by Hugh Brogan
It was a violent world. In part this was the legacy of the frontier, which persisted longer in the South than in the North (not until the 1830s were the last Indian tribes cleared out of Alabama and Mississippi). And whereas in the North-West the family farm was the most efficient unit for developing the country, and entailed a supporting network of roads and market towns by means of which farm-produce could be got to the customers (there was besides the village tradition of New England to fortify civilizing tendencies), in the South, where vast cotton plantations would be hacked out of the virgin forest, their produce being sent to market down untamed rivers, the density of the population – especially the white population – continued much lower, though the financial yield of agriculture might be as great, or greater. Growth, that is, was too rapid to be smooth. But the time span in question (some seventy years, from the invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin to the attack upon Fort Sumter) is too long for this explanation to be sufficient. The North too was raw country for most of the nineteenth century.
No, Southern violence owed most to the persistence of slavery. Young men had to be trained to ride and shoot so that they could effectively play their part in the slave patrols. As a result a strange, barbarous culture grew up which quickly annihilated (for example) Jefferson’s dream that the University of Virginia, which he founded in 1819, would be a great light of republican civilization. The colleges of the South remained jokes until the twentieth century. Instead of science and Greek, the young gentlemen learned to hold their liquor, or at least not to mind getting blind drunk; how to use a knife in a brawl; how to handle duelling pistols and to play cards; how to race and bet on horses. They were provincial, ignorant and overbearing: excellent cannon-fodder, as it turned out, but lacking the desirable peacetime qualities of a sense of reality and responsibility.
An eye for profit did something to substitute for academic education. The graces with which the planters liked to adorn their way of life and their great white mansions deceived many at the time, and more since, into accepting them as a class of well-bred gentlemen, strictly comparable to the nobility of Europe. Their account books tell a different story. Experience sobers the wildest blade, if he lives long enough; in the Old South the demands of plantation management turned innumerable roaring boys into disciplined capitalists. They had little in common with the gilded lords of England, whose talent lay in spending rather than getting. Their true affinity was with the restless merchants and manufacturers of Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts.
For the great planters, at their height, it was a good life, so long as new lands could be found for tillage (incessant cotton-growing exhausted the soil as badly as tobacco) and more slaves could be bought from Virginia, and the meddlesome abolitionists of the North could be kept at bay, and the hands in the houses and the fields did as they were told, and the weather was good, and the world market for cotton was buoyant. But for the other white men of the South – the great majority – matters were never so simple.4Their moral position was weak, for they had taken part in the expulsion of the Indians and were indifferent to the sufferings of the Africans; but they were injured by slavery all the same. The profits of the peculiar institution were so enormous that the slave-holders were always able to outbid the white yeomanry for the choicest lands. As a result a sharp class division grew up in the South, which was to some extent also a geographical division, the poorer whites being thickest on the ground in the upland and mountain areas, the planters and their slaves in such rich lowlands as the Black Belt. In an age as stridently democratic as the early nineteenth century this growing gulf within the white population naturally had to find expression in politics (the yeomen were mostly enthusiastic followers of General Jackson) and might have been expected to lead to an attack on slavery as giving some whites an unfair advantage in the race for riches; but no such thing occurred. Planters exacted the utmost labour from their bondsmen; revelled in the wealth which resulted, and boasted of the skill of their slaves; appeased their consciences by inconsistently asserting the ignorance, shiftlessness and helplessness of blacks – a race so inferior that it needed enslavement; and made themselves affable to the yeomanry at election time. Poor whites shared to the full the contempt for and fear of African-Americans which were felt by their betters; they could not contemplate liberating slaves who, as free men, would compete on their own behalf for land and profit; they deeply resented any scheme which might place blacks on the same footing as themselves, however nominally (it was much more agreeable to feel that, however unfortunate and ignorant you were, there were always a large number of others even worse off); many among them cherished a hope, however unrealistic, that they too would rise into the planter class; and they dreaded the revenge which, they thought, free blacks would take on their former oppressors. These views forged a strong bond between the yeoman farmers, the ‘poor white trash’ and the rich planters: they formed an alliance that was to survive all vicissitudes until the late twentieth century, and do incalculable damage to America and Americans. This alliance removed what might have been the strongest force making for abolition.
So far as Southern whites were concerned, then, slavery was an evil because, whether they realized it or not, it thwarted progress: in spite of its wealth the slave South lagged further behind the rest of the United States, not to mention Europe, every year. Some Southerners perceived some of its evil consequences; perhaps all its evils were noticed by someone or other in the South at some time in the years before the Civil War. Many voices were heard lamenting the backward state of Southern agriculture and the failure of the South to industrialize, or even to build enough railroads. The great men of the eighteenth century – Washington and Jefferson above all – had freely recognized slavery for an evil; they had been quite prepared to admit that it was inconsistent with the Declaration of Independence, and looked forward with confidence to its eventual disappearance. The tragedy of the South was that it ceased to listen to these prophetic voices. As time went on the assertion was made ever more frequently that slavery, far from being an evil, was ‘a positive good’, bringing all sorts of benefits with it.
