Chapter Fifteen
In the 1850s, a Russian aristocrat who owned an estate, Yasnaya Polyana, about 120 miles south of Moscow kept a detailed diary of what life was like for someone of his class in the last days of the serf empire. Situated in fertile country, Yasnaya Polyana had measured almost ten thousand acres worked by eight hundred serfs when the nobleman inherited it in 1847, but he had already had to sell two thousand acres together with two hundred serfs to pay gambling debts he incurred, first as a student and later as an artillery officer in Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Following Russia’s defeat in 1857 by the combined armies of Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire, the aristocrat returned to Yasnaya Polyana, and his diary records many of the concerns that were common to any landowner: the state of the harvest, the slaughter of hogs, the collection of timber. But other entries could only have come from an owner with total control, including sexual rights, over those on his estate.
“A wonderful day,” he wrote for April 21, 1858. “Peasant women in the garden and by the well. I’m like a man possessed.” And the following month, “Today, in the big old wood. I’m a fool, a brute. Her bronze flesh and her eyes. I’m in love as never before in my life. Have no other thought. [She is] clean and not bad-looking, with bright black eyes, a deep voice, a scent of something fresh and strong and full breasts that lifted the bib of her apron.”
The one exceptional element in these encounters was the identity of the diarist, Count Leo Tolstoy; otherwise the sexual excitement of owning other people was as common to serfdom as to slavery. Thomas Jefferson was undoubtedly more discreet in his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, but he was also more insightful than Tolstoy about its nature. “The whole commerce between master and slave,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other . . . The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”
Tolstoy’s reflections rarely went beyond paroxysms of self-loathing, mitigated by blaming the serf women for what had happened, but Jefferson was tormented by the injustice of the relationship and its corrosive effects, both personal and social—“can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?”
The 1860s marked one of the great watersheds in the history of individual liberty when some forty-seven million serfs and four million slaves were set free, and the most powerful serf and slave economies in the world were destroyed. Each liberation was the outcome of war, but while the abolition of slavery in the United States was the direct consequence of the Civil War, the emancipation of Russian serfs occurred as a result of the shock of defeat in the Crimean War and the realization that the country needed to modernize.
The immediate outcome in both cases was to change the way the earth was owned. Once the labor needed to release the land’s value had to be paid for, it was necessary to make a profit from its produce, and this gave the soil a capital value. In purely economic terms, abolition and emancipation proved that property in people was incompatible with free-enterprise capitalism. But the social consequences were more profound. Increasing the freedom of many people could only be achieved by curbing the extreme liberty enjoyed by a few others. Out of the change should have come a society that was not only more efficient but more just and therefore more stable.
In Russia, that process began with the emancipation manifesto issued by Tsar Alexander II in 1861. Defeat in Crimea had brought to a head a festering crisis in the serf economy. Criticism of Russia’s feckless nobility was voiced not just by the tsar’s bureaucrats but by writers of every description. It appeared even in Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 verse epic, Eugene Onegin, where traditional aristocratic values were compared unfavorably to the system of “Adama Smit” or Adam Smith. An influential political analyst, Boris Chicherin, himself owner of some three thousand “souls,” led the way in blaming the institution of serfdom. It was, he said, economically harmful because it encouraged owners to become “lazy, careless, extravagant, incapable of conducting serious business.” The most pressing consequence was the rising debt they owed to the State Loans Banks that had reached 328 million rubles with no possibility of being paid off.
The tsar’s emancipation of the serfs solved both problems at one stroke. While it freed serfs from their landlords’ courts and the fear of the knout, the manifesto also required them to purchase the land they once had worked so that their owners’ debts could be paid off.
