Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  The Democrats, once the sole champions of the people, were forced to accept the legitimacy of the Whigs. ‘We have taught them how to beat us,’ they sighed after the 1840 returns were in: they could not plausibly allege any longer that they had been defeated by the corrupt wiles of aristocratic Federalists. Both parties embodied the principle of compromise, for otherwise the different groups of which each was composed could never have stayed together; and by accepting the limitations of the Constitutional system and each other’s existence they made compromise, which is one good way of accepting reality, a basic ingredient of American politics outside, as well as within, the parties. Both were extravagantly nationalistic, casting covetous eyes on Texas (which broke away from Mexico in 1836), on the Pacific coast, on Canada. Both were at bottom alliances of smaller groups from all parts of the Union. And if the rich as a class tended to vote Whig, having been frightened by Jacksonian rhetoric, there were nevertheless plenty of wealthy men who thought better of the Democrats. America was anyway not yet a society in which the moneyed class wielded disproportionate power. Numbers were everything, as every foreign visitor was told again and again; the zest for democracy was such that many of the citizens began to think that it might be extended yet further: say, to women. The first important meeting to demand universal suffrage was held at Seneca Falls, NY, in 1848.

  But one of the similarities between the parties boded no good for what was otherwise a very promising political system. There was one urgent question which neither Whigs nor Democrats would willingly raise; both knew that they would split if it was asked too insistently, and that even the Union was not safe; yet, again and again, it obtruded, in spite of all the politicians could do. The question was that of slavery.

  The tragedy of nineteenth-century America was to be that in spite of the heroic exuberance which tamed a continent, launched an industrial revolution and set up the first true modern democracy, the problem of the South and its ‘peculiar institution’ was to prove so intractable as to put all America’s achievements in mortal danger.

  14 Slavery and its Consequences 1800–1861

  I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

  Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1784

  Harper’s Creek and roaring river

  There, my dear, we’ll live for ever

  Then we’ll go to the Indian Nation.

  All I want in this creation

  Is a pretty little wife and big plantation.

  Plantation song

  Everybody, in the South, wants the privilege of whipping somebody else

  Frederick Douglass

  Slavery in nineteenth-century America is best understood as a survival. It had begun as a device for securing cheap labour to work raw land on the edge of civilization. It outlived its time because soon after men discovered that it was an evil they also discovered that they could not bear to part with it. They could not imagine a tolerable future without it – could not endure to acknowledge the pace and direction of the changes which the world was hurrying upon them. White Southern men, that is. Most of the blacks of course hated it; white Northerners gave it up with comparative ease in the twenty or so years that followed the Revolution: the last Northern state to put an end to the institution where it had previously existed was New Jersey in 1804. White Southern women were divided about slavery. No matter. Anti-slavery whites were too weak, blacks too few, to overthrow the system. Even in 1800, when one inhabitant in five of the United States was an African-American, the slaves – dispersed, socially backward, militarily feeble – could not have organized a successful uprising; and by 1860, though there were nearly four million slaves, there were nearly twenty-seven million free whites, and only 488,000 free blacks. The question of the persistence of slavery in the United States can be answered only by examining the attitudes of the ascendant race and its ascendant sex; the same is true of the question, why did the system end so calamitously? There was something inexorable about the trend of events to rebellion, war and emancipation; but this could not have been the case if the pro-slavery whites had not been so hopelessly provincial; that is, so caught up in slave society that they became, willy-nilly, its victims and its tools. The abolition of slavery was not an experiment that most of them would ever have felt free to try. Their courage, compassion and intelligence failed. Slavery frustrated the desires and abilities of the blacks; it perverted the whites. When slavery vanished, no one mourned it for long.

  For the blacks, slavery was a regime of sorrow, of degradation, of unremitting toil, dreadful personal insecurity and perpetual frustration. Yet the enslaved Africans might have been worse off. They retained their self-respect, fragments of their ancestral culture, memories of their origins, and achieved some measure of fulfilment even in their bonds. Their essential victory is demonstrated by their religion and by the great music evolved from their plantation work songs; from the celebration songs, born in those revels which white gentlemen such as Mr Jefferson regarded with cool disdain; and above all from the spirituals, with their message of human sorrow, divine consolation and ultimate joy. Some of the most poignant themes of the spirituals arose directly from the slave experience: above all, perhaps, the feeling that life is a burden, and death the opportunity to lay it down. ‘Never to be born is best,’ said Sophocles: everybody knows that mood, occasionally. It predominated in the slave spirituals – so markedly that it even shaped the pastiche plantation songs of Stephen Foster (1826–64), such as ‘Old Black Joe’:

  No more rain fall for wet you, hallelujah.

  No more sun shine for burn you,

  There’s no hard trials

  There’s no whips a-cracking

  No evil-doers in the Kingdom,

  All is gladness in the Kingdom, hallelujah!

  Slavery as a regime of incessant labour was nothing abnormal. There had been incessant labour in Africa; indeed, North American slaves were mostly descended from tribes among whom harsh agricultural toil was traditional: the hunting tribes successfully resisted enslavement. The nineteenth-century Atlantic world paid for its numerous leisured classes by merciless exactions on everybody else. The story of industrial workers in Britain (or, a little later, in Pennsylvania) was as bad as anything which could be told of the plantations, as defenders of slavery liked to point out. The ending of the importation of slaves from Africa, which became federal law in 1808, forced masters to look after their property better. ‘The time has been that the farmer could kill up and wear out one Negro to buy another; but it is not so now,’ one planter remarked in 1849. ‘Negroes are too high in proportion to the price of cotton, and it behooves those who own them to make them last as long as possible.’ Slaves were often whipped to work; and, a crucial point, their working day was of appalling length (‘from day clear to nightfall’ was the phrase); but otherwise their conditions of labour were little worse than those of many whites. The abundant evidence of the grinding nature of work for slaves is best understood as showing what slaves had in common with free men – or free women and children, for that matter. Cruel toil was as much the law in the factories of New England, the slums of New York and on the farming frontier as it was in Alabama.

  Still, the fact remains that workers in New England were not whipped, they did have a shorter working day, they were legally free to change masters and they were free to spend their wages as they saw fit. Slaves without wages had to accept such clothing, housing and food as their owners doled out to them: none were of the best. ‘Negro cloth’ and ‘Negro brogans’ (shoes) were of the cheapest, poorest manufacture, and were seldom provided in enough quantity, so most slaves went dirty, barefoot and in rags. Most slave cabins were badly built, leaky and unglazed and unhealthy. The slave diet was chiefly maize and bacon, or pork, eked out by what could be hunted or stolen; it was deficient in vitamins and variety. Things were better than this on some plantations; but a plantation might also be more like a prison run by sadists than any Northern factory ever was. Such laws as exi
sted for protecting the slaves were frequently unenforced, in the cause of white solidarity. Even if a master whipped a slave to death he might escape punishment, for it would never do if the blacks began to think that there were any limits to their owners’ power over them. Also, masters often delegated responsibility to hired overseers, who, as one planter in Mississippi observed, were, ‘as a class, a worthless set of vagabonds’.

  The overseers might have retorted that most masters cared for nothing except production and profit, and thought that the best overseer was the one who produced the largest number of cotton bales or sugar hogsheads per slave. So no wonder the slaves were overworked. ‘I’d rather be dead,’ said one overseer, ‘than a nigger on one of those big plantations.’ The fact was so inescapable that even pro-slavery writers sometimes acknowledged it. ‘It is this unrelenting, brutalizing, drive, drive, watch and whip, that furnishes facts to abolition writers that cannot be disputed, and that are infamous’ – so said one Southern journal on the eve of secession.

  Another difference between slaves and factory workers was in the matter of personal insecurity. In Victorian England, for example, the rise of the trade unions was a natural response to bad food, atrocious housing and dread of hard times – of unemployment, and the workhouse where families could be broken up, where husbands and wives, after a lifetime together, could be separated. No such response was possible under slavery. At the very time when the restrictions on union activity were slackening in England, the slave codes were tightening in America. Husbands might still be sold away from their wives, children from their mothers; a casual decision might uproot a man for ever from the place and people that he loved. Worst of all was the fate dreaded by slaves in the Upper South (Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky), where conditions were easiest: they might, for a dozen reasons, suddenly be sold ‘down the river’ – down the Mississippi to the Black Belt of central Alabama or Mississippi state; or to the coastal swamps, the regions of malaria and yellow fever; to the endless exhaustion of the cotton fields and sugar plantations. Even some of the slave-owners deplored this internal slave-trade; yet without it the Cotton Kingdom could not have prospered, for the trade was the chief means by which the labour supply was adjusted to the demand, and workers were shifted from the exhausted lands of the Atlantic coast to the fresh fields of the interior. Many a great gentleman of South Carolina owed his standing to his plantations and slaves in the West. There was always an acute labour shortage on the Southern frontier; consequently voices were often raised to demand the re-opening of the slave-trade with Africa. Therefore the planters’ dislike of the internal slave-trade need not be taken any more seriously than their contempt for the overseers. They sold slaves away from their homes and families without compunction when they thought it necessary. What the slaves thought can be guessed from the large number of runaways, most of whom, if not simply treating themselves to a few days’ holiday in the woods, paid for on return with a whipping, were trying to rejoin their wives and children.

  Not that the wives were legally recognized as such. Even when a master agreed to say the marriage service for two slaves, he always left out the essential words, ‘Till death us do part’ – he might want to part them much sooner. The abolitionists certainly exaggerated in the appeals they made to the prurience of the righteous, but the stark fact remains that slave women belonged to their masters, and the result was a great deal of sexual exploitation. The best that could be said was that prudent masters acknowledged the validity of slave marriages in practice, because it was good for morale and labour discipline.

  Frustration of the personality is something more difficult to measure or even to demonstrate than the more material forms of oppression; it is not necessarily less harmful. Slavery wasted generations of talent and energy. Slaves might not be taught to read or write, lest they read ‘incendiary publications’; they could not own property; it was commonly thought unwise to teach them industrial trades, because, as De Bow’s Review remarked, ‘whenever a slave is made a mechanic, he is more than half freed’. They were given only the most limited responsibilities. A man so talented as Frederick Douglass (1817–95) might be condemned to pass his life as little more than a beast of burden unless, like Douglass, he succeeded in escaping to the North. To this particular form of humiliation was added a systematic attempt to cow the slaves by force and insult. Slave testimony would not be accepted in court against white; all blacks, slave or free, must accept close restrictions on their movements, being, typically, confined to quarters after dark and forbidden to go any distance except under orders; they were answerable to the slave patrols, a white gendarmerie which rode about at night maintaining order; must put up with whatever treatment they got; and must endure the knowledge that their oppressors, when not frightened of them or sentimental about them, regarded them with contempt as an inferior order of creation. They even found it convenient to pander to the racialist view by posing as so many Sambos – bewildered darkies with childish joys and fears, lazy, affectionate and stupid. It was safer to be seen as a Sambo than as a marauding ape, lusting for fire, slaughter and white women.

  Finally, men and women cannot be unfree in a free society without knowing that they are wronged – even if their masters try to keep the fact from their attention.

  So the African-Americans hated slavery. Decent treatment could not buy acquiescence – rather the contrary, as Frederick Douglass pointed out. ‘Beat and cuff your slave,’ he said, ‘keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog; but feed and clothe him well, – work him moderately – surround him with physical comfort, – and dreams of freedom intrude. Give him a bad master, and he aspires to a good master; give him a good master, and he wishes to become his own master.’ Yet the slaves on the whole did not try to alter their hated condition. They knew their injuries, but they also knew their weakness. It is a striking fact that in the half-century before the Civil War there were no slave risings of any great account, and those that did occur – the abortive Denmark Vesey conspiracy at Charleston in 1822, the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia in 1831, in which some sixty whites were murdered – owed their notoriety chiefly to the terror which they inspired in the master race. From time to time there would be outbreaks on solitary plantations; or a white family might be slain, suddenly, by its slaves, with poison or knives.1 These were isolated events, leading to nothing, meaning nothing, except that in one place, at one particular time, matters had reached a crisis point. Nevertheless, the slave-owners could not afford to take such affairs coolly. They too knew insecurity: they dared not trust the people they lived among. Periodically something would terrify them into renewed excesses of cruelty. After the Turner rebellion they hanged not only the murderers but also scores of the innocent.

  Indeed, the drawbacks of slavery from the point of view of the whites were so glaring that it sometimes seems astonishing that it lasted so long. The women – some of them – saw clearest. One of them, Mary Chesnut (1823–86) of South Carolina, put the case most trenchantly, and with such frankness that her limitations, of class and personality, are as palpable as her insights. So her testimony is doubly valuable to historians. She disliked living among slaves, and some of the reasons she gives (black faces, woolly heads) show that she was racially prejudiced. But she was also bitter because many Southern women had to pretend not to notice the resemblance between their own offspring and certain little black children on the plantations: proof that their husbands and brothers had been dallying in the slave quarters. She greatly resented the strictures made by such Northern ladies as Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96), author of the immensely celebrated anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (published in 1852):

  On one side Mrs Stowe, Greeley, Thoreau, Emerson, Sumner. They live in nice New England homes, clean, sweet-smelling, shut up in libraries, writing books which ease their hearts of their bitterness against us. What self-denial they do practice is to tell John Brown to come down here and cut our throats in Ch
rist’s name. Now consider what I have seen of my mother’s life, my grandmother’s, my mother-in-law’s… They live in Negro villages. They do not preach and teach hate as a gospel, and the sacred duty of murder and insurrection;2 but they strive to ameliorate the condition of these Africans in every particular. They set them an example of a perfect life, a life of utter self-abnegation. Think of these holy New Englanders forced to have a Negro village walk through their houses whenever they see fit… These women I love have less chance to live their own lives in peace than if they were African missionaries.

  The resentment in this diatribe is genuine, but misdirected. The slight note of persecution mania is significant, for it illustrates one of the traits, general among white Southerners, which brought about secession from the Union and, hence, the ultimate destruction of the slave society. But Mrs Chesnut was not prevented from living the life she wanted either by the slaves or by the abolitionists. She was the victim of the planters, who, in a sense, owned the whites as well as the blacks. Certainly they owned their own wives and daughters. Mrs Chesnut loved her husband, or told herself she did; but he treated her abominably. Once he locked her up in her room rather than allow her to keep an appointment to meet a gentleman of whom he disapproved solely, it seems, because his wife liked him. On another occasion Mrs Chesnut congratulated herself: she had acquired a secret supply of money, which meant that for a time she wouldn’t have to run to her husband for every penny she needed. She had no children, and found the work of supervising her house-slaves insufficiently challenging: she had no hope of a career.3 The myth of slavery exacted this unnatural life. White ladies had to be idle, else they would not have needed slaves to work for them. They had to be sexually cold and rigidly chaste, or there could be no justification for their husbands to chase after black women. They had to abandon their function as mothers to black ‘mammies’, so that they could parade before the world perpetually in fine dresses, jewels and carriages – the fruits of slavery, advertisements of their menfolk’s success. White women had to be denied education and political rights, so that no challenge could be made to the supremacy of the white male: one challenge might breed another, and if men once conceded that they had no right to tyrannize over women, what right could they claim to tyrannize over slaves?