One might expect, then, that Black Lives Matter and Antifa activists would by now have vandalized or toppled Douglas’ monument. But it remains untouched. In fact, there is no controversy about it at all. The reason is obvious. Douglas was a Northern Democrat, and to target Douglas’ statue would be to remove the focus from the Confederacy, which was of course Southern. Thus toppling Douglas’ monument would expose the involvement of the Northern Democrats—in short, the national Democratic Party—as the political champions of slavery. So Douglas must be allowed to stand, serene and unchallenged, so as not to disrupt the progressive lie about where the political responsibility for slavery truly lies.
KING COTTON
On August 2, 1862, after Lincoln had informed his cabinet about the Emancipation Proclamation, the president met with a committee of five free blacks. He told them he looked forward to the end of slavery, but ended with this grim assessment: “Even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. On this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact.”7
Lincoln was referring to something that involved slavery but went beyond slavery, what he termed the debauching of the public mind regarding blacks and white supremacy. Basically Lincoln understood that a great change had come over America between the founding period and his own, a change not merely in the nature of the slave plantation but also in the prevalence of the plantation philosophy being peddled by the Democratic Party both in the North and in the South. This change goes almost unnoticed today in progressive historiography—because it does not fit the progressive narrative—so let’s draw it out.
By 1828—the year Andrew Jackson was elected, the official date for the formation of the Democratic Party—the plantation was vastly bigger and more powerful than it had been in Washington and Jefferson’s day. In 1776, the slave population in all thirteen states was around 650,000, but by 1828 it had grown to around two million, doubling again to four million by 1860. In sum, the plantation had grown sixfold since the founding era, and from the 1820s to 1860 it was the cornerstone of the economy of the South.
The founders had hoped slavery would gradually die out, but they did not anticipate Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Whitney’s simple device for separating short-staple cotton from its seeds revolutionized the plantation. Southern cotton production grew from 6,000 bales in 1792 to 178,000 in 1810, and up from there. From the diversified agricultural economy of Jefferson’s day, the South became largely a single-crop economy. And as the nation expanded the cotton kingdom grew, too, the number of slave states expanding from eight to fifteen.
Since “King Cotton” was the basic raw material of the Industrial Revolution, it made the planters rich. By the 1830s, cotton accounted for more than half of all U.S. exports. Cotton planters were the wealthiest people in America, and there were more millionaires in the South, living off the big plantations, than there were in any other region of the country. The significance of this is that the plantation economy generated a powerful political lobby, and a new political party was ready at hand to take up the cause of the slave-owners.
Most Americans don’t realize that around the time of the Revolution, there were powerful antislavery currents in the South no less than in the North. Historians Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese inform us that “antislavery expressions . . . reverberated in the South during and after the American Revolution.” Winthrop Jordan notes that in Virginia—which had 40 percent of the slaves in the entire nation at the time—denunciations of slavery, though not universal, were “acceptable and widespread.”8
Speaking in July 1773 at the Virginia Constitutional Convention, George Mason described slavery as “that slow Poison, which is daily contaminating the Minds and Morals of our People.” Two years later, Patrick Henry urged his fellow Southerners to look for a time “when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.”9 This was the tone. And Southern states joined Northern states in excluding slavery from the Northwest Territory and in abolishing the African slave trade.
The tone persisted through the early nineteenth century. “Until the 1820s,” John Blassingame writes in The Slave Community, “many planters, convinced of the immorality of bondage, joined with clergymen in seeking its abolition.” During this period, the South had more than a hundred antislavery organizations, and manumissions of slaves were fairly common, especially in Maryland, Delaware and Virginia. Yet historian Stanley Elkins points out that by the 1830s “the hostility to slavery that had been common in Jeffersonian times . . . all but disappeared.”10
How did this happen? According to Blassingame, planters launched a massive campaign to uphold slavery in the wake of the abolitionist and antislavery pressures generated by the Revolution. The goal was to unify the slave community in defense of the plantation. Mob attacks were organized against antislavery ministers. “By the 1840s,” Blassingame writes, “the propagandists had largely succeeded in silencing the churches.”11 Then they began browbeating the clergy into becoming advocates of slavery.
Around the same time, planters organized a campaign throughout the South—largely successful—to block literature from antislavery societies from being delivered through the mail. In response to political pressure, every Southern state except Maryland and Kentucky passed laws prohibiting teaching slaves to read and write. Many Southern legislatures adopted measures banning manumissions, some forced free blacks to leave the state, and a few even invited free blacks to enslave themselves. By the 1850s some slavery apologists like William Yancey and Robert Barnwell Rhett were calling for the reopening of the African slave trade.
