The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  In the wake of this ruling, the leaders of Britain’s own evangelical “awakening”in the early nineteenth century had succeeded in having the slave trade prohibited in Britain in 1807, and to prevent others from taking advantage of her withdrawal from a business she once dominated, Britain’s navy assiduously policed the ocean, stopping and searching ships of other nations, including the United States, an irritant that contributed greatly to the outbreak of the 1812 war.

  On each of its new frontiers, the United States’ neighbors were slave-free. Canada had put a stop to slavery over a twenty-five-year period that ended in 1818, while Mexico’s Declaration of Independence in 1812 committed the new nation to abolishing it there as well. Indeed until the 1820s, repugnance in the United States was widespread, even in the South. St. George Tucker, the eminent Virginian lawyer, claimed that slavery was “considered by the great majority of Virginians among its greatest misfortunes,” and in 1817 an editorial in Georgia’s Milledgeville Journal demanded, “Shall we not merit execration, if we fail to provide in time an adequate remedy for this great and growing evil?”

  In the North, opinions ranged from the covert support offered by financiers and shippers who had an interest in maintaining the cheap production of cotton to the Quaker view that slavery should be halted—gradually. Until 1831 when William Lloyd Garrison gave them a voice in The Liberator, only a few wild extremists called for the immediate emancipation of slaves. Such a policy presented two intractable problems—the need to pay compensation amounting to billions of dollars to former slave owners, and the difficulty of caring for millions of released slaves, other than by resettling them in Africa as proposed by the American Colonization Society. Thus, while few northerners wanted slavery abolished, most were determined to see that it did not spread.

  While opinion in the upper states of the South, Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, remained ambivalent about “the peculiar institution,” Georgia and South Carolina, always more militant in their defense of slavery, received new allies following Jackson’s war with the Creeks and the rapid distribution of land from the Louisiana Purchase, both of which made millions of acres available to plantation owners. Northern protests against this increase of slave territory started to grow in 1812 when Louisiana, the first of the states to be carved out of the Louisiana Purchase, was admitted to the Union, to be followed by Ellicott’s offspring, Mississippi and Alabama. Although they were balanced by Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the feeling grew in the north that balance was not enough, slavery should be hemmed in.

  In 1819 the first political clash occurred when the rapidly growing population of the Missouri Territory qualified it for admission to the Union, and leaders such as Thomas Hart Benton, the editor of the St. Louis Enquirer, insisted it should be admitted as a slave state. Geographically, the territory was near the northern limits of where cotton could be grown, and only in the center, along the silt-rich banks of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, was the soil suitable. But almost because of its marginal potential, Missouri symbolized what the north most feared about the capacity of slavery to seep anywhere beyond the Mississippi.

  The argument over Missouri’s admission to the Union was remarkable because it brought into the open for the first time the extraordinary power that Jefferson had created for the U.S. government. Regardless of the wishes of Missouri’s citizens, including Benton’s clamorous calls for total independence from the United States, the issue was decided from start to finish in Washington.

  On the basis of Article Four of the Constitution, New York congressman James Tallmadge put forward an amendment linking Missouri’s admission to the gradual abolition of slavery in the state. His proposal—no new slaves to be allowed into the state and the children of existing slaves to become free at the age of twenty-five—was taken from New York’s experience: a similar law had put an end to slavery there in 1817 without great difficulty, despite New York City’s having in 1776 the largest population of slaves of any city outside of Charleston, South Carolina. But the furious response of southern legislators indicated that Tallmadge had touched a raw nerve.

  “You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out,” threatened Representative Thomas W. Cobb of Georgia, “which seas of blood can only extinguish.” Despite the savagery of his language, the continuing embarrassment felt in much of the upper South about slavery made it possible for the two giants of Congress, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and Kentucky’s Henry Clay, to broker a compromise. The critical trade they proposed was to permit slavery in Missouri, but otherwise prohibit it north of the parallel 36 degrees 30 minutes. This was the disputed frontier that separated Virginia from North Carolina and, after jumping the Appalachians, Kentucky from Tennessee. West of the Mississippi, it would now divide Missouri from Arkansas and, following the admission of Texas, would slice off its northern extremity, the chunk of land that became known as the Oklahoma Panhandle, before petering out in the mountains of New Mexico.

  For forty years after the Missouri Compromise, the parallel was to serve as the western equivalent of the Mason-Dixon Line, the frontier between free and slave states. For the North, it served as the stopper on the spread of slavery in the territories. But the aged Jefferson, wakened by the argument over Missouri as by “a firebell in the night,” predicted grimly that “a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.”

  Despite being one of the architects of the compromise, Calhoun was slow to appreciate its significance as a yardstick of federal strength. During four years as vice president to John Quincy Adams, he seemed oblivious to the south’s growing resentment against the central government’s apparent bias in favor of the north. The “American System” encouraged by Adams produced federal finance for canals and roads linking western farmers to northern markets rather than to the south, while federal duties on imports protected northern manufacturers and raised the price of goods that were needed in the south. Not until 1828, when he was vice president to the newly elected Jackson, did Calhoun at last rebel.

