The Great Stain

by Noel Rae

  Thanks to the three-fifths rule, northern sympathizers, and its extension to the new states in the southwest, the slave interest was more than able to hold its own in national politics, where its cardinal principle was that slavery was a matter reserved exclusively to the states. It was, as the fire-brand John C. Calhoun of South Carolina put it, “beyond the jurisdiction of Congress—they have no right to touch it in any shape or form.” There could be no yielding on this matter. “If we concede an inch, concession would follow concession—compromise would follow compromise until our ranks would be so broken that effectual resistance would be impossible. We must meet the enemy on the frontier.” The root of the problem was the “incendiary spirit” of northern fanatics. “Unless it be speedily stopped, it will spread and work upwards till it brings the two great sections of the Union into deadly conflict … Abolition and Union cannot co-exist. As the friend of the Union I openly proclaim it—and the sooner it is known, the better … We of the South will not, cannot surrender our institutions. To maintain the existing relationship between the two races inhabiting that section of the Union is indispensable to the peace and happiness of both. It cannot be subverted without drenching the country in blood, and extirpating one or the other of the races. Be it good or bad, it has grown up with our society and institutions, and is so interwoven with them, that to destroy it would be to destroy us as a people.

  “But let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relation between the two races in the slave-holding States is an evil. Far otherwise, I hold it to be a good, as it has thus far proved to be to both, and will continue to prove so if not disturbed by the fell spirit of abolition. I appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. It came among us in a low, degraded and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown under the fostering care of our institutions, reviled as they have been, to its present comparatively civilized condition. This, with the rapid increase in numbers, is conclusive proof of the general happiness of the race, in spite of all the exaggerated reports to the contrary.” Far, then, from being “an evil,” slavery was “a good—a positive good.”

  Words were not the only weapons used in Congress. “Within the last three years,” wrote Theodore Dwight Weld in 1839, “some of the most prominent slave-holding members of the House, and among them the late Speaker, have struck and kicked, and throttled, and seized each other by the hair, and with their fists pummeled each others’ faces, on the floor of the Congress … During the session of the last Congress, Mr. Wise of Virginia and Mr. Bynum of North Carolina, after having called each other ‘liars, villains’ and ‘damned rascals,’ sprang from their seats, both sufficiently armed for any desperate, purpose, cursing each other as they rushed together, and would doubtless have butchered each other on the floor of Congress if both had not been seized and held by their friends.” At the close of the 1838 session there was “another brutal and bloody row. It occurred on Sunday morning, immediately at the moment of adjournment, between Messrs. Campbell and Maury, both of Tennessee. He [Maury] took offense at some remarks made to him by his colleague, Mr. Campbell, and the fight followed.” According to the Huntville (Ala.) Democrat, “Mr. Maury is said to be badly hurt. He was near losing his life by being knocked through the window; but his adversary, it is said, saved him by clutching the hair of his head with his left hand, while he struck him with his right.” The same paper gave the particulars of a fist-fight on the floor of the House “between Mr. Bell, the late Speaker, and Mr. Turney of Tennessee.” Bell had called Turney “the fool of fools,” and soon “both gentlemen were perceived in personal conflict, and blows with the fist were aimed by each at the other. Several members interfered and suppressed the personal violence; others called ‘Order! Order!’” Three such fights took place in one month, and “at the same session Messrs. Peyton of Tennessee and Wise of Virginia went armed with pistols and dirks to the meeting of a committee of Congress, and threatened to shoot a witness while giving his testimony.”

  The abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, holding in his right hand a quill pen (perhaps a symbol of non-violent eloquence) is brutally thrashed by Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Some of the senators in the background—presumably southerners—seem to be enjoying the show.

  The most notorious instance of this “ruffianism” occurred in May, 1856, after Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the leader of the Radical Republicans, had delivered a lengthy and at times sarcastic speech called The Crime Against Kansas. As he rambled along, one of his colleagues, Senator Stephen Douglas, of Illinois (Lincoln’s future debating opponent), said to another, “This damn fool Sumner is going to get himself shot by some other damn fool!”