On the face of it, the deal was all to the advantage of Russia’s idle nobility. They kept their private, demesne land, usually the most fertile, and saw the cost of their borrowing from the State Loans Bank wiped out, while the twenty-two million impoverished peasants they had once owned were ultimately expected to pay for it all. The twenty-five million serfs owned by the tsar and the state later gained their freedom with more varied conditions, and generally at lower cost. Overall, the severity of the financial terms of emancipation meant three in four peasants could not afford more than twenty-five acres. Although the state lent them up to 80 percent of the purchase price at 5 percent interest, by 1881 the peasants’ debt had reached 716 million rubles, worth, as a result of inflation, about $1.2 billion. Yet the effects of the tsar’s March 3 manifesto set in motion social and economic forces that neither his government nor the aristocracy could control.
Despite emancipation, the Romanov goal remained autocratic government, only now in a modern context—“Genghiz Khan with an electric telegraph” in the jibe used by social reformers. But in legal terms freeing serfs transformed the private estates of the nobility into a form of landed property comparable with western Europe. It took time for the civil law to adjust, but broadly it was governed by Roman law that spread ownership among the family, while recognizing the contractual obligations of an individual so far as mortgages and sales were concerned. But, as anyone who had read Oceana might have predicted, the creation of landed property spawned a host of property owners’ associations to lobby for their interests and to acquire political power.
To fill the gap in local government left by the abolition of aristocratic control over their serfs, Saint Petersburg was forced to create a more powerful form of provincial council, the zemstvo, still subordinate to the provincial governor appointed by the tsar, but with power to initiate schemes for roads, schools, and hospitals. Very quickly they became vehicles for reform-minded local landowners interested in making the system work better, or at least more responsively to what they wanted.
Among the torrent of petitions sent to the imperial government in Saint Petersburg was one from the zemstvo of Iaroslavl Province, 150 miles to the northeast of Moscow, demanding an overhaul of the legal and police system which was riddled with corruption and inefficiency—one million thefts had taken place in 1861 with only thirty thousand items recovered. To eliminate endemic bribery and intimidation of judges by the governor and other powerful officials, the assembly called for a wide range of changes that included a free press, an independent judiciary, and making officials subject to legal rules rather than to the lax supervision of Saint Petersburg. Until the 1860s, pressure for such reforms had been confined to exiled radicals like the Socialist Alexander Herzen, but now similar petitions came from other assemblies—Vladimir Province to the east of Moscow, for example, wanted trial by jury, a proper banking system, and equality before the law.
The most powerful case for presuming that a new society and economy grew out of the changed form of land ownership was made by its bitterest enemy, Vladimir I. Lenin. In his study The Agrarian Question and the Forces of the Revolution, published in 1908 and based on official statistics gathered from across European Russia by the zemstvo system, he warned his fellow revolutionaries that “Commercial farming is growing much more rapidly, the influence of exchange is wider, and capital is transforming agriculture much more profoundly than one might suppose from aggregate figures and abstract averages.”
But his chief concern was with the huge peasant population that had been emancipated in 1861. In his view, ownership of the land was producing a bourgeois structure at alarming speed, with the richest 20 percent of peasants employing the poorest 40 percent to increase production, and either purchasing or renting additional land with their profits. “The richer that the peasants are in land,” Lenin wrote, “the fainter are the traces of serfdom, the more rapidly economic development proceeds, the more energetic is this emancipation from allotment land [farmed before 1861], [and] the drawing of all land into the sphere of commerce.”
Historians both then and since have questioned Lenin’s analysis. The continuing logjam of peasant landholdings, whose use was still controlled by the mir, impelled two reforming chief ministers, Sergei Witte and Peter Stolypin, to initiate unpopular land reforms at the start of the twentieth century specifically to encourage the creation of privately owned smallholdings. And the two million peasant households in European Russia who asked between 1906 and 1915 to have their strips of land consolidated, surveyed, and registered as property showed how far the process still had to go at that late stage.
