by Larry Tagg
Neither was there a judicial system that carried authority. In Jacksonian America, there was no court esteemed enough to command a binding solution, such as the English Lord Chief Justice possessed in 1772, when he ruled that slavery was not supported by English law, and laid the legal basis for the freeing of England’s 15,000 slaves. The courts in America, by contrast, were in wretchedly low repute, largely because there was no national bar to set and enforce professional standards. By the 1830s the democratic impulse in America had carried away all previous standards for admission to the law profession. If every man was the equal of every other, popular thinking went, no one should be prevented from practicing in any field. Indiana, for example, provided in its constitution that “every person of good moral character, being a voter, shall be entitled to admission to practice law in all courts of justice.” In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln received a license to practice law in 1836 without any training; he had taught himself, reading books borrowed from friends. When he ran for election in 1860, only three years after the nadir of American jurisprudence—the Dred Scott decision, ignored by the majority of the people—there was a sneer explicit in referring to Lincoln as a “prairie lawyer.” It was an epithet, one that drew its sting from a widespread contempt for lawyers and the profession of law. Anti-slavery intellectuals in New England developed the idea that there was no law they were bound to respect except a “higher law.” Henry Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience in 1849 exclaimed that breaking the written law was a duty in a society where the law protected slavery. William Lloyd Garrison went even further, shouting “To Hell with the Constitution” from the pages of the Liberator, and burning copies of the Constitution in public.
And there was little national history. Public records weren’t kept. Tocqueville himself had noticed, “no methodical system … pursued, no archives … formed, and no documents … brought together when it would be easy to do so.” As a result, “the only historical remains in the United States are newspapers.” Every new public official had to start from scratch, with no accumulated experience, no wisdom to draw upon. The bonds of nationhood were weak, sustained almost entirely by worship of the Founding Fathers. “We are so young a people,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary, “that we feel the want of nationality, and delight in whatever asserts our national ‘American’ existence. We have not, like England and France, centuries of achievement and calamities to look back on; we have no record of Americanism and we feel its want. …”
All these were unavailable to Americans in the Age of Jackson. They had instead a lack of history, a worship of the individual, and a contempt for all authority—including the authority of their own democracy, which was still considered an “experiment.” With no conservative institutions to provide cohesion, with nothing to which a statesman could appeal, demagogues dominated. With everything unsettled, power was seized by those most settled in their convictions, often the least responsible and the most extreme.
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It was in this milieu of indiscipline and unbridled emotion that the abolitionists appeared in the early 1830s.
Abolition societies were a new phenomenon. In colonial America, the rare abolitionist had been an isolated zealot, possibly insane. Slavery was a system that had stood above criticism for three thousand years—why would anyone oppose both the Old Testament and the natural order? But the ancient rules trembled like the walls of Jericho before the terrible trumpets of the evangelical Christian movement of the 1820s. It begat thousands of reformers, men and women appalled at the wickedness of America, especially the sin of slavery. At the same time, Van Buren and the architects of the new Democratic Party understood that any national party—that is, one attracting both Northerners and Southerners—would be impossible if it took a stand on slavery, and avoidance of the issue became the rule during the rise of the national parties. Anti-slavery, thus ruled out of bounds in politics, sought and found other venues.
On January 31, 1831, the first issue of the Liberator, a Boston abolitionist newspaper edited by William Lloyd Garrison, marked the birth of the organized abolitionist movement in America. Garrison was a bomb thrower. He wrote to inflame, to shock, to incite. His sentences ended in exclamation points. He was a product of the 1820s evangelical explosion, and he took the spirit of Jesus overturning the tables of the money-changers in the Temple. In his first issue, he announced, “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.”
The moral attack by abolitionists such as Garrison ended the “necessary evil” attitude of the South toward slavery, held since the Revolution. Abolitionists, many of whom were famous religious leaders, called slavery “sin,” and all slaveholders, whether cruel or kind, “sinners.” So now, to remove its terrible stain, the South increasingly defended slavery as a positive good. The violent and uncompromising attacks of Garrison and his followers produced for the first time a self-righteous defiance in the South. Attacks on slavery mobilized a new Southern patriotism, a new self-awareness in opposition to the abolitionists. And at the heart of this reaction was a new view of slavery as a blessing to both master and slave.
The new pro-slavery argument reaffirmed that slavery had God-given Biblical sanction, that science had established the biological inferiority of the African race, and that history had proved slavery the best foundation for stability and progress. The personal odyssey of the champion of the South, Senator John C. Calhoun, provides an insight into the Southern mind at large. As a youth, Calhoun conceded that slavery was “a dark cloud that obscures half the luster of our free institutions.” But after Northern attacks on it, he rushed to its support. “Many in the South,” he explained, “once believed that it was a moral and political evil; that folly and delusion are gone; we see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world.”
