These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  While men like Finney preached to the workers and bosses of Rochester, New York, black evangelicals preached to free blacks who were keenly aware of the very different effects of the age of the machine on the lives of slaves and slave families. Cotton production in the South doubled between 1815 and 1820, and again between 1820 and 1825. Cotton had become the most valuable commodity in the Atlantic world. The Atlantic slave trade had been closed in 1808, but the new and vast global market for cotton created a booming domestic market for slaves. By 1820, more than a million slaves had been sold “down the river,” from states like Virginia and South Carolina to the territories of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Another million people were sold, and shipped west, between 1820 and 1860. Mothers were separated from their children, husbands from wives. When the price of cotton in Liverpool went up, so did the price of slaves in the American South. People, like cotton, were sold by grades, advertised as “Extra Men, No.1 Men, Second Rate or Ordinary Men, Extra Girls, No.1 Girls, Second Rate or Ordinary Girls.” Slavery wasn’t an aberration in an industrializing economy; slavery was its engine. Factories had mechanical slaves; plantations had human slaves. The power of machines was measured by horsepower, the power of slaves by hand power. A healthy man counted as “two hands,” a nursing woman as a “half-hand,” a child as a “quarter-hand.” Charles Ball, born in Maryland during the American Revolution, spent years toiling on a slave plantation in South Carolina, and time on an auction block, where buyers inspected his hands, moving each finger in the minute action required to pick cotton. The standard calculation, for a cotton crop, “ten acres to the hand.”36

  David Walker, living in Charleston, bore witness to those sufferings, and he prayed. So did Denmark Vesey, a carpenter who worshipped with Walker at the same AME church. In 1822, Vesey staged a rebellion, leading a group of slaves and free blacks in a plan to seize the city. Instead, Vesey was caught and hanged. Slave owners blamed black sailors, who, they feared, spread word in the South of freedom in the North and of independence in Haiti. After Vesey’s execution, South Carolina’s legislature passed the Negro Seaman Acts, requiring black sailors to be held in prison while their ships were in port.37 Walker decided to leave South Carolina for Massachusetts, where he opened his shop for black sailors and helped found the Massachusetts General Colored Association, the first black political organization in the United States. Meanwhile, he helped runaways. “His hands were always open to contribute to the wants of the fugitive,” the preacher Henry Highland Garnet later wrote. And he studied; he “spent all his leisure moments in the cultivation of his mind.”38 He also began helping to circulate in Boston the first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, published in New York beginning in 1827. “We wish to plead our own cause,” its editors proclaimed. “Too long have others spoken for us.”39

  In the fall of 1829, the year Jacob Bigelow and Thomas Carlyle were arguing about the consequences of technological change, David Walker published a short pamphlet that struck the country like a bolt of lightning: An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to those of the United States of America. Combining the exhortations of a revivalist preacher with the rabble-rousing of a Jacksonian political candidate, Walker preached that, without the saving redemption of abolition, there would come a political apocalypse, the wages of the sin of slavery: “I call men to witness, that the destruction of the Americans is at hand, and will be speedily consummated unless they repent.”

  Walker claimed the Declaration of Independence for black Americans: “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident—that ALL men are created EQUAL!! that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!!’” He insisted on the right to revolution. Addressing his white readers, he wrote, “Now, Americans! I ask you candidly, was your sufferings under Great Britain, one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you?” He described American expansion, the growth of the Union from thirteen states to twenty-four, as a form of violence: “the whites are dragging us around in chains and in handcuffs, to their new States and Territories, to work their mines and farms, to enrich them and their children.” And he damned manifest destiny as a fraud, resting on the belief of millions of Americans “that we being a little darker than they, were made by our Creator to be an inheritance to them and their children forever.” He called the scheme of Henry Clay’s American Colonization Society the “colonizing trick”: “This country is as much ours as it is the whites, whether they will admit it now or not, they will see and believe it by and by.” And he warned: “Are Mr. Clay and the rest of the Americans, innocent of the blood and groans of our fathers and us, their children?—Every individual may plead innocence, if he pleases, but God will, before long, separate the innocent from the guilty.” He asked black men to take up arms. “Look upon your mother, wife and children,” he urged, “and answer God Almighty; and believe this, that it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.” And, remarking on the history of the West Indies, he warned the owners of men: “Read the history particularly of Hayti, and see how they were butchered by the whites, and do you take warning.” In an age of quantification, Walker made his own set of calculations: “God has been pleased to give us two eyes, two hands, two feet, and some sense in our heads as well as they. They have no more right to hold us in slavery than we have to hold them.” And then: “I do declare it, that one good black man can put to death six white men.”40

