American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Certainly Greeley let them know of his; the Tribune picked up a circulation of 11,000 within seven weeks. He also published the weekly Tribune, whose national readership soared to over 100,000 by the mid-1850s.

  As he became editorially and politically more powerful, Greeley did not bother to change his style to suit the fashionable. He remained “a strange, child-like figure,” in Vernon Parrington’s words, “with his round moon-face, eyes blinking through spectacles and a fringe of whiskers that invited the pencil of the cartoonist—yet carrying the sorrows of the world in his heart….” Nor did Greeley forget the poverty of his earlier days. A believer in Fourierism, he encouraged his staff to share in the profits of the paper. Writing was remunerative for only a very few at the time; young reporters were lucky to earn eight dollars a week. Most of the famous authors of the period, for that matter, lived on other income—Emerson on his lecturing, Hawthorne on patronage, Melville on a small bequest from his wife’s father.

  The penny press was still an urban phenomenon. As people moved away from closed parochial communities—where everyone knew everyone else and what each was doing—into the impersonal city, the demand for penny papers grew. The anonymity of the environment whetted urban dwellers’ appetites for more newspaper coverage of events, more human-interest stories at a cheaper price. As the factory had made cheaper, mass-produced goods available to a growing market, so did the penny press make mass-circulation papers available to every urban dweller. Railroads and the Erie Canal opened the midwestern market as publishing became a big business centralized in the eastern cities.

  Literary magazines proliferated, catering mainly to women; Godey’s Lady’s Book had 150,000 subscribers in 1860, the prestigious North American Review only a few thousand. Domestic novels written by women authors sold thousands of copies. The Wide, Wide World by Susan B. Warner launched the wave of best-selling novels by and for women, followed by The Curse of Clifton by Mrs. E. D.E.N. Southworth, The Lamplighter by Maria S. Cummins, and Tempest and Sunshine by Mary J. Holmes. The total sales of all the works of Hawthorne; Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman in the 1850s did not equal the sales of one of the more popular domestic novels.

  The special journal flourished, as reform sentiment grew—Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation, William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, labor organs such as Frances Wright’s Free Enquirer and George Henry Evans’ Workingman’ s Advocate. But the penny press, with its low price, high circulation, emphasis on human-interest stories, and advertisements, appealed most to the growing urban middle class in the Jacksonian age.

  No matter how intent on mass circulation and moneymaking, or on exploiting freedom of the press in fierce local disputes, the press could not wholly escape the moral issue of slavery. And some editors did not want to. Elijah P. Lovejoy, son of a Congregational minister and student at Princeton Theological Seminary, published a religious paper, the St. Louis Observer. In 1836, he had to move his press from St. Louis to Alton, Illinois, twenty-five miles up the Mississippi River, after mobs attacked his newspaper for assailing injustices to blacks. Supported by prominent businessmen, Lovejoy continued his crusades in the Alton Observer, against intemperance, “popery,” mob violence, and slavery, as opposed to God’s law. By 1837, after mobs had destroyed two additional presses, Alton citizens called a public meeting, condemned the mob action, and pledged money for a new press. A third press was shipped for Lovejoy to a warehouse protected by sixty armed guards. But a mob broke through, smashed the new press, set the building afire, and killed the editor.

  ABOLITIONISTS: BY TONGUE AND PEN

  Lovejoy’s murder electrified the antislavery leadership. It was a “shock as of any earthquake throughout this continent,” said John Quincy Adams. To some, the mob had struck a blow not merely against the antislavery movement but against liberty for all. Never mind that Lovejoy himself was an anti-Catholic extremist who viewed slavery as a papist plot—bigots too had their rights. “To say that he who holds unpopular opinions must hold them at the peril of his life,” asserted the New York Evening Post, was “to strike at all rights, all liberties, all protection of law.” In Boston, William Ellery Channing, backed up by a committee of 100 notables, asked the city authorities for the use of Faneuil Hall, the “cradle of liberty,” to mourn Lovejoy’s death as a threat to liberty of tongue and pen. The mayor and aldermen turned him down.