The pro-slavery argument also claimed that slavery was the best way of life for the “irresponsible and childlike” Negro, giving him more protection than any other system. “The Negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world,” wrote one defender. “No fact is plainer than that the blacks have been elevated by their servitude in this country,” wrote another; “We cannot possibly conceive, indeed, how Divine Providence could have placed them in a better school of correction.” Another made the case for slavery in verse:
Instructed thus, and in the only school
Barbarians ever know—a master’s rule,
The Negro learns each civilizing art
That softens and subdues the savage heart,
Assumes the tone of those with whom he lives,
Acquires the habit that refinement gives,
And slowly learns, but surely, while a slave
The lessons that his country never gave.
Buttressed by these supports, proponents of slavery went further, painting abolitionists as “criminal agitators,” bent on destroying peace and order; as fanatics, heretics, the enemy of property rights and all other social controls.
Garrison’s published rants would have had little effect in the North but for the sense of persecution and bitterness they provoked in the South. There, the Nat Turner Rebellion in 1831 intensified a sense of dread and insecurity. Believing abolitionists were bent on inciting more bloody insurrections, the defenders of slavery struck out wildly. Georgia offered a $5,000 reward for the trial and conviction of Garrison. Laws were passed forbidding teaching slaves to read. In defiance of Federal law, Southerners tampered with the mails. An abolitionist mailing
campaign to distribute the Liberator and other anti-slavery publications to opinion-makers in the South was intercepted in post offices across the South in the 1830s, and the offensive tracts seized and burned. This censoring and burning of the U.S. mail outraged the North where Garrison could not.
Then, in 1837, a pro-slavery mob massed on the banks of the Mississippi River in Illinois to burn down the new printing press of the abolitionist preacher and publisher, Elijah Lovejoy. Mobs had already thrown three of Lovejoy’s presses into the river, and when Lovejoy attempted to defend his fourth, the mob cut him down in a hail of bullets; he died shot five times. Lovejoy’s murder gripped the nation’s attention, and produced in the North a new wave of hostility to the defenders of slavery.
Beginning in the 1830s, the South was united by aristocrats who insisted that no frank discussion of slavery could safely be tolerated. “Freedom of speech is to be distinguished from licentiousness,” they argued; “No man has a moral right to use the power of speech in defiance of reason and revelation.” Under this repressive regime, the Southern pro-slavery consensus hardened in the years leading up to the Civil War. By 1859, Jefferson Davis could claim that ten years earlier there might have been men in the South who thought slavery wrong, but such had been the progress of “truth and sound philosophy,” that “there is not probably an intelligent mind among our own citizens who doubts either the moral or the legal right of the institution of African slavery, as it exists in our country.” Every Southern state except Kentucky passed laws controlling and limiting speech, press, and discussion of slavery. Virginia’s law punished anyone who “by speaking or writing maintains that owners have no right of property in slaves” with up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $500. Louisiana punished conversation “having a tendency to promote discontent among free colored people, or insubordination among slaves” with a prison term of twenty-one years at hard labor to death.
But courts were slow. When something swifter and more effective was needed, the South turned to lynch mobs, called “vigilance committees,” which were given quasi-legal status, as in South Carolina, where Governor Hammond believed that abolitionism could be “silenced in but one way—Terror— Death.” According to the governor, a group of citizens who gathered to lynch abolitionists was “no more a mob than a rally of shepherds to chase a wolf out of their pastures.”
Thus the combat was joined between Northerners, who grew up believing that life in the South was lived with chains, bloodhounds, auction blocks, and mobs; and Southerners, who were taught that evil slanderers in the North were anxious to stir up slaves to warfare to exterminate their white masters. Each side was able to demonize the other, since there was very little contact between the sections. The dispute over slavery became an entirely abstract moral struggle. Taking the form of “good” vs. “evil,” of “the righteous” vs. “the wicked,” the slavery argument was of the deadliest kind, and the least likely of solution.
With no conservative elements at work to bridge the divide, the slavery argument in America could only be a louder and louder shouting match, framed in moral absolutes. It became more and more venomous, as each side saw itself as divinely sanctioned, and the other side as an abomination in God’s eyes. From the 1830s on, the oscillating pattern of claim and counter-claim, charge and counter-charge between Northern abolitionists and Southern “slavocrats” eventually spiraled into a dispute whose intensity produced a holocaust.
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In the 1830s this bitter slavery battle was still being fought outside Washington. As long as the slavery controversy was fought in the abstract, it had little traction in the sphere of national politics. According to the Constitution, the only places where the Federal government had any jurisdiction over slavery were the Federal lands—the national territories and the District of Columbia. Only when there was new national territory could the slavery argument flare up in Congress, as it had over Missouri in 1820.
