The Bonfire

by Marc Wortman

Outside Atlanta, a rising tide of radicalism threatened to swamp such good-government, business-first approaches. With the 1856 elections on the horizon, the Southern Whig Party’s splintering sent its former members scrambling into various other emerging and still-born political organizations, none with even close to the regional or national clout of the Southern Democrats under its radicalized and more powerful leaders, like Cobb in Georgia, W. L. Yancey in Alabama, and Jefferson Davis in Mississippi. Calhoun and other Southern Unionists joined in supporting Millard Fillmore as a third-party American Party candidate.

  In the North, many old Whig Party members gradually coalesced into the newly formed Republican Party, which, along with support for industry-minded infrastructure and tariff policies, sought to halt the spread of slavery. The Republicans’ first presidential candidate was the famed western explorer John C. Frémont, now a slavery-loathing senator from California. The Democrat candidate was James Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian whose major political virtue was having been out of the country as minister to the Court of St. James in London, thus missing the entire Kansas uproar. Sympathetic to the slaveholders, he captured the South and enough Northern electoral votes to win the presidency. Fillmore could win only Maryland. Frémont handily captured the upper Northern states. The voting patterns made clear, though, that a Republican candidate who took another large Northern state such as Pennsylvania or Illinois could be president.

  Two years later, in the closely watched off-year senatorial race in Illinois, Stephen Douglas defeated a little known Republican vying for his Senate seat in a hard-fought contest. Abraham Lincoln was a lanky small-town lawyer and former single-term Whig congressman given to humorously sardonic pronouncements that masked powerful ambition and a keen political intelligence. Douglas’s opponent told large audiences during a series of nationally discussed public debates that, though “I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position . . . there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. . . . I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.” More importantly for the Union, argued Lincoln, the divisiveness brought on by a nation contending over the further spread of slavery was a political hobble laming the country. Extension of “an apple of discord and an element of division in the house” would likely cause it to fall.

  Lincoln favored effective compromises that would halt slavery’s nationalization, closing off its spread beyond the slave states and placing it back “in the course of ultimate extinction.” Such an outcome might take “one hundred years,” but “it would be going out of existence in the way best for both the black and the white races.” Ultraist Slave Power leaders viewed this “Black Republican,” more widely regarded as a moderate Whig, as little different from the most ardent abolitionist. Whether the abolition Lincoln advocated came sooner or later, he threatened “the cornerstone” of Southern life and national power. The two views were irreconcilable.

  IN RESPONSE TO THE THREAT, GEORGIA, like most slaveholding states, further knotted its already tight restraints on blacks. In December 1859, the state legislature passed a comprehensive package of laws designed to end any hopes blacks might have entertained of winning their freedom or, if free, relaxing within the safety of their liberty. Among its new statutes, the legislature closed the remaining loop-holes prohibiting freeing of slaves by restricting dying owners stricken with deathbed guilt from releasing their human chattel from bondage through statements made in extremis. The newly promulgated laws also created a vaguely defined illegal-vagrancy status for free blacks apprehended “wandering or strolling about, or leading an idle, immoral or profligate course of life.” That gave any court leeway to sell offenders, scooped up on an afternoon stroll or caught drinking, into slavery for two years for a first offense. A second conviction led to permanent reenslavement.

  The possibility that racial unrest sparked by Northern abolitionist politics might engulf Georgia sent shivers through Atlanta. The shivers became pandemic when news broke of John Brown’s return east and bungled October 19 attempt to instigate a slave revolt with a dramatic raid on the Harper’s Ferry arsenal. Rumors of threatened or imagined black insurrections, more often than not based on unfounded reports of abolitionist provocateurs come south, ricocheted through the region. Just days after the calendar turned to 1860, the Daily Intelligencer, an influential Democratic Party organ, reported the arrest in Knoxville, Tennessee, of “an Abolitionist in the shape of a traveling dealer in fruit trees” (their emphasis). The editor, Jared I. Whitaker, had political ambitions in the city, and his newspaper, according to another Southern editor, enjoyed “tremendous sway . . . over the political arrangements of this State.” He and his readers were “no advocates of mob law . . . unless the case be an extreme one,” but they recommended taking firm steps “for such gentry,” when identified, such as, “notify them to leave at once, and on their failure to do so, arrest and whip publicly.”

  The swift condemnation and hanging of John Brown and his small band of Harper’s Ferry insurrectionists in early December 1859 had done little to allay Slave Power fears. Volatile Atlantans would no longer stand for affronts to their rights. Touchiness quickly became trigger happiness. Gunfire broke out at a New Year’s Eve ball in a downtown hotel in answer to “someone giving expression to Abolition sentiments,” the Intelligencer reported. Whitaker approvingly suggested, “Gentlemen of the Abolition cloth” learn from the incident. They should “well be chary of expressing such opinions and sympathies, for it is a noted fact that our climate invariably becomes unhealthy to such.” Another disturbance broke out at a public celebration shortly after New Year’s Day when a dry goods store clerk named D. S. Newcomb toasted the late John Brown, “stating,” reported the Intelligencer, “that he should not have been hung.” When the owner of the store was informed about his clerk’s “conduct savoring of Abolition,” he “gave him his walking papers.” Newcomb fled town, “although,” the newspaper archly pointed out, “delegations of citizens would have been glad to pay him their respects could they have discovered him. . . . The sooner he treads Northern soil the better it will be for him.”

  High tensions wound higher still as the November 1860 general election date neared. Dissenters were driven out of town, and blacks were often attacked. Barn fires were credited as the work of abolitionist arsonists or blacks. Vigilante committees rounded up and brutalized unwary slaves and freemen, who in desperation “confessed” to their evil acts or intentions. Lynchings and even burnings at the stake terrorized an already cowed populace.

  Even the remote Georgia up-country, where relatively few slaves lived, reacted in panic to possible slave-revolt plots being hatched. Much as happened during the Indian removal wars, men went out on patrol duty at night, while women and children huddled together in windless rooms, recalled Sallie Clayton, then a Kingston schoolgirl. “There was very little sleeping and we gladly hailed the morning” after those nights spent listening for the murderous black men stalking whites to massacre. Despite having armed protection along, she and other children out on a nighttime ride “crouched in the bottom of the carriage like frightened hares.” Many up-country parents moved their families to Atlanta, where they believed they’d be safer. Clayton’s family soon moved into a large house on Mitchell Street, directly across from the open square in front of City Hall, next door to Ben Yancey’s mansion on Washington Street.

  Rumors of black insurrection could not be doused that summer. Finally, whites struck first. Word went out that on the night of August 25, dozens of black men in cahoots with a white abolitionist intended to burn down Dalton, a rail depot town on the Western & Atlantic line in the rough terrain of the northwestern corner of the old Cherokee country. The insurrectionists allegedly hoped to “accomplish all they could in the work of destruction” by night and then to take to the rails the next day, capturing a train and beginning a town-by-town rampage until they reac
hed Marietta to “pursue the work of killing and burning.” After that, “thence as far on the road as they were successful.” That meant Atlanta. Shortly after sunset, a citizen force gathered near Dalton and then swept through several slave and freemen’s quarters nearby, capturing thirty-six black men. One white man was taken and lynched.

  The railroads that brought prosperity to the region took on a different, grimmer cast. Those tracks of prosperity could also carry a different and dangerous cargo, violent men bent on destroying Atlanta. White citizens all along the Western & Atlantic armed themselves, took to patrolling streets, and challenged all who dared move about at night.

  In Atlanta, Whitaker got a popular hearing when he urged ending any freedom for blacks, which undermined public security and corrupted the slave population. He opined,Free negroes . . . go to and fro without any one to look after them specially—live by thieving—are almost invariably lazy and indolent, and are continually corrupting the slave population. We should be glad to see free negroism totally abolished, and we think the next Legislature cannot do a better thing than pass a general law compelling them to choose the alternative of leaving the State or being sold into slavery. Every negro in Georgia should have a master; it will be better for the community and infinitely better for the negro himself.

  Even as Atlanta’s black population lived in unprecedented freedom, many white neighbors shared his view that just as dogs should not roam free, their chains should bind them forever.

  ATLANTA’S WILLINGNESS TO LOOK the other way while its black population lived in quasifreedom, at the same time that it was tightening the bonds of slavery, led to a singular publication event in the history of the Slave Power. Harrison Berry, a forty-four-year-old Covington slave hiring his time as a shoemaker, apparently in Atlanta, authored an extraordinary pamphlet in 1860, titled “Slavery and Abolitionism as Viewed by a Georgia Slave.” With his owner’s support, the forty-six-page diatribe was printed in Atlanta the following winter. It is the only known published writing about slavery by a slave still in bondage.

  Berry had received what he called “some knowledge of an education” as a child on a Black Belt plantation where he worked as a field hand. Sold three times and thwarted in his efforts to purchase his freedom from his master, and probably deeply embittered, he became convinced that whites anywhere would never tolerate blacks other than as their inferiors. “The colored man,” he wrote, “is but the tool North and the servant South.” Northern whites used blacks indifferently to their ends; Southern whites openly enslaved them. Berry saw little that either side offered him except oppression. He addressed his pamphlet to those he labeled “the fanatical Abolitionists, who call themselves Republicans.” He derided their activities, which, he insisted, only made the slave’s life worse. The sole thing blacks, in slavery or freedom, might hope for from whites was an oppression less brutal. When the Black Republicans agitated the slavery question, “slaves,” lamented Berry, “are much worse treated.”

  To demonstrate the abolitionists’ poisonous effects, Berry created an imaginary dialogue between two slaveholders after one has spied a slave reading newspaper reports of the “proceedings of that Convention of the Abolitionists,” then communicating his gleanings to the owner’s other slaves that “they would not be Slaves much longer, for the Abolition party intended to set them all free.” The first master gave his bondsman “two hundred lashes,” and then both “whipped every one” of their slaves to convince them that their condition would never change. The political climate in the South, made toxic by Northern politicians, contended Berry, drove Southern whites to greater brutality, not fairness, toward their human property. “You [abolitionists] are absolutely the worst enemy the Slave has ever had.” Their work for slave liberation was driving their slaveholding enemies to worsening repression of the slaves. “Even now,” he reported, “the oppression is commenced, but where it will end God only knows.”

  Making vividly clear what form white reaction would take should Republicans ever come to national power, he laid out a vision of hell for people of color. He wrote, I see gibbets all over the Slaveholding States with negroes stretched upon them like slaughtered hogs, and pens of light-wood on fire! Methinks I hear their screams—I can see them upon their knees, begging, for God’s sake, to have mercy! I can see them chained together . . . and shot down like wild beasts. These are but shadows of what would have been done, had John [Brown] succeeded.

  Berry feared that an impending Republican victory would “put manacles on every Slave South of Mason & Dixon’s line,” and lead to worse, much worse.

  THE AUGURIES FOR JAMES CALHOUN, too, were dire: The fateful year 1860 started off ominously in February when Emma, his wife of twenty-eight years, the mother of his seven children, died. While he grieved, he also worried. In the following months, John C. Calhoun’s deathbed prediction about the fate of the Union following a divisive presidential election came true. The forces that had so long threatened to split America faced off over the race for the presidency and its probable outcome. James Calhoun, his nation on the line, traveled out of the Lower South for the first time in his life in a desperate bid to help save the union he held so dear. The opposing sides, though, were moving swiftly to the extremes, leaving men who clung to the center, like Calhoun, gasping for political oxygen.

  The die was cast after nearly all Southern delegates bolted from the National Democracy convention. At the party’s April platform-drafting meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, W. L. Yancey penned a separate Southern position paper, supported by Howell Cobb, Robert Toombs, and most other leading Georgia Democrats. The Yanceyites insisted that their party commit itself to congressional protection for slavery in the territories—and, with Southern expansionists eying Cuba, Haiti, and even Mexico, in any future American lands. The Northern delegates, led by Stephen Douglas’s backers, held a nominating majority, but the Yancey men controlled the Charleston meeting. They wanted to destroy the Douglasites’ hold on the party. “Ours are the institutions which are at stake; ours is the property that is to be destroyed; ours is the honor at stake,” intoned Yancey in demanding federal protection for slaveholder rights anywhere within the growing nation as a condition for his followers’ support for Douglas. The Douglasites resented Southern intransigence, on the grounds that it would serve only to drive Northern voters away. When they rejected the Yancey men’s demands, the Southern Democrats walked out.

  With the Southern wing out of the National Democracy Party, a split Democratic vote in the November election was assured, almost certainly paving the way for Republican victory. Yancey and his followers took heart. Before he left Charleston, a huge crowd gathered in the port city’s moonlit courthouse square to hear his farewell speech. A deafening three cheers went up for “an Independent Southern Republic,” followed by Yancey’s declaration that “perhaps even now, the pen of the historian is nibbed to write the story of a new revolution.”

  Northern Democrats put forward Douglas as their candidate, with former Georgia governor Herschel Johnson, a Calhounite Unionist, as his running mate; the Southern Democrats came together in a separate convention to back Buchanan’s vice president, Kentucky’s John Breckinridge. Not tightly bound to the Southern Rights faction before his nomination, Breckinridge warmly endorsed Yancey’s platform, moving the press and public to link his candidacy closely with the Yanceyite ultraists. Larger crowds turned out to hear Yancey at his campaign stops on behalf of Breckinridge than for the party nominee himself. The fearless Yancey did not hesitate to campaign anywhere, even in New York City and other Northern locales, where he faced angry National Democracy audiences, yet, ever the duelist, still lashed out at Douglas, “that arch-enemy of true Democracy,” and declared that only the election of Breckinridge would “keep the [federal government’s] hands off of us and let the Constitution work its own way!” to save the Union.

  IN ATLANTA, the Breckinridge Yanceyite men were proclaiming a victory that would enshrine Southern rights while
at the same time using the campaign to build a local base in the South’s fastest-growing city in support of separation from the Union, should it come to that. They exuded a confidence in the city’s future, whatever happened. Even as the Intelligencer urged a crackdown on dissenting voices and tighter control of free blacks and hired slaves in town, its pages crowed about Atlanta’s miraculous progress. The instant city could not be contained. “Springing, as it were, spontaneously out of a wilderness, she proudly rears her head and demands audience of her sister cities.” Atlanta’s strides were unprecedented in such a short span of time. “The quiet path once trod by the stalwart form of the red man, is now the busy street; the woods that once knew no sound save that of the whoop of the savage, is now familiar with the shrill whistle of the engine. . . . All branches of business are prospering; and we are emphatically going ahead.” Atlanta was cocky enough to stand up to any challenge.

  That economic engine armed Atlanta with trade weapons it could fire at its Northern enemies. A letter writer in the Intelligencer declared the time had come to “strike, merchants of Georgia, at the black Republican and Abolition trade of the North! Repudiate it, give it no countenance, no quarter; reject it, spurn it, and spit upon it.” Merchants who continued to trade in the “black” merchandise faced barely veiled threats. A few days later, a gathering of many city merchants drew up resolutions for cutting off trade with Northern merchants known to be in favor of abolition and to form a mercantile association open only to those ready to declare their fealty to the Southern Rights cause.

  Not to be outdone, the Intelligencer’s leading daily rival, the Southern Confederacy, under its ferocious editor, James P. Hambleton, published what it called the “Black and White List” of New York businesses. The editor demanded merchants boycott the “black list” entities until they “make an affidavit that they are neither Black Republicans, Abolitionists, Free-Soilers, or have never been enemies to the institution of Slavery and the rights of the South in any shape or form whatever.” Reporting on the list, the New York Times responded tartly that all operating under “the Atlanta ban” need only “abjure all that is to be abjured, and avow all that is to be avowed, and they will have no further trouble in disposing of their silks and muslins. The streets of Atlanta will once more rustle with constitutional crinoline; the drummers of New York will once more shake hands with the buyers of Georgia; and the names of the faithful will shine as the stars in glory upon the new-washed pages of the Index Expurgatorius.”