by Larry Tagg
So said the Northerners. The real panic in 1860, however, was in the South. There was a real fear that spoilsmen appointed by the “Black Republican” Abraham Lincoln would establish a Southern abolition party and plunder their section. One religious leader in Charleston, William H. Barnwell, warned his congregation that Southern politicians would soon be turned by the offers of spoils. “The patronage of government,” he cried, “has seduced but too many whose virtue seemed immaculate, and I tremble for our commonwealth lest she too may encounter the blighting smiles of Executive favor, and shame, burning shame—the shame of having sold herself for money.” Another prominent South Carolinian, John Townsend, despaired that once Lincoln’s spoilsmen came to power, “we shall be betrayed and weakened by desertion from all ranks, through the bribes which shall be held out to the ambitious or the needy.” Southerners, believing that Lincoln’s minions would soon corrupt their political virtue, used the imagery of purification to justify a final break with the North. “We cannot coalesce,” preached another, “with men whose society will eventually corrupt our own, and bring down upon us the awful doom which awaits them.”
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The epidemic of corruption foreshadowed the end of republican government to many in the North, and provoked fear of Lincoln in the South. However, it could not by itself plunge an entire nation into civil war. For that, the American bete noir must be summoned. To accomplish the destruction of the Union, it was necessary to conjure slavery.
Chapter 5
The Slavery Debate
“You could not look upon the table but there were frogs.”
That slavery was the cause of the Civil War has become a truism. But it is not obvious from the facts in 1860 why this should have been so. The South really had no vital grievances, no real cause for war. Placating slaveholders, in fact, had been a national tradition since before there was a nation. The history of the United States had been an unbroken series of triumphs for the proponents of the “peculiar institution” and surrenders by slavery’s opponents.
The Founding Fathers had been sensitive to Southern feelings, and had left the treatment of the slavery question open ended. They had left the work on that issue “to be continued” rather than face it head on and risk the wreck of the Constitutional Convention. The word “slavery” never appeared in the Constitution, even though it was implicit in the “three-fifths compromise,” in which slaves (referred to as “other persons”) were counted to swell congressional power for the states where they lived, but discounted for any rights. The subject of slavery was thus banished from public discussion by the revered gathering of Washington, Franklin, Adams and Madison.
There seemed little danger in sweeping the problem under the rug. In the nation-building era there was unanimity among Americans North and South that slavery ran counter to the revolutionary spirit, counter to the “self evident truth” that all men are created equal. All the states, slave and free, were quieted in this period by a shared belief that slavery would wither away on its own. Post-revolutionary Southerners were awake to the fact that slavery violated republican values, and the consensus in the South was that slavery was a necessary evil, soon to die a natural death in the anti-slavery current of world opinion. It was seen as a temporary convenience, tolerated during the initial labors of clearing the land, after which free labor would be affordable. While Americans waited passively for the ultimate death of slavery, thirty years of complacency passed.
The Deep South was passive about slavery, however, only as long as slaves were limited to working rice, indigo, and black-seed cotton, none of which would grow outside the tropical coastal swamps of South Carolina and Georgia. By a twist of fate, the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 by Connecticut Yankee Eli Whitney made the hardier green-seed cotton a wildly profitable crop, and acreage leapfrogged across the Carolinas, Georgia, and the newly-created states of Alabama and Mississippi. By the time both Maine and Missouri applied for statehood in 1819, it was no longer clear that slavery would disappear.
Southern congressmen insisted that, since there were at that time eleven free and eleven slave states, and since there was no question but that Maine would enter as a free state, Missouri must be admitted as a slave state. The solution, dubbed the Missouri Compromise, continued the revolutionary-era tradition of appeasing the slaveholders. Missouri was enrolled as a slave state, and any future territorial acquisitions south of a line extending west along the latitude of Missouri’s southern border was reserved for slavery.
Another decade passed, during which the nationwide indifference about the moral issue of slavery went undisturbed. Even after the abolition movement arrived in the 1830s, the federal “hands off slavery” policy continued, and national leaders sat mute on the subject for another decade. In 1844, a pro-slavery majority in Congress annexed Texas, entering its name on the roll of slave states and adding its millions of acres of virgin land to the production of cotton.
In 1848 the Mexican War—conjured out of nothing by slave-owning President James K. Polk, and pushed by the sturdy pro-slavery majority— added 1.2 million square miles of national territory, which renewed agitation over slavery in the new land and again brought the issue before the lawmakers. Pro-slavery men were again coddled, this time by the Compromise of 1850, which allowed the settlers in the new territories of Utah and New Mexico to decide for themselves whether the states made from them would be slave or free, and included the Fugitive Slave Law, which obligated the authorities in the northern states to return all escaped slaves to their Southern owners.
The Democratic presidents of the 1850s accelerated the Federal capitulation to the Southern slave-owners by pushing through the Kansas- Nebraska Act in 1854—which repealed the Missouri Compromise in favor of the South by declaring all United States territories open to slavery under the “popular sovereignty” principle—and by abetting the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, which declared unconstitutional any federal law which prohibited slavery in any of the national territories.
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At the time of Lincoln’s arrival, the South had dominated the politics of the nation for as long as anyone could remember—by Jefferson and his successors, and then by Jackson and his. In 1861 the United States was seventy-two years old. During all those years every elected President had been a slave-owner or a pro-slavery Northerner, with the exception of the Adamses (and William Henry Harrison, the parenthetical President, who caught a cold at his inaugural and died one month later; his replacement was John Tyler, a slave owner). Twentythree of the thirty-six Speakers of the House and twenty-four of the thirty-six Presidents Pro Tem of the Senate had been from the South. Twenty of the thirty-five Supreme Court justices had been Southerners, and the Court had never been without a Southern majority. The South enjoyed the cooperation of the most powerful party in America, the Democratic Party. By dominating the Democrats, the South had dominated Congress and won concessions so complete that by 1860 no territory was denied to slavery.
Then, with the election of Lincoln, Southern rule was interrupted. Even so, however, slavery was safe in the South. Lincoln had sworn never to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed—he was limited by the Constitution and could not, he said. Lincoln’s only offense against slavery was his opposition to slavery’s extension into the territories. And though this may have been an insult, it was not an injury. By 1860, there was nothing at stake. It was plain that slavery could not thrive in the territories; the natural barriers of climate and terrain had decided the issue. At the time of Lincoln’s election, years after the vastness of the territories had been opened to slavery by the laws of 1850 and 1854, they contained a paltry forty-six slaves: two in Kansas, fifteen in Nebraska, twenty-nine in Utah, and none in New Mexico. Even Southerners realized that the whole controversy over the territories, as one man put it, “related to an imaginary Negro in an impossible place.”
In fact, Southern fire-eaters could point to only one official transgression
against slavery in the history of the Republic, and that was the personal liberty laws enacted by Northern states that flouted the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and aided the “underground railroad.” However, here too they were beating a straw man, for only a handful of slaves, a few hundred out of a slave population of four million, escaped each year. Even the South’s most radical newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, wrote that Northern refusals to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law mattered only “in the insult they conveyed to the South, and the evidence they offered of Northern faithlessness.” Nor were Republicans intransigent on this issue. Many, in fact, were willing to rescind the personal liberty laws to keep the peace and end Southern wrangling about unreturned runaways.
The two reasons given to justify secession in 1861, then—the Republicans’ opposition to the extension of slavery into the West and the loss of runaway slaves—were entirely inadequate as causes of war. But the reasons for the violence of Southern feeling over the slavery question were visceral, not intellectual. After the bitter criminations and recriminations breathed into flame by extremists on both sides over the previous thirty years, there burned in the South a ferocious hatred of Northerners and a real desire to flee the Union. Southern fire-eaters relied on that ferocity when they precipitated the flight of seven states from the Union as a reaction to one purely political event—the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States.
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The slavery argument was so divisive because it was not counteracted by any binding sense of social responsibility. In the years between Jackson and Lincoln, the center could not hold. This roaring period from 1830 to 1860 was without any stabilizing institutions such as held nations together in the Old World. Paradoxically, the Old World powers of Europe—England, France, Spain, and Portugal, with their centuries-old systems of church, state, class, court, and finance—had used those hide-bound institutions to accomplish reform. All of the colonial European nations succeeded in abolishing slavery at home, slavery in their colonies, and the slave trade at sea before the middle of the nineteenth century.
America, however, was moving backward, against the tide of historical reform. Here, slavery was becoming more entrenched. Here, conservative institutions, which had made possible the wiping of the scourge of slavery from Europe, were under assault by the American “ideal of liberty.” Liberty rested at the very center of the national character, and had given rise by the 1830s—after the cohesive power of the revolutionary spirit had died—to the celebration of the completely unfettered individual. The doctrine of the free individual became the most widely shared Jacksonian creed. Alexis de Tocqueville was so struck by Americans’ faith that each man had the right, the power, even the duty “to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends … [leaving] society at large to itself,” that he coined the term “individualism” to describe this thing at the core of the American character. The worship of the individual even trumped democracy. The great reformers of the era, the Boston Transcendentalists and the abolitionists, disdained the idea of rule by the muddy-booted many. “When were the good and brave ever in the majority?” asked Henry David Thoreau. “One, on God’s side, is a majority,” insisted Wendell Phillips.
There was nothing in the Age of Jackson to restrain liberty or the vigor of the individual man. It was a time of newness. It was a time of exuberance. It was a time of unprecedented plenty, of a limitless horizon of rich, untouched resources and vast lands begging to be developed. With the absence of threat from neighbors either to the north or to the south, there was no wasting of energy and wealth on defense, nothing to divert Americans from exploiting nature’s abundance. Everyone was on the make—and on the move, since the mobile man could best seize opportunity.
In this milieu, all the recognized values of social order became eroded. Standards and traditions were forgotten, drowned out by the buzz and hum of a society disintegrating into a million tiny atoms. The high priest of intellectual culture, Ralph Waldo Emerson, gave voice to a new religion—the worship of novelty. “Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone,” he wrote, “to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men … . Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. … Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity.”
Armored with this disregard for the wisdom of the past, the Jacksonian ethic begat a widespread hostility toward all authority. Tocqueville observed this American characteristic on his tour in 1831, when he wrote, “The citizen of the Southern states becomes a sort of domestic dictator from infancy; the first notion he acquires in life is that he was born to command, and the first habit he contracts is that of ruling without resistance. His education tends, then, to give him the character of a haughty and hasty man—irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles.” In 1838, dismayed British visitor George Combe noticed the same unfortunate habits: “The people worship themselves as the fountains equally of wisdom and power. They bend all institutions in subserviency to their views and feelings. They are no longer led by, but they often dictate to, the wealthy and the highly educated.” He observed “the great self-complacency of the mass of the people, who although very imperfectly educated, are persuaded by political orators that they know everything, and can decide wisely on every question; [there is a] general absence of reverence for authority or superior wisdom, displayed first in childhood and afterwards in the general progress of life.”
Nowhere was this more obvious than in politics, where the Common Man was suddenly all-powerful. Writing of the effects of the universal voting franchise, Englishman Walter Bagehot observed:
The steadily augmenting power of the lower orders in America has naturally augmented the dangers of the Federal Union … . [U]niversal suffrage … places the entire control over the political action of the whole State in the hands of common labourers, who are of all classes the least instructed—of all the most aggressive—of all the most likely to be influenced by local animosity—of all the most likely to exaggerate every momentary sentiment … . The unpleasantness of mob government has never before been exemplified so conspicuously, for it never before has worked upon so large a scene.
The rejection of authority was reflected in the sudden fade of prestige and power of the Chief Executive between 1789 and 1860, from the most revered Presidents—Washington-Adams-Jefferson-Madison-Monroe—to the most feeble—Taylor-Fillmore-Pierce-Buchanan.
Jacksonian society was so young, so little organized, so without stabilizing institutions, that it had no resistance to strain; it was at risk of shattering under the shock of an emotional convulsion such as slavery stirred. As Henry James noted:
One might enumerate the items of high civilisation, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great universities nor public schools … .
James’ impressionistic sketch of American life was a list of missing conservative elements:
There was “no sovereign, no court”—no royal power that could decree solutions and bind all parties.
… “no personal loyalty.” America was a land without personal allegiance. It was a country of provincials, people whose loyalty was to that which they could see at first hand—as expressed by the man who said, “I go first for Greenville, then for Greenville District, then for the up-country, then for South Carolina, then for the South, then for the United States.”
… “no church, no clergy.” The most powerful engine for social cohesion in Western history
was itself in atoms. In the aftermath of the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s and 1830s, religious enthusiasm was cresting, but its vitality was expressed in individual, personal rebirth. With camp meetings and new churches springing up everywhere, the churches themselves splintered into a thousand parts. Philosophers like Emerson and Thoreau were teaching that every man was his own minister.
… “no army.” The institution that worked hand-in-glove with the regimes of the Old World to translate policy into action was nowhere seen. American revolutionaries had preached the evils of the standing army, so there wasn’t one. With no powerful enemies on its borders, there remained only the vestige of an army, a pigmy thing, a few thousand men idling in a hundred small outposts on the Western frontier.