This was a new and different South, and to the incredible good fortune of the planter aristocracy, there was a political party, the Democratic Party, to represent their interests and press their claims, both at the local and the national level. Working with and through this party, the planter class found itself equipped with a full-blown moral, legal and political philosophy of the plantation, one that historians say no previous class of slave-owners ever developed.12
Two features of the Democratic apologia for the plantation stand out to distinguish this mode of thinking from anything that came before. First, slavery was defended not as a necessary evil but rather as a “positive good.” Typical of this rhetoric is Democratic congressman James Henry Hammond’s 1936 speech in Congress: “Sir, I do firmly believe, that domestic slavery, regulated as ours is, produces the highest toned, the purest, best organization of society that has ever existed on the face of the earth.”13
Hammond and others insisted that slavery was not only good for the master, but also for the slave. Slaves were happier under slavery that they would have been as free laborers. The Democratic propagandist George Fitzhugh—who remarkably enough regarded himself a socialist—declared slavery so good for the slaves that he thought it might be worth trying not just on blacks but also on whites and all laborers worldwide. The sheer audacity of these claims is worth noting. No previous slave community dared say such things. Evil as the Nazis were, they didn’t have the chutzpah to claim that what they did to the Jews was somehow good for the Jews.
Second, leading Democrats rejected the principles of the founding, including the Declaration of Independence. According to Democratic senator John C. Calhoun, founding documents like the Declaration provided “an utterly false view of the subordinate relation of the black to the white race,” and his fellow Southerners like Jefferson should be blamed for “admitting so great an error” into the South, which was now suffering its “poisonous fruits.” Needless to say, Calhoun’s defense of slavery was constructed on the premise of white supremacy.
Calhoun acknowledged that the mood in the South fostered by the Democratic Party in the nineteenth century was quite different from what it had been in the founding era. “Many in
the South once believed that it was a moral and political evil; that folly and delusion are gone; we see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world.”14
The Democrats were the majority party in the Jacksonian era. Yet it took more than Southern Democrats to defend the plantation; the Northern Democrats too did their part. Through their leader Stephen Douglas, they concocted a second, entirely independent pro-slavery philosophy, one equally imbued with racism and one that identified the cause of slavery with the cause of democracy itself. This was Douglas’ doctrine of “popular sovereignty.”
Working in concert, the Northern and Southern Democrats didn’t merely secure slavery and fight for its expansion into the territories. The pro-slavery ideologies of the Democratic Party made slavery seem, morally and politically, beyond reproach. Thus in the wake of mounting political criticism of the plantation, these ideologies produced a political intransigence in the planter class that led to—indeed caused—the Civil War.
Sectional differences, intense though they may be, do not inevitably lead to war. As historian David Potter points out, “Sectionalism has been chronic in American history. At times, the divisions between East and West have seemed even deeper and more serious than those between North and South.”15 The Democrats enabled the planter class to refuse political accommodation, and thus the North-South difference took the form of lethal political strife. In this respect, it may be said that the Democratic Party unleashed the malignant forces that started the Civil War.
LIFESTYLES OF THE DEMOCRATIC PLANTERS
“There’s a cotton nigger for you! Genuine! Look at his toes! Look at his fingers! There’s a pair of legs for you! . . . He’s just as good for ten bales as I am for a julep at eleven o’clock.” This is from the travel journal of Frederick Law Olmsted, witnessing a slave auction in New Orleans. On another occasion, Olmsted saw a small white girl stop a slave on the road, wag her finger and order him to return to his plantation. To Olmsted’s astonishment, the grown man promptly obeyed.16
This was slavery. I want to probe further the pro-slavery ideologies of the Democratic Party in the nineteenth century, but first I wish to give some account of how slavery was actually experienced, not so much by the slaves—I cover that throughout this book—but mainly by the Democratic master class. What were they actually doing throughout this period?
Turns out, not much, because they had slaves to do it for them. Booker T. Washington, born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, reports that during his childhood servitude, “My old master had many boys and girls, but not one, so far as I know, ever mastered a single trade or special line of productive industry. The girls were not taught to cook, sew, or take care of the house. All of this was left to the slaves.”17
The slaves, of course, worked not because they wanted to but because they had to. Slavery was, at its core, a system of labor extortion that took on a racist cast because the slaves were all black. (The slave-owners were not: some American Indians owned slaves, and between 1830 and 1860 there were approximately 3,500 black slave-owners who owned upward of 10,000 black slaves.) Yet the vast majority of planters were, of course, white, and inevitably this master class drew a sharp caste line between their own white community and that of the slaves.
These slave-owners never forgot what slavery was in its essence. “For what purpose does the master hold the servant?” asked Democratic planter John Tompkins in the North Carolina Farmer’s Journal in 1853. “Is it not that by his labor, he, the master, may accumulate wealth?”18 While historians would later debate whether slavery retarded the economic welfare of the South, it is indisputable that it advanced the economic welfare of the planters. As one of my college professors wryly said, it strains credibility to think that the planter class would have taken on slavery as a nonprofit venture.