  “Has Boston fallen so low?” Channing implored in an open letter. “May not its citizens be trusted to come together to express the great principles of liberty for which their fathers died?” When Channing mobilized his influentials, the city gave way. After five thousand or more people crowded into Faneuil Hall to hear Channing’s declarations, the attorney general of the commonwealth of Massachusetts gained the floor to castigate Boston’s blacks as lions, tigers, hyenas, jackasses and monkeys, to praise the South for subjugating their own “wild beasts of the menagerie,” and to call the Alton mob as glorious as the Revolutionary patriots who had dumped John Bull’s tea into Boston Harbor. Authority would exercise its right to free speech too.

  It was a challenge thrown into the teeth of the abolitionists in Faneuil Hall—Channing, Maria Chapman, Benjamin Hallet, and others lesser known. One of these was a handsome, sandy-haired young man named Wendell Phillips. Under the influence of Garrison—whom he had seen dragged through the streets of Boston by a rope—and of his abolitionist wife, Anne Greene, Phillips had embraced the antislavery cause, to the consternation of his aristocratic friends of Harvard, Beacon Hill, State Street, and the law. During the cacophony of applause and hoots that followed the attorney general’s speech, Phillips pushed his way forward through the crowd and leaped up on the platform. Speaking quietly, slowly gaining the attention of the crowd, Phillips seemed to intoxicate himself and the crowds.

  “Sir, when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips”—here Phillips pointed to portraits of the apostles of liberty—“would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American—the slanderer of the dead.…” The audience burst into applause and catcalls. Channing’s resolutions carried and Phillips left the hall a celebrity. “Sublime, irresistible, annihilating,” Garrison called the speech.’

  Abolitionism thrived on news of tragedy and martyrdom: the burning of abolitionist churches, the return of terrified fugitive slaves, the congressional ignoring of petitions, the murder of Lovejoy and others. By the 1840s the American Anti-Slavery Society numbered more than 1,200 societies in the national organization, with a membership of about a quarter million persons. As abolitionism expanded, the central questions of ends and means that once could be debated in isolation now took on enormous theoretical and practical importance. Literary and forensic abolitionists could find larger audiences for their speeches, books, and articles. Wendell Phillips quickly reached the first rank of the brilliant leadership of antislavery, and was one of the boldest and most articulate on questions of strategy.

  These questions were as complex as they were compelling. They were questions of ultimate goals, of strategy, and of tactics in realizing strategy. Should abolitionists and other radicals concentrate on seeking equality and liberty for all deprived persons—women and Indians and newspaper editors as well as blacks—or focus on arousing public opinion only against the most dramatic and egregious sin, slavery? In either case, should abolitionism seek to accomplish its aims by gradually reforming society—that is, cleansing it of its impurities—or by reconstructing it? And in either of those cases, should radicals work within the existing system of political parties, elections, fragmented constitutional government, at the risk of being corrupted or compromised by it, or bypass the system and emphasize direct political action and propaganda?

  Garrison and others had long denounced the constitutional compromise over slavery. Phillips saw the whole political system as biased toward certain outcomes. “Every government i
s always growing corrupt,” he said. Every Secretary of State was “an enemy to the people of necessity, because the moment he joins the government, he gravitates against that popular agitation which is the life of a republic.” Phillips held liberty to be as essential to a republic as a republic was to liberty; hence antislavery agitation was part of the machinery of the state. “The Republic which sinks to sleep, trusting to constitutions and machinery, to politicians and statesmen, for the safety of its liberties, never will have any.”

  Phillips understood the clashing roles of reformer and politician. “The reformer is careless of numbers, disregards popularity, and deals only with ideas, conscience, and common sense,” he said. “…He neither expects nor is overanxious for immediate success. The politician dwells in an everlasting NOW. His motto is ‘Success’—his aim, votes. His object is not absolute right, but, like Solon’s laws, as much right as the people will sanction. His office is not to instruct public opinion, but to represent it.”

