CHAPTER 16
By the time the Mexican War ended, paranoia about The Slave Power was virulent throughout New England and among her Midwest emigrants. The original abolitionist hope that they could change the minds of Southerners through “missionary work” had expired. William Lloyd Garrison now called the idea “a useless waste of time.” No longer would they deluge the South with pamphlets or bury Congress in blizzards of petitions. Instead, they hoped to “abolitionize the North” by portraying The Slave Power as a corrupt and decadent society whose inequity had to be trumpeted to the world.
The abolitionists convinced themselves, based on their evangelical experiences, that smearing the South’s reputation in every possible way would create the “anxiety” that would lead to a mass conversion of the North to their crusade. In an analogy that was tortured at best, and blasphemous at worst, the South was portrayed as a province ruled by Satan that would consume the North’s soul if her citizens did not vow to expunge the sin of slavery. It was the evangelical camp meeting on a national scale, accusing the South of four unforgiveable sins: violence, drunkenness, laziness, and sexual depravity.1
Abolitionists declared that the South’s “lust for power” was built into the system because from boyhood Southerners learned to tyrannize their male slaves and exploit defenseless female slaves. That was why the South had become “an erotic society” which encouraged whites to “all the vicious gratifications that unrestrained lust can amalgamate.” From Richmond to New Orleans, “the Southern states are one great Sodom.”2
This absorption with pleasure had supposedly produced a society that regarded work as degrading. Southerners saw it as something that only slaves performed. Free white laborers in the South were almost as worthless as slave labor, which everyone knew was inferior because it was unrewarded. Presiding over this swamp of decadence and degradation were the great planters, who looked down with scorn on the “mud-sills” of society, white and black, and devoted their days to loathsome pleasures.
Abolitionist clergymen developed a jeremiad on The Slave Power. They identified it as the anti-Christ, come to terrifying life in America after their Protestant ancestors had defeated this evil being in a centuries-long struggle with the Catholic Church in Europe. The South was “the apocalyptic dragon” of the book of Revelations, rising to strangle freedom in the North as it had already extinguished it in the South.3
No one loved this rhetoric more than William Lloyd Garrison. “The spirit of southern slavery,” he declared, “is a spirit of EXTERMINATION against all those who represent it as a dishonor to our country, rebellion against God and treason to the liberties of mankind.” Senator William Sumner of Massachusetts summed up this rampaging hatred with three questions he roared at a rapt audience in Boston’s Faneuil Hall. “Are you for freedom? Or are you for slavery? Are you for God or the Devil?”4
Others saw Slave Power plots in the early history of the republic. First came the concessions southern spokesmen demanded at the Constitutional Convention. Then they acquired the immense territory of Louisiana for slavery’s expansion. Next came Jefferson’s embargo, which crippled New England’s commercial power. In the War of 1812, southern generals had prevented “the brave soldiers of New England and New York from capturing Canada.” These were, of course, the same New England soldiers who had refused to serve beyond the borders of their states, in defiance of “Mr. Madison’s War.”
Paranoid history is indifferent to facts. The Slave Power preachers told their followers that the South had fallen far behind the North in wealth—the exact opposite of the truth. By playing off the two political parties against each other, they claimed the slavocrats had elected presidents and congressmen and senators and chosen judges of the Supreme Court. The Slave Power had caused the financial panic of 1837 by draining the wealth of the North into endless needless expansion exemplified by the Mexican War. For a final touch, there were invented quotations attributed to John C. Calhoun: “The North must be shorn of her natural strength when needful, that slavery may preserve her balance of power.”