  What prompted Douglas’ remark was Sumner’s comments on the character of the elderly Senator Andrew Butler, of South Carolina, one of the sponsors of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened the door to slavery in those territories. (Douglas was the other sponsor.) Butler was not present, so missed hearing Sumner describe the Act as if it were one of sexual assault. “Rape … lust … hateful embrace … depraved desire” were some of the terms he used. Next he compared Butler to Don Quixote and the short and portly Douglas to Sancho Panza, figures of fun “who sally forth together in the same adventure.” Then he focused on Butler: “The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course, he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste to his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery!” And now Butler was trying to force this polluted harlot into the arms of the good people of Kansas and Nebraska! And if he fails to do so “the chivalric Senator will conduct the State of South Carolina out of the Union. Heroic knight! Excellent Senator! A second Moses come to a second Exodus!”

  Now it happened that Senator Butler had a young nephew, Preston Brooks, also of South Carolina and currently a member of the House. Two days later, while Sumner was sitting at his desk in the Senate, conning over the printed text of his speech, young Brooks approached. “Mr. Sumner,” he said. “I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.” Thereupon he began to thrash Sumner with a gold-knobbed gutta-percha cane, first beating him over the head so that he was soon blinded by blood. Sumner, who was tall and strong, tried to rise, but was trapped by his desk which was bolted to the floor. When nearby members tried to intervene, Brooks’s friend, Laurence Keitt, pulled out a revolver and cried “Let them be!” Eventually Brooks’s cane broke, after which he left. (Brooks thrashed Sumner rather than challenge him to a duel because he did not consider Sumner to be a gentleman.)

  Reaction to the episode revealed how far apart North and South had become. “The South cannot tolerate freedom of speech anywhere,” wrote the Cincinnati Gazette, “and would stifle it in Washington with the bludgeon and the bowie knife, as they are now trying to stifle it in Kansas by massacre, rapine and murder.” “I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can continue one state,” wrote Emerson. “I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.”

  In the South matters were viewed differently. Hundreds of canes were sent to Preston Brooks, some with the message “Hit him again!” The Richmond Enquirer was of the opinion that “these vulgar abolitionists must be lashed into submission.” A motion to expel Brooks from the House failed; he then resigned, but was re-elected. His gun-wielding friend, Keitt, also resigned and was also re-elected, and two years later set off a brawl in the House by calling Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania a “black Republican puppy,” and then, when Grow called him “a Negro driver,” trying to choke him.

  Any hope that the law mig
ht help the cause of emancipation ended with the 1857 case of Dred Scott vs. John Sandford. The events leading up to it began in 1834 when Scott, a slave, was taken by his master from Missouri to Illinois, a free state, and then to the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was also illegal. In 1846, after being brought back to Missouri, he sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had become free when taken to a free territory. Eleven years later, after various trials and appeals, the case ended up in the Supreme Court, which was presided over by Chief Justice Roger Taney, then aged eighty. Many years earlier Taney had freed the slaves on his Maryland plantation and called slavery “a blot on our national character.” Since then his attitude had, as a contemporary put it, “hardened.”

  Two main questions had to be answered by the court: was Scott a citizen of Missouri, and therefore entitled to bring a case in federal court; and had his residence in Illinois and Wisconsin made him free? (The case was tried in federal court because the two parties resided in different states.) Here are some of Taney’s decisions:

  “The question is simply this: Can a Negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen?”

  To this the short answer was No—“they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to the citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.”

  Next, an important distinction: “We must not confound the rights of citizenship which a State may confer within its own limits and the rights of citizenship as a member of the Union. It does not by any means follow, because he has all the rights and privileges of a citizen of a State, that he must be a citizen of the United States … The question then arises, whether the provisions of the Constitution, in relation to the personal rights and privileges to which the citizen of a State should be entitled, embraced the Negro African race at that time in this country, or who might afterward be imported, who had then or should afterward be made free in any State; and to put it in the power of a single State to make him a citizen of the United States, and endue him with the full rights of citizenship in every other State.”

  Once again the answer was No—or rather, “the court thinks the affirmative of these propositions cannot be maintained. And if it cannot, the plaintiff in error [Dred Scott] could not be a citizen of the State of Missouri, within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States, and consequently was not entitled to sue in its courts.”

  That could have been the end of the matter, but Taney still had a lot more to say. “In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the time, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument … They had for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect …”

  After this history lesson, Taney went on for another fifty pages of opinion and precedents, including the declaration that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was invalid, since Congress had no right to ban slavery anywhere. Six of the judges concurred, two dissented, one of whom, Benjamin Curtis, also resigned from the court.

  Reaction to the decision was as might be expected. “The opinion of Chief Justice Taney in the case of Dred Scott was more thoroughly abominable than anything of the kind in the history of the courts,” wrote Senator Sumner. “Judicial baseness reached its lowest point.”