Yet other evidence also indicated that a land revolution was taking place across Russia. The creation of landed property was initially handicapped by a lack of capital except in the Baltic and Polish provinces, where a land registry system made lending easy. But nearly six hundred million rubles, almost nine hundred million dollars, allocated by the state in bonds and cash to new and aristocratic landowners, on top of the 328 million rubles in written-off debt, helped to fire up Russia’s rural economy. Despite their slow start, a variety of banks and credit unions came into being, and by 1894 their mortgage lending had reached almost one billion rubles, including the notable sum of fifty-eight million rubles lent to former serfs by the Peasants’ Bank since its foundation in 1883. That level of lending gave each landowner’s property in European Russia, from peasant to Grand Duke, an average capital value of about ten rubles or fifteen dollars an acre. By chance, that was almost exactly the value of land in the United States according to the 1850 census, a period when its rural economy was beginning to turn on the afterburners of industrialization.
Writing at the same time as Lenin but with rather more humanity, Anton Chekhov gently lamented and laughed at the impact of this increasingly energetic, capitalist use of land on the Oblomovan outlook of old-fashioned aristocrats. In The Cherry Orchard, the past is represented by the charming fecklessness of the orchard’s owner, Madame Ranevskaya, who is incapable of dealing with the fact that the land must be sold off to pay her debts; the future is the emotionally inept Lopahkin, the family’s former serf, now a wealthy businessman, who buys the estate and chops down the cherry trees to build vacation homes. The scenario encapsulated Russia’s social history. Unable to cope with the new conditions, the nobility who had owned 80 percent of European Russia in 1861 were forced to sell most of their land, and by 1912 two thirds of it belonged to Lopahkin-like newcomers. In the rush to make money, the Lopahkins created an ecological disaster, and by 1900 had cleared more than half the forests that once covered Russia as far south as the steppes in an orgy of wood-felling.
Perhaps the most telling example that a sea change had come over a large proportion of Russia’s peasants was apparent in their sudden mobility. Census returns recorded that until the end of the century well over 90 percent of peasants still lived in the place where they were born. But in the 1880s, out of relatively crowded and relatively capitalized European Russia came a surge of migration beyond the Urals into the vast expanse of Siberia. In the years up to the outbreak of war in 1914, more than ten million peasant migrants sold up and traveled east by steamship, riverboat, and, after the opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1891, by train to find cheaper, more profitable land in the wild east. Many of the journeys were government aided, with an official allotment of forty acres at the end, but, as one pioneer boasted in a letter, “Here you can plough as much land as you want, and as much hay as you want! Life is possible!” Something akin to the kind of freebooting, individualized societies that had sprung up earlier in the century in the American Midwest, in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, could be found in the former penal colony of Siberia.
The similarity struck foreign and Russian observers alike. “Instead of a gaunt, lone land inhabited only by convicts,” wrote one British traveler, “I saw a country that reminded me from the first day to the last of Canada and the best parts of America.” The Russian writer Nikolai Barsagin quoted a friend who had lived in the United States: “Siberians have many similarities with the Americans—in their manners, in their customs and even in their way of life.” And an American agent selling agricultural machinery in the region said simply, “I tell you Siberia is going to be another America.”
Infuriated by the selfishness, the materialism, and, it must be added, the freedom encouraged by the new way of owning the earth, Tolstoy wrote a grim fable in his old age called “How Much Land Does a Man Need? ” It concerned the peasant Pahom who is tempted by ambition and the devil to buy more ground than the parcel allocated to him by the mir in 1861. Moving eastward in search of larger, cheaper parcels of land, Pahom finally arrives beyond the frontier where a tribe of nomads offers him as much land as he can walk around in a day. Greed tempts him to run for miles, until, arriving back exhausted as the sun sets, he collapses and dies. The story ends: “His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahom to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.”
The popularity of Tolstoy’s story was evidence of the growing backlash against the attitudes that went with private property. To a conservative brand of opinion that labeled itself Slavophile, the authentically Russian institution of the mir presented a far preferable model of owning the land. Instead of individual wants, its goals were set by the community’s needs. “A mir is a union of the people who have renounced their egoism, their individuality, and who express their common accord,” wrote one Slavophile, Konstantin Aksakov. “This is an act of love, a noble Christian act.”
