American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  “You see,” she added, “Mrs. Stowe did not hit the sorest spot. She makes Legree a bachelor.”

  Yet out of this patriarchal, caste-ridden, self-indulgent, elitist community had emerged one of the most cultivated and elegant societies in America. Its capital, Columbia, sitting astride the fall line over a hundred miles from the coast, was a city of handsome houses and gardens, wide, tree-lined streets, and sparkling social life. Thomas Cooper, aging but still vigorous, presided for years over the lively South Carolina College, which spread its maternal wings over the state and strengthened the ideological and political ties binding the Carolinian elite. The eminent political scientist Francis Lieber came to teach here. Small but brilliant groups of artists, scientists, architects, intellectuals, physicians thrived in the state, and many of these masters taught as well. By the mid-1850s educators had founded several women’s colleges that taught classics and not merely comportment.

  Probably the most cosmopolitan people in Charleston were the East Bay merchants in the great export and import houses in the Cooper River docks area. Their traditional family and financial ties to Londoners and Parisians, New Yorkers and Philadelphians, their close links to planters needing goods and loans, their involvement in the system of elite power, enabled the merchants to serve as moderating and mediating influences among the powerful forces long building up in the Carolinian lowlands.

  Charleston, Carolinians liked to say, was the Athens of America, and the boast was not wholly idle. Here at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers flourished an active press, the stimulating Southern Review, the respectable Literary and Philosophical Society, the Apprentices’ Association with its 10,000-volume library and lectures in science, about twenty-five churches, a bank, a theater, and a noted medical college. Here also were a slave auction house, jail with flogging block and treadmill, almshouse, orphan asylum, two arsenals, and noisome slums.

  By the 1850s, however, some wondered whether the glory of Charleston and of the state lay in the past, in the eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth. Historians would differ as to just when the state seemed to mutate from the moderate and cosmopolitan community of old to the most bellicose, separatist, and politically homogeneous in the South, but the nullification crisis of the early 1830s seemed to lie at the center of this sea change. Perhaps it was only accidental that such cultural adornments as the Southern Review and the Academy of Fine Arts died during this crisis. The fact that many Carolinians were willing separately to take on General Jackson’s armies over the issue of the tariff seemingly a mere matter of dollars and cents—reflected the depth and intensity of the feeling. The tariff was not the real issue, of course; the South feared that national majorities could be turned against slavery, that northern firebrands might incite slave revolts. Ten years earlier, South Carolinians had exorcised from their midst Denmark Vesey and thirty-four other blacks by hanging them for planning a revolt that never took place; years later they could not exorcise the great fear that still perturbed them.

  The bonds that would snap between North and South a quarter century later were already fraying between Carolinians and other Americans. Calhoun’s resignation as Jackson’s Vice-President, Hayne’s resignation as United States senator and selection as governor, and Calhoun’s election to replace him in the Senate marked the turning away of these men from national to sectional leadership. In South Carolina the nullifiers now were top dogs. Seeking always to strengthen Carolinian solidarity in the face of external threats, nullifier leaders almost put through a test oath that would require all state officers to swear primary allegiance to a sovereign South Carolina. Any possible ties between Carolina slaves and the North were attacked by laws that forbade slaves to learn to read and write and that taxed out of existence peddlers who might traffic in tempting ideas as well as goods. Thus the planter elites tried to suppress criticism and choke off opposition.

  The leadership now governing South Carolina was as powerful and unified as any the nation had seen for half a century. Its power and unity flowed from a political system that reflected an ideological solidarity so strong as to render most questions merely tactical disputes over how best to carry out an agreed-on strategy. The Carolinian structure of government was remarkable in a nation that worshipped the checks and balances. An almost omnipotent legislature selected the governor for a two-year term, at the end of which the incumbent was ineligible for re-election. The legislature chose other key state officers and court clerks, as well as local officials. The governor lacked the power of veto. This centralization of power in legislative elites might not have been unusual if the legislators operated in a competitive two-party system, or at least could expect to face opposition, but such was not the case. The absence of a statewide-gubernatorial election that might stimulate grass-roots participation and unity, a doctrine of “virtual representation” that gave legislators wide leeway, the absence of a strong and continuing opposition party, the fear of any opposition at a time when Carolinians were mobilized against external and internal threats, the weakness of local government and voluntary associations, the partial diking off of state from national politics—all these intended and accidental factors drew South Carolina away from the mainstream of national competitive politics, immensely fortified the power of the slaveholding elites, and emasculated the old Unionist opposition.

  Mightily sustaining the Carolinian power elites, and mightily sustained by them, was an ideology—a set of lenses through which the elites perceived the world, a system of doctrines by which they understood it, a hierarchy of values by which they measured it. South Carolinians needed such an ideology, a guide to political action and policy decision, and a way of rationalizing and justifying action taken. Under the intellectual leadership of John Calhoun, the Carolinians and Southerners allied with them shaped perhaps the single most potent ideology to appear in the nation since its founding—but an ideology so flawed at its very heart as to betray those who embraced it.

  When Calhoun responded to President Jackson’s famous toast, “Our Federal Union—it must be preserved, ” with his own counter-toast, “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear,” the South Carolinian was expressing the central value of his ideology. From Jeffersonian roots Calhoun had drawn a relatively generous and expansive concept of this supreme value. To him liberty was the goal because, in Charles Wiltse’s words, “it was the liberty of the individual to seek his own betterment, to develop his own talents and skills, to realize his own fullest potentialities, that led to every advance in civilization and thereby improved the condition of the whole society.” While this was a highly individualistic theory of liberty, it flowed powerfully from the historic defense of the rights of man against authority as expressed in the English, American, and French revolutions.

  Carolinians warmly embraced Calhoun’s idea of an elaborate mechanism to keep government off the back of the citizen—not only states’ rights in general but state nullification of abhorrent federal law, not only the traditional checks and balances but the requirement of a “concurrent majority”—that is, agreement of all major sections and interests—in order for the federal government to act. Calhoun wanted two Presidents, representing two major sections of the country and each having an absolute veto over the other. Calhoun’s was almost a caricature of the old notion of checks on government officials to stop them from interfering with individual liberty; once again the questions of checks against private abuse of individual liberty, and of the ready availability of “government by the people” to curb arbitrary use of private power, were left by the wayside, enveloped in a fog of theory.

  The more, however, that Carolinians apotheosized liberty as individual opportunity, as defense against oppression, as the “unalienable right” written into the Declaration of Independence and signed by eminent Carolinians, the more they faced a flagrant political and intellectual contradiction—the subordination of women and especially of blacks in a caste society. Immensely sharpening this dilemma was t
he emphasis that Calhoun and others placed on the constant threat to liberty of excessive power, the tendency of those holding power to abuse it, the need to balance power with power. Where was the balancing power of slaves? For a century Carolinians had had to confront the taunting cry from the North: how could slaveholders talk about liberty?

  It would take men of great intellectual power and resourcefulness to resolve this dilemma, and such men South Carolina had in abundance in the antebellum period. Calhoun had deposited his intellectual legacy with a group of thinkers who were at least as uncompromising as he and who criticized him, indeed, mainly for his expedient concessions to the North when he was seeking the presidency. There was William Gilmore Simms, a big, proud man with a bluff manner and slyly sarcastic tongue, shunned by the Charleston elite even after he “married into a good name.” There was Edmund Ruffin, an archetypal Yankee-hater, a Virginia-born and -raised agriculturalist who served for a time as agricultural surveyor for South Carolina. There was James Henry Hammond, well wed to a woman who brought him a plantation of 7,500 acres and 148 slaves, a onetime fire-eater who called slavery “the cornerstone of our Republican edifice.” An able politician and longtime champion of nullification and secession, Hammond started as the editor of a paper in Columbia, where he challenged one critic to a duel and horsewhipped another, and once advocated the death penalty for abolitionists. These men and other Carolinians, like Thomas Cooper, in intellectual communion with writers in other states, such as George Fitzhugh and Nathaniel Beverly Tucker of Virginia and William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, wrenched the concept of liberty out of its old moral foundations to make it serve new political purposes.

  Thus, where Calhoun contended that people were not all “equally entitled to liberty” but had to earn it, Simms added that liberty was “not intended to disturb the natural degrees of humanity,” but was served only when a man was “suffered to occupy his proper place.” Where Calhoun warned that liberty should not be overextended to those not yet ready for it, Simms would grant only “such liberty as becomes one’s moral condition.” Slavery was a benign institutionalization of natural inequality. Liberty was often defined simply as states’ rights, in the Calhoun tradition, but this old doctrine too was flawed. If South Carolina demanded her freedom from national governmental control on the ground that she knew best how to govern her affairs, should not South Carolinians in their localities be guaranteed their liberty against state control—and how could that proposition be defended when the South Carolina legislature had almost total power over local officials?

  There was a much simpler way to overcome the intellectual dilemma over liberty than reinterpreting and narrowing and trivializing it—to repudiate the concept entirely and with it the essence of Jeffersonian moral philosophy. “Liberty and equality are not only destructive to the morals,” said George Fitzhugh, “but to the happiness of society.” So much for the Declaration of Independence. Slavery, contended Albert Taylor Bledsoe, another non-Carolinian, was in effect liberty: “By the institution of slavery for the blacks, license is shut out, and liberty is introduced.…” It was even simpler to dispose of that dangerous concept of Mr. Jefferson’s that “all men are created equal.” Hammond simply denied it.

  Whatever their attitude toward liberty in theory, Carolinians and other Southerners were unquestionably ready to abrogate it in fact. By the 1850s every southern state save Kentucky had passed laws limiting freedom of speech, press, and discussion. Hammond recommended “one way” to silence talk of abolition: “Terror—Death…” Even in Kentucky, Cassius Clay’s antislavery True American was suppressed by other means, as a mob dismantled his presses and sent them to Cincinnati: Most southern editors applauded this clamp-down on their fellow journalists. The failure of the press to challenge the proslavery litany reflected—aside from the ever-present threat of the duel—a failure of the southern imagination to see alternative possibilities for its society.

  The dragnet covered even the universities. When in Chapel Hill a chemistry professor remarked that he would vote for the 1856 Republican ticket if it should be run in North Carolina, there was a public uproar. The Raleigh Standard called for his ilk to be “silenced or…be driven out,” students burned him in effigy, and he was hounded out of the university. The silencing of any independent critical voice, the absence of any of the “isms” sweeping the North, and the tendency of southern schools to become institutions of propaganda constituted crucial ways, in Clement Eaton’s words, in which the “Southern people set up an intellectual blockade, a cordon sanitaire.”

  By the time that slavery boiled up again as a national issue in the mid-1850s, the intellectual effort to reconcile slavery and liberty had become so extremist and even gymnastic that a simple and straightforward defense of slavery seemed more useful to southern elites. This defense took many forms. Some arguments for slavery were essentially debating points: that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible; that the founding fathers had owned slaves; that most of the abuse of blacks took place in southern cities, at the hands of owners who had never before had slaves. Other proslavery arguments were essentially biological: black men were, innately inferior and even helpless, and needed white masters to look out for them. In a famous address to the United States Senate in 1858, Hammond argued that all societies required a “mud-sill” class of laborers and that Negroes were born inferior, while another Carolinian, William Henry Trescot, held that they were unfit to be educated. Still other arguments were philosophical: that the slaves were part of a “bygone pastoral Arcadia,” in David Donald’s words, that “had formerly flourished in the South before it was undermined by the commercialization of urban life on the one hand and by the increasing democratization and decentralization of the frontier on the other.” Could not agrarian community and hierarchy and order be saved?

  By far the most telling southern argument, however, was not the defense of slavery, but the attack on northern capitalism as a system of “wage slavery” far less just and humane than black slavery. Better to be a slave at the mercy of a master who must take responsibility for him, wrote “a Carolinian,” than a wage worker subject to “no tyrant but the hard laws of demand and supply, stern and unchangeable.” Southern writers triumphantly contrasted the slave cared for by his master in illness and old age, in hard times and good, with the wage slave abandoned by his employer on a minute’s notice. As usual, Fitzhugh put the point the most tellingly, in his aptly titled tract Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters. Everywhere, he said, the strong took advantage of the weak—hence cannibals all—but the South had long recognized this and made provision for protecting the slave, while the North extracted full value from the worker and then tossed him into the ashcan. Capitalism, in short, was white slavery.

  Candid Carolinians knew, however, that masters did not always provide for their bondspeople, as when planters for months left slaves to the mercy of overseers and malaria, or provided poor food or shelter, or sold off rebellious or inefficient field hands. Candid capitalists of the North knew that the “white slavers” were often as unjust as southern polemicists claimed. Behind the lofty pretensions of each lay an ignoble defense of the elite monopolization of property and profits. The tragedy of South Carolina was that, despite its possession of the finest intellects of the South, the defense of slavery was shallow and self-interested. The tragedy of the North was that it was too vulnerable to southern charges of “wage slavery” to be able to mount a respectable defense. The tragedy of both North and South was that neither fully engaged with the other, neither treated the value of liberty analytically and multidimensionally, and neither linked it to equality and other principles in a well-considered hierarchy of values. Where a war of words was so inadequate, a war of weapons would seem likely to follow.

  THE GRAND DEBATES

  “Oyez! Oyez!” intoned the court crier as the Supreme Court justices, gathering their black robes around them, seated themselves behind their long bench. It was the same cry that had opened th
e court session for Marbury v. Madison a half century before, and all the sessions since; the high court still met in a drab, ground-level basement room beneath the Senate chamber; and the Chief Justice was about to render a decision as portentous and controversial as Marbury. Otherwise things were different. It was March 6, 1857, two days after Buchanan’s inaugural. The court had grown from five members to nine. The case involved not a white clerk named Marbury, but a black slave called Dred Scott. And the court was about to invalidate not a minor procedural act of Congress, as in Marbury, but one of its towering achievements—the Missouri Compromise restriction on slavery.

  The faces of the men behind the bench would have delighted Dickens: Taney’s deeply seamed countenance of parchment yellow, set among shaggy eyebrows and graying locks, highlighted by large, world-weary eyes; the stern and swarthy visage of Virginia’s apoplectic Peter V. Daniel; the genial and philosophical expression of John A. Campbell of Alabama; the dour, ruddy face of Robert C. Grier of Pennsylvania; the aristocratic features of the youthful Benjamin R. Curtis. Emerging out of the rough-and-tumble of American law and politics, the justices were mainly a collection of able, experienced mediocrities, notable more for their party and sectional background than their intellects. Flanking Taney were party men—six other Democrats, one Republican, and one Whig. Flanking him were sectional men—four other judges from slaveholding states, two men from the middle states, and one from Massachusetts. The last was the Whig Curtis, the ablest intellect among the associate justices. Dominating the scene and the court—was Taney, born of the Maryland planting gentry, appointed Chief Justice by Jackson after the fight against the national bank, a devout Catholic who had long since freed his own slaves. Taney had proved to be the perfect heir to the Jeffersonian states’ rights tradition, guiding the court away from the nationalist direction it had taken under Marshall’s leadership.