American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Few immigrants had any contact with the one large group of white Americans who rivaled them in their poverty. These were the poor rurals of the hilly regions of Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Many of them, or their forebears, had once lived in tidewater areas or on the piedmont and tried to compete with the large slavery operations of the plantations. Some had tried to earn land, or at least a living, by working for large planters as slave overseers. But many gave up and moved west to the mountains, where they could live by hunting and fishing and marginal farming. Poor whites, they came to be called, or piney woods folks or sandhillers or clayeaters or rednecks or crackers. They might sell their game or fish or farm produce for cash, or “hire out” to labor on more prosperous farms at fifty cents a day. Or they might be paid in tobacco or whiskey. At the base of the class hierarchy lay the landless woodcutters, farm laborers, and squatters on the land.

  Undernourished, uneducated, often afflicted by the parasitic hookworm, housed in crude log cabins or shanties, these rural whites were often too listless to scratch more than a bare existence from the red soil. But, like the immigrant, they needed someone to look down on, and this usually was the black. Despite their need for jobs, the poor whites refused to do certain tasks, such as waiting on table in the homes or working in the fields of nearby planters. Fearing the competition of black people if the slaves were freed, they opposed any talk of emancipation. One of their hopes, indeed, was to acquire slaves of their own.

  Their one great solace was religion. Sundays and other times they would come down from their hollows, the women barefoot in the summer and wearing long homespun dresses, handkerchiefs spread over their shoulders, with men’s hats on their heads; the men in shirt sleeves and barefoot. After services, they would return home for middle-of-the-day dinners of fresh pork and sweet potatoes, cut up and served in one large tin pan.

  Some poor whites turned to politics, as increasingly they gained the right to vote and as leaders grew among them, or came to them. One of the latter was Franklin Plummer, who emigrated from New England to the pineland belt of Mississippi and proceeded to build a political machine by cultivating poor whites. Illiterate themselves, they valued Plummer’s Massachusetts education, calling him a “walking encyclopedia.” He visited their log cabins, talked with the kinfolk, and seated the children on his lap to search for “redbugs and lice in their hair.” His cry of “Plummer for the people and the people for Plummer!” won him a seat in Congress, but the poor whites voted him out of office when he abandoned demagoguery to support the Natchez banking interests.

  There were other poor in America: marginal New England farmers holding on to their rocky soil, frontier people, impecunious scholars, laborers at the bottom of the pile, and, always, Indians and blacks—a mélange. They were bound together in a great commonality of deprivation—denied good homes and food and clothes, good health and nutrition and education, and hence damaged in motivation, aspiration, and self-fulfillment. City “micks” and southern “crackers,” in particular, had in common an existential condition: contempt. They retreated into insularity and clannishness, and resorted to church and drink. The poor suffered many different types of poverty, however, stemming from diverse sources. They lacked the most essential quality that might have alleviated their plight: an awareness of the commonality of their suffering, a feeling of shared grievances, a sense of potential unity.

  LEADERS WITHOUT FOLLOWERS

  “We find ourselves oppressed on every hand—we labor hard in producing all the comforts of life for the enjoyment of others,” an “Unlettered Mechanic” protested to the “Mechanical and Working Classes” of Philadelphia in 1827, “while we ourselves obtain but a scanty portion, and even that in the present state of society depends on the will of employers.” After twenty-five members of the Union Society of Journeymen Tailors in New York were found guilty of conspiracy to restrain trade, a handbill proclaimed: “THE RICH AGAINST THE POOR! Judge Edwards, the tool of the aristocracy, against the people! Mechanics and working men! A deadly blow has been struck at your liberty!”

  “The man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?” Sojourner Truth so addressed a women’s rights convention in Akron in 1851. A former slave who believed that she had been called by the Lord to travel the land testifying to the injustices against her people, she had claimed the floor after hearing ministers dwelling on the manhood of Christ and the lesser intellect of woman.

  “Look at me!” she went on. “Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have born thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?…” Sojourner Truth’s voice was her weapon; she had never learned to read or write.

  “David has signed my will and I have sealed it up and put it away,” Lydia Maria Child wrote to a close friend. “It excited my towering indignation to think it was necessary for him to sign it, and if you had been by, you would have made the matter worse by repeating your old manly ‘fling and twit’ about married women being dead in the law. I was not indignant on my own account, for David respects the freedom of all women upon principle, and mine in particular by reason of affection superadded. But I was indignant for womankind made chattels personal from the beginning of time, perpetually insulted by literature, law, and custom. The very phrases used with regard to us are abominable. ‘Dead in the law.’ ‘Femme couverte.’ How I detest such language! I must come out with a broadside on that subject before I die.”

  The unfulfilled wants and needs of poor and enslaved Americans and of middle-class women in the early nineteenth century seem to have been psychological as well as material—problems of damaged self-esteem as well as of physical survival. Slaves and the very poor in city and country often had unbalanced, monotonous diets, leading to malnutrition, disease, and death; severe hunger and open starvation were uncommon. There is ample evidence that the manner in which people responded to their material situation—to poverty amidst plenty, to being excluded from the American cornucopia—was more crucial to how they ultimately behaved politically than was the “objective” situation itself.

  The sense of deprivation and damaged self-esteem intensified in a nation whose ideologues preached liberty and equality. During the whole pre-Civil War period the preamble to the Declaration of Independence remained “the single most concentrated expression of the revolutionary intellectual tradition,” in Staughton Lynd’s estimate. Jefferson, Robert Owen, Garrison, and other spokesmen invoked it; Lincoln referred to the Declaration as the “standard maxim for a free society.” The sense of deprivation arose even more fundamentally from what Barrington Moore has called “a recurring, possibly pan-human, sense of injustice, which arises from the combined requirements of innate human nature and the imperatives of social living.”

  Given such conditions of material and especially psychological deprivation, how could individual feelings be converted into some kind of collective action? This was initially seen as a task of consciousness raising. Reading over the speeches, tracts, protest novels, convention debates, street-meeting oratory, and knowing of the immense amount of grumbling that went on among activists within the ranks of the poor and the enslaved, one marvels at the power of the written and spoken word, the force of the appeals to scripture, the intellectual clarity and logic of many of the more formal writings, the ability of some radicals and reformers to appeal eloquently to common men and women. And the protesting leaders did penetrate to the hearts and minds of hundreds upon thousands of Americans.

  But they penetrated far too little for the purpose of converting widespread feelings of injustice
and deprivation into self-expressed feelings of need—into hopes and expectations, into feelings of entitlement that could then be converted into effective demands on the political system. Far too little to build a militant minority movement that might serve as both pressure on and alternative to the authorities in power. And certainly far too little to build an organized, lasting mass movement on the left, or radical political party, capable of gaining enough votes in elections to win majority control of the government.

  Where, then, was the failure of leadership? Certainly not in the qualities—the commitment, imagination, compassion, acuteness, courage, and articulateness—of the leaders themselves. Women with the leadership capacity of a Stanton, Mott, Child, Wright, a Sojourner Truth; men with the skills of a Douglass, Garrison, Walsh, Weld, with all their diverse talents and aims, were nothing less than adornments to the nation, whether or not recognized at that time. And this top cadre was almost matched by a second cadre of regional and state leaders, operating within the various abolitionist, women’s, and other radical and reform organizations.

  Some of the nationally known leaders sprang from unlikely roots. Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Emily Grimké, for example, were the daughters not of Boston abolitionists but of wealthy and conservative South Carolina aristocrats. Encouraged by Quakers to break away from the social and political constraints of Charleston, the sisters in turn broke with the Quakers over the Friends’ equivocal attitudes toward abolitionism. By the late 1830s, both had enlisted heart and soul with Garrison, Weld & Co., overcome their initial timidity on the lecture platform, and won national attention as speakers for women’s as well as black rights.

  Nor could the national leaders of the various causes be faulted for failing to work, or at least communicate, with one another. Many noted feminists were also abolitionists. Frederick Douglass, after attending the Seneca Falls convention, wrote a North Star editorial in which, standing upon “the watch-tower of human freedom,” he claimed for women the same political rights as for men. The Grimké sisters not only corresponded at great length with Weld; Angelina Grimké married him. Communication—and sometimes confrontation—occasionally occurred in subtle and personal ways. Lydia Maria Child noted some gossip about the well-known actress Fanny Kemble, who had retired from the stage after marrying Pierce Butler, heir to a large Georgia plantation, and who had been deeply revolted by slavery. “It seems she keeps tugging at her husband’s conscience all the time, about his slaves,” Child wrote after the Butlers had spent a summer in Stockbridge.

  “One day he begged her to spare him—saying, ‘You know, Fanny, we don’t feel alike on that subject. If I objected to it in my conscience, as you do, I would emancipate them all.’

  “ ‘Pierce!’ exclaimed she, ‘look me full in the face, and say that in your conscience you think it right to hold slaves, and I will never again speak to you on the subject.’

  “He met her penetrating glance for a moment, lowered his eyes,—and between a blush and a smile, said, ‘Fanny, I cannot do it.’ ”

  Within a few years, Fanny Butler had left her husband.

  There was amazingly good communication among the top leaders of the elite. The abolitionists and even the North and South thoroughly communicated, thoroughly knew one another’s views. They understood each other only too well. This close communication, and collaboration among top women’s rights leaders and abolitionist leaders—and their mutual understanding even when in full disagreement—was not matched, however, among large sectors of their movements. Thus it was symptomatic that abolitionists often excluded women or women’s representatives from their meetings. At the Akron meeting some women begged the chair not to let Sojourner Truth speak for fear “every newspaper in the land will have our cause mixed with abolition,” and one reason the ex-slave wanted to speak was that ministers at this meeting had opposed political rights for women “ ’cause,” as Sojourner Truth said, “Christ wasn’t a woman!” (“Where did your Christ come from?” she demanded in her speech. “From God and a woman!”) Many adherents of these two causes, as well as others such as temperance and Sabbatarianism, followed a “one issue” strategy—they feared dividing their own ranks by taking stands on other reform issues, even though, as others pointed out, they might have built at least a loose coalition behind a program of reforms.

  By far the most fundamental reason for the failure of leaders lay in their inability to engage with the masses of people who did not see any connection between women’s or black rights and their own welfare. Only at the end of the long roll of middle-class women’s grievances in the Seneca Falls declaration was there a reference to a bread-and-butter question—“securing to women an equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce”—and this resolution was listed as merely having been offered and spoken to by Lucretia Mott. The declaration utterly ignored the plight of women in industry or the condition of the poor. There was virtually no organizational connection between the reform groups and the craft unions or even workers’ movements. Yet the potential for collaboration was there, if only because of the common feelings of deprivation and oppression. Thus a “Factory Tract” of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association protested:

  “Much has been written and spoken in women’s behalf, especially in America, and yet a large class of females are, and have been, destined to a state of servitude as degrading as unceasing toil can make it. I refer to the female operatives of New England—the free states of our union—the boasted land of equal rights for all—the states where no colored slave can breathe the balmy air, and exist as such;—but yet there are those, a host of them, too, who are in fact nothing more nor less than slaves in every sense of the word!…”

  Perhaps the connections that failed to be made at the higher level could have been achieved at the lower, in states and localities, where rank-and-file members of various organizations might have worked out local coalitions or at least collaborations. But there were relatively few members, in large part because the national organizations had not built, in contrast to the political parties, the kinds of local structures of leaders and activists—the “third cadres”—that ultimately were required for national leaders to build and engage with grass-roots constituencies.

  Were there in the United States persons of rare potential leadership who might have transcended the differences among the reform and radical groups and built a coalition of the have-nots? We will never know, because such a leader did not arise. But that the potential existed was indicated by the career, among others, of the incomparable Frances Wright. She was a cosmopolitan who enjoyed the friendship of the most eminent men of her time—Lafayette, Jefferson, Madison, John Stuart Mill, Robert Owen. She was a rationalist who advocated universal education to perfect a democracy in which the inequalities of sex, color, and class would wither away. She was fearless, whether boating down rivers, traveling alone on horseback in the wilderness, or, dressed in a plain white muslin dress that adorned her like the drapery of a Greek statue, facing down howling mobs in lecture halls and in the streets.

  For a time it seemed that Fanny Wright might attract a national following. In the great cities of America she lectured to as many as two thousand people at a time. In Cincinnati only a few people, and scarcely one woman, showed up at her first lecture; the house was full for her second, as word raced around town; and five hundred people had to be turned away from her third. She began publication of her own newspaper, The Free Enquirer, in New York, and built her own lecture building, the Hall of Science. She seemed equally concerned for the needs of the black, the poor, and the female, and she was active in the causes of all three.

  But Fanny Wright and the people around her had audiences rather than followers. It was not only that her advocacy of greater rights for women, more liberal divorce laws, equal education, “free” marriage, and less church influence in politics made her so unpopular that several times she was nearly mobbed. Her undoing was that she could not win the support of a
ctivist women, blacks, and immigrants in sufficient numbers to make a difference, and that few cadres of rank-and-file leadership were available to link her national, inspirational appeal to local needs and thus raise the political consciousness of the deprived. Deeply concerned about all deprived groups, she was yet not a coalition-builder. Mainly she walked alone. And ultimately, so did women, blacks, and the poor.

  Historians tend to doubt that a massive, nationwide, organized collaborative reform or radical movement was possible in the United States in the 1840s or 1850s. The ideological and social and political makings of such a movement simply were not there, in this view. They point to the powerful inhibitors to social action: the essential powerlessness of the deprived groups, as in the inability to vote; racist and sexist biases that kept radicals separated; the American “pragmatic” tradition, as it came to be called, emphasizing day-to-day efforts and step-by-step progress rather than collaborative long-range political action; the fragmenting and pulverizing effect of the American political system on nationwide mass movements; the inhospitability of an essentially agrarian society to urban radicalism; the ideology of individualism, self-help, self-promotion, individual advancement; the hospitality of the American economy to individual effort; the frontier as a social and political safety valve and escape hatch.

  The issue, then, is not that the American reformers did not achieve power. The issue is that they fell so far short of achieving remedies for their objective situation, their sense of deprivation, and the gap between what they had and what they were entitled to, measured by the patriotic ideals of liberty and equality.