The mir had survived the abolition of serfdom, largely because of the onerous conditions of the emancipation decree. Unable to afford the cost of buying land, the majority of peasants had continued to live as laborers on the estate where they had once been serfs. Since the government made the mir liable for its members’ taxes and public service, it wielded great power, not only assessing dues but sorting out village quarrels and supervising the periodic redistribution of common land so that growing families received strips of ground from those with fewer mouths to feed. And its members accepted its authority, even over redistribution, because the allocation of strips served as a form of social security. “Of course I want to keep the allotment I have got,” one member of a mir told a foreign visitor in the 1890s. “But if the land is never again to be divided up, my grandchildren may be beggars. We must not sin against those who are to come after us.”
There were, in consequence, special terms of abuse for peasants who shirked communal tasks or bought the land that had been held in common. The offenders were called miroyedi, meaning commune-eaters, and—referring to their tight-fisted selfishness—kulaki, or fists.
But however highly Tolstoy esteemed the mir, it was a leftover from serfdom. In the early twentieth century, when Russia’s private landowners were exporting ten million tons of wheat a year with a value of almost six hundred million rubles, the mir practiced subsistence farming. And while railroads and electricity were dragging Russia into the modern age, the mir continued to buttress the old subservient hierarchy that Slavophiles—and Tolstoy—remembered with fierce nostalgia. During the last years of the Romanov dynasty, Tsar Nicholas II’s reforming minister, Stolypin, instituted a series of agrarian reforms aimed at turning the mir’s communal peasants into private propertied smallholders, thereby creating a Russian version of the Jeffersonian yeoman or, in Stolypin’s description, “an independent, prosperous husbandman, a stable citizen of the land.”
His attempt to accelerate the land revolution persuaded another two million peasants to leave the mir, but it aroused ferocious opposition from both conservative Slavophiles and left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries, who regarded the mir as rural Socialism, and brought about Stolypin’s assassination in 1911. Weakened by infighting between conservative supporters and loyal reformers, tsarist government was left fatally vulnerable to the social upheavals of the First World War.
The mir’s survival—it was only eliminated by the collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the 1920s—symbolized Russia’s failure to translate the individual freedom promised to the serfs in 1861 into political and economic power. Even as the tsarist government encouraged the spread of private ownership, its autocratic nature naturally led it to resist the pressure for political representation exerted by owners anxious to protect their property. The more obvious result of the contradiction was the proliferation of violent revolutionary movements aiming to overthrow tsarist rule, whose membership was heavy with university students and other children of the propertied middle-class, like Lenin himself. But the silent existence of the mir was more significant because it represented the majority of Russians who had been left outside the new system, and whose values and way of life were threatened by the reforming policies of the old autocratic government. Their rootlessness would make it possible for the urban leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to capture the rural heartland of the Russian Empire.
In the year that the serfs were freed, the bloody struggle that would liberate American slaves engulfed the United States. The unparalleled savagery of the war saved the Union and defined modern America. But the majority of freed slaves, like the majority of freed serfs, were to find that without political power individual liberty was eroded as swiftly as it was won.
In 1824, the elderly Thomas Jefferson, still wrestling with the problem of slavery, identified what seemed to him the insuperable difficulty that prevented its abolition. “For actual property has been lawfully vested in that form,” he acknowledged, “and who can lawfully take it from the possessors?” In 1850, the value of a slave would reach $1,000, making the South’s property in slaves worth four billion dollars—more than six times the capital value of Northern manufacturing—a sum too large either to redeem or confiscate. Yet there was nothing sacrosanct about the institution itself. Slaves had been owned since civilization began, but they had only been owned as private property since the late seventeenth century.
When Massachusetts’ General Court issued its famous code of legislative principles known as the Body of Liberties in 1641, it still followed the traditional European principle, derived from Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas, that people were naturally free, but that captivity or debt might allow them to be enslaved. Consequently the code banned “bond slaverie” except for “lawfull Captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of god established in Israell concerning such persons doeth morally require.”