It could not have been otherwise. The planters were in a hereditary trap, just as much as the blacks. They had inherited a labour system which, though extremely profitable,5 was also degrading, dangerous and unstable. Towards the end of his life Jefferson, the eternal optimist, despaired and, speaking as a Southerner and a slave-holder, remarked:
I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other…6
He had once hoped that a new generation, brought up in republican liberty, would complete the work of the Revolution by abolishing slavery; in his old age he sadly recognized that he had been wrong. And today it is clear that he himself was hopelessly entangled in the contradictions of slavery. He too was a victim of fear and guilt. Because he could not trust African-Americans, he persuaded himself that they were racially inferior to whites; that God did not intend them to have any share in the bounties of the New World, reserved for enlightened Europeans; that therefore any scheme of emancipation must include provision for sending the Negroes back to Africa, or to Haiti; and that until such a scheme was in operation, slavery must remain, indeed expand. He was not consciously influenced by the consideration that James Henry Hammond of South Carolina (1807–64) put so bluntly when he asked if any people in history had ever voluntarily surrendered two billion dollars worth of property; but the racism which did influence him was at least as responsible for maintaining nineteenth-century Americ
an slavery as greed. Guilty slave-holders could not believe that their victims would not take a horrible revenge at the first opportunity. Slaves were sly enough for anything:
He died – the jury wondered why?
The verdict was, the blue-tail fly.
So it was emotionally very difficult to contemplate emancipating the blacks; and as the number of slaves increased, so did the difficulty.
Not that the economic argument was neglected. Slavery meant power and prosperity for the planter class; a huge amount of capital had been invested in it; and no white believed that the crops of the South could be grown and harvested except by slave labour. Free blacks, it was assumed, would abandon the cotton-fields, or insist on working only for themselves, as happened in the British sugar islands after emancipation in 1833. And then what would happen to the planter and his family?
In these circumstances there was no chance that the majority of voters in any Southern state would support abolition. Even enlightened Virginia, after long and anguished debate, rejected the idea in 1832. Private acts of manumission (never very numerous) came to be frowned on as irresponsible. What right had a man to undermine his neighbour’s safety and prosperity merely to gratify his private conscience? Besides, a free Negro population was not only anomalous in the slave South, it was unsettling to discipline. Consequently, in state after state, manumission was outlawed, and the status of the free black was reduced. In this way the South bound itself anew to slavery and to the proposition that slavery was to be eternal. Thereby, Southerners excluded the possibility that black servitude could be ended peaceably, an exclusion that they were well able to enforce. They also denied that it would be ended violently. This they were not so well placed to command.
As we have seen, the slaves themselves were in no position to rebel successfully, and on the whole declined to do so unsuccessfully (though whether such restraint would have continued for ever may be doubted). It is also true that the United States Constitution permitted slavery and that there was never majority support in the North for armed emancipation until halfway through the Civil War at earliest. The South was a citadel, walled with law, force and opinion. To many it seemed impregnable. Yet its fall was rapid, and the process which destroyed it was a fairly simple, almost a predictable one. The castle’s foundations were rotten. Its defenders proved incompetent, and their incompetence was as much a result of slavery as was any other aspect of Southern life.
This was proved by the fact that the enemies who first touched the fatal weakness had no idea of what they were doing. They did not understand the South at all. The abolitionists were as much the children of the North as the planters were children of the South, and in their way just as purblind. But they were much luckier.
Perhaps they deserved to be. Obsessed with their own experience, the slave-holders constantly misjudged other Americans. For instance, one of the worst mistakes made by such apologists for slavery as Calhoun and Hammond – a mistake prompted, no doubt, by the ever-increasing amount of cotton which New England mills were buying from the South – was to assume that the Industrial Revolution already dominated Northern society. They drew parallels between the chattel slavery of the South and the wage slavery of the North, and appealed for an alliance with the financiers and manufacturers who were beginning to form a new, moneyed aristocracy. But they were misguided, for rapidly though industrialism was rising,7 there were far too few factories in the North as yet to determine the distribution of political power. The North, like the South, was predominantly agrarian. Its towns were growing more rapidly than at any other period of their history, but they were as yet chiefly commercial, rather than manufacturing: they provided goods and services for the surrounding farms and forwarded agricultural produce to the world market. Never, perhaps, has the city dominated American society less than in this period.
