I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I WILL BE HEARD!

Other dedicated abolitionists rallied to Garri- son’s standard, and in 1833 they founded the Ameri- can Anti-Slavery Society. Prominent among them was Wendell Phillips, a Boston patrician known as “abolition’s golden trumpet.’’ A man of strict princi- ple, he would eat no cane sugar and wear no cotton cloth, since both were produced by southern slaves.

Black abolitionists distinguished themselves as living monuments to the cause of African-American freedom. Their ranks included David Walker, whose incendiary Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829) advocated a bloody end to white supremacy. Also noteworthy were Sojourner Truth, a freed black woman in New York who fought tire- lessly for black emancipation and women’s rights, and Martin Delaney, one of the few black leaders to take seriously the notion of mass recolonization of Africa. In 1859 he visited West Africa’s Niger Valley seeking a suitable site for relocation.

364 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

The greatest of the black abolitionists was Fred- erick Douglass. Escaping from bondage in 1838 at the age of twenty-one, he was “discovered’’ by the aboli- tionists in 1841 when he gave a stunning impromptu speech at an antislavery meeting in Massachusetts. Thereafter he lectured widely for the cause, despite frequent beatings and threats against his life. In 1845 he published his classic autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. It depicted his remark- able origins as the son of a black slave woman and a white father, his struggle to learn to read and write, and his eventual escape to the North.

Douglass was as flexibly practical as Garrison was stubbornly principled. Garrison often appeared to be more interested in his own righteousness than in the substance of the slavery evil itself. He repeat- edly demanded that the “virtuous’’ North secede from the “wicked’’ South. Yet he did not explain how the creation of an independent slave republic would bring an end to the “damning crime’’ of slavery. Renouncing politics, on the Fourth of July, 1854, he publicly burned a copy of the Constitution as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell’’ (a phrase he borrowed from a Shaker condemnation of marriage). Critics, including some of his former supporters, charged that Garrison was cruelly prob- ing the moral wound in America’s underbelly but offering no acceptable balm to ease the pain.

Douglass, on the other hand, along with other abolitionists, increasingly looked to politics to end

The Abolitionist Crusade 365

Frederick Douglass (1817?–1895), the remarkable ex-slave, told of Mr. Covey, a white owner who bought a single female slave “as a breeder.’’ She gave birth to twins at the end of the year.

“At this addition to the human stock Covey and his wife were ecstatic with joy. No one dreamed of reproaching the woman or finding fault with the hired man, Bill Smith, the father of the children, for Mr. Covey himself had locked the two up together every night, thus inviting the result.’’

After hearing Frederick Douglass speak in Bristol, England, in 1846, Mary A. Estlin wrote to an American abolitionist,

“[T]here is but one opinion of him. Wherever he goes he arouses sympathy in your cause and love for himself. . . . Our expectations were highly roused by his narrative, his printed speeches, and the eulogisms of the friends with whom he has been staying: but he far exceeds the picture we had formed both in outward graces, intellectual power and culture, and eloquence.”*

*From Clare Taylor, ed., British and American Abolitionists, An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh University Press, 1974), p. 282.

the blight of slavery. These political abolitionists backed the Liberty party in 1840, the Free Soil party in 1848, and eventually the Republican party in the 1850s. In the end, most abolitionists, including even the pacifistic Garrison himself, followed out the logic of their beliefs and supported a frightfully costly fratricidal war as the price of emancipation.

High-minded and courageous, the abolitionists were men and women of goodwill and various col- ors who faced the cruel choice that people in many ages have had thrust upon them: when is evil so enormous that it must be denounced, even at the risk of precipitating bloodshed and butchery?

The South Lashes Back

Antislavery sentiment was not unknown in the South, and in the 1820s antislavery societies were more numerous south of the Mason-Dixon line* than north of it. But after about 1830, the voice of white southern abolitionism was silenced. In a last gasp of southern questioning of slavery, the Virginia legislature debated and eventually defeated various emancipation proposals in 1831–1832. That debate marked a turning point. Thereafter all the slave states tightened their slave codes and moved to pro- hibit emancipation of any kind, voluntary or com- pensated. Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 sent a wave of hysteria sweeping over the snowy cotton fields, and planters in growing numbers slept with pistols by their pillows. Although Garrison had no demon- strable connection with the Turner conspiracy, his Liberator appeared at about the same time, and he was bitterly condemned as a terrorist and an inciter of murder. The state of Georgia offered $5,000 for his arrest and conviction.

The nullification crisis of 1832 further im- planted haunting fears in white southern minds, conjuring up nightmares of black incendiaries and abolitionist devils. Jailings, whippings, and lynch- ings now greeted rational efforts to discuss the slav- ery problem in the South.