Perhaps the most amazing—and dismaying—aspect of this raging final stage of the abolitionist disease in the public mind was the relatively small number of men who perpetrated it. One of slavery’s best historians estimates that the paranoid phase of the campaign was launched by little more than twenty-five people.5
• • •
Did the campaign of slander about the South’s sexual exploitation of its slaves have any basis in fact? The mulatto population of the South, as recorded in the censuses of 1850 and 1860, suggests a rather low rate of miscegenation. In the nation as a whole, the census takers of 1850 counted 406,000 “visibly mulatto” people out of a black population of 3,639,000, which is 11.2 percent of the total. About 350,000 mulattoes lived south of the Mason-Dixon line.6
These figures make it clear that there was a considerable amount of sexual activity between the two races, even if it was a long way from meriting the term “unrestrained lust.” There were many factors that kept the percentage relatively low. A master who recklessly seduced his slaves would demoralize his plantation. A white overseer exhibiting such a tendency would usually be fired. Slaves were accustomed to making stable marriages. The average age at which a slave woman gave birth to her first child was 22.5. This does not suggest teenage girls having wild sex by the tens of thousands.
A strong religious faith persuaded many Southerners to take their marriage vows seriously. At least as important was the genuine love that existed between most husbands and wives. At the same time, slaves were subject people. A master who wanted to assert his dominance undoubtedly possessed the power, and there are more than a few examples of men who did so.
One of the most deplorable cases is James Henry Hammond of South Carolina. A governor, congressman, and senator, he was semifamous as one of the first who declared, “Cotton is king!” Over three hundred slaves toiled on his ten-thousand-acre Silver Bluff plantation. Hammond regarded stable marriages among his slaves as crucial to the good order of the plantation. A slave who committed adultery was liable to severe punishment.
Nevertheless, for twenty years Hammond maintained a ménage á trois with two black women, Sally Johnson and her daughter Louisa, who worked in his mansion as servants. He had children by both of them, and in his will he begged his oldest son to care for the women and their offspring. His wife discovered the truth early in their marriage, but she seemed powerless to do more than berate him and treat the defenseless black women with livid hostility.7
Was Hammond typical of slave owners? Apparently not. Was his example lurid enough to “prove” the wildest fantasies of the abolitionists? Unquestionably, yes.
• • •
In the South, Senator John C. Calhoun was telling people, “We have borne the wrongs and insults of the North long enough.” He called for a southern convention that would, like the Hartford Convention of 1814, put George Washington’s sacred Union out of business by forming a separate confederacy. Calhoun had a pretext more serious than abolitionist smears—the threat of admitting California to the Union as a free state, barring slavery.
Calhoun’s fellow senator, Henry Clay of Kentucky, disagreed. Speaking as a fellow Southerner, he asked Calhoun if there was anything the South had demanded in the previous decades that she had not obtained. President Polk had lowered the tariff to the vanishing point, to the chagrin of New England’s textile magnates. Slavery still flourished in the nation’s capital. Florida, the Louisiana Territory, and now Texas had created opportunities for an enormous expansion of their peculiar institution.
All true enough. But Calhoun and his followers felt that they were surrounded by enemies. A British naval squadron cruised the Atlantic, seizing ships that attempted to transport slaves from Africa. Urged by British diplomats, every other nation and colony in South America except Brazil and Cuba had freed their slaves. On nearby Jamaica and other West Indian islands, freed slaves seemed to be living peacefully with their former masters, undermining the assumption that emancipation meant insurrection. More and more, it looked as if the South would soon become an isolated community, despised for their refusal to consider some form of gradual emancipation.
To counter this isolation, Southerners like Calhoun began yearning for an empire. Their purple dream had ironic similarity to the fantasy John Quincy Adams created in one of his early rants against The Slave Power. It would stretch from the Potomac River to California and extend into the Caribbean, with slave-owning Cuba a first and obvious prize. At the close of the Mexican War, many people in the northern Mexican states had expressed a desire to join the United States. Why not occupy them and convert them into slave states? Each year, the price of cotton increased, as England’s and New England’s mills prospered and grew. Why should the South be limited by lines drawn on a map by the aging architects of the Missouri Compromise?8
• • •
This purple dream redoubled the South’s rage at the slanderous abuse they were receiving from the North. Soon there was a flourishing paranoid conviction that the abolitionists were a conspiracy aimed at destroying the South. This belief was intensified by the slaves who fled to the northern states with the help of an abolitionist creation, the Underground Railroad. The members of this organization, many of them courageous free blacks, helped runaways dodge federal marshals and professional slave catchers until they were across the border into Canada and settled in free communities.
