Instead, Garrison cashiered the evangelicals. Garrison had been deeply impressed in the 1830s with the fervency and eloquence of two former South Carolina cotton heiresses, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who had been converted to abolition. Garrison promoted them as lecturers on the circuit of the local anti-slavery societies, and they brought Garrison into close contact with the new women’s rights movement and its leaders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abby Kelley, and Lydia Maria Child. These early feminists argued that a campaign to emancipate slaves could not avert its eyes from the need to emancipate American women from social conventions and legal restraints that prevented them, like the slave, from owning property and voting, and kept them altogether subservient to the interests of white males. “Woman,” declared Stanton, is “more fully identified with the slave than man can possibly be… for while the man is born to do whatever he can, for the woman and the negro there is no such privilege.” And even if women’s rights did not fall precisely within the goals of an anti-slavery society, at least that society could admit women to its membership and leadership, and allow them to bear their “subjective” testimony against slavery. But when Garrison attempted to place Abby Kelley on the business committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society at its annual meeting in May 1840, the Tappan brothers and fully half of the society’s delegates rose and withdrew. 96
Garrison was left with a rump society, and although he now had a free hand to place three feminists—Lucretia Mott, Lydia Child, and Maria Chapman—on the society’s executive committee, the American Anti-Slavery Society was never more than a shadow of what it had been in the 1830s. The Tappans, meanwhile, organized a rival anti-slavery society, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, whose constitution expressly barred women from voting in its deliberations. Many of the other leaders and followers of the abolitionists wandered off to support various schemes of “gradual emancipation” or colonization for freed blacks in Africa or the Caribbean. Colonization turned out to be a particularly popular solution to the slavery problem, since it promised to eliminate both slavery and blacks from white view. The colonizationists did not much worry about the injustice of colonizing African Americans back to a continent from which many of them were six to eight generations removed.
But the South increasingly failed to see this evidence of fragmentation, poverty, and outright resistance to abolition in the North, and ignored how easily Northerners might oppose slavery on a variety of grounds without necessarily wishing for its abolition in the South. Instead, South Carolina governor James Hamilton thrust copies of the Liberator under the noses of state legislators, claiming that Nat Turner’s revolt had been “excited by incendiary newspapers and other publications, put forth in the non-slaveholding states,” and in 1836 the legislatures of South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama formally sent to the legislatures of ten northern states requests that the publication and distribution of “newspapers, tracts, and pictorial representations, calculated and having an obvious tendency to excite the slaves of the slave states to insurrection and revolt,” be made a criminal offense, and John C. Calhoun tried to persuade Congress to prosecute any postmaster who would “knowingly receive or put into mail any pamphlet, newspaper, handbill, or any printed, written, or pictorial representation touching the subject of slavery.” 97 Never mind that no connection between Turner and Garrison was ever demonstrated—Southern pressure forced Postmaster General Amos Kendall to turn a blind eye when Southern postmasters began censoring suspicious mail and newspapers from the North.98
Because Northern state and local governments did not likewise act at once to silence the abolitionists, Southerners concluded that Northerners were actually in quiet collusion with the abolitionists to produce more Nat Turners. Throughout the 1840s and early 1850s, Southerners turned away from the Whig Party to the Democrats, convinced that the Whig programs for federal intervention in the economy were only laying the groundwork for federal tampering with slavery. The tide of Southern suspicion and Southern temper rose higher and higher, and Southerners forgot that they had ever discussed emancipating their slaves. The happiest-people-on-the-face-of-the-earth argument silenced Jefferson’s warning that the South had by the ears a wolf that it could neither master nor release. Southerners who coveted independence and liberty also found themselves extolling white men’s democracy and passing solemn resolutions that warned that “freedom of speech and press do not imply a moral right to freely discuss the subject of slavery. …” 99
Eventually, by the mid-1850s, they came to the point of claiming that the political liberties enjoyed by Northern workers were useless frauds compared to the cradle-to-grave care given by the slaveholder to the slave. “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world,” George Fitzhugh intoned yet again in 1857. “We do not know whether free laborers ever sleep,” Fitzhugh snickered; “the free laborer must work or starve,” while the slaves “enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care not labor.” The Northern worker is actually “more of a slave than the negro, because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave, and has no holiday, because the cares of life with him begin when its labors end. He has no liberty, and not a single right.” At that moment, the slaveholders ceased to be an accident within a liberal democracy and became its enemies. 100