So after the war with Mexico ended in 1848, when the area of the United States was enlarged by more than a million square miles of western territory, the bitterness over slavery came into collision with “Manifest Destiny,” the national obsession over land. In 1846, Pennsylvanian David Wilmot broke Congress’ twenty-year-long code of silence on slavery and, from the floor of the House, urged a ban on slavery in the new territories. From then until Lincoln’s election in 1860, arguments over slavery in the West overshadowed all other concerns in the nation’s capital. At stake was the future of the continent. The Wilmot Proviso changed the political landscape forever—debates in Congress, which had up until this time been between national parties, were now between sections, North vs. South. Northern editors illumined the importance of the territories by pointing out that if slavery were allowed to go there, “the free labor of all the states will not,” since free men did not want to compete with slave labor. If slavery were kept out, however, “The free labor of the states [will go] there … and in a few years the country will teem with an active and energetic population.” To Southerners, it mattered little that the harsh, dry climate made an agrarian slave society impossible. The stakes were much bigger than profits. As one Georgia editor wrote, opening the territory to slavery would “secure to the South the balance of power in the [U.S.], and for all coming time … give to her the control in the operations of the Government.”
Abuse from abolitionists had been one thing—after all, abolitionists were not popular in the North, either—but now the South found itself facing hostility in the very halls of Congress. Every issue, large and small, seemed to point back to the slavery issue. By 1848, the Senator from Missouri likened the omnipresence of the slavery argument to a plague of frogs: “You could not look upon the table but there were frogs, you could not sit down at the banquet but there were frogs, you could not go to the bridal couch and lift the sheets but there were frogs. We can see nothing, touch nothing, have no measures proposed, without having this pestilence thrust before us.”
Once in Congress, the emotional temperature of the slavery debate soared. By 1860, practically every member of the House came to the floor armed with a knife or a gun. The South was still an aristocratic society where any gesture of inequality was an insult, and was properly met by a challenge to a duel. To accept such an insult was submission; it was surrender. Southerners had a violent reaction to being told by Northerners that they could not take their property into the West. It was a denial of Southern equality, and it was regarded as a damnable affront. As a Virginia Supreme Court justice saw it, the Wilmot Proviso “pretends to an insulting superiority on the one hand, and denounces a degrading inequality or inferiority on the other: which says in effect to the Southern man, Avaunt! You are not my equal, and hence are to be excluded as carrying a moral taint with you.”
Moreover, there was a special acuteness in Southerners’ sensitivity to any suggestion of inferiority—ironically, because of their constant exposure to the conditions of the black slaves themselves. Any loss of freedom, they felt, would put them on the road to a condition similar to these pitiful creatures. The editorials of the period are full of warnings alive with the imagery of chains, bonds, manacles, and fetters. The heady experience of being the master of other human beings bred a powerful devotion to freedom—their own. As a result, they saw their fight for slavery in the territories as a fight against despotism, a fight against their own enslavement. South Carolinian Lawrence M. Keitt said, “I would rather my state should be the graveyard of martyred patriots than the slave of northern abolitionists.” Virginian George Fitzhugh complained that African slavery was “not half so humiliating and disgraceful as the slavery of the South to the North.” An Alabama congressman: “It is clear that the power to dictate what sort of property the State may allow a citizen to own and work—whether oxen, horses, or negroes … is alike despotic and tyrannical.” And another: “Southerners must refuse to be bridled and saddled and rode under whip and spur.” Increasingly, they saw their duel with the North as being the e
xtension of the battle against enslavement they had fought against King George III, except that, in 1861, Abraham Lincoln had taken the place of King George. The outgoing Secretary of War, Jacob Thompson, put the alternatives available to the South as “naked submission or secession”; “We are either slaves in the Union or freemen out of it.”
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Finally, the Southern exodus in reaction to Lincoln’s election, so out of proportion to any threat he posed, was possible because fundamental principles of democracy had been violated for a generation. Civil liberties in the South were already in tatters, under assault by the logic of slavery. To buttress the proslavery argument, Southern opinion-makers tried to show that “the little experiment” of free society was a failure. “Modern free society, as at present organized,” editorialized the New Orleans Delta, “is radically wrong and rotten. It is self-destroying, and can never exist happily and normally, until it is qualified by the introduction of some principle equivalent in its effect to the institution of slavery.” The Richmond Enquirer agreed: “Free society in the long run is an impracticable form of society; it is everywhere starving, demoralized, and insurrectionary … cowardly, selfish, sensual, licentious, infidel, agrarian and revolutionary.” Not only was free society a failure, the argument went, but workers within such a society were worse off: “the whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives’ as you call them are essentially slaves.” The Enquirer’s solution? “Make the laboring man the slave of one man instead of the slave of society and he would be far better off.” If one argued that a slave society was superior to a free one, it must mean that anybody could be a slave. The Enquirer boldly drew this conclusion in 1856: