A Disease in the Public Mind

by Thomas Fleming

  • • •

  Beyond heated and abusive oratory on both sides, nothing came of the first southern attempt to censure John Quincy Adams. He continued to agitate Congress with petitions and declamations against the gag rule. In 1839, fate handed Adams an opportunity to strike a blow against slavery that won him even more national attention. A Spanish slave ship, the Amistad, was transporting fifty-three blacks to a Cuban port when the unwilling passengers revolted, killed the captain and most of the crew, and ordered a surviving white officer to sail back to Africa. Instead he sailed to America, where a U.S. warship captured the Amistad and guided it into New Haven, Connecticut’s harbor.

  Spain demanded that the slaves be returned to Cuba, where they would be tried for piracy. President Van Buren was inclined to give them up, and more than a few southern members of Congress supported him. But abolitionists rushed to defend them; their newspapers portrayed the slaves’ leader, Cinque, as a hero. A violent legal tangle exploded in the Connecticut courts. The case soon reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where John Quincy Adams volunteered to represent the slaves. Although the court had a majority of Southerners on its bench, they listened respectfully to Adams’s argument that the slaves should be released because both Spain and the United States had outlawed the slave trade. The Supreme Court freed the slaves and they returned to Africa accompanied by five Christian missionaries.12

  • • •

  Back in Boston, William Lloyd Garrison was drifting toward a new variation of his extremist views—a dissolution of the Union. He began denouncing the Constitution for the bargain the founders had made with slave owners. He called on people of the North “to demand the repeal of the Union or the abolition of slavery.”

  Garrison claimed the North would be forever sinful if they ignored this moral ultimatum. Some forty-five citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts, decided to send Congressman Adams a petition asking Congress to begin working out “measures peaceably to dissolve the union of these states.” They did not mention slavery; they claimed to be writing as taxpayers. In their opinion they were not getting their money’s worth from the federal arrangement.

  When Adams introduced this petition, southern congressman by the dozens lost their tempers. One man declared his intention to get rid of a certain member,

  Who in the course of one revolving moon

  Was poet, fiddler, statesman and buffoon.13

  A motion for censure was swiftly voted and approved by a majority of Adams’s own Whig Party. The Southern Democrats were equally ferocious, of course. But the Whigs had decided that getting rid of Adams was a good way to bolster the link between the northern and southern sections of their unstable political enterprise. The man whom the Whigs selected to submit the resolution was Thomas F. Marshall of Kentucky, the nephew of the late Chief Justice John Marshall, a man whose reputation as an interpreter of the Constitution had no equal.

  Adams welcomed the opportunity to defend himself. For the next two weeks, he held the floor, day after day, flinging abuse and argument with a vehemence and persistence that stunned his opponents. He told Thomas Marshall to resign from Congress and enroll in some law school that might teach him about “the rights of the citizens of these states and the members of this House.” He also hoped that Marshall would learn to control his fondness for alcohol. Again and again Adams ridiculed Southerners for having a double standard—crying disloyalty to the Union at Northern citizens for their petitions against slavery while holding the nation hostage to tolerating slavery with similar threats of secession.

  His assaults regularly contained the sort of personal barb that left Thomas Marshall red-faced with chagrin. Adams asked Congressman Henry A. Wise, the future governor of Virginia, how he could have the nerve to attack him. Everyone knew Wise had encouraged a Kentucky congressman to challenge a new Maine member to a duel for supposedly insulting him. The Kentuckian had killed the New Englander, and some members had wanted to censure Wise, but Adams had defended him because a censure trial would have violated his constitutional rights. “Is it possible I saved this blood-stained man,” Adams roared, “although his hands were reeking with the blood of murder?”14

  All this and much more appeared in the daily papers. People in every state in the North read Adams’s words with growing fascination. In Boston, a huge meeting convened in storied Faneuil Hall with William Lloyd Garrison presiding. It was jammed with Boston’s so-called “best people,” who a few short years before would cross the street rather than pass Garrison on the sidewalk. It was electrifying evidence of the impact Old Man Eloquent was having in New England.

  At the end of Adams’s two weeks of oratory against his censure, the battered southern Whigs said nothing while their anxious northern brethren proposed a motion to table the measure. An ecstatic Garrison gloated in The Liberator that Adams had “frightened the boastful South almost out of her wits.” Theodore Weld had worked behind the scenes to supply Adams with material for his daily harangues. In a burst of optimism he would repudiate a few years later, Weld told his wife Angelina that from this “first victory over the slaveowners in a body. . . their downfall takes its date.”15

  • • •

  Adams sensed he was close to an even bigger victory—the defeat of the gag rule. One of his Midwest supporters, Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio, submitted a resolution opposing the southern argument for regaining some Virginia slaves who had revolted aboard the ship Creole while en route to New Orleans. The slaves had sailed the ship to the Bahamas, where the British freed them. Without permitting any of the apparatus of debate that Adams had exploited, the southern Whigs censured Giddings. He resigned from Congress and immediately ran for reelection, winning in a landslide.