With the wealth of slavery, the Democratic master class developed a lifestyle based on leisure. In the words of historian Gordon Wood, “They came closest in America to fitting the classical ideal of the free and independent gentleman.”19 Self-consciously imitating the English gentry, the upper tier of Democratic planters built country homes, traced family genealogies and held sumptuous banquets. Their day was designed for people with time on their hands. A good part of it was taken up with gambling and sports: croquet, cards, cockfighting and hunting. One magazine suggested that the most enjoyable way to hunt deer was to camp alongside a stream for a week.
At the same time, there was a dark underside to the culture of the Democratic slave-owning class, vividly exposed in Kenneth Greenberg’s Honor and Slavery. As Greenberg shows, the slave-owners developed a code of honor and respect based on values they took to be the inverse of slave values. Slaves were considered persons without honor and unworthy of respect. Not only did they lie and steal; the master class expected them to lie and steal.
Consequently, the Democratic master class developed a code in which the slightest implication that they were dishonest or dishonorable provoked a prickly, sometimes murderous response. Greenberg gives a telling example. In the North, he says, professional entertainers like P. T. Barnum made fortunes putting on shows in which jokesters made fools of people, pulled out chairs while unsuspecting people plumped down on the floor and so on. North of slavery, these antics were perceived as hilarious by the jokester and the audience—everyone, that is, except the butt of the joke.
But when a young gentleman, Marion Sims, tried that at a South Carolina college, sending his classmate Boykin Witherspoon crashing to the ground, “no one thought this was funny.” A deadly silence filled the room of onlookers. Sims, Greenberg notes, apologized in the most profuse terms, “in the humblest manner.” Why? Because a failure to do so could easily have resulted in serious injury or an invitation to a duel. “Everyone understood that this kind of joke in South Carolina did not end in laughter and a round of drinks. It was likely to end in death.”
Duels, Greenberg writes, were the “central ritual of antebellum plantation life.” They far outlasted the practice of dueling in the North, and the culture of dueling was sustained by slights to honor or respect. But not any slights; typically they were slights to honesty or status. Slaves were considered ineligible for duels because they had no honor to lose; only the master class could be “dissed,” and only by another member of the master class.
Greenberg cites the example of a planter who was challenged to a duel because he told a fellow planter that he smelled bad. “When the man of honor is told that he smells,” Greenberg writes, “he does not draw a bath—he draws his pistol.” Today we would find it crazy that two people could fight to the death over this. Even in the nineteenth century, Americans far removed from the plantation were baffled by such behavior. Not only does the resolution seem disproportionate to the slight, but in addition, how could a duel possibly settle the factual question of whether the guy smelled bad or not?
But for the Democratic planter class, duels had nothing to do with establishing who was right over a disputed issue. The issue was not whether the fellow smelled bad or not. Rather, the issue was the questioning of a man’s honor and reputation, which was to him as important as life itself. As Greenberg puts it, “The man of honor does not care if he stinks, but he does care that someone has accused him of stinking.”
A further objective of duels, in addition to upholding reputation, was for the participants “to demonstrate they did not fear death.” This display of fearlessness at the possibility of dying was, Greenberg says, even more important than prevailing in the duel. Moreover, planters loved to gamble and the duel was the ultimate form of gambling. “The duel was the type of gamble in which a man could achieve the highest honor because he assumed the greatest risk.”
Incomprehensible though this code of behavior may be to most of us, I believe the only place that it would be comprehensible today is in our inner cities. There too is a prickly culture of ho
nor and respect. There too slights to status and respect are not taken lightly and provoke fights and duels. Two antebellum planters might duel over who had a legitimate claim to a downed pigeon; two gang members now might duel over a pair of sneakers. Now too in places like Oakland, Baltimore and Chicago stand men ready to risk death in order to humiliate and shame an opponent who has insulted them.
And on the plantation as in the inner city today, duels were public rituals—Greenberg calls them “theatrical displays for public consumption”—aimed at saving face and shaming others. One dueler stood triumphantly over his slain opponent and announced, “This is not the profile of a man; it is the profile of a dog.” Duels required the presence of witnesses, and large numbers of people participated in duels as principals, seconds, adjudicators, physicians, timekeepers or general audience.20
ENFORCED SUBORDINATION
Another common practice of the slave-owners that would be recognizable in our inner cities was informal polygamy. As overlords of their plantations, male planters took advantage of their position with young female slaves. “I hate slavery,” fumed Mary Boykin Chesnut. “Under slavery, we live surrounded by prostitutes . . . God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own.”21
One such “patriarch” was James Henry Hammond, Democratic senator from South Carolina, who was quite candid with his son Harry about his extracurricular activities. As Hammond wrote young Harry in 1856, “In the last will I made I left to you . . . Sally Johnson, the mother of Louisa & all the children of both. Sally says Henderson is my child. It is possible, but I do not believe it. Yet act on her’s rather than my opinion. Louisa’s first child may be mine. I think not. Her second I believe is mine . . . Do not let Louisa or any of my children or possible children be the Slaves of Strangers. Slavery in the family will be their happiest earthly condition.”22
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