Australian Confederates

by Terry Smyth

  That’s why the Mason-Dixon line – once merely ink on a map, marking borders between states – became a colossal cultural divide, alienating Americans humming ‘Yankee Doodle’ from Americans whistling ‘Dixie’.

  That’s why, in 1861, the drums of war drowned out the voices of concord, and that’s why now, in January of 1865, the tally in blood for a nation divided has posted numbers to make the head spin. Of more than three million men who have fought in the American Civil War so far, some 620,000 have lost their lives. Total casualties on both sides are reckoned at 1.5 million, including soldiers and sailors killed or wounded in battle, those missing in action and those who died of disease. There has been no accounting for the civilian toll a later age will coldly call collateral damage. And it isn’t over yet.

  That’s why North and South, once unfamiliar names, have been etched forever into memory. Places such as Manassas, Shiloh, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Cold Harbour. Men such as Robert E. Lee, William T. Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant.

  That’s why, as the United States Congress debates the Thirteenth Amendment – to abolish slavery – the Confederate raider CSS Shenandoah is sailing into Australian waters, bound for the port of Melbourne.

  And that’s why the Shenandoah’s master, Lieutenant Commander James Iredell Waddell, striding the quarterdeck of his rakish black warship as it slices its way into this notionally neutral port – with the Roaring Forties behind him and an Antipodean summer haze on the shore ahead – has no way of knowing if he will be welcomed as a warrior in a desperate cause or hanged as a pirate.

  Had destiny taken a different turn, this 41-year-old native of Orange County, North Carolina, would likely still be Second Lieutenant on USS Saginaw, serving in the peacetime navy he had joined as a boy but is now his sworn enemy. So here he is, captain of the scourge of the Yankee merchant fleet, seeking safe harbour in a strange land; a raw and remote place that is not so much a country as a curiosity.

  A lifetime earlier and half a world away, in 1792, a 27-year-old farmer’s son from Westborough, Massachusetts, took ship for South Carolina. Eli Whitney had always known that a life on the land was not for him. As a youth, during the Revolutionary War, he had turned a modest profit manufacturing nails on his father’s farm, and dreamt of earning fame and fortune as an inventor and engineer. However, after graduating from Yale with a law degree but little enthusiasm to practise the profession, and short of money and opportunity, Eli set his dreams aside and took a job as a children’s tutor on a plantation in South Carolina.

  But Eli Whitney never made it to South Carolina. Fate stepped in in the form of Catherine Littlefield Greene, a passenger on the same ship. Like Whitney, Catherine Greene was blessed with an inventive mind, and during the voyage the pair became fast friends. She invited him to abandon his plan to become a tutor in South Carolina and tutor her children instead, at her plantation in Georgia. As an incentive, she offered to provide him with a workshop where he could tinker with his inventions. Whitney accepted with gratitude.

  ‘Caty’ Greene, as she was widely and fondly known, was the widow of General Nathanael Greene, a hero of the Revolutionary War. Like her late husband, Caty was a Northerner, from Rhode Island. As arguably the most capable general after George Washington, Nathanael Greene emerged from the war covered in glory, but his campaigns against the British had left him financially ruined. To provide rations for his troops, he had guaranteed large sums of money to merchants through a middle-man who turned out to be a fraudster. When, at the end of the war, the merchants demanded their money, Nathanael had no choice but to sell the family’s northern estate to pay his debts and, with Caty and their five children, move south to a Georgia plantation granted to him in gratitude for his war service.

  Mulberry Grove plantation, on the Savannah River, had been a successful rice plantation, and Nathanael hoped to restore the family’s fortunes cultivating that crop. But the plantation had been deserted for 10 years. Its former owner, British loyalist John Graham, the Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, fled in fear for his life after Britain lost the war. Although the mansion house and outbuildings were in fair order, the rice fields were choked with weeds and marsh grass, and all the slaves had run away.

  Still, Nathanael and Caty were determined to make the plantation a going concern once more. The task proved arduous and, for Caty, became doubly so when, in 1786, Nathanael died suddenly of sunstroke.

  To pay his respects, President Washington visited the plantation, noting in his diary that he ‘called upon Mrs Green, the widow of the deceased General Green, (at a place called Mulberry Grove) and asked her how she did.’1

  And it seems that within three years of her husband’s death she was doing well. The plantation was thriving, its success credited to Caty’s courage and determination, although in truth its prosperity – like that of all plantations throughout the South – was built on slavery.

  While, in Georgia, slaves toiled in the rice fields and at the crop-cleaning machines in the cause of Caty’s wealth and comfort, in England, the renowned abolitionist William Wilberforce rose in Parliament to condemn the slave trade as irredeemably wicked. Presenting his Abolition Bill to the House for the first time, he warned, ‘You may choose to look the other way but you can never again say you did not know.’2 Year after year, Wilberforce reintroduced the Bill until it was finally passed – albeit by a slim majority – in 1807, making the slave trade illegal on British ships. In Britain’s former American colonies, however, lawmakers continued to either look the other way or to look the institution squarely in the eye and, as God-fearing Christians, heartily approve of it, citing the Bible for justification.

  Both the Old and New Testaments have references to slavery as an acceptable practice. According to the Scriptures, some people were born to be chattel and others to be masters. It was simply nature’s way; part of God’s great plan: ‘Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ.’3 The fact that Jesus himself spoke not a word against slavery was cited as proof that he approved of it, while Biblical passages opposing slavery – and there are several – were conveniently ignored.

  That’s not to say American voices were not raised in opposition to human bondage. After the Revolutionary War, abolitionist sentiment slowly gained traction in the North. In the South, too, church leaders loudly echoed Methodist founder John Wesley’s denunciation of slavery as ‘the sum of all villainies’.4

  But for every voice supporting Wesley’s view, there were many more favouring that of another founder of Methodism, Englishman George Whitfield. A famed preacher and evangelist on both sides of the Atlantic, Whitfield successfully campaigned in 1751 for the relegalisation of slavery in Georgia, where it had been banned since 1735. Although Whitfield preached the usual claptrap about slavery being God’s will, the main thrust of his argument was that it was an economic necessity – for the South in general and for himself in particular. He intended to buy a plantation in Georgia and become a slave-owner.

  In his opinion, ‘hot countries cannot be cultivated without negroes. What a flourishing country might Georgia have been, had the use of them been permitted years ago? How many white people have been destroyed for want of them, and how many thousands of pounds spent to no purpose at all?’5

  An apologist for the brutal trade, he apparently believed that as a paternalistic master, he would be doing his kidnapped, captive workers a favour. ‘And though it is true that they are brought in a wrong way from their own country, and it is a trade not to be approved of, yet as it will be carried on whether we will it or not, I should think myself highly favoured if I could purchase a good number of them, in order to make their lives comfortable, and lay a foundation for breeding up their posterity in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.’6

  The re-introduction of slavery in Georgia, largely due to the influence of George Whitfield, caused the enslaved population to grow from less than 500 in 1750 to 15,000 within five y
ears, as more and more slaves were brought from Africa to boost the production of Georgia’s staple crops: rice, tobacco and indigo.

  At Mulberry Grove, for example, during the years slavery was outlawed in Georgia, the plantation’s workforce was a small number of white indentured labourers. In 1792, when Eli Whitney arrived at Mulberry Grove, there were a dozen or so slaves toiling in Caty’s fields. They numbered among some 30,000 throughout Georgia – more than a third of that state’s total population, yet this was a fraction of what was to come. By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the slave population of Georgia – the state with the largest number of slaves – would swell to more than 462,000. Nationally, of a total population of just over 31 million, almost four million would be in bondage.7

  In 1792, the 2,000-acre Mulberry Grove estate grew corn and orchard fruits, but rice was still the prime cash crop, and the plantation’s slaves had dug by hand a massive system of irrigation and drainage canals for the rice fields. But the South’s rice economy was about to be upset by an upstart.

  As promised, Eli Whitney was given a workshop in an upper room of the mansion in which to turn his ideas into practicalities. And one of his ideas was to find some way to improve the production of what was then a very minor crop. Cotton.

  Potentially, cotton was extremely valuable. The cotton mills of northern England, centred on the ‘Cottonopolis’ of Manchester, had an insatiable appetite for the fibre, and Britain’s main source of the crop, India, was struggling to meet demand. The trouble was that even in areas ideally suited to its cultivation – such as the American South, with its long, hot summers, moderate rainfall and rich soils – removing the seeds by hand from the fibres in the fluffy seed pods, called ‘bolls’, was a slow and laborious process. Producing a single bale of cotton needed more that 600 hours of labour, and, even with slave labour, large-scale production in the United States was unviable.

  So the story goes, one day at Mulberry Grove plantation, in 1793, Eli Whitney, in an idle moment, stood staring at a brood of fluffy chicks in a slat chicken coop, perhaps struck by their similarity to fluffy cotton bolls.

  Just then, according to a presumably embroidered tale told and retold: ‘Along came Tabby the house cat. Tabby reached in to claw a chick out of the coop, but as she did so the old mother hen pecked at her. That caused the cat to make a sweeping swipe at one of the chicks, with her claws exposed.

  ‘She did not get the chick, but she withdrew her paw with a bunch of fluff clinging to her claws.’

  This was Whitney’s Eureka moment. ‘He cried, “At last I have a plan for separating cotton from the seed! What we need is a machine that will act like a cat’s paw. The cat struck at the chicken and removed its feathers. I want a machine that will strike at the cotton and remove it from the thing to which it is fastened.”

  ‘So he invented a machine which had a multiple of fine teeth revolving rapidly in a cylinder, and when the cotton was fed through it the teeth tore all the cotton from the seed in much the same way as the cat’s claws stripped the fluff from the baby chick.’8

  Whitney’s prototype cotton gin (‘gin’ being short for engine) was a failure. Its ‘teeth’ were made of wood and broke off. Caty Greene suggested he try again using metal wire teeth, and it worked like a charm. Where previously it had taken hundreds of hours, now it took only 10 to 12 hours to produce a bale of cotton.

  It was a revolution. By the 1820s, cotton had become the United States’ biggest agricultural export and, in the South, the main source of wealth. By the 1840s, India could no longer compete on price or quality with American cotton. By 1860, Southern plantations supplied more than 75 per cent of the world’s cotton, shipping directly to England – the global hub of the industry – from Savannah, Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans and other Southern ports.

  But there was a catch: more cotton under cultivation required more slaves to pick the crop. As the Southern economy became dependant on cotton, its very survival depended on the institution of slavery. The once minor crop had become the basis of an economy, a society, and the justification for an abomination.

  At the same time, a longstanding dispute over the role of the federal government was gaining heat. On one side were those who believed the powers of the national government should have pre-eminence over the powers of the states. On the opposing side were those who held the view that states should retain their sovereign rights within the federation.

  Whereas, in Australia, a similar dispute between rival colonies would eventually be resolved – albeit grudgingly and imperfectly – by compromise in a federal constitution, the American debate over states’ rights was hamstrung by the issue of slavery. There might well have been wriggle room on taxation and tariffs, but on the matter of slavery the South was immovable.

  Northern states had been gradually abolishing slavery since the Revolutionary War, and by 1840 almost all slaves north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon line – the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and, generally, free and slave states – had been freed. Unlike the industrial North, however, the agricultural South would not, could not, consider dispensing with the unpaid labour force that was the engine of its economy. In Dixie, a popular term for the South, ‘abolition’ was a dirty word. It was just plain unthinkable.

  The dispute grew hotter still when new states were added to the Union. On the question of whether these former territories would be free states or slave states, tempers flared and sabres were rattled.

  Could it lead to war between the states? Not likely, scoffed Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, in 1858. ‘Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us, we could bring the whole world to our feet.

  ‘What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilised world with her save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on the earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is King.’9

  Hammond, who owned several plantations and more than 300 slaves, was an influential pro-slavery advocate before the war. He firmly believed slavery was ‘commanded by God through Moses, and approved by Christ through his apostles’.10 But his faith in King Cotton was misplaced.

  When the presidential election of 1860 put the anti-slavery Republican Abraham Lincoln in the White House, the enmity between Northern and Southern interests reached breaking point. Of the 15 slave states – the United States of America was comprised of 33 states at that time – South Carolina was first to secede from the Union. Ten more followed – Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina – and on 9 February 1861, the rebel states proclaimed a new nation: the Confederate States of America.

  Two months later, when the first shots of the Civil War were fired in the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, it was blindingly obvious that King Cotton could not prevent a war. And, as it would soon become depressingly clear, neither could King Cotton help to win a war.

  The Confederates hoped to gain the support of Britain and France, which were heavily dependant on Southern cotton, by restricting exports, creating economic crises in those markets. ‘Cotton diplomacy’, it was called, and it backfired spectacularly. Britain and Europe, with warehouses bulging with surplus cotton, enjoyed hefty profits as the price of cotton shot up, and saw no sense in picking a fight with the United States. And with the US Navy imposing a blockade on Confederate ports, the South could not ship its cotton regardless. The result was an economic crisis, not in Britain and Europe, as expected, but in the Confederacy. For a one-note economy, this spelt disaster not only in the treasury but on the battlefield.

  Bad news for the Confederacy meant good news for other lands of cotton, and India, Egypt and Argentina massively increased production. Not so for the mill towns of Northern England, however. In Lancashire towns such as Oldham, the drying up of the supply of affordable American cotton led to what came to be known as the ‘cotton fam
ine’. Thousands of workers, laid off by the town’s mills, were forced to rely on soup kitchens and charitable handouts for survival. Nevertheless, at a public meeting in Oldham, sacked workers declared they would rather starve than support slavery – a commendable but curious claim, given that the town had thrived on spinning and weaving slave-grown cotton since the turn of the 19th century.

  In an aspiring land of cotton – Australia – the fledgling colony of Queensland sought to capitalise not only on the woes of the American South but on England’s cotton famine. To attract investment by British mill owners and manufacturers, the colonial government guaranteed the price of raw cotton, which had soared since supplies from the South were cut off. And to attract unemployed English mill workers, Queensland offered free passage and grants of land to grow cotton. Some 1,000 families took up the offer, but they were urban factory workers, not farmers, and for many the task of carving out cotton fields from the rugged bush of south-eastern Queensland proved too much. The scheme was a failure.

  Undaunted, Australia looked elsewhere for labour. In 1863, shipping magnate and entrepreneur Robert Towns established a cotton plantation on the Logan River, in Queensland. Convinced the venture would never turn a profit if he paid white man’s wages, he sent a schooner to the South Pacific to recruit islanders. The ship returned with 67 Melanesian men who were put to work picking Towns’ cotton. ‘Kanakas’, they were called – originally Hawaiian for ‘free man’ but used by whites as a derogatory term akin to ‘nigger’. Although Towns’ islander labourers were offered wages, food and housing and a promise they could return home if they wished, the practice of so-called indentured labour, as it spread throughout eastern Australia, soon degenerated into a form of slavery called ‘blackbirding’.

  For more than 40 years, blackbirding ships would carry human cargoes from Vanuatu, Tonga, the Loyalty Islands, Samoa, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands to toil on the cotton plantations and later in the sugar-cane fields of Queensland and Fiji. Regulations required that only willing recruits could be taken aboard the traders’ ships, but in reality officialdom turned a blind eye to a corrupt and brutal practice of kidnapping. Often, islanders would be tricked into coming aboard with promises of trade, then forced below as the ship set sail or rounded up at gunpoint in their villages, in the manner of African slave raids. On Queensland plantations, living and working in appalling conditions, islanders often died young: worked to death in the fields; struck down by disease; destroyed by despair; or murdered by Australians who claimed the islanders were taking white men’s jobs.