  The preaching of David Walker, even more than the preaching of Lyman Beecher or Charles Grandison Finney, set the nation on fire. It was prosecutorial; it was incendiary. It was also widely read. Walker had made elaborate plans to get his Appeal into the hands of southern slaves. With the help of his friends Maria and James Stewart, he stitched copies into the linings of clothes he and Stewart sold to sailors bound for Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Wilmington. The Appeal went through three editions in nine months. The last edition appeared in June of 1830; that August, Walker was found dead in the doorway of his Boston shop. There were rumors he’d been murdered (rewards of upward of $10,000 had been offered for him in the South). More likely, he died of tuberculosis. James and Maria Stewart moved into his old rooms on Belknap Street.41

  Walker had died, but he had spread his word. In 1830, a group of slaves plotting a rebellion were found with a copy of the Appeal. With Walker, the antislavery argument for gradual emancipation, with compensation for slave owners, became untenable. Abolitionists began arguing for immediate emancipation. And southern antislavery societies shut their doors. As late as 1827, the number of antislavery groups in the South had outnumbered those in the North by more than four to one. Southern antislavery activists were usually supporters of colonization, not of emancipation. Walker’s Appeal ended the antislavery movement in the South and radicalized it in the North. Garrison published the first issue of the Liberator on January 1, 1831. It begins with words as uncompromising as Walker’s: “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.”42

  That summer, in Virginia, a thirty-year-old revivalist preacher named Nat Turner planned a slave rebellion for the Fourth of July. Turner’s rebellion was at once an act of emancipation and of evangelism. Both of his parents were slaves. His mother had been born in Africa; his father escaped to the North. The wife of Turner’s owner had taught him to read when he was a child; he studied the Bible. He worked in the fields, and he also preached. In 1828, he had a religious vision: he believed God had called him to lead an uprising. “White spirits and black spirits engaged in battle,” he later said, “. . . and blood flowed in streams.” He delayed until August, when, after killing dozens of whites, he and his followers were caught. Turner was hanged.

  The rebellion rippled across the Union. The Virginia legislature debated the possibil
ity of emancipating its slaves, fearing “a Nat Turner might be in every family.” Quakers submitted a petition to the state legislature calling for abolition. The petition was referred to a committee, headed by Thomas Jefferson’s thirty-nine-year-old grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who proposed a scheme of gradual emancipation. Instead, the legislature passed new laws banning the teaching of slaves to read and write, and prohibiting, too, teaching slaves about the Bible.43 In a nation founded on a written Declaration, made sacred by evangelicals during a religious revival, reading about equality became a crime.

  Alexis de Tocqueville, the sharp-eyed French political theorist and historian, landed in New York in May 1831, for a nine-month tour of the United States. Nat Turner waged his rebellion in Virginia that August. Maria Stewart’s first essay appeared in the Liberator that October. “If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States,” Tocqueville predicted. “They will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition.”44 Even as Tocqueville was writing, those revolutions were already being waged.

  II.

