The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876

by Nester, William

  It is often remarked that slavery was America’s original sin, although the continent’s original inhabitants might dispute this.3 Nonetheless, the tragic matrix of race, slavery, wealth, and power extends back nearly to the nation’s beginning. It remains unclear whether the shipload of blacks sold by a Dutch sea captain to Jamestown’s leaders in 1619 ended up as slaves or indentured servants. Regardless, this transaction decisively altered the course of what would become American civilization. Ironically, given New England’s later leading role in the abolition movement, slavery was first legalized in Massachusetts in 1641 and in Connecticut in 1650 but in Virginia not until 1661, two generations after that first fatal shipload of chained Africans dropped anchor. Although slavery eventually existed in every colony, the proportion of whites to blacks widened the farther north and narrowed the farther south one journeyed. For nearly two and a half centuries, nine of ten blacks throughout first the colonies and then the states were slaves. Slavery was best suited to large-scale plantations producing commodities like tobacco, cotton, sugarcane, indigo, and rice.

  Americans justified their war of independence from Britain by declaring the self-evident truth “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Morally developed individuals thereafter deplored the discrepancy between these ideals and the reality that slaves numbered one of five people then living in the new United States.

  This hypocrisy troubled most of the nation’s founders, among whom many themselves were masters. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were the most prominent leaders who at once hated slavery yet kept slaves all their lives. Jefferson admitted in Notes on the State of Virginia that “the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the . . . most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it.” He described slavery’s moral dilemma as “holding the wolf by its ears,” in which dangers lurked in both holding on and letting go. He feared that these pent-up, raging hatreds “will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.”4

  A few founders did more than deplore the institution. In 1784 Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay founded the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. The following year Hamilton and Jay formed the New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves. In 1794 these two groups established the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race.

  The Constitution’s framers at once upheld slavery’s legality and assumed that the institution would eventually die a natural death. Out of shame they barred the word slave from the Constitution. Yet they alluded to and allowed the institution by counting three slaves for every five white people in a state’s population to determine how to apportion representatives and taxes, requiring states where slaves had escaped to assist masters in recovering their chattel, and delaying to 1808 any law outlawing the importation of slaves.

  Congress first asserted its power to regulate slavery with the 1787 Northwest Ordinance that forbade slavery north of the Ohio River, then the 1790 Southwest Ordinance that permitted slavery south of the Ohio River. From 1789 to 1854, most politicians struggled to uphold a balance between slave and free states. To this end, they tried to admit pairs of free and slave states, like Indiana and Mississippi, Illinois and Alabama, Maine and Missouri, and Michigan and Arkansas. With this balance, slavocrats could block in the Senate, where each state has two senators regardless of its population, any antislavery bill that emanated from the House of Representatives, where more seats were apportioned each decade to the North, with its rapidly growing population. Congress’s power to regulate slavery culminated with the 1820 compromise that let in Missouri and Maine as a slave and free state, respectively, and drew a line at 36°30´ north latitude from Missouri to the Rocky Mountain watershed, with slavery permitted south and forbidden north of that line.

  At the time or soon after America won independence most states acted on the Revolution’s ideals by granting limited political rights to free black men. By 1790 free blacks could vote in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina. Free blacks received that right in Kentucky in 1792 and Tennessee in 1796.

  Tragically, this revolution provoked a counterrevolution. In 1799 Kentucky became the first state to rescind its rights for free blacks and, one by one, nearly every state enacted similar laws that imposed varying degrees of political, economic, and social discrimination. Laws segregated blacks in schooling, housing, public transportation, marriage, and most jobs. Some states tried to limit the presence of blacks. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Oregon forbade any new blacks from residing within their borders or required them to post expensive bonds to guarantee good behavior. By 1850 blacks had equal voting rights and could serve on juries only in Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire.5

  This racist backlash split abolitionists. Those of the revolutionary era believed in freeing, improving, and integrating blacks within white society, and countless abolitionists in the nineteenth century upheld these values. But a different approach appeared with the American Colonization Society’s founding in 1816 by Henry Clay, John Marshall, James Madison, and James Monroe, among others, who sought to liberate blacks and expatriate them to Africa. Abolitionists also split over whether emancipation should be gradual or immediate and compensated or not.6

  Divisions among abolitionists reflected their different backgrounds. Those favoring the gradual compensation of owners and the expatriation of blacks tended to be slaveholders who sought government’s aid in ridding themselves of their moral dilemma. During the nineteenth century, those advocating eventual abolition and integration, like Theodore Weld, James Birney, the brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan, the sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Gerrit Smith, Charles Finney, Benjamin Lundy, Theodore Parker, Lydia Maria Child, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, enjoyed abundant wealth and education and were members of liberal Christian sects like the Unitarians and Quakers. This did not hold true for abolitionism’s most celebrated and reviled advocate.

  Probably no abolitionist was more influential than William Lloyd Garrison.7 He began his life in poverty after his father abandoned his family and a fire destroyed their home along with much of the rest of Newburyport, Massachusetts. As a young teenager Garrison became an apprentice printer at a newspaper, where he learned literally and figuratively how to construct arguments on the era’s leading issues. His powerful intellect, ambitions, and sense of justice led him swiftly to master the trade and, when he was twenty-one, launch his own newspaper, the Free Press. His printing skills and impassioned essays inspired Benjamin Lundy, who asked him to coedit Lundy’s monthly newspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, in Baltimore. During his half-year sojourn, Garrison converted from believing in gradual, compensated emancipation to immediate, uncompensated, and integrated emancipation. Among the millions of words he wrote or spoke, these perhaps best capture his core beliefs: “Enslave but a single human being and the liberty of the world is put in peril. . . . The war [against slavery] is a war of extermination and I will perish before an inch shall be surrendered, seeing that the liberties of mankind and harmony of the universe, and the authority and majesty of Almighty God, are involved in the issue.”8

  This uncompromising moral stance repeatedly got Garrison into trouble with lawsuits or clubs wielded by slavocrats and into squabbles with moderate abolitionists. In 1830 he was jailed for libeling a local slaveholder. This precipitated his split with Lundy, who was a gradualist. Garrison moved to Boston, where, on New Year’s Day 1831, he printed the first edition of his newspaper, the Liberator, which would appear weekly until 1866, and in 1832 founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Then, on December 4, 1833, Garrison was a leading force among sixty-two deleg
ates who established the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia. Membership soared to 250,000 members among 1,350 branches by 1838.9

  Black abolitionists were just as divided.10 David Walker helped found the Massachusetts General Colored Association, edited the Freedom’s Journal, and in 1829 issued his “Appeal to the Colored People of the World,” whereby he called on blacks to revolt against their oppressors. In contrast, Frederick Douglass all along emphasized the peaceful liberation of blacks from slavery, poverty, and discrimination, although with time he shifted from being a gradualist into an immediatist. After escaping from slavery as a young man, he eventually became the leading black abolitionist. He first achieved fame with the publication in 1845 of his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself. He proved to be as skilled a speaker as a writer as he traveled the abolitionist circuit. His home was Rochester, New York, where he published his weekly abolitionist newspaper, the North Star.11

  Being an abolitionist was a dangerous vocation for blacks and whites alike. Slavocrats beat, tarred and feathered, jailed, and at times murdered abolitionists and wrecked their offices and printing presses. The most notorious terrorist act was the murder of Elijah Lovejoy and destruction of his printing press at Alton, Illinois, in November 1837. Violence and even riots of white supremacists against blacks and abolitionists erupted throughout the antebellum era, with 21 during the 1820s, 115 during the 1830s, 64 during the 1840s, and 46 during the 1850s.12

  With time the power balance among abolitionists shifted from gradualists to immediatists, and the movement itself from America’s radical fringe to the political mainstream. By the end of the Civil War’s fourth blood-soaked year, the immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery was grounded in American policy, law, and the Constitution as demanded by majorities in Congress and among the public.

  Over time slaveholders developed an ideology to justify their way of life that is best called slavocracy and its adherents slavocrats, terms coined in the 1830s.13 Slavocracy, however, suffered from two fatal flaws—it was grounded in legal and moral quicksand. Slavocrats compounded these flaws by reacting with rage rather than soul-searching when critics exposed the depravity of their beliefs and lifestyles. They pummeled their critics with increasingly extreme demagoguery and eventually with violence. This, of course, only provided critics with more ammunition to expose slavocracy’s pathologies.

  Slavocrats tried to build a legal wall around slavery with the notion of states’ rights, the belief that the United States was merely a confederation of sovereign states with each reserving the right to nullify any federal law and even secede. This belief, however, is rooted in wishful thinking rather than the law. One searches in vain for any hint of this dogma in the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, or other expressions of the framers’ original intent. Indeed, the overwhelming evidence is that those who designed and approved the Constitution sought to establish an enduring, sovereign national and republican government. Chief Justice John Marshall explained this in the Supreme Court’s 1821 Cohens v. Virginia decision: “In war we are one people. In making peace we are one people. In all commercial regulations we are one and the same people. In many other respects the American people are one, and the government which is alone capable of controlling and managing their interests in all these respects is the government of the Union. It is their government and in that character they have no other.”14 Yet the resounding refutation of states’ rights by history and the Supreme Court did not stop countless people from fervently believing in it and just as fervently acting on this belief.

  The “moral” arguments of slavocrats were just as delusional and dogmatically asserted. If eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slaveholders tended to defend their way of life as “a necessary evil,” subsequent generations insisted that slavery was “a positive good” for everyone, especially childlike blacks who would be helpless savages without their masters’ paternal care.15 Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina explained that “the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class.” Senator William Yancey of Alabama insisted that the nation’s founders “built this government on two ideas. The first is that the white race is the citizen, and the master race. . . . The second is that the negro is the inferior race.” No one developed slavocracy as an ideology further than George Fitzhugh. In his 1854 book Sociology for the South; or, the Failure of Free Society, he tried to prove with tortured logic that slave labor was far more humane than free labor and that a privileged elite was morally and mentally entitled to rule over everyone else. He summed up slavocracy with the phrase “Liberty for the few—Slavery, in every form, for the mass!” Slavocracy’s justification for enslaving blacks was best summarized in the title of his 1857 book, Cannibals All!; or, Slaves without Masters.16 Slavocracy’s sheer Orwellian “logic” was most succinctly expressed by the Richmond (VA) Enquirer: “Freedom is not possible without slavery.”17

  A pathological mindset upheld a pathological economic system. To justify slavery, slavocrats had to dehumanize their chattel. How else could they justify enchaining and beating, sometimes raping, and occasionally outright murdering their slaves if they were fellow humans? At best blacks were at the mental and moral level of children who forced their masters to care for them, and at worst they were nothing but beasts tamable only with the lash.

  Slavocracy was rooted in cultural as well as racial stereotypes. Slavocrats romanticized themselves and their region as characterized by honor and chivalry that contrasted with Yankee coldheartedness and greed.18 From a psychological perspective, this utterly deluded view is understandable. Slaveholders were at the apex of two overlapping economic, social, and political hierarchies grounded respectively in the exploitation of black slaves and white tenants. What could be more coldhearted and greedy? Few people have the strength of character to admit such a harsh truth about themselves. To do so would logically and morally demand a revolution in one’s way of life. So rather than come to terms with their own pathologies, slaveholders projected them onto hated others—Yankees and especially abolitionists.

  Slavocrats condemned abolitionists for provoking thoughts of liberation among their chattel, then assisting their escape. They were enraged by the antislavery pamphlets smuggled into the South and the antislavery petitions introduced in Congress. Each slave state passed laws that harshly punished anyone guilty of distributing abolitionist literature. In Congress, slavocrats succeeded in grossly violating the Constitution by imposing a formal gag rule in the House of Representatives from 1836 to 1844, and an informal gag rule in the Senate throughout the antebellum era, on any debate of antislavery petitions. This merely provoked abolitionists to increase the number of petitions and number of signatures on each that they submitted to Congress.

  The growing movement of those who would limit or abolish slavery provoked the worst primordial existential fears and challenged the basest interests of slavocrats. Only one event worried slavocrats more than being deprived of their slaves, and that was being murdered by their slaves. Each decade or so, an aborted or realized slave revolt reinforced this deep fear. Southerners pointed to the thwarted plots of Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800 or Denmark Vesey in South Carolina in 1822, or Nat Turner’s bloody revolt in Virginia in 1831 in which fifty-seven white men, women, and children were murdered before it was crushed. Then there were the occasional murders of masters by individual slaves. These horrendous crimes must be weighed against the reality that they were extremely rare, statistical near nullities amid four million slaves. But in this as in all related issues, slavocrats spotlighted anything that justified their beliefs and obscured the rest.

  Perversely, this fear provoked slaveholders to cling all the more tightly to their way of life rather than discard it. They became increasingly frantic not just to defend but to expand slavery as widely as possible. The most zealously outspoken slavocr
ats—Robert Barnwell Rhett, who published the Charleston (SC) Mercury; George Fitzhugh, the best-selling author; and the senators Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, and William Yancey of Alabama—became known as the “fire-eaters.” Inspired by John Calhoun’s speeches and writings, they shrilly advocated nullification and secession if necessary to defend slavery. The fire-eaters demanded that slavery be free everywhere and that the African slave trade be reinstated, which would overturn existing American law and defy international law.19

  Even this was not good enough for fire-eaters, who increasingly advocated breaking away from the United States and forming their own country. Senator Alexander Stephens of Georgia noted as early as December 1849 that “the feeling among the Southern members for a dissolution of the Union—if the antislavery [measures] should be pressed to extremity—is becoming much more general. . . . Men are now beginning to talk of it seriously, who, twelve months ago, hardly permitted themselves to think of it.”20 This vision first peaked on June 3, 1850, when delegates from fourteen slave states met in a states’ rights convention at Nashville. Over the next nine days, although they vented their rage at anyone who disputed the God-given right of slaveholding, majorities upheld the 1820 Missouri Compromise and rejected secession. When this states’ rights group reconvened in November, only seven delegations attended; elsewhere Unionists blocked the efforts of extremists to get state governments officially to join the proceedings. Nonetheless, these states’ rights conventions were dress rehearsals for the Confederacy’s birth little more than a decade later.

  Slaveholders were increasingly aware that history was rapidly turning against their way of life as more governments and people in the Western world viewed slavery as evil. Britain outlawed the international slave trade in 1808 and abolished slavery in 1833. The countries that won independence from the Spanish Empire all ended slavery during the 1820s. By 1860 the United States, Brazil, and Cuba were the only Western Hemisphere countries where slavery was legal. Carl Schurz of Wisconsin spotlighted the reality that slavocrats were fighting an increasingly powerful current of history: “Slaveholders of America . . . Are you really in earnest when you speak of perpetuating slavery? . . . You stand against a hopeful world, alone against a great century, fighting your hopeless fight . . . against the onward march of civilization.”21