  “We cultivate certain great staples for the supply of the general market of the world,” he protested in a secretly written pamphlet. “They manufacture almost exclusively for the home market. Their object in the Tariff is to keep down foreign competition, in order to obtain a monopoly of the domestic market. The effect on us is, to compel us to purchase at a higher price, both what we obtain from them and from others.”

  In his pamphlet, Calhoun tried to develop Jefferson’s thesis that the sovereignty of the states who had agreed to the federal compact allowed them to veto laws they deemed unconstitutional. “This very control,” he proposed, “is the remedy which the Constitution has provided to prevent the encroachments of the General Government on the reserved rights of the States.”

  Whatever the validity of Jefferson’s original argument, Calhoun’s version of it defied the realities of history: that the federal infant had grown to a giant; that a government once small enough to cost by Jefferson’s estimate around $68,000 a year now had annual revenues of more than $30 million, almost half of it coming in 1835 from sales of federal land; that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall had established beyond doubt its role as sole interpreter of the Constitution; and that after the admission of Missouri, the influence of an individual state in the Union had dwindled from a thirteenth of the total in 1789 to a twenty-fourth in 1828. In short, the nature of the United States was changing.

  A sense of what was happening ensured that a Senate discussion in 1831 about the sale of public lands—whether the income should continue to go to the central government or be distributed among the states—would quickly widen into an examination of what the nation had become. The two protagonists were South Carolina’s Robert Hayne, supporting Calhoun’s argument, and Daniel Webster, who deployed his famous powers of
oratory to argue the superiority of U.S. sovereignty over that of the states. “It is to that Union that we owe our safety at home, and our consideration and dignity abroad,” Webster asserted in his triumphal peroration. “It is to that Union that we are chiefly indebted for whatever makes us most proud of our country.” And his final, bellowed phrase, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” was to become the watchword of Unionists for a generation.

  John C. Calhoun

  This was his answer to the question the framers of the Constitution had dared not address—the United States was a single nation. Two years later Calhoun offered his own interpretation, that the United States was and remained a compact of sovereign states. His bleak Presbyterian advocacy galvanized South Carolina’s legislature. In 1833 it decided to nullify federal legislation relating to the level of tariffs and backed its veto with an implicit threat to secede from the Union. Andrew Jackson’s response was based on raw power rather than constitutional niceties. Declaring nullification and the threat of secession to be tantamount to “insurrection and treason,” the president demolished Calhoun’s thesis in a sentence. “To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union is to say that the United States is not a nation,” he thundered, and let it be known that he would march into Charleston with up to fifteen thousand militia to enforce federal legislation.

  The crisis was defused when Henry Clay brokered another deal allowing South Carolina to nullify a different act while accepting the tariff. Thus the issue of sovereignty was left unresolved, but the reality of federal power was not in doubt. Jackson’s terrifying display of executive authority in the 1830s, when he created the conditions for the expulsion of the Cherokees from their land in Georgia in direct defiance of the Supreme Court, then demolished the Bank of the United States in the face of ferocious opposition from business and financial interests, demonstrated that none of the checks and balances in the Constitution—neither the legislature, nor the states, nor the judiciary—could prevent a popular president from having his way.

  Since Jacksonian democracy randomly benefited state sovereignty, as in its support for Georgia’s campaign to expel the Cherokees, as well as limited it, southerners found reasons both to support and oppose it. In the same way, northern opinion was divided about the appeal of the Whigs, who opposed his monarchical power. But on both sides of the slavery argument, one lesson had been learned from Jackson’s presidency. There could be no challenge to the power of the United States government in the territories. The goal, therefore, was to gain control of that powerful institution.

  The arithmetic was against the south: out of a national population of seventeen million in 1840, nearly ten million lived in the north, in the House of Representatives the north had a majority of fifty, and in the electoral college a majority of fifty-two. Yet by a mixture of intimidation, disarray among their opponents, and skillful use of the two-party system, southerners managed to keep the federal government sympathetic to the institution that underpinned their way of life. Florida and Arkansas followed Missouri into the pro-slavery fold, two presidents attempted to buy Cuba in an effort to bring that slave-owning appendage within the Union, an alliance with western farmers gradually reduced tariffs from their 1830s level, and until some other slave-owning territory could be identified, development of the prairies north of 36 degrees 30 minutes was stalled. So long as the frontier remained at the limits Adams had set, the southern way of life was safe.

  The formidable increase of territory made by the Adams-Onís Treaty in the northwest did not satisfy everyone. Some critics immediately condemned the new frontier for not having been extended farther in the southwest to include the gigantic state of Texas, which was widely assumed to have been part of the Louisiana Purchase. The short-term advantage of removing Florida as a sanctuary for runaway slaves stilled these doubts, but they were renewed in 1833 when American settlers in Texas asserted their independence from the republic of Mexico.