  MARIA STEWART WAS the first woman in the United States to deliver an address before a “mixed” audience—an audience of both women and men, which happened to have been, as well, an audience of both blacks and whites. She spoke, suitably, in a hall named after Benjamin Franklin. She said she’d heard a voice asking the question: “‘Who shall go forward, and take of the reproach that is cast upon the people of color? Shall it be a woman?’ And my heart made this reply—‘If it is thy will, be it even so, Lord Jesus!’”45

  Stewart delivered five public addresses about slavery between 1831 and 1833, the year Garrison founded the American Anti-Slavery Society, in language that echoed hers. At the society’s first convention, Garrison declared, “We plant ourselves upon the Declaration of our Independence and the truths of Divine Revelation, as upon the Everlasting Rock.”46

  Shall it be a woman? One consequence of the rise of Jacksonian democracy and the Second Great Awakening was the participation of women in the reformation of American politics by way of American morals. When suffrage was stripped of all property qualifications, women’s lack of political power became starkly obvious. For women who wished to exercise power, the only source of power seemingly left to them was their role as mothers, which, they suggested, rendered them morally superior to men—more loving, more caring, and more responsive to the cries of the weak.

  Purporting to act less as citizens than as mothers, cultivating the notion of “republican motherhood,” women formed temperance societies, charitable aid societies, peace societies, vegetarian societies, and abolition societies. The first Female Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Boston in 1833; by 1837, 139 Female Anti-Slavery Societies had been founded across the country, including more than 40 in Massachusetts and 30 in Ohio. By then, Maria Stewart had stopped delivering speeches, an act that many women, both black and white, considered too radical for the narrow ambit of republican motherhood. After 1835, she never again spoke in public. As Catherine Beecher argued in 1837, in An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females, “If the female advocate chooses to come upon a stage, and expose her person, dress, and elocution to public criticism, it is right to express disgust.”47

  While women labored to reform society behind the scenes, men protested on the streets. The eighteen-teens marked the beginning of a decades-long struggle between labor and business. During the Panic of 1819, the first bust in the industrializing nineteenth century, factories had closed when the banks failed. In New York, a workingman’s wages fell from 75 cents to 12 cents a day. Those who suffered the most were men too poor to vote; it was, in many ways, the suffering of workingmen during that Panic of 1819 that had led so many men to fight for the right to vote, so that they could have a hand in the direction of affairs. Having secured the franchise, they attacked the banks and all manner of monopolies. In 1828, laborers in Philadelphia formed the Working Men’s Party. One writer in 1830 argued that commercial banking was “the foundation of artificial inequality of wealth, and, thereby, of artificial inequality of power.”48

  Workingmen demanded shorter hours (ten, instead of eleven or twelve) and better conditions. They argued, too, against “an unequal and very excessive accumulation of wealth and power into the hands of a few.” Jacksonian democracy distributed political power to the many, but industrialization consolidated economic power in the hands of a few. In Boston, the top 1 percent of the population controlled 10 percent of wealth in 1689, 16 percent in 1771, 33 percent in 1833, and 37 percent in 1848, while the lowest 80 percent of the population controlled 39 percent of the wealth in 1689, 29 percent in 1771, 14 percent in 1833, and a mere 4 percent in 1848. Much the same pattern obtained elsewhere. In New York, the top 1 percent of the population controlled 40 percent of the wealth in 1828 and 50 percent in 1845; the top 4 percent of the population controlled 63 percent of the wealth in 1828 and 80 percent in 1845.49

  Native-born workingmen had to contend with the ease with which factory owners could replace them with immigrants who were arriving in unprecedented numbers, fleeing hunger and revolution in Europe and seeking democracy and opportunity in the United States. Many parts of the country, including Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, recruited immigrants by advertising in European newspapers. Immigrants encouraged more immigrants, in the letters they wrote home to family and friends, urging them to pack their bags. “This is a free country,” a Swedish immigrant wrote home from Illinois in 1850. “And nobody needs to hold his hat in his hand for anyone else.” A Norwegian wrote from Minnesota, “The principle of equality has been universally accepted and adopted.”50