In effect, the basis of slavery was contractual, a penalty imposed because of a military or financial failure to maintain one’s freedom. The manumission laws on both sides of the Atlantic gave legal status to this moral outlook by enabling owners to return slaves to their naturally free state once the slave expiated the failure, either by paying off the debt or securing the owner’s forgiveness. Since all British colonies in North America began by adhering to this concept of slavery as a mixture of servitude and freedom, there was initially little to distinguish between slaves and indentured servants. As Virginia’s first historian, Robert Beverley, noted “the male servants and slaves of both sexes are employed together in tilling and manuring the ground [although] . . . some distinction indeed is made between them in their clothes and food.” By the time his history was published in 1705, however, liberty was being squeezed out of the mixture for Africans in servitude, starting with those colonies where slave labor was essential to release the value in land.
In 1664, under pressure from tobacco planters, Maryland declared that slaves could never escape servitude, and that their children “shall be Slaves as their fathers were for the term of their lives.” Five years later, Virginia decided that an owner who killed a rebellious slave could not be found guilty of murder because “it cannot be presumed that premeditated malice (which alone makes murder a felony) should induce any man to destroy his own estate [property].” In 1696, the Carolina slave code of 1696 defined slaves specifically as “chattel possessions,” meaning they were totally owned, rather than constituting “real estate” as in the 1691 Virginia slave code, indicating that the owner possessed simply the right to their exploitation. Although the difference hardly affected everyday practice, the trend toward establishing unmixed property rights in a slave was beyond question.
As the reach of British ownership extended, the liberties that British slaves could claim retreated, until they were left with virtually no legal rights, unable to own property, to plead in court, or even to live with their families. What this might lead to emerges from the dispassionate account by Sir Hans Sloane of the punishments meted out in the West Indies sugar plantations to slaves in 1698. For rebellious behavior, they were pinned to the ground, he wrote, and burned “by degrees from the feet and hands, burning them gradually up to the head, whereby their pains are extravagant . . . For crimes of lesser nature Gelding [castration], or chopping off halve of the foot with an Ax . . . For Negligence, they are usually whipt by the overseer with Lance-wood Switches, till they be bloody, and several of the Switches broken, being first tied up by the hands in the Mill-Houses . . . After they are whip’d till they are Raw, some put on their Skins Pepper and Salt to make them smart; at other times their Masters will drop melted Wax on their skins and use several exquisite tortures.”
The sadistic penalties inflicted on sugar plantations were notorious—in 1766 George Washington deliberately punished his runaway slave, Tom, by sending him for sale in the West Indies—but what makes this account truly shocking is its tone. Hans Sloane was the epitome of Enlightenment culture, a founder of the British Museum and president of the Royal Society, yet he noted these horrors with complete detachment. Even for such an intelligent, perceptive observer, it had become impossible to see the victims as human beings rather than recalcitrant property. His blindness, however, would be shared by many otherwise compassionate commentators for generations to come.
In the nineteenth century, states in the American South issued a succession of slave codes attempting to deal with the complex problem of identifying a human being as property. The legal characteristics were dryly listed in Louisiana’s 1834 code: “The master may sell [a slave], dispose of his person, his industry, and his labour; [a slave] can do nothing, possess nothing, nor acquire anything, but what must belong to his master.” What this meant in practice was spelled out by North Carolina’s Judge Thomas Ruffin in 1830 when he explained why John Mann could not be guilty of harming a slave girl named Lydia whom he had shot and wounded after she ran away rather than be whipped by him. Whatever human feelings might be involved, Ruffin said, “We cannot allow the right of the master to be brought into discussion in the courts of justice . . . The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect . . . This discipline belongs to the state of slavery. It is inherent in the relation of master and slave.”