But it was not enough for Southerners merely to justify the “positive good” of slavery in books, learned treatises, and sermons. Nat Turner had been no respecter of arguments, and so the pro-slavery defenses began to sprout demands that the federal government and the Northern states issue assurances that the abolitionists would never be allowed to tamper with what John Calhoun delicately described as the South’s “peculiar domestic institution.” Slavery became the lens through which Southerners looked at every question, the red dye that tainted every American conflict. Opposition to Henry Clay’s “American System” was not merely a matter of agrarian economic theory; it sprang from the fear that a national government capable of interfering that deeply in the structure of the economy might prove capable of interfering with slavery, too. North Carolina senator Nathaniel Macon suspected, as early as 1818, that “the passage of a bill granting money for internal improvements” would also make “possible a bill for the emancipation of the negroes,” and he “desired to put North Carolinians on their guard, and not simply North Carolinians, but all Southerners.” And one no less than John Calhoun admitted that nullification of the tariff was really only a mechanism for ensuring that the federal government would never be able to tamper with slavery.101
I consider the tariff but as the occasion, rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things. The truth can no longer be disguised, that the peculiar dome-stick institution of the Southern states, and the consequent direction, which that and her soil and climate have given to her industry, has placed them in regard to taxation and appropriation in opposite relation to the majority of the Union; against the danger of which… they must in the end be forced to rebel or submit to have their permanent interests sacrificed, their domestick institutions subverted… and themselves and children reduced to wretchedness.102
Still, Southern slaveholders need not have worried overmuch, since the Constitution had sanctioned the existence of slavery by allowing the slave states to count three-fifths of their slave populations toward the creation of federal congressional districts. (This arrangement, to the disgruntlement of the free states, effectively granted the South something like two dozen extra members of Congress, though their constituents could not vote.) “Slavery existed in the South when the constitution was framed,” declared Calhoun on the floor of the Senate in 1848, and “it is the only property recognized by it; the only one that entered into its formation as a political element, both in the adjustment of the relative weight of the States in the Government, and the apportionment of direct taxes; and the only one that is put under the express guaranty of the constitution.” William Lloyd Garr
ison found himself powerless to disagree: “It is absurd, it is false, it is an insult to the common sense of mankind, to pretend that the Constitution… or that the parties to it were actuated by a sense of justice and the spirit of impartial liberty. …”103 And when it came to choosing between abolition and the Union, Northerners were content to choose the Union.
Content, that is, until the time came for Americans to deal with the West.
At the end of the Revolution, the outward fringe of the thirteen newly independent United States stopped pretty much at the foothills of the Appalachians. But the British surrendered to the American republic complete title to all their remaining colonial lands below Canada, stretching west beyond the Appalachians to the Mississippi River. Then, in 1803, President Jefferson bought up 830,000 square miles of old Spanish land beyond the Mississippi River for the United States for $15 million in spot cash from Napoleon Bonaparte, who had finally despaired of his project to re-create a French colonial empire in America. Both the midwestern land won from the British and the western lands bought by Jefferson originally had next to nothing in the way of American settlers in them, but there was no reason any of them could not soon fill up with settlers, organize themselves as federal territories, and then petition Congress for admission to the Union as states on an equal footing with the original states.
Because the Northwest Ordinance had already barred slavery from the upper midwestern land, the territories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan all entered the Union as free states; slaveholders, skirting southward below the Ohio River, were content to organize Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Louisiana as states where slavery would remain legal. The trouble began when people started to look westward, beyond the Mississippi, where no Northwest Ordinance mandated the slave or free status of the land. Southerners anxious to keep open the way to new cotton land reasoned fearfully that if nonslaveholding Northerners squatted in the Louisiana Purchase lands and settled them as free states, the South could easily find itself barricaded in behind the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Surrounded by free states on the Mississippi and Ohio lines, and by Louisiana’s border with Spanish-held Mexico, cotton and slavery would suffocate, no matter what the Constitution said.
And so came the first of the great angry Southern demands for assurances about the future of slavery, in the form of the Missouri controversy of 1819, and with that controversy, the first in a series of threats that the slave states would leave the Union if sufficient assurances were not forthcoming. Then, and again in 1850, slaveholders would turn the Garrisonian gospel on its head and ask the rest of the United States to choose between slavery and the Union. Both times, desperate politicians would find a way to avert the choice, until finally, in 1861, the choice had to be made.
And the war came.
CHAPTER TWO
THE GAME OF BALANCES
The fatal sequence of public events in the United States that stretched from 1820 until 1861 and the outbreak of the American Civil War can be visualized as a game of balances, with the Union as the balance point along the beam, and the two trays representing the interests of North and South, slave and free. During those years, the federal Union became increasingly threatened and unstable as states or sections or interests laid the weight of their demands on one or the other of the trays and waited to see if the other states or sections or interests would produce reassurances and compromises weighty enough to right the balances.