Family farms spread westward as far as the prairies of Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Times were mostly good, and when they were not the farmer was better placed than the townsman to sit them out. He could feed and clothe himself, and equip himself for the still comparatively simple needs of agricultural production (expensive machinery such as the mechanical reaper was not to become indispensable until after mid-century), and if his debts became heavy he possessed enough political power to stave off his creditors by one means or another. The tradition of the American Revolution gave him immense pride in being a free citizen and a keen sense of his rights. The rapid spread of modern means of communication (canals, newspapers, the post office) kept him in touch with his countrymen and the new ideas of the age. A brisk appetite for dollars (every foreign visitor noticed that Americans had an inordinate respect for riches) fostered his energy, his commercial astuteness and his relish for innovation of all kinds. There was nothing of the cautious, slow peasant about the successful Northern farmer, any more than there was about the Southern planter. He believed that the future was his, and boasted about the glorious destiny of whatever place he inhabited – every small settlement was going to outdo London and Paris – as if mere assertion (it was called boosting) would make all dreams come true. And his institutions were deeply marked by the heritage of New England. Education was highly valued, so that it would be hard to say which was most typical of the North-West, the proverbial little red schoolhouse where a basic literacy and patriotism was whacked into the souls of young Americans; or the small country college, where slightly higher attainments could be acquired; or the Lyceum, a hall maintained by subscription where adults could spend their evenings listening to travelling lecturers, who covered an amazing miscellany of subjects. The central institution remained the church or the meeting-house. To those New Englanders who moved west, Puritanism remained a living force, setting its stamp as deeply on the nineteenth century and the Mississippi valley as it had on the seventeenth century and Connecticut. It made Mid-Westerners both serious and passionate, though no less given to self-importance, self-deception and the seven deadly sins than other men. The same was true of many Southerners: there was never a more joylessly dutiful Calvinist than John C. Calhoun. But as time went on, Northern culture, not forced into sterile conformity by the need to defend the indefensible, slavery, began to deviate markedly from the ancient norms. In the old centre of the faith, Boston, heterodoxy had long ago reared its successful head. The leading minds of Massachusetts, while remaining deeply Puritan in the best sense – men and women of austere, aspiring lives, of lively consciences and highly trained intellects – were yet abandoning the theology which had once brought Puritanism to birth. They discarded traditional Christianity and became Unitarians; or, with their representative sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), and inspired at a distance by Wordsworth, turned to the cult of Nature. But their influence was restricted. Emerson was barred from Harvard College for thirty years because of his unconventional religious views, though Harvard itself was Unitarian; Unitarianism, in turn, was of little or no attraction to the masses of Northern Protestants. Not that they were necessarily frightened of novelty: this was the period of the birth of Mormonism and of numerous other equally experimental, if less durable creeds. But the bulk of Americans were more susceptible to the call to conversion than to intellectual deliberations. As the eruption of the Great Revival demonstrated, for them the key-experience of life was still that desired by their ancestors under Elizabeth I: the confrontation of the individual soul with the challenge of God. Conversion again became a common episode in the lives of earnest Americans, even such unlikely ones as W. H. Seward, whose career as a distinguished politician does not give much evidence of a religious sense. Most of the conversions either wore off after a time (as was the case with Seward) or led the converts only to greater introspective concern with the state of their souls and the conduct of their daily lives. But the instinct to make over the world, an instinct clearly owing everything to the sense of boundless opportunities which the opening of the continent entailed, and which was already a deeply established trait of the American character
, led a great many of the converts to feel God’s challenge as a spur to undertake social and political reform. With missionary zeal they threw themselves into the task. Some tried to save Americans from the slavery of alcohol (‘the demon Rum’ in their jargon); others undertook, with even less success, to turn American prisons into humane institutions for reclaiming criminals; yet others became campaigners for women’s rights, or for world peace. Others set to work to abolish Negro slavery. They saw it as offensive to God and destructive to American claims to the world’s respect. They brought a terrifying determination and single-mindedness to the task of ending it.
Abolitionism, as distinct from anti-slavery, emerged as a clear movement in 1831, the year in which William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79) founded his journal, the Liberator, in Boston. He has not, on the whole, had a good press, North or South (Georgia once offered a reward of $5,000 for his arrest and conviction as a seditious agitator). In some ways his personality recalls that of the arch-enemy, Calhoun. Both men were ruthlessly logical in following out their beliefs, and both, like so many fanatical leaders, spent as much time quarrelling with their associates as in attacking the opposition. As a political tactician Garrison suffered from two fatal weaknesses: he saw, all too clearly, how all the reform causes were intertwined, so that he could not support one without supporting all; and he refused the slightest compromise with what he saw as evil. His business was to cleanse the American soul, to purge it of the sin of slavery: nothing less would be acceptable to God. But Garrison’s function was not really that of a politician. He was a born journalist, and he kept the slavery issue alive by the eloquence and courage of his writings. It was inconvenient to the more conventional, no doubt, that he supported women’s rights and associated with African-Americans (whose subscriptions were the Liberator ‘s main support); but today we must surely find these eccentricities rather noble, and Garrison’s instinct for the central issue positively magnificent: