American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  So by the late 1830s Americans had a party system. National, state, and local parties were linked through a pyramid of local, county, and congressional-district conventions sending delegates to state and national conventions. Party consciousness was high among both party leaders and party followers. Strong cadres of leaders developed at every level. Party competition was intense and strengthened partisan feeling on both sides. The parties were well balanced against each other not only nationally but also in most of the states—a degree of national political unity that would not be seen again for four decades. The linkage within and between parties was almost complete.

  On the surface, at least, the two parties looked splendid, with their national conventions topping the pyramids of state, county, and local committees and caucuses and conventions, their sonorous platforms rhetorically thwacking their foes hip and thigh, their national and state leaders skilled in the arts of intra-party negotiation and compromise, their robust local activity full of parades and picnics and speechifying and occasional fisticuffs and barroom brawls. Behind the façade lay certain weaknesses, existing and potential.

  It was not wholly clear by the end of the 1830s what the parties were, what they were for and against. More than ever the Democrats claimed to be the “party of the common man,” despite the fact that it did not engage with the average woman or the blacks or the really poor; nor did these people engage with the Democrats. The Jacksonians had made some effort to appeal to the expanding wage-earning class, especially in Van Buren’s executive order establishing a shorter working day on federal public projects, but the Democracy was still largely an agrarian party. The Whigs, an unstable coalition of old Federalists, Anti-Masons, mercantile and industrial elements, and a congeries of other groupings, found it much easier to denounce Jackson’s executive “usurpation” and Van Buren’s partisanship than to develop a positive program of their own. Both parties had weaknesses at their foundations. Political change and realignment had occurred so quickly during the 1830s that large numbers of Americans were left in a void between or outside the two major parties. State and local parties lacked organization and vigor in a number of areas, especially in the South and parts of the West.

  The main weakness of party as the second, or “people’s,” constitution lay in its awkward embrace with the first. The organized two-party system of the late 1830s was potentially strong enough to be a vehicle for popular majority rule. Theoretically a winning majority party takes over the government and rules until at least the next election. But the Constitution was craftily designed to thwart majority rule. Winners of a presidential election could take over the White House but not necessarily the Congress. Representatives were elected out of their own, often independent constituencies; only a third of the senators were even chosen in the same year as the President. The Supreme Court, as John Marshall had demonstrated, lay beyond the reach of transient popular majorities. Even if one party achieved the feat of winning control of the whole federal government, a profusion of states, counties, cities, and towns had their own counterbalancing and conflicting constituencies.

  The party “constitution,” in short, was designed to concentrate power, the formal Constitution to disperse it. Only a centrally organized and powerfully led and united party could overcome the separation of powers and checks and balances stitched into the American national and state constitutional systems, and neither the Whigs nor the Democrats were such a party. Thus the first constitution rent the second far more than the second constitution knit together the first. To a great extent, indeed, different parts of the two parties enhanced fragmentation by providing a local or state party foundation for the dispersed efforts of independent legislators or elected officials.

  Still, the republic was only half a century old by the end of the 1830s; it was still young, changing, experimental. The question was the future potential for majority rule through party government. Voting turnout rose so strongly and dramatically during the 1830s as to seem to make the “people’s” constitution ultimately more viable. The participation of more and more low-income people in voting also made more possible a national party, whether Democratic or Whig or something else, that could provide the nation with a genuinely radical, democratic, popular national government that might, if given enough time and sense of commitment, unite the separated organs of government behind a comprehensive national effort to meet the needs and aspirations of the great number of lower-income people.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Majority That Never Was

  SIXTY YEARS AFTER THE Declaration of Independence, Americans still had a revolutionary credo without a revolutionary movement, a radical rhetoric without a radical party. At the Fourth of July celebrations of 1836, during President Jackson’s last year in office, orators evoked the egalitarian phrases of the Declaration with little heed to the considerable inequality around them. The eras of Jefferson and Jackson would come to be described as “revolutions,” but these at most were political rather than economic or social overturns. During these eras men had been revolved in and out of office, legislative and bureaucratic elites joined and sometimes displaced by more plebeian and populist types, banking and other establishments challenged, smaller enterprisers given a better chance to rise to the top. But the structure of society and government remained unchanged.

  So did the essential condition of freed and enslaved blacks, middle-class and lower-class women, and the urban and rural poor. Together these people comprised the great majority of the population. These blacks and women and poor could hardly have been more different from one another. They could barely communicate with one another or even recognize each other, much less sympathize with one another. Some would hate one another. Yet the three groups had some things in common—they were in many ways impotent, economically, socially, politically, legally. They all were living in a great republic that preached and practiced its own peculiar form of majority rule. And they, together with Indians both subjugated and unvanquished, made up a popular majority in contrast to the cadres of middle-class and upper-class white men running the affairs of the republic. In the expanding democratic consciousness of the 1830s and 1840s, was there any chance for some kind of collective revolutionary or radical or even reformist impetus from people who shared only their powerlessness?

  Historians have enough trouble dealing with events that did happen without trying to consider events that might have happened but did not, or should have happened and could not. But occasionally, like the dog that did not bark in the night, supremely important developments that might have occurred, and in the eyes of many should have happened but in the end did not, must be considered in the balance accounts of history. This must be done not only to grant a kind of retrospective historical justice to such groups, but even more because in the stream of history the causal agents that are blocked or diverted are entwined with those that are intensified and accelerated. Knowing the potential forces that never came into being helps us understand those that did.

  “If ever America undergoes great revolutions,” Tocqueville wrote, “they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition.”

  The potential reformist or radical or revolutionary forces that never came to realization—how can they be measured? First by assessing the “objective” conditions of people suffering major deprivations. Then, and more difficult, by analyzing how people responded subjectively to the unsatisfied wants and needs arising from those conditions. Finally, and most difficult of all, estimating the leadership, institutional, ideological, and other external forces that influenced the motivation and ability of people to reform, radicalize, or revolt.

  The capacity to measure “objective” conditions has been enormously enhanced by the joint efforts of historians, archivists, demographers, geographers, and others. Through memoirs, diaries, account books, tax rolls, and the like, sophisticate
d analysis has provided better insight into the everyday lives of lower-class persons than do some of the lurid and partisan accounts of the past. These latter reports have often described exceptional situations, because they were more easily dramatizable and publishable. But they ignore the experiences of the great number of persons studied—experiences that ultimately affected the course of history.

  Consider, for example, the “slaver.” All too familiar are the horrifying tales of those floating slave pens whose smell of human squalor could be picked up miles downwind. On some slavers black persons sickened and died by the scores, were brutalized sexually and in other ways, thrown overboard on the approach of a naval vessel, left to die of thirst by deserting crews, were flogged, mutilated, hanged, and shot after any show of resistance. But for most slaves La Fortuna was a more typical introduction to life and death in America.

  On La Fortuna, a ninety-ton schooner bound out of the Rio Pongo for Cuba, everything was efficiency, for maximum profit. Before embarkation the heads of all Africans, male and female, had been neatly shaven, and their bodies lightly branded with pieces of silver wire forming the recipient merchant’s initials. Given a final big “feed” in the African slave pens, they had been taken out to the ship in canoes and stripped naked. The men were sent into the hold, the women to a cabin, and children left on deck. At mealtime, rice or farina or yams or beans, depending on tribal origin, were served in a large tub. The slaves dipped into it and swallowed on commands from a monitor; to prevent “inequality in the appropriation of nourishment.” Every morning a dram was given to prevent scurvy, and thrice a week mouths were washed out with vinegar. At sundown the blacks were stowed below, in spoon position, each head in the next person’s lap. Shackles were used as little as possible, and only for full-grown men, as it was believed that the more a slave was ironed, the more he deteriorated.

  This trip was profitable for Captain Canot. After deducting expenses of $10,900 for his human cargo, $6,200 for the ship and her outfitting, and the pay of officers and crew, he fetched $77,469 for his cargo and $2,950 for the ship, netting $41,439.

  Data from rich and diverse sources enable historians to think their way back into the existential conditions even of those who left few formal records. Any retrospective view is partial, distorted, and limited by the cultural blinders of the twentieth-century Western mind, but enough is known about the “objective” circumstances of existence and deprivation to permit speculation about how persons experienced those circumstances at the time, and why they behaved as they did, why they acted or failed to act.

  BLACKS IN BONDAGE

  Reverend Charles Colcock Jones, the owner of Montevideo, a 941-acre rice and Sea Island cotton plantation on the coast of Georgia, liked things run in an orderly and efficient manner. On a summer morning, as sea breezes drifted through the gray Spanish moss bearding the majestic live oaks, magnolias, and cedars that surrounded the plantation settlement, a single blast of a horn broke the stillness in the slave quarters. The summer sun would be burning as forty or so slaves, after a hurried breakfast, walked from their quarters to the plantation gales. In the fields, Cato, the black foreman, directed the field hands and assigned tasks for the day. Reverend Jones and his family would have fled the summer heat for higher ground at Maybank. Only the slaves, with their white overseer, remained to work the canals, ditches, and dams of rice culture in the malarial, mosquito-ridden swamps.

  Cato directed the slaves at a variety of tasks, such as “working the roads, raising the river dams, cutting new ground, making fences, overseeing carpentry, planting cotton, breaking in corn, rice, and hops.” Slaves had to be able to reach the most distant field in an hour’s walk—one reason why Jones and other planters had split their holdings into two or three separate plantations under separate white overseers. Planters often rated a faithful, experienced driver such as Cato more valuable than white overseers, who tended to move from plantation to plantation.

  At noon, Cato ordered the slaves to break for dinner, always eaten in the fields; at night, he would tell them to quit. Like other black drivers and foremen, he maintained the agricultural equipment by checking it and noting which implements needed repair. The driver estimated the size of the crop his labor force would produce, supervised the ginning of cotton and the harvest of corn, kept the keys to the barn, dairy, smokehouse, cotton house, gin house, corn house, rice house, winnowing house, and mill house at Montevideo. He kept track of the cattle, poultry, and other livestock holdings of the plantation.

  At night, after the day’s work was done, the driver policed the quarters, usually crudely built log cabins with dirt floors. Planters often crowded seven or eight slaves into the two-room cabins. Enlightened men like Jones supplied their slaves with sufficient though badly prepared and monotonous food—rice, fat pork, and clabber. After they had eaten their evening meal, the driver would blow a horn, signaling that every slave must be in for cabin check. Cato made a nightly report to the overseer.

  The Montevideo slaves, like the majority of blacks in slavery, could support one another, maintain some community life, and build a certain group solidarity at work and at night in the slave quarters because they lived with other blacks in plantation units of twenty or more. By 1860 more than half of the 3,954,000 blacks listed as slaves lived with more than twenty other slaves; one-fourth of all the bondmen worked on plantations holding more than fifty slaves, while only one-fourth lived on small farms of ten slaves or less. The overwhelming white majority and superior white firepower would have made revolt suicidal, but blacks could maintain their own cultural and spiritual world within the group, and the group, in many cases, was led by one of their own—a black driver or foreman.

  Slaves at Montevideo also gathered often in the small chapel built by Reverend Jones for religious meetings. “Your people all seem to be doing very well,” wrote Cato. “They attend praise and go to church regularly whenever there is preaching in reach.” Even in winter, Jones was often absent from Montevideo, preaching and teaching ecclesiastical history at a Columbia, South Carolina, theological seminary. In his absence, slaves received religious instruction from visiting white preachers who used Jones’s “slave catechism” and his widely circulated work, Suggestions on the Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the Southern States. Slaves often heard the favorite text of Reverend Jones: “Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eyeservice, as men pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God. And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.…” Recalcitrant blacks were brought before the local minister, who “cited them in front of the next church service.”

  Religion was as important to many slaves as it was to their white masters, if for different reasons. Reverend Jones could not understand the “extravagant and nonsensical chants, and hallelujah songs of their own composing” in the black praise meetings on his plantation. The cultural blend of African tribal customs with evangelical religion created a unique personal area for slaves that the white master could neither comprehend nor control. The singing of spirituals in praise meetings expressed and heightened the slaves’ sense of autonomy and hunger for liberty. Fearing religion as a potentially dangerous force, planters required white preachers such as Jones to lead the worship of slaves. To encourage slaves to listen to white ministers, owners often yielded to their demands for black assistant preachers in praise meetings and worship services. Black ministers formed a third cadre of black leadership, helping to hold their people together under duress.

  Always in the consciousness of field hands loomed the “Big House,” with its white masters and black servitors. About one-fourth of all the slaves in the South were house servants, including coachmen and gardeners, Eugene Genovese has estimated. Reverend Jones’s body servant, Tom, dressed his master every morning and attended the family. Some body servants slept at the foot of their master’s bed so as to be ready for his call. Each member of the family had a personal servant. Jones’s son
owned a body servant, George, who at times traveled alone on the railroad to Savannah, protected by a written pass from his owner.

  Built upon a concept of blacks as inferior and childlike, slavery encouraged owners to promote feelings of dependence. “Will you please keep George, if convenient, with you on the island, about the house,” young Jones wrote to his father, “as I do not wish that he should forget his training. I want him to acquire a house look, which you know is not the acquisition of a day.” Young Jones asked his mother to have slaves make four shirts for George. Later he wrote, “The ‘general’s’ garments fit him admirably and he emphatically looks a little Corporal Trim.…He expects to excite by his fine raiments quite the jealousy of his own sex, and the admiration of the fair sex of kindred extraction.” In some slaves this kind of treatment produced virtual infantilization, but more often blacks only pretended to be dumb, childlike, and ignorant. Donning the grinning, head-bobbing, shambling role of Sambo was another way to resist oppression.