Compared to the three and a half million men and women living in slavery, the actual number of these escapees was trivial—about two thousand a year. Almost all came from the border states of the upper South. But the symbolic impact of these fugitives was large. When a runaway was caught, abolitionists and their sympathizers began defying the U.S. Supreme Court, which had ruled in 1842 that state laws providing jury trials to determine a runaway’s status were invalid. Northern state legislatures passed new laws, forbidding their officials from cooperating in any way with federal pursuers.
Then there was California. Thanks to the discovery of gold in 1848, its population had multiplied almost overnight. A cry for statehood soon produced a constitution that barred slavery. Next came a governor and a legislature, asking for admission to the Union. When the new president, Mexican War hero General Zachary Taylor, took office in 1849, he recommended in his first message to Congress that California be admitted immediately. Southerners were infuriated and all but shouted secession in his face. The old soldier replied that he would personally take charge of the federal army and smash any such venture without mercy, a la Andrew Jackson.9
• • •
Meanwhile, slavery was paralyzing that crucial arm of the federal government, Congress. When the legislators gathered for their first session under the new president, it took sixty-three ballots to elect a speaker of the House of Representatives. The contest was between the previous speaker, Whig Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts, and Howell Cobb, a Georgia Democrat, with eight other candidates churning on the fringes. For three weeks the House’s walls vibrated with furious oratory. The Whig Party virtually dissolved in the cauldron, as southern Whigs deserted in favor of Cobb. Finally, for the first time in its history, the House voted to accept someone who won by a plurality, rather than a majority, and Cobb became the speaker.
So rancid was the antagonism between proslavery and antislavery congressmen, even the most trivial jobs, such as doorkeeper of the House, became a contest that depended on the applicant’s allegiance. With Cobb in command of appointing committee chairmen, a congressional revolt was soon fermenting. The admission of California would tip the balance of free versus slave states, sixteen to fifteen, in the Senate.
It was time for desperate measures, and seventy-three-year-old Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky summoned his dwindling strength and undertook the rescue of the imperiled Union. With masterful oratory and even more masterful backstairs negotiations, Clay asked Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun to join him in a package of compromises that would, he hoped, settle the issue of slavery without bloodshed or further divisive rancor.
California would be admitted as a free state. As for New Mexico and Utah, two territories that were within California’s borders when conquered and then purchased from Mexico, Clay urged that they remain neutral on slavery for the time being, in spite of the Wilmot Proviso (which had never been approved by Congress). Next came a tough new fugitive slave law that would provide both money and legal machinery to capture runaways. Finally, the slave trade, but not slavery, would be abolished in the District of Columbia.
To the amazement of many people, southern congressmen displayed little enthusiasm for defending the Washington, DC, slave trade. The slave pens in the vicinity of the White House were to be dismantled. For the first time, the free blacks of the district would live without fear of being kidnapped and sold south.10
• • •
For abolitionists, especially of the Garrison sort, compromise was still a filthy word. They unanimously denounced Clay’s political package. This surprised no one, of course. More unexpected was a speech by Senator Clay. Speaking as a Kentuckian, he issued a warning to his fellow Southerners. Secession was not and never would be a peaceful solution. The Americans of the Midwest, of which Kentucky was a geographic neighbor, would never tolerate the idea of letting a foreign state control New Orleans and the immense commerce from their farms that flowed down the Mississippi River for export to a hungry world. Webster followed Clay with a speech extolling the vital importance of the Union. The abolitionists condemned him as a traitor to New England.
Calhoun, too ill to speak, let a Virginia senator read his speech, while he glared out at the Senate with the angry eyes of a man who accepted nothing, including his imminent death. (He would expire of chronic lung congestion four weeks later.) His words declared he accepted the compromise but warned it would never work unless Congress and the president “did justice to the South” by guaranteeing her the right to bring slaves into all the remaining western territories. Even more important must be an absolute and total end to “the agitation of the slave question.”