  Their revolt against the dictatorial rule of General Antonio de Santa Anna was not just about democracy but about slavery. In 1829 the government of Vicente Guerrero had fulfilled the promise made in Mexico’s Declaration of Independence and declared all slaves to be free. Mexico’s loose confederate structure enabled the slave-owning Americans in Texas to ignore the ban at first. Then Santa Anna reformed the constitution so that power was centralized in Mexico City and in 1833 issued a decree banning further immigration of American settlers to Texas, while requiring slaves there to be set free. Thus the siege of the Alamo and Sam Houston’s defeat of Santa Anna in 1836 were triggered by the need to defend not just Texans’ liberty but their property in people.

  The independent republic of Texas stretched as far north as modern Wyoming, an immense territory two thirds the size of the Louisiana Purchase. When the proposal to include this gigantic, slave-owning state within the frontier of the United States began to be considered seriously in the 1840s, it presented an immediate challenge to the delicate balance of the Missouri Compromise.

  The risks might have been thought too great but for the remarkable change in the south’s attitude toward slavery as a system. In reaction to the Missouri Compromise, southern leaders began to identify the institution with the south’s way of life, while religious figures such as the Reverend Richard Furman of the South Carolina Baptists offered the defense that even the early apostles had deemed slavery “lawful and right.” By 1830, the end of the south’s lingering embarrassment was signaled by a speech from Calhoun praising slavery as “a great political institution, essential to the peace and existence of one-half this Union.”

  The change was driven by the sheer scale of the slave economy growing up in the new states of the deep south. It simply defied apology. Although the economic depression caused by Jacksonian economics reduced output briefly, the value of cotton exports bounced back to reach more than $120 million a year by the 1850s—about 54 percent of the total of all exports— creating a financial bonanza that stretched far beyond the deep south. Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina grew rich supplying slaves for the cotton fields farther south. Philadelphia, New York, and Boston profited from financing the slave economy, and the cotton factories of England earned fortunes for their owners.

  The one economic obstacle to the continuation of the “peculiar institution” came from the very success that had driven the price of a slave to $750 in 1845 and would soon send it above $1,000. Yet the rise in value only reinforced slavery’s unchallengeable position. The south’s three million slaves represented a $2.75 billion investment—more than ten times the total capital invested in northern manufacture. To question the morality of such a gigantic property was, as Mississippi’s declaration of secession would later put it, “to strike a blow at commerce and civilization.”

  Even to an antislavery visitor, the sight of a Louisiana cotton plantation was impressive. “The fields are as level and regular as gardens,” wrote Timothy Flint. “They sometimes contain three or four thousand acres in one field; and I have seen from a dozen to twenty ploughs, all making their straight furrows through a field a mile in depth, with a regularity which, it would be supposed, could be obtained only by a line.”

  At the dawn of the industrial era, such plantations could easily be compared to large-scale factory production. Southern spokesmen made the comparison with increasing frequency to present their system as one of relative humanity. Unlike the system of hired labor that overworked some and left the old and weak to starve, wrote William J. Grayson in The Hireling and the Slave, “Slavery makes all work, and it insures homes, food, and clothing for all. It permits no idleness, and it provides for sickness, infancy and old age…There is no such thing with slavery as a laborer for whom nobody cares or provides.”

  This growing confidence in slavery as an acceptable institution, as well as a source of profits, helped persuade the majority of southern politicians in the 1840s that the frontier of the United States should be extended again to annex the ind
ependent republic of Texas. Mexico’s announcement that it would regard annexation as a hostile act was positively welcomed as an excuse to enclose still more territory within the American frontier.

  Urgency was added to the situation by Britain’s decision to recognize Texas as an independent state, and to push for abolition of slavery within its frontiers. According to an alarmist report from Ashbel Smith, Texas’s representative to Britain, the plan was to create a free-labor zone in Texas, “a refuge for runaway slaves from the United States, and eventually a negro nation…to be more or less, according to circumstances, under the protection of the British Government.”

  The tipping point came with the popularity of James Polk’s expansionist program in the presidential election of 1844, calling for the annexation of Texas and the seizure of the Oregon Country. Deciding that the risk of war with Mexico was worth taking, President John Tyler and his secretary of state, John Calhoun, introduced legislation to annex Texas. To reduce opposition from the north, Texas agreed to relinquish all territory north of 36 degrees 30 minutes. With the addition of this new territory, the U.S. frontier would be pushed almost one thousand miles farther west from the Sabine River to the Rio Grande. This was what Andrew Jackson called “extending the area of freedom.”

  The tragedy of John Quincy Adams’s life was that he lived to see his dream come true. The thin confederation of Atlantic states of his childhood had more than doubled its size while he was still in his prime. He himself then extended it across the continent to the Pacific, and by 1848, the year of his death, the frontier enclosed Oregon and California, Texas and New Mexico, and everything in between. What made this tragic was the gap between his dreams of what the United States stood for and the reality of its power being used to further the ends of slave owners. Freedom had expanded, but slavery had spread with it step by step, and he had connived the deal. In his diary he agonized about his role in which, as his grandson Henry Adams observed in a memoir written toward the end of the century, the great statesman had become “a tool of the slave oligarchy (especially about Florida).”