His ruling made a striking contrast to the civil codes of France and Spain, where the mixed nature of slavery was retained. It was explicitly recognized in the article of France’s 1685 Code Noir that required slaves to be baptized and instructed as Roman Catholics. For all the code’s severity—penalties included flogging, branding, and slitting the hamstring of a persistently runaway slave—torture and murder were forbidden, and owners were required to provide for the marriage of younger slaves, for their clothing and shelter, and for the treatment of the sick and elderly. Although the legal restraints were widely ignored in France’s West Indian colonies, especially Sainte Domingue, today’s Dominican Republic and Haiti, where extremes of torture were commonplace, the underlying recognition of a free humanity within the slave condition had unmistakable consequences.
Manumission—the freeing of a slave—figured prominently in the Code Noir, with ample provisions made for owners to confer freedom and wealthy slaves to buy it. And because the Code recognized the child of a free woman to be born into liberty, free blacks enjoyed a social legitimacy rarely guaranteed in private property colonies. Even in the ferocious conditions of Sainte Domingue, there were almost as many free people of color as the thirty thousand whites, and they owned more than one hundred thousand slaves and one third of the plantations.
Paradoxically, since it was the home of the “Black Legend” of the supposedly unspeakable cruelty inflicted on their Indian captives, the Spanish Empire allowed more humanity into the slave mixture than either of the others. Slaves could marry, own their personal possessions, and testify in court—in a celebrated case in Spanish-ruled Baton Rouge in 1806, the testimony of slaves even secured the acquittal of two other slaves accused of attempting to poison their white overseer, an unthinkable scenario in a colonial common law court, and one that soon changed after Louisiana became an American state. Although in reality owners often ignored the legal provisions, even in sugar-producing Cuba where conditions were harshest, Spain’s liberal policy of manumission resulted in almost 40 percent of African-Cubans being free in 1792, compared to just over 10 percent of black Virginians. In Havana, slaves enjoyed enough autonomy to run shops and, according to an eighteenth-century observer, become skilled craftsmen, “not only in the lowest [trades] such as shoemakers, tailors, masons, and carpenters, but also in those which require more ability and genius, such as silversmith’s craft, sculpture, painting, and carving.”
Once large-scale plantations took over Cuban sugar production in the early nineteenth century, many of these freedoms were swept away. But resourceful slaves there and elsewhere in Latin America continued to use Spanish law to improve their conditions. A significant minority still managed to buy their freedom during their lifetime, a right that the law recognized and that the Roman Catholic Church consistently encouraged owners to allow.
Perhaps the most interesting pointer to the effect of these legal differences was shown by the contrast in attitudes to sexual and social relations. In the Spanish Empire, the mestizos, or children of mixed race couples, faced discrimination and were ranked by color and parentage on a strict social hierarchy—the term for these classifications, castas, would be adopted by the British as “caste” to describe India’s rigid social divisions—but the lowliest mestizo could claim, though perhaps no more than that, to be recognized by law as a full citizen. The most successful owned businesses and slaves, and they served in the militia. And by the late nineteenth century, mestizos constituted more than half the population of Latin America.
In the United States, where the common law allowed a slave to be treated as virtually complete property, sexual contact was always socially fraught, very often illegal, and, to many owners, close to irresistible. That illicit attraction gave rise to two centuries of legislation prohibiting sex between owners and slaves. They first appeared in the colonial era, beginning with Virginia’s 1691 slave code prescribing banishment for anyone married to “a negroe or mulatto,” whether slave or free. In 1705 Massachusetts also banned marriage to “any negro or mulatto,” but now imposed the penalty of flogging on both man and woman. The wording made clear the increasingly racial hostility behind such legislation, and that it should have also accompanied the shift from servitude to slavery was not a coincidence.
Once black Africans were identified with slavery, part of the definition of freedom became whiteness. But that clear-cut opposite was blurred by the existence of both mulattoes and freed slaves. The sheer mass of legislation designed to prevent sex between bodies with black and white skins, and to regulate the activities of free people of color, revealed how difficult it was to keep the distinction clear. Racial prejudice culminated in the notorious “one drop rule” enacted in several states, defining as colored anyone with any black ancestor.