Proslavery whites responded by launching a massive defense of slavery as a positive good. In

doing so, they forgot their own section’s previous doubts about the morality of the “peculiar institu- tion.’’ Slavery, they claimed, was supported by the authority of the Bible and the wisdom of Aristotle. It was good for the Africans, who were lifted from the barbarism of the jungle and clothed with the bless- ings of Christian civilization. Slavemasters did indeed encourage religion in the slave quarters. A catechism for blacks contained such passages as,

Q. Who gave you a master and a mistress? A. God gave them to me. Q. Who says that you must obey them? A. God says that I must.

White apologists also pointed out that master- slave relationships really resembled those of a fam- ily. On many plantations, especially those of the Old South of Virginia and Maryland, this argument had a certain plausibility. A slave’s tombstone bore this touching inscription:

JOHN: A faithful servant:

and true friend: Kindly, and considerate: Loyal, and affectionate: The family he served Honours him in death: But, in life they gave him love: For he was one of them

Southern whites were quick to contrast the “happy’’ lot of their “servants’’ with that of the over- worked northern wage slaves, including sweated women and stunted children. The blacks mostly toiled in the fresh air and sunlight, not in dark and stuffy factories. They did not have to worry about slack times or unemployment, as did the “hired hands’’ of the North. Provided with a jail-like form of Social Security, they were cared for in sickness and old age, unlike northern workers, who were set adrift when they had outlived their usefulness.

These curious proslavery arguments only widened the chasm between a backward-looking South and a forward-looking North—and indeed much of the rest of the Western world. The south- erners reacted defensively to the pressure of their own fears and bristled before the merciless nagging of the northern abolitionists. Increasingly the white South turned in upon itself and grew hotly intoler- ant of any embarrassing questions about the status of slavery.

366 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

*Originally the southern boundary of colonial Pennsylvania.

Regrettably, also, the controversy over free peo- ple endangered free speech in the entire country. Piles of petitions poured in upon Congress from the antislavery reformers, and in 1836 sensitive south- erners drove through the House the so-called Gag Resolution. It required all such antislavery appeals to be tabled without debate. This attack on the right of petition aroused the sleeping lion in the aged ex- president, Representative John Quincy Adams, and he waged a successful eight-year fight for its repeal.

Southern whites likewise resented the flooding of their mails with incendiary abolitionist literature. Even if blacks could not read, they could interpret the inflammatory drawings, such as those that showed masters knocking out slaves’ teeth with clubs. In 1835 a mob in Charleston, South Carolina, looted the post office and burned a pile of abolition- ist propaganda. Capitulating to southern pressures, the Washington government in 1835 ordered south- ern postmasters to destroy abolitionist material and called on southern state officials to arrest federal postmasters who did not comply. Such was “freedom of the press’’ as guaranteed by the Constitution.

The Abolitionist Impact in the North

Abolitionists—especially the extreme Garrisoni- ans—were for a long time unpopular in many parts of the North. Northerners had been brought up to

revere the Constitution and to regard the clauses on slavery as a lasting bargain. The ideal of Union, hammered home by the thundering eloquence of Daniel Webster and others, had taken deep root, and Garrison’s wild talk of secession grated harshly on northern ears.

The North also had a heavy economic stake in Dixieland. By the late 1850s, the southern planters owed northern bankers and other creditors about $300 million, and much of this immense sum would be lost—as, in fact, it later was—should the Union dissolve. New England textile mills were fed with cot- ton raised by the slaves, and a disrupted labor sys- tem might cut off this vital supply and bring unemployment. The Union during these critical years was partly bound together with cotton threads, tied by lords of the loom in collaboration with the so- called lords of the lash. It was not surprising that strong hostility developed in the North against the boat-rocking tactics of the radical antislaveryites.

Repeated tongue-lashings by the extreme aboli- tionists provoked many mob outbursts in the North, some led by respectable gentlemen. A gang of young toughs broke into Lewis Tappan’s New York house in 1834 and demolished its interior, while a crowd in the street cheered. In 1835 Garrison, with a rope tied around him, was dragged through the streets of Boston by the so-called Broadcloth Mob but escaped almost miraculously. Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy, of Alton, Illinois, not content to assail slavery, im- pugned the chastity of Catholic women. His printing

White Southerners on the Defensive 367

press was destroyed four times, and in 1837 he was killed by a mob and became “the martyr abolition- ist.’’ So unpopular were the antislavery zealots that ambitious politicians, like Lincoln, usually avoided the taint of Garrisonian abolition like the plague.

Yet by the 1850s the abolitionist outcry had made a deep dent in the northern mind. Many citi-

zens had come to see the South as the land of the unfree and the home of a hateful institution. Few northerners were prepared to abolish slavery out- right, but a growing number, including Lincoln, opposed extending it to the western territories. Peo- ple of this stamp, commonly called “free-soilers,’’ swelled their ranks as the Civil War approached.