These three famous voices did not by any means stifle further debate on the compromise. The oratory lasted for weeks. But sheer exhaustion began to play a part in a growing sentiment to accept these four proposals. This willingness was somewhat ironically accelerated by the sudden death of President Taylor from a stomach disorder and the ascent of mild-mannered Vice President Millard Fillmore of New York. Partly at his suggestion, the package was broken into four separate bills and passed individually, under the leadership of a strong new voice in the Senate, Democrat Stephen Douglas of Illinois.
It would take another year to learn whether the South would accept the compromises of 1850. In the state elections of 1851, the two political parties, Democrats and Whigs, were temporarily irrelevant. The contest was between unionists, who were in favor of the compromise, and secessionists. The unionists met their opponents with a steady and frequently steely denial that secession was a constitutional right. Backed by Henry Clay’s warning, James Madison’s denunciation of nullification and secession came back to life with surprising force. The unionists won in every state except South Carolina, which remained loyal to its lost prophet, John C. Calhoun.11
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In the North, where Slave Power paranoia remained strong, the compromise of 1850 proved to be a temporary truce. The revised fugitive slave law rapidly became unacceptable in New England. Even aloof Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nation’s best known writer, who strove to avoid all types of extremism, was enraged. (He had urged abolitionists to love their southern neighbors more and their colored brethren a little less in the name of civic peace.) “This filthy enactment was made in the Nineteenth Century, by people who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God!” declared The Sage of Concord.
The law empowered federal officials to draft northern citizens to assist them in catching and detaining runaway slaves. If a local federal marshal refused to pursue the fugitive, he could be fined $1,000. Any citizen who aided or concealed the runaway was liable to the same fine. All the slave catcher needed was an affidavit from a slave’s owner to seize a runaway. Jury trials were banned. A hearing before a federal judge was the only legal procedure permitted.
In states where abolitionist sentiment was strong, there were legal counterattacks. The Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional, freeing a fugitive slave named Joshua Glover. Vermont’s legislature passed a “habeas corpus law” that required state officials to do everything in their power to assist a captured runaway. In other states, local juries regularly acquitted men arrested for helping runaways. An infuriated President Fillmore threatened to send the U.S. Army to support federal authority.
The most sensational challenge to the law came in 1853 in Boston, where a Virginia runaway, twenty-year-old Anthony Burns, was arrested. New Hampshire–born President Franklin Pierce, elected by the Democrats in 1852, made it clear that he was going to enforce the law in the name of sectional peace. Undeterred, an enraged crowd stormed the courthouse and battled with fists, clubs, and knives against outnumbered U.S. marshals. In the melee, a deputy marshal was fatally stabbed. But the lawmen finally drove the protestors into the street.
A grimly determined President Pierce rushed hundreds of troops to Boston and a hearing was conducted before Judge Edward G. Loring, who served as commissioner of the federal circuit court in the state. His ruling was a foregone conclusion—Burns must be returned to his owner. While a huge crowd screamed insults, the soldiers lined the streets from the courthouse to the harbor, where a ship waited to take Burns back to Virginia. One Bostonian said he and his friends “went to bed one night old fashioned conservative compromise Whigs and woke up stark mad abolitionists.”
Not long after Burns left Boston, William Lloyd Garrison presided over a huge protest meeting, at which he burned copies of the Fugitive Slave Act and the U.S. Constitution. Abolitionists launched a movement to dismiss Judge Loring. After another three years of agitation in and out of the legislature, a new Massachusetts governor fired the jurist. The new Democratic president, James Buchanan, promptly gave him an appointment in the federal government.