  To others the verdict was a triumph. “This decision, except the Declaration of National Independence in 1776, is the most momentous event that has ever occurred on this continent,” wrote Dr. Van Evrie in his introduction to a mass-market pamphlet on the case. “The relations of citizenship—the rights of the individual—in short, the status of the dominant race is thus defined and fixed for ever.” All “doubts and uncertainties” were now at an end “and the Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision, has defined the relations, and fixed the status of the subordinate race forever. This decision must be accepted and sustained by the northern masses, or there must be a disunion and dismemberment of the Union.”

  The great orator, author and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, as he approached old age. Although the fight against slavery and racism was his main concern, Douglass also supported free public education, an end to capital punishment, temperance, land reform, Home Rule for Ireland and women’s suffrage—he was present at the famous Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, and died while attending the National Council of Women in Washington, D. C. in 1895. For good reason, his newspaper, The North Star, had as its motto: “Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color, God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.”

  CHAPTER 13

  THE ABOLITIONISTS

  APART FROM THE SLAVES THEMSELVES, WHO IT MAY BE ASSUMED WERE ALL abolitionists but were denied a voice, there had always been a few people in this country who were outspoken in their condemnation of slavery—Samuel Sewall, Benjamin Lay, Benjamin Franklin, Anthony Benezet. But these individuals did not constitute a movement. That did not appear until well into the nineteenth century, starting on a very small scale and characterized by pacifism and non-resistance, and ending with the long and bloody Civil War.

  A good way to begin that story is to turn to The Life, Travels and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy, written by Thomas Earle, and published in 1847.

  “Directly after the adoption of the Constitution, petitions were sent to Congress by the Pennsylvania Society and others, asking that body to exert its full constitutional power for the abolition of slavery. These petitions were referred to a committee who reported that the national government had no power to interfere for the extinction of slavery within the limits of any state within the confederacy [i.e. the Union]. The report to this effect was adopted with unanimity. From that time the energy of anti-slavery action evidently declined … insomuch that in the year 1810 there were scarcely any abolition societies still in existence.

  “The lethargy into which the nation had sunk in reference to the great question of slavery was at length dissipated by a renewed agitation, in which Benjamin Lundy, the subject of this memoir, may be justly considered the pioneer, as well as one of the more energetic, indefatigable and self-sacrificing actors.”

  Much of The Life, Travels and Opinions was in Lundy’s own words. Earle, who seems to have known him well, described him as “slightly under the middle size, of a slender form, light and rather sandy complexion and hair, a sanguine temperament, and a cheerful and sprightly disposition. His manners were gentle and very unassuming.” Born of Quaker parents in New Jersey in 1789, Lundy had little education but “an unquenchable thirst for knowledge.” When he was nineteen he moved to Wheeling, Virginia, where he was apprenticed to a saddler; briefly led astray by “wild, fashionable youths,” he soon sobered up, “kept on my plain dress, attended regularly the meetings of our religious Society, shunned every species of gambling and frolicking, and spent most of my leisure time in reading instructive books. It was in this situation that I first became acquainted with the wrongs of the slave. Wheeling was a great thoroughfare for the traffickers in human flesh. Their coffles passed through the place freque
ntly. My heart was deeply grieved at the gross abomination; and the question, ‘What can I do?’ was the continual response to the impulses of my heart. As I enjoyed no peace of mind, I at length concluded that I must act. I called a few friends together and unbosomed my feelings to them. The result was the organization of an anti-slavery association, called the Union Humane Society. The first meeting, which was held at my own house, consisted of but five or six persons. In a few months afterwards, the Society contained nearly five hundred members, among whom were most of the influential preachers and lawyers, and many respectable citizens of several counties in that section of the state.” (By now he had moved to Ohio.)

  This was in 1815, when Lundy was twenty-six. Invited to contribute to the Philanthropist, an anti-slavery paper, he soon became the editor, and when that paper folded in 1821 he gave up his leather-working business and started his own weekly publication, the Genius of Universal Emancipation (“genius” in the sense of “guiding spirit”). “I had my printing done at Steubenville, Ohio, a distance of twenty miles. I went to and fro on foot, carrying my papers, when printed, on my back. I had begun the work without a dollar of funds, trusting for success to the sacredness of the cause; nor was I disappointed. In four months from the commencement, my subscription list had become quite large.”