  The abolitionists would instruct, preach, inspire, elevate public opinion; they were wary of electoral activity because even ad hoc alliances with other parties or movements for achieving practical, short-run ends through government, would help the enemy by legitimizing its institutions. “Moral influence,” said Lydia Maria Child, “dies under party action.” Because the militant abolitionists were above all moralizers and preachers, they impressed some of their contemporaries—and some historians—as dogmatic, humorless, rigid, aggressive, and even neurotic, responding more to their internal psychological needs than to the social and economic needs of the masses. They can better be understood as persons who, because of their social, educational, and religious backgrounds, took the values of liberty and equality with the utmost seriousness; saw slavery as the monumental repudiation of these values that it was; and cast about unceasingly for moral or political solutions to an evil that seemed to be spreading.

  Inevitably, abolitionists tended to be earnest, committed, single-minded. Some, like the New York capitalist Lewis Tappan, often were morally arrogant, obstinate, cliquish, and abrasive. But many seemed notably reasonable, gentle, good-humored, personable. Maria Chapman was a beautiful person in almost every meaning of the phrase; Wendell Phillips showed all the graces of his birth and breeding; Lydia Maria Child’s devotion to justice was matched by her love of nature; the Grimké sisters were sensitive and compassionate, if determined; even Garrison revealed himself in his letters as a frequent conciliator and occasional wit. Aileen Kraditor saw them as “a group of people intensely earnest in their struggle against slavery but also capable of poking fun at their own seriousness and laughing at their own vagaries.”

  The abolitionists lived amid conflict—conflict not only with proslavery opponents but among themselves. Their disagreements over gradualism versus immediatism, over moral agitation versus political coalition-building, over reconstructing society versus purifying it—these and other disputes erupted in meeting after meeting. But they were also distinguished by their ability to listen to one another. They corresponded among themselves indefatigably, editorialized in their own newspapers and wrote letters to their opponents’, talked and talked endlessly at their conferences. Debates went on within families too; James Russell Lowell and Wendell Phillips were but two who admitted the influence on them of their wives. “My wife,” said Phillips, “made me an out and out abolitionist.”

  Dedicated to transcending leadership, educated and invigorated by conflict, united in a great intellectual collective, firmly grounded in a “third cadre” of rank-and-file activists throughout the Northeast and Midwest, the abolitionists of the 1830s and 1840s constituted a leadership group surpassed only by the men who earlier had built the nation’s political system. Rather than operating through institutions, however—especially after the failure of the Liberty party in the 1840s—these men and women appealed directly to the public, through their speaking and writing, in order to raise people’s consciousness of the evil of slavery. The object, said Lydia Maria Child, was “to change public opinion on the subject of slavery, by the persevering utterance of truth.” This change would then show itself “in a thousand different forms:—such as conflict and separation in churches; new arrangements in colleges and schools; new customs in stages and cars; and new modifications of policy in the political parties of the day.” Instead of staking their hopes on any of these developments, she said, abolitionism must control the public opinion that dominated them all. “The business of anti-slavery was, and is, to purify the fountain, whence all these streams flow; if it turns aside to take charge of any one of the streams, however important, it is obvious enough that the whole work must retrograde.”

  Ultimately, the abolitionist leaders were strategists of propaganda. Since even their incessant editorializing and lecturing could not reach masses of people, much depended on men and women who could. To some degree the antislavery writings and sentiments of Emerson and Thoreau had penetrated the popular consciousness. James Russell Lowell’s poetry and prose—especially The Biglow Papers—and John Greenleaf Whittier’s poems against slavery expansion influenced public opinion, as did Richard Hildreth’s 1834 novel The Slave, or, Memoirs of Archy Moore. But their combined impact could hardly compare with that of a tiny woman, lately of Cincinnati, of a deeply religious family, who had been antislavery though not abolitionist, but who reacted passionately to the fugitive-slave provisions of the Compromise of 1850. The author earlier principally of books on housekeeping and “domestic science,” she now penned a sentimental novel about two well-meaning but negligent southern masters, a cruel, New England-born villain named Simon Legree, a faithful black couple called Tom and Eliza, and a little white child named Eva. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold three thousand copies on the day of publication, one hundred times that within a year, perhaps a million copies in Britain alone. Inspired by moral conviction and religious fervor, filled with gripping banalities, the book (and the play based on the book) became probably the most effective piece of propaganda in American history.

  Whatever their differences and conflicts, antislavery people were united in their belief in moral persuasion and their opposition to the use of force. Some indeed made a fetish of nonviolence and “nonresistance.” By the advent of the 1850s, however, powerful antislavery propaganda, intensifying abolitionist feeling, deepening southern intransigence, and a constitutional and political system that seemed to satisfy neither side, combined to raise storm clouds on the horizon. Not only nonresisters had responded to Lovejoy’s murder. At a memorial meeting in Ohio a man of thirty-seven had risen at the end of the ceremonies to raise his hand and vow to consecrate his life to the destruction of slavery. His name was John Brown.

  PART V

  Neither Liberty Nor Union

  CHAPTER 15

  The Ripening Vineyard

  IN OCTOBER 1852, IN his big house overlooking salt marshes stretching toward the Atlantic, hardly a dozen miles north of the Pilgrim landing, Daniel Webster lay dying of cirrhosis of the liver. His stomach and legs were swollen; he could barely sit up; he vomited blood even as five or six leeches sucked away. But the old warrior would die as he had lived, acting the parts of squire, orator, and statesman. Even prostrate on a sofa the Secretary of State seemed as imposing as ever in his blue coat, buff vest, black pantaloons, white cravat and turned-down collar. He spent hours watching as his ox and sheep were paraded, past his window, and he supervised the daily activities of house and farm, gazing raptly at the stars and stripes of a miniature Union flag fastened to the masthead of a tiny boat in his pond. Toward the end, after completing his will and assembling family and servants around his bed, he delivered an oration on immortality. Drowsily closing his eyes for a moment and then opening them, he cried out, “Have I—wife, son, doctor, friends, are you all here?—have I, on this occasion, said any thing unworthy of Daniel Webster?”

  The old gladiator died in bitter political disappointment. Vexed and humiliated by the Whig
convention’s nomination of General Winfield Scott earlier in the year, he had written his son that he was determined to quit as Secretary of State “and either go abroad, or go into obscurity…” President Fillmore kept him on until the end. Webster predicted that the Democrats under Pierce would sweep the country. As a “national party,” he said, “the Whigs are ended.”

  But not only the Whig party was dying in the early 1850s; a way of government was dying with it. The three resplendent leaders who had, in their different ways, acted for union were gone. Calhoun had died within a few weeks of Webster’s great speech of March 7, 1850, still doubting that “two peoples so different and hostile” could “exist together in one common Union,” while hoping that the North might make the necessary concessions for the nation to continue. Henry Clay, the very symbol of union, had died only four months before Webster. During most of their public lives these three leaders had fought to save the Union, even at the sacrifice of high principles like liberty and equality, as they defined them.

  But now, in the early 1850s, the air was filled with the voices of those who proclaimed that the Union was but a means to higher ends—and what lofty ends was this union serving? Ralph Waldo Emerson happened to be on the beach at Plymouth the Sunday morning when Webster died, looking out across the rough water whose spray was blowing onto the hills and orchards. Not since Napoleon, Emerson reflected, had Nature “cut out such a masterpiece” as Webster, a strong leader, the teacher of the nation’s legislators in style and eloquence, the model for young adventurers. “But alas!” as he wrote in his journal, “he was the victim of his ambition; to please the South betrayed the North, and was thrown out by both.”