Among the manic antislavery crusaders in New England and the Midwest, this rescue only confirmed the virtual omnipotence of The Slave Power.12
John Brown grew this beard to hide his identity while reconnoitering Harpers Ferry for his 1859 raid. He was wanted for murdering five defenseless men in Kansas and ordering his sons to chop up their bodies with swords, while their horrified wives and children watched. Brown regularly denied his guilt for this atrocity. Library of Congress
Here is the John Brown that the beard concealed. Note the grim mouth and glaring eyes of the fanatic. One can almost hear his war cry: “Without the shedding of blood there can be no remission of sin.” Library of Congress
Many Virginians considered Captain Robert E. Lee to be George Washington’s heir. He was married to Mary Custis, the founder’s step great-granddaughter. In the war with Mexico, Lee won promotion to lieutenant colonel for his daring and leadership. President Lincoln offered him command of the Union Army in 1861. In one of the hidden turning points of American history, Lee refused the offer. National Archives
Quaker John Woolman urged slavery’s abolition through patience, prayer, and gentle reproaches. Hatred was foreign to what one biographer has called his “beautiful soul.” Woolman died in England, urging the British to free the slaves of the West Indies. The seed he planted led to peaceful emancipation in 1833.
Phillis Wheatley arrived in Boston on a slave ship in 1761 at the age of seven. She learned to read and write almost immediately and in 1773 published a book of poems. In 1775, she dedicated a poem to General Washington. He paid tribute to her “great poetical talents” and invited her to visit him. It was a first glimpse of the remarkable freedom from race prejudice that led Washington to free all his slaves in his will. Library of Congress
Colonel John Laurens persuaded George Washington to back his proposal to free 3,000 slaves to serve in the Continental Army. The Continental Congress voted its approval. Some historians have called their vote the first emancipation proclamation. Sadly, Laurens was killed in a skirmish and the idea died with him. National Park Service
When President Thomas Jefferson approved Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of St. Domingue (Haiti) in 1802 to restore French rule, he created a nightmare that became a disease of the Southern mind—fear of a race war. Yellow fever destroyed the French army and the enraged Haitians killed almost every white man, woman, and child on the island. From France Militaire, 1833
Short, stocky Jean Jacques Dessalines was the black general who fought Napoleon’s invasion of Haiti and ordered the slaughter of the surviving French men and women on the island. But his hatred extended only to French whites. In 1804, he sought American recognition of Haiti’s independence. President Jefferson persuaded Congress to reject his letter. The next president to send a diplomat to Haiti was Abraham Lincoln in 1862.
In 1822, inspired by the example of Haiti, Denmark Vesey proposed to kill all the whites in Charleston, South Carolina, seize ships in the harbor, and flee. Some blacks revealed the plot the day before the rebels were to strike. Vesey and many of his followers were hanged. The South’s fear of a race war grew deeper.
In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison launched The Liberator, a newspaper that demanded the immediate emancipation of the South’s slaves. Although he claimed to be inspired by God, Garrison repeatedly compared slavery to rape and preached hatred of slave owners and “The Slave Power”—his name for the southern states. Almost single-handedly he created a disease in the public mind. Library of Congress
Ex-President John Quincy Adams was elected to Congress soon after Andrew Jackson defeated him in his bid for a second term. Although Congressman Adams promised to represent “all the people,” he gradually became an outspoken foe of “The Slave Power” and helped turn abolitionism into a political movement. Library of Congress
Thomas Jefferson Randolph was Thomas Jefferson’s oldest grandson. In 1833, he called for the gradual emancipation of Virginia’s slaves and participated in a ferocious debate on the issue in the state legislature. Numerous Virginians admitted slavery was a great evil. Randolph’s proposal lost by only five votes. Thomas Jefferson Foundation
Theodore Dwight Weld was a brilliant preacher who converted thousands to the cause of abolitionism. But he gradually realized he was contradicting his belief in a loving God by preaching hatred of slave owners. He quit the crusade he had done so much to create. Library of Congress
On almost every road in every county of the South, armed men patrolled each night, challenging every black man or woman they met, to make sure they were not plotting a revolt. Above is a slave patrol operating near New Orleans. These patrols underscored the South’s constant fear of a race war. From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated History of the Civil War, 1895