  In 1831, twenty thousand Europeans migrated to the United States; in 1854, that number had risen to more than four hundred thousand. While two and a half million Europeans had migrated to all of the Americas between 1500 and 1800, the same number—two and a half million—arrived specifically in the United States between 1845 and 1854 alone. As a proportion of the U.S. population, European immigrants grew from 1.6 percent in the 1820s to 11.2 percent in 1860. Writing in 1837, one Michigan reformer called the nation’s rate of immigration “the boldest experiment upon the stability of government ever made in the annals of time.”51

  The largest number of these immigrants were Irish and German. Critics of Jackson—himself the son of Irish immigrants—had blamed his election on the rising population of poor, newly enfranchised Irishmen. “Everything in the shape of an Irishman was drummed to the polls,” one newspaper editor wrote in 1828.52 By 1860, more than one in eight Americans were born in Europe, including 1.6 million Irish and 1.2 million Germans, the majority of whom were Catholic. As the flood of immigrants swelled, the force of nativism gained strength, as did hostility toward Catholics, fueled by the animus of evangelical Protestants.

  In 1834, Lyman Beecher delivered a series of anti-Catholic lectures. The next year, Samuel F. B. Morse, a young man of many talents, best known as a painter, published a virulent treatise called Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States through Foreign Immigration, urging the passage of a new immigration law banning all foreign-born Americans from voting.53 Morse then ran for mayor of New York (and lost). Meanwhile, he began devising a secret code of dots and dashes, to be used on the telegraph machine he was designing. He believed there existed a Catholic plot to take over the United States. He believed that, to defeat such a plot, the U.S. government needed a secret cipher. Eventually, he decided that a better use of his code, not secret but public, would be to use it to communicate by a network of wires that he imagined would one day stretch across the entire continent. It wouldn’t be long, he predicted in 1838, before “the whole surface of this country would be channeled for those nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land; making, in fact, one neighborhood of the whole country.”5
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  Could a mere machine quiet the political tumult? In Philadelphia in 1844, riots between Catholics and Protestants left twenty Americans dead. The single biggest wave of immigration in the period came between 1845 and 1849, when Ireland endured a potato famine. One million people died, and one and a half million left, most for the United States, where they landed in Eastern Seaboard cities, and settled there, having no money to pay their way to travel inland. (Patrick Kennedy, the great-grandfather of the first Catholic to be elected president of the United States, left Ireland in 1849.) They lived in all-Irish neighborhoods, generally in tenements, and worked for abysmal wages. New York lawyer George Templeton Strong, writing in his diary, lamented their foreignness: “Our Celtic fellow citizens are almost as remote from us in temperament and constitution as the Chinese.” The Irish, keen to preserve their religion and their communities, built Catholic churches and parochial schools and mutual aid societies. They also turned to the Democratic Party to defend those institutions. By 1850, one in every four people in Boston was Irish. Signs at shops began to read, “No Irish Need Apply.”55

  Germans, who came to the United States in greater numbers than the Irish, suffered considerably less prejudice. They usually arrived less destitute, and could afford to move inland and become farmers. They tended to settle in the Mississippi or Ohio Valleys, where they bought land from earlier German settlers and sent their children to German schools and German churches. The insularity of both Irish and German communities contributed to a growing movement to establish tax-supported public elementary schools, known as “common schools,” meant to provide a common academic and civic education to all classes of Americans. Like the extension of suffrage to all white men, this element of the American experiment propelled the United States ahead of European nations. Much of the movement’s strength came from the fervor of revivalists. They hoped that these new schools would assimilate a diverse population of native-born and foreign-born citizens by introducing them to the traditions of American culture and government, so that boys, once men, would vote wisely, and girls, once women, would raise virtuous children. “It is our duty to make men moral,” read one popular teachers’ manual, published in 1830. Other advocates hoped that a shared education would diminish partisanship. Whatever the motives of its advocates, the common school movement emerged out of, and nurtured, a strong civic culture.56