Legislation did not stop the sex—around one in five of Pennsylvania’s slaves were defined as “mulatto” in the 1780s—but the importance of excluding blackness led to increasingly stringent restrictions being placed on free people of color to prevent them associating with either whites or enslaved blacks. Attempts were made to banish them, to make them live apart, to carry passes restraining their movement, and, in nineteenth-century Georgia, to deny that their freedom meant anything more than the absence of an owner: “to be civilly and politically free, to be the peer and equal of the white man,” wrote Joseph Lumpkin, Georgia’s chief justice, in 1853, “to enjoy the offices, trusts and privileges our institutions confer on the white man, is not now, never has been, and never will be, the condition of this degraded race.”
The difficulty in thinking past the property definition was demonstrated in 1833 when slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire, and the government paid twenty million pounds, about one hundred million dollars, in compensation not to the slaves but to their owners for their loss of assets. The same logical madness appeared in a famous speech by the dominant voice in Congress, Daniel Webster, in 1850 when he argued that the protection of property of every kind, including “property in persons,” was “the great object of government.” Aware that restive Northerners were opposed to a new Fugitive Slaves Act that required them to aid in the capture and return of an escaped slave, he bluntly demanded what right they had “as a question of morals and of conscience . . . to endeavor to get round this Constitution, or to embarrass the free exercise of the rights secured by the Constitution to the persons whose slaves escape from them?”
The purpose of his speech was to defend the Union, but it did so, as Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out derisively, by treating “the Union as an estate, a large farm,” in effect as a property. Instead of giving priority to the sense of justice that, as John Locke argued, provided the basis of private property, Webster proposed that property itself was so sacred that an individual’s conscience should be sacrificed to the priority of protecting it. The very purpose of the Union was lost.
Yet that was what the upholders of slavery demanded. In Washington, Southern representatives required Congress to observe the notorious “Gag rule” that banned any discussion of slavery for fear of inciting ideas of insurrection among slaves. In the world outside, free speech was punished brutally: prominent abolitionists invariably received threats of violence and often were physically assaulted; Elijah Lovejoy, an anti-slavery newspaperman in Illinois, was lynched, and in Saint Louis, Missouri, Francis McIntosh, a free black, was burned alive after being accused of abolitionist sympathies.
Throughout the South, slave codes regulated what white people could teach their slaves, when they could hire them out, and how they were to keep them disciplined. Pass laws restricted the movement of free blacks, and Southern ports routinely detained in prison black crew members of Northern ships. The regulations effectively taxed the whole of Southern society to safeguard the profits of an elite minority, and increasingly they were being spread throughout the United States.
Not only did the 1850 Fugitive Slaves Act require Northern abolitionists to assist in the arrest and return of people trying to win their freedom—as a result escaped slaves could only find genuine liberty in Canada—it also forced the new territories in the West to accept slavery and the slave codes’ restrictions on the movement of free blacks. “We have a right of protection for our slave property in the Territories,” declared Senator Albert G. Brown of Mississippi in 1858. “The Constitution as expounded by the Supreme Court awards it. We demand it, and we mean to have it.”
The ruling of the Supreme Court ensured that federal law safeguarding slave property overturned any state legislation safeguarding individual liberty. The paradoxical result was that while the enslavement of humans was a matter of states’ rights in the South, it became a federal concern sweeping aside state sovereignty in the North and West.