  Sensing a shift in public opinion, Adams’s son Charles, having won a seat in the Massachusetts legislature, drafted a resolution that called on Congress to draw up a constitutional amendment that would eliminate the provision entitling Southerners to count five slaves as three men in apportioning representatives to Congress.

  On the defensive now, the House’s majority created a select committee to consider the proposal and made John Quincy Adams the chairman. It was a sign that they had learned a hard lesson from the censure debacle. The rulers of the House made sure the rest of the committee was chosen with a view to making rejection a certainty. When they submitted their negative report, the House adopted it by a huge majority.

  Undaunted, Massachusetts submitted the resolution three more times in the next year (1844). It went nowhere, of course. Some Southerners called it “the Hartford Convention Amendment,” implying that they had not forgotten New England’s flirtation with secession in 1814. The House refused even to print copies of the later submissions to circulate among the members. But the onslaught made some southern members wish they had never made an enemy of Old Man Eloquent.16

  Adams waited until the first session of the next Congress in 1845 to introduce a resolution to abandon the gag rule. Congress approved it 105 to 80 with virtually no debate. A startling number of northern Democrats supported Adams—evidence of the growing strength of antislavery sentiment in that section of the country. In his diary, John Quincy Adams wrote: “Blessed, ever blessed be the name of God.” There was little doubt that he now saw himself exclusively as a warrior for righteousness, in the style of William Lloyd Garrison—the opposite of the judicious politician he had once been.17

  CHAPTER 14

  The Slave Patrols

  Is there evidence unmentioned in the bitter debates that engulfed Congress in the 1830s and 1840s that demonstrates how seriously Southerners took the danger of slave insurrections—the reason they gave for their angry determination to suppress petitions calling for the emancipation of their slaves?

  Probably the best answer to that question is a civic duty performed by thousands of southern men. Every night, in almost every county in the South, armed riders patrolled the roads, challenging every black man they encountered, demanding to know his name, where he w
as going, and why. If the man did not have a letter from his master justifying his journey, he was given fifteen strokes of the lash. If he was defiant or tried to run away, the number was raised to thirty-nine.

  If these midnight riders saw a group of blacks meeting in a field or woods off the road, they immediately dispersed them and detained a half dozen for questioning. They often searched slave cabins for weapons or stolen goods. They had the power to question whites too, and enter their homes without a warrant. The riders were drawn from the local militia in each county and were paid for their time.1

  This was the world of the South’s slave patrols. A visitor to Charleston in the 1850s was astonished by the way patrols “pass through the city at all hours.” When he inquired about them, he was told that Charleston had many criminals who needed watching. But the visitor soon concluded that the real reason for the patrols was “the slave population.” One letter writer to a South Carolina newspaper remarked that “in this country at least, no arguments will be necessary to prove the necessity of such a police.”

  Slave insurrections, real or rumored, were not the only reason slave patrols were vigilant. In the 1830s, an incendiary book written by an ex-slave, David Walker, triggered widespread anxiety throughout the South. The North Carolina legislature created a new committee, whose only duty was the supervision of slave patrols. Three men in each county were given semi-judicial authority to dismiss inept or unreliable patrollers and hear complaints about them.

  In some places where slaves outnumbered whites by large ratios, private patrols were also organized. Planters in St. Matthew’s Parish, South Carolina, created a Vigilant Society with about twenty members. Their chief worry was not an insurrection but the steep rise in theft from their plantations. Slaves stole jewelry, clothing—anything portable—and headed for the local railroad station. Blacks working for the railroad gave them money and sold the stolen goods somewhere up the line.

  On Edisto Island, an auxiliary association also recruited members to supplement the regular slave patrollers. The residents of the island had a special reason to be worried. Blacks outnumbered whites fifteen to one. Too often “the midnight incendiary has escaped with impunity and the assassin has perfected his schemes of horror,” one jittery white resident said. The auxiliary association asked the state to give them the same legal authority as the official patrollers. Sometimes these spontaneous associations agreed that they would whip only their own slaves. If a patroller whipped a slave so violently that he was unable to work, his owner could sue the patroller.

  If several years passed without a serious disturbance, the discipline of the patrols tended to deteriorate. The newspapers carried frequent complaints about the carelessness and inefficiency of some patrols. But these cries of alarm only underscored the intensity of the South’s anxiety about slave insurrections. People who refused an order to serve in a patrol could be fined and even jailed.

  Joining a slave patrol was serious business in other ways. The new arrival had to go before a justice of the peace and take a solemn oath:

  I [patroller’s name] do solemnly swear that I will search for guns, swords and other weapons among the slaves of my district, and as faithfully and as privately as I can, discharge the trust reposed in me as the law directs, to the best of my power. So help me God.

  The specificity of the patroller’s task leaves little room for doubt about the reason for his promise to serve. The word “privately” also reduced the possibility that a patroller might talk to a newspaper.2

  Slave patrols were sometimes good at tracking down runaway slaves before they left their district. In this respect, they often competed with professional slave catchers, who searched for runaways expecting suitable compensation for their time and trouble. Some patrollers became so adept that they made slave-catching a full-time job. One man moved to New York and advertised in southern papers about his ability to seize runaways in that city.

  Most of the time patrolling was tedious work, not unlike contemporary policing. Some bored patrollers felt free to drink while on the job. Often, the captain of the patrol was expected to furnish the alcohol as well as food, such as an oyster supper, paying for these pleasures out of his own pocket.

  In a crisis, state and county boundaries were ignored. The first militia to arrive after Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia came from North Carolina, only a few miles away. State governors and other officials corresponded frequently about rumors of insurrectionary plots.

  When the news of the first large-scale rebellion on Saint-Domingue reached South Carolina, the state organized coastal patrols to make sure blacks from the rebellious island did not reach its shores. Slave patrols were expanded everywhere from militia reserves.

  The patrols played a curious and paradoxical role in southern life. Their existence more or less admitted that the slaves were unhappy and often deeply resentful of their bondage and were a constant threat to white lives. Simultaneously the patrols assuaged these fears and enabled people to go about their daily routines with no more than passing qualms. Any attempt to use the patrols as an argument that slavery should be eliminated was dismissed with scorn. But in the hours of darkness, more than one Southerner, in the words of the best historian of the patrols, still “dreamed vivid racial nightmares.”3

  Slave patrols are convincing evidence that Thomas Jefferson’s nightmare—the dread of a race war—had become a fixture in the southern public mind.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Trouble with Texas

  Congressman John Quincy Adams and his southern antagonists were soon deep in an argument much larger than the gag rule: the admission of Texas into the Union. The idea had on its side something far more powerful than constitutional contentions about slavery. North, South, and West, the American public mind of the 1840s was in the grip of an idea that united most of the country: Manifest Destiny. Numerous journalists, many of them spokesmen for the Democratic Party, foresaw an America that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific shores, absorbing the parts of the continent that lay beyond the boundaries of Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.1

  No one had been a more enthusiastic proponent of this idea than John Quincy Adams before he became embroiled with the issue of slavery. At a time when there already were three quarters of a million slaves in the nation, he predicted God had destined the United States “to be the most populous and most powerful people ever combined under one social compact.” When he was president, he had tried to buy Texas from a disorganized, unstable Mexico, which had won independence from Spain in 1821.2

  President Andrew Jackson had continued the attempt to purchase this huge swath of prairie and plateau, stretching 750 miles from the Sabine River to the border of California, and almost as lengthy from the panhandle to the Rio Grande. Its loamy black soil promised riches for cotton growers and almost as much wealth for grain farmers. Larger than France, Texas was peopled only by a few Indian tribes and a scattering of small Mexican settlements. The mantra of Manifest Destiny lured thousands of Americans, often with the encouragement of the erratic Mexican government. By 1835 these pioneers numbered fifty thousand. The majority were Southerners, who had brought with them some five thousand slaves.3

  Mexican authority grew more and more unpredictable as revolutionary governments came and went. When a one-legged dictator named General Antonio López de Santa Anna seized power and abolished all state governments, the Texans revolted and won America’s attention with their heroic stand in a fort named the Alamo, facing a Mexican army that outnumbered them 30 to 1. Santa Anna’s slaughter of wounded captives galvanized Texan resistance.

  Within a year, an army led by an Andrew Jackson disciple, General Sam Houston, smashed the dictator’s battalions in the 1836 battle of San Jacinto and captured him. Texas declared her independence, and cheering Americans deluged Washington, DC, with demands for immediate recognition. Most people had little doubt that this was only a necessary first step for Texas to join the Union.4

  Inst
ead of celebrating with the rest of the nation, several antislavery spokesmen viewed with horror the prospect of admitting another slave state to the Union. Into this emotionally charged political brew the abolitionists flung a new phrase, “The Slave Power.” They claimed that the whole process—the massive immigration, the importation of slaves, Houston’s role as a Jackson emissary—was part of a long-range plot hatched by the South to take complete control of the United States government.5

  Soon no American politician was doing more to popularize the use of “The Slave Power” than John Quincy Adams. To a confidential correspondent in Massachusetts, Adams stated his position: “There is no valid or permanent objection to the acquisition of Texas but the indelible stain of slavery.” Adams ignored the way this claim contradicted his previous political principles. In 1803, Senator Adams had backed President Jefferson’s right to buy Louisiana by treaty, to the outrage of not a few people in Massachusetts. In 1819, Secretary of State Adams had bought Florida from Spain by treaty. In both cases, slaves were involved. Now Adams told a skeptical House of Representatives that acquiring Texas and its few thousand slaves by treaty with Mexico was unconstitutional.6

  For three weeks in the summer of 1838, Adams used his procedural skills to hold the floor of the House, frustrating Congress’s hopes of achieving a quick vote to annex Texas. In the course of this filibuster he went public with his new political creed: “I believe that slavery is a sin before the sight of God, and that is the reason and the only insurmountable reason why we should not annex Texas to this union!”