Of all the issues that divided Americans and provoked them to threaten that equilibrium—tariffs, trade, banks, reform—nothing proved so heavy or so liable to plunge the balance off the table entirely as slavery. Slavery pitted cultures, economic interests, and moral antagonisms against each other; worse, it pitted states against other states; worst of all, it pitted whole associations of states (in this case, the South), which could plausibly regard themselves as a nation, against other whole associations of states (namely, the free North of the old colonies and the free West of the Northwest Ordinance). It was bad enough that in 1832 one single state had been willing to defy and disrupt the Union over the tariff question. It was almost unimaginable what might happen if several states, sharing common borders in a common section of the country, with a common culture and common economy, came to believe that their very way of life was at stake, and decided that self-preservation required disunion. Had slavery been legal only in far-removed places such as Minnesota and Florida, or Maine and Alabama, it is hard to see anyone there arguing that they could stand independently on their own among the nations of the world. There would be no such difficulty, however, if the fifteen slave states were grouped together in a single landmass, comprising 750,000 contiguous miles, and thus able to cooperate, communicate, and support one another. They would look like a nation, rather than just islands of complaint.
So long as some Americans still believed that the Union was only a federal union—only a league or federation of quasi-independent states that could be terminated at will—and so long as Southerners continued to believe that northern anti-slavery attacks on slavery constituted a real and present danger to Southern life and property, then disunion could not be ruled out as an ugly resort. And if the Northern states, and the federal government in Washington, failed to place on their balance pan a weight of assurances equal to Southern demands for reassurance about slavery, then the South would drop onto its pan the immense and destructive weight of disunion and the balance would be wrecked, perhaps forever.
That made the threat of secession useful.
The key word in understanding the South’s behavior throughout the four critical decades before the Civil War is threat. The Union had increasingly taken on the lineaments of a nation ever since the ratification of the Constitution, no matter what the secession-mongers liked to say, and the American Constitution had become increasingly intertwined with the idea of an American nation. It would always be easier to challenge both the Union and the Constitution in fustian rhetoric, but in practice, compromise within the Constitution would always get the greatest applause. Of course, in any compromise situation, threats are the weightiest chips to bargain with. So from the 1820s onward Southerners would begin talking a great deal about seceding from the Union, but frequently it was little more than intimidating talk, meant to squeeze out concessions during the compromise process rather than to announce action. There were few Southerners in 1820 who seriously wanted to leave the Union, and most of them lived in South Carolina. But Southerners were willing to talk secession because of the leverage such talk easily acquired within a federal union. If it was believed that disunion was a possible political outcome of the balancing game, then using secession as a threat could be highly useful in cajoling favorable responses out of the rest of the Union. “It has come to this,” complained one Northern senator, “that whenever a question comes up between the free States and the slave States of this Union, we are to be threatened with disunion, unless we yield.”1 It mattered little enough whether secession was likely or even desirable, or whether in fact the balance itself was far more indestructible than any of the players realized. So long as the threat of secession and disunion continued to pry assurances out of the rest of the country that slavery would never be imperiled, then the South would stay in the Union.
“YOU HAVE KINDLED A FIRE”
The first round of threats and assurances played out in February 1819, when Missouri applied for admission to the Union with a state constitution that legally recognized slavery. Missouri’s application was a moment for celebration, since it was the first territory that lay entirely west of the Mississippi, in the Louisiana Purchase lands, to apply to Congress for statehood. What was less obvious was that Missouri’s petition also represented a challenge to the free states, since the Union in 1819 was perfectly balanced between eleven free states and eleven slave states. Allow Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, and it would add two “slave” senators to the Senate and an indeterminate number of representatives to the House (ar
tificially swollen, as Northerners saw it, by the three-fifths rule). That, in turn, might give the South enough of an edge in Congress to disrupt the Northern campaign to protect American manufacturing and weaken the demands of Henry Clay and the National Republicans for an “American System” of federally tax-supported roads, turnpikes, canals and other “internal improvements.” So on February 13, 1819, New York congressman James Tallmadge rose in the House to add an amendment to the Missouri statehood bill that would bar the further importation of slaves into Missouri and emancipate any slave living in Missouri who reached the age of twenty-five. 2
Southern congressional delegations erupted in rage and panic. Not only was Missouri the first of the Louisiana Purchase territories to be added to the Union, but it also represented the only direct highway that the South possessed to lands further west. The land President Jefferson had purchased lay within a rough triangle, with the long side running from a point on the north Pacific coast in Oregon to Louisiana’s border with the old Spanish empire, and the great bulk of the area lying along the United States’ northern boundary with British Canada. Northern settlers could expand straight westward, across the Mississippi River, without being crammed together, but Southern settlers moving west were forced into the narrow lower corner of the triangle, against the border of Spanish Texas. Unless Southerners and slavery were allowed to expand equally into the Louisiana Purchase territories with Northerners, then the South could hope to develop only one or two future slave states. In short order, their alarm turned into threats of disunion and demands for assurance.
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