Yet the sheer size of the slave economy made it hard to argue for its abolition on purely rational grounds. By the 1850s, the value of cotton exports had soared above $120 million a year—more than half of all United States exports—and the multiplier effect spread commercial prosperity far beyond the deep South. Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina grew rich supplying slaves for the cotton fields further south. The fisheries of New England depended on sales of salt cod to the plantations; shippers and financiers in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston took their cut from the cotton trade; and the cotton factories of England earned fortunes for their owners.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the drive to abolish slavery in the private property societies had to step outside rationalism. “On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation,” William L. Garrison declared in the first issue of his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831. In Britain, evangelical Protestants had started the campaign focusing simply on the evil of enslavement and presenting their case in the image of a chained black man with the slogan “Is he not a man and a brother?” Significantly, women, who provided much of the energy and finance for the abolition campaign, repeatedly chose to make justice a central theme in their appeals and speeches. And the final decision to put an end to American slavery depended on a stark moral choice: in Abraham Lincoln’s iconic phrase, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”
Unlike Russia, whose society and economy were transformed by the sale of aristocratic estates following emancipation, most of the South’s landowners retained their property after abolition. Cotton was too valuable to business interests in the North for any but the most heinous rebels to be deprived of their plantations. Existing growers resumed production, either with employed labor or under sharecropping arrangements with former slaves, and were joined by small farmers, black and white, either working their own fields or leasing them from larger owners. Freed from the restrictions of the slave codes on the employment and mobility of black workers, the cotton crop of 1870 was larger than any harvested before the war.
Massive changes were brought about in the South by Reconstruction—the construction of eight thousand miles of railroad track, reform of the tax system, the rebuilding of roads, the provision of free education in four thousand new schools, the foundation of black colleges like Fisk and Howard, and, backed by the presence of eight thousand federal troops, the participation of African Americans in government and law. Around twenty thousand Northern carpetbaggers came south to take part in these enterprises, and with the assistance of the Freedmen’s Bureau, many former slaves were able to negotiate labor contracts and register to vote. Yet Southern society remained virtually unaltered.
“Political reconstruction is inevitable now,” Mary Greenhow Lee, a wealthy Virginian widow, wrote in her diary in 1865, “but social reconstruction we have in our hands and we can prevent.”
Social reconstruction failed because the old, hierarchical distribution of land remained untouched. The most important attempt to alter the pattern was swiftly ended. In January 1865 General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order Number 15 confiscating four hundred thousand acres of Confederate territory along the coast from Charleston, South Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida, and ordering its redistribution to freed slaves with the specification that “each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground.”
As social engineering, the order had the potential for creating a Jeffersonian society of independent owners. In Congress, Thaddeus Stevens, the most radical exponent of Reconstruction, introduced a bill to spread the policy of land redistribution across the South, confiscating property from “traitors to the United States” and allocating it to those who had formerly been property themselves. Reconstruction on those lines would have led to the South being recolonized. But the program soon faltered. Following Lincoln’s assassination, the new president, Andrew Johnson, canceled Sherman’s order, and Stevens’s death in 1868 dissipated the momentum for radical Reconstruction. The few African Americans who had taken up Sherman’s offer lost their land, and the old structure was left largely untouched. Even politics soon turned out to bear a certain resemblance to what had existed before. “This is a white man’s government,” said the first postwar governor of South Carolina, “and intended for white men only.”
Once the secessionist states had accepted the three new amendments to the Constitution outlawing slavery, extending citizenship to everyone born within the United States, and prohibiting racial or color restrictions on the right to vote, they could be readmitted to the Union. Any lingering enthusiasm in the North for intervention was killed by the economic crash of 1873. In the next presidential election, both Republican and Democratic candidates promised to bring an end to Reconstruction, and, as the high tide of equal rights began to ebb, a series of Jim Crow measures brought about segregation and the return of the old exclusive freedom that only whites could enjoy.
One by one, elected black representatives who had been admitted into state legislatures at the point of a federal bayonet were ejected. Then, in 1890 Mississippi Democrats, under the leadership of Senator James Z. George, introduced literacy tests that prevented 90 percent of African Americans from voting. Six years later the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that the provision of racially divided facilities, disguised as “separate but equal,” did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment. Like the Polish szlachta and Britain’s eighteenth-century aristocracy, Southern whites had succeeded in creating a political monopoly for the exercise of their property rights. And like their predecessors, Southerners did so at the cost of ignoring the inner logic that every private property society had to follow: without a moral foundation, property had no standing except that of force. As a consequence, they too would find themselves stuck in a blind alley.