368 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

C h r o n o l o g y

1793 Whitney’s cotton gin transforms southern economy

1800 Gabriel slave rebellion in Virginia

1808 Congress outlaws slave trade

1817 American Colonization Society formed

1820 Missouri Compromise

1822 Vesey slave rebellion in Charleston Republic of Liberia established in Africa

1829 Walker publishes Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World

1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion in Virginia Garrison begins publishing The Liberator

1831- Virginia legislature debates slavery and 1832 emancipation

1833 British abolish slavery in the West Indies American Anti-Slavery Society founded

1834 Abolitionist students expelled from Lane Theological Seminary

1835 U.S. Post Office orders destruction of abolitionist mail

“Broadcloth Mob’’ attacks Garrison

1836 House of Representatives passes “Gag Resolution”

1837 Mob kills abolitionist Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois

1839 Weld publishes American Slavery As It Is

1840 Liberty party organized

1845 Douglass publishes Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

1848 Free Soil party organized

VA R Y I N G VIEWPOINTS

What Was the True Nature of Slavery?

By the early twentieth century, the predictableaccounts of slavery written by partisans of the North or South had receded in favor of a romantic vision of the Old South conveyed through popular literature, myth, and, increasingly, scholarship. That vision was persuasively validated by the publication of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips’s landmark study, Ameri- can Negro Slavery (1918). Phillips made three key

arguments. First, he claimed that slavery was a dying economic institution, unprofitable to the slaveowner and an obstacle to the economic devel- opment of the South as a whole. Second, he con- tended that slavery was a rather benign institution and that the planters, contrary to abolitionist charges of ruthless exploitation, treated their chat- tels with kindly paternalism. Third, he reflected the

Varying Viewpoints 369

dominant racial attitudes of his time in his belief that blacks were inferior and submissive by nature and did not abhor the institution that enslaved them.

For nearly a century, historians have debated these assertions, sometimes heatedly. More sophisti- cated economic analysis has refuted Phillips’s claim that slavery would have withered away without a war. Economic historians have demonstrated that slavery was a viable, profitable, expanding economic system and that slaves constituted a worthwhile investment for their owners. The price of a prime field hand rose dramatically, even in the 1850s.

No such definitive conclusion has yet been reached in the disputes over slave treatment. Begin- ning in the late 1950s, historians came increasingly to emphasize the harshness of the slave system. One study, Stanley Elkins’s Slavery (1959), went so far as to compare the “peculiar institution” to the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. Both were “total institutions,” Elkins contended, which “infan- tilized” their victims.

More recently, scholars such as Eugene Gen- ovese have moved beyond debating whether slavery was kind or cruel. Without diminishing the depriva- tions and pains of slavery, Genovese has conceded that slavery embraced a strange form of paternal- ism, a system that reflected not the benevolence of southern slaveholders, but their need to control and coax work out of their reluctant and often recalci- trant “investments.” Furthermore, within this pater- nalist system, black slaves were able to make reciprocal demands of their white owners and to protect a “cultural space” of their own in which fam- ily and religion particularly could flourish. The crowning paradox of slaveholder paternalism was that in treating their property more humanely, slaveowners implicitly recognized the humanity of their slaves and thereby subverted the racist under- pinnings upon which their slave society existed.

The revised conceptions of the master-slave relationship also spilled over into the debate about

slave personality. Elkins accepted Phillips’s portrait of the slave as a childlike “Sambo” but saw it as a consequence of slavery rather than a congenital attribute of African-Americans. Kenneth Stampp, rejecting the Sambo stereotype, stressed the fre- quency and variety of slave resistance, both mild and militant. A third view, imaginatively docu- mented in the work of Lawrence Levine, argues that the Sambo character was an act, an image that slaves used to confound their masters without incurring punishment. Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977) shares with books by John Blassingame and Herbert Gutman an empha- sis on the tenacity with which slaves maintained their own culture and kin relations, despite the hardships of bondage. Most recently, historians have attempted to avoid the polarity of repression versus autonomy. They assert the debasing oppres- sion of slavery, while also acknowledging slaves’ ability to resist the dehumanizing effects of enslave- ment. The challenge before historians today is to capture the vibrancy of slave culture and its legacy for African-American society after emancipation, without diminishing the brutality of life under the southern slave regime.

A new sensitivity to gender, spurred by the growing field of women’s history, has also expanded the horizons of slavery studies. Historians such as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Jacqueline Jones, and Catherine Clinton have focused on the ways in which slavery differed for men and women, both slaves and slaveholders. Enslaved black women, for example, had the unique task of negotiating an identity out of their dual responsibilities as planta- tion laborer, even sometimes caretaker of white women and children, and anchor of the black fam- ily. By tracing the interconnectedness of race and gender in the American South, these historians have also shown how slavery shaped conceptions of mas- culinity and femininity within southern society, fur- ther distinguishing its culture from that of the North.

For further reading, see page A11 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.