In Southampton County, Virginia, in the summer of 1831, a black preacher named Nat Turner launched a race war that killed more than sixty white men, women, and children. He called on his followers to imitate the example of “Santo Domingo”—as Haiti was called at that time. From Authentic and Impartial Narrative of the Tragical Scene which Was Witnessed in Southampton County, 1831
Harriet Beecher Stowe often amazed people by denying she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “Who wrote it?” they asked. “God,” Mrs. Stowe replied. When President Abraham Lincoln met her in 1862, he supposedly said: “So you’re the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war.” Library of Congress
Josiah Henson was the real Uncle Tom—the Maryland-born slave whose story gave Harriet Beecher Stowe the idea for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But Stowe’s Uncle Tom had very little resemblance to the tough, shrewd, independent man of business that Henson became. Library of Congress
Horace Greeley was the editor of the New York Tribune, America’s leading anti-slavery newspaper. When Civil War loomed, he was horrified. But he could not control his managing editor, Charles Dana, who repeatedly called for war in fiery headlines. Library of Congress
Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery and became a leading voice calling for abolition. In the 1850s he met John Brown, who urged him to join the raid on Harpers Ferry. Douglass warned Brown that it would end in disaster. After the Civil War, Douglass worked with President Ulysses Grant to win civil rights for the freed slaves. Library of Congress
Dred Scott was a Missouri slave whose master took him to Illinois, a free state. Scott claimed this made him and his wife and two daughters free. In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that as a slave Scott was not a citizen and could not sue in federal court. Three months later, Scott’s owners freed him and his family. The court’s decision convinced many northerners that the judges were under the evil influence of “The Slave Power.” Library of Congress
In 1861, ex-President John Tyler proposed a peace conference to avoid an imminent civil war. He argued that diffusion—the spread of slavery into the western territories—was the only way to avoid a bloody clash. Already slaves were 40 percent of the South’s population. Confining them to the Southern states forced the South to choose between a civil war and a race war. When President-elect Lincoln rejected Tyler’s proposal, the ex-president called for Virginia’s secession. Library of Congress
In this illustration, John Brown and his men fire on citizens of Harpers Ferry from the doorway of the federal armory. Hundreds of militiamen responded to the town’s call for help and took cover in nearby buildings and on the looming heights. Harpers Ferry became a trap for Brown and his raiders. From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1859
A New York Tribune reporter concocted this story of John Brown kissing a black child on his way to his execution. “Faking it” was a well-established custom in American newspapers until the early twentieth century. This became one of the many abolitionist myths about Brown that made Ralph Waldo Emerson and others compare him to Jesus Christ. Library of Congress
Few people are aware that the first battle of the Civil War was fought in the streets of Baltimore. The Sixth Massachusetts regiment was attacked as they marched through the city to board a train to Washington, DC. The regiment suffered four dead and seventeen wounded. In return, they killed twelve rioters and wounded dozens. Marylanders blamed the abolitionists of Massachusetts for starting the war. Library of Congress
This map, reprinted from Harper’s Weekly magazine, shows the Union and Confederate armies clashing at Manassas Junction, with Bull Run Creek flowing through the battlefield. General Lee was the unseen planner of the battle. Thanks to his foresight, fresh Southern troops arrived by railroad to overwhelm the weary Union men.
On July 22, 1862, President Lincoln read his first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. Secretary of State William Seward is on the president’s left, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton sits midway down the table on the right. Seward persuaded Lincoln not to issue the epochal statement until the Union had won a victory, lest it seem like “the last shriek” of an exhausted government.Library of Congress
Taken in February 1865, this picture shows the deep weariness that the war inflicted on Abraham Lincoln. But when a senator visited him on April 14, he was amazed by the cheerful, energetic man who shook his hand. The war was virtually over and “The Tycoon,” as his aides called Lincoln, was preparing to forge a peace of reconciliation. Alas, that night he went to the theater. Library of Congress