Chapter One
The House of Dixie was an imposing thing indeed. On March 4, 1858, South Carolina planter and political leader James Henry Hammond rose on the floor of the U.S. Senate to emphasize the slave states’ wealth, power, and solidity to northern colleagues who were then challenging some of their prerogatives.
One of the things that Hammond boasted of that day was the South’s sheer physical size, which had grown greatly since the nation’s founding. The number of southern slave states more than doubled over those years with the creation of Kentucky (in 1792), Tennessee (in 1796), Louisiana (in 1812), Mississippi (in 1817), Alabama (in 1819), Missouri (in 1821), Arkansas (in 1836), Florida (in 1845), and Texas (in 1845). “If we never acquire another foot of territory for the South,” Hammond summarized, “look at her. Eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles. As large as Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Spain” combined. Here, surely, Hammond trumpeted, was “territory enough to make an empire” that might “rule the world.”1
But the American South was more opulent and formidable than even its great size suggested. Of the more than twelve million souls who resided there, almost one out of every three was enslaved—owned outright by others.2 As commodities that could be (and were) freely bought and sold, slaves themselves were immensely valuable. At prices quoted on the markets of the day, those nearly four million human beings were worth something like $3 billion—an immense sum, especially at that time, a sum that exceeded the value of all the farmland in all the states of the South, a sum fully three times as great as the construction costs of all the railroads that then ran throughout all of the United States.3
Still more important to southern wealth than even the enormous potential sale price of these human beings was the work that they could be made to perform. The efforts of slaves yielded more than half of all the South’s tobacco; almost all of its sugar, rice, and hemp; and nine-tenths of its cotton.4
The last item on this list, cotton, was in aggregate the single most valuable commodity produced in the United States. It was a key raw material for the international Industrial Revolution and therefore of trans-Atlantic commerce. By 1860, in fact, the American South was producing two-thirds of all the commercially grown cotton in the world and about four-fifths of the cotton that Great Britain’s mammoth textile industry consumed every year. The cotton trade was just as important to the national economy of the United States. The ubiquitous dirty-white bales that were hauled down to coastal wharves and there packed into the holds of big ships destined for European markets accounted for about half the value of all the United States’ exports, as they had since the 1830s.
Small wonder, then, that most of the country’s richest men lived in the slave states and that the nation’s dozen wealthiest counties, per capita, were all located in the South.5
Slaves were by far the most valuable properties one could own in the southern states. But only a minority of white southerners (about one-fourth) owned human beings in 1860, and among those who did, the size of their property holding varied dramatically.6
The typical master owned between four and six slaves.7 That much human property made him or her many times as prosperous as the average southern farmer but considerably less wealthy than those masters who owned at least twenty slaves, for whom the federal census bureau reserved the title of “planter.”8 Only one out of eight southern masters belonged to this group—some forty-six thousand in total. But as a group, they controlled more than half of all the South’s slaves and an even larger share of its total agricultural wealth.9
Some planters were far richer than others. The true planter aristocracy embraced ten thousand families that owned fifty or more slaves apiece.10 These were the people who, as the former North Carolina slave William Yancey later recalled, “gave shape to the government and tone to the society. They had the right of way in business and in politics.”11
Among these people were Patrick M. Edmondston and his wife, Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, who owned two plantations in northeastern North Carolina.12 Jefferson Thomas and Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas owned Belmont, a plantation in east-central Georgia that by 1861 boasted ninety slaves.13 In Virginia, Edmund Ruffin, a well-known agricultural innovator and a tireless exponent of slavery’s merits, also claimed a place in this charmed circle. So did Robert E. Lee and his wife, Mary Fitzhugh Custis Lee. Both came from old Virginia planter families. Mary’s father, George Washington Parke Custis, was one of the state’s largest planters. He left the Lees one of his three plantations (Arlington) and sixty slaves to work it.14
About one in fifteen planter families enjoyed wealth that dwarfed the holdings of even the Ruffins, Lees, Edmondstons, and Thomases. Each of these three thousand or so families owned at least 100 slaves in 1860.15 The family of Louisiana’s Katherine Stone was one of these.16 Twenty-five to thirty miles south of the Stones’ Brokenburn plantation lay Davis Bend, a peninsula formed by the twists and turns of the Mississippi River. It contained Jefferson Davis’s 1,800-acre cotton plantation, named Brierfield, and the 113 slaves who lived and labored on it.17 Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, who spearheaded the campaign to bring a proslavery form of Christianity to southern bondspeople, owned 129 slaves on three plantations in coastal Georgia’s Liberty County.18 Robert Toombs, who became the Confederacy’s first secretary of state, held 176 slaves and 2,200 acres of land in three counties.19
And even richer than these moneyed masters were about three hundred planters who each owned at least 250 people. One of them was Jefferson Davis’s brother, Joseph; another was Howell Cobb, who at various times served as Georgia’s governor, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and secretary of the Treasury, and went on to become the Speaker of the Confederacy’s provisional Congress.20 A third was James Henry Hammond. The son of a teacher and minor businessman who had married into the planter class, by 1860 he owned 338 people. Another South Carolinian, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Sr., published the fire-eating Charleston Mercury; Rhett owned at least two rice plantations and more than 400 slaves.21 Other Palmetto State planters of comparable wealth included Colonel James Chesnut, Sr., master of the grand Mulberry plantation in Kershaw County. His son, James, Jr., sat successively in both houses of the U.S. Congress and later became a Confederate brigadier general and aide to Jefferson Davis.
At the very apex of the South’s social pyramid stood about fifty southern planters, each of whom owned at least five hundred slaves. Some owned considerably more than that.22 The richest planter in North Carolina was Thomas P. Devereux, the father of Catherine Devereux Edmondston, referred to earlier. He owned more than one thousand people.23 Georgia’s James Hamilton Couper owned fifteen hundred.24
In the words of North Carolina plantation mistress Gertrude Thomas, members of the planter elite enjoyed the “life of luxury and ease.”25 Many lived in homes that were palatial by the standards of their day. In eastern Virginia, John Armistead Selden presided over the venerable Westover plantation. Its mansion boasted a great hall, a dining room that regularly hosted more than fifty, a grand stairway, multiple fireplaces, a lush garden, and a lawn that carpeted the 150 feet between the mansion and the James River.26 In Virginia’s Chesapeake region, Richard Baylor’s neoclassical mansion, Kinloch, boasted twenty-one rooms, eighteen fireplaces, four great halls, an imposing front portico, and an observation deck that overlooked the valley of the Rappahannock River.27 James Hamilton Couper modeled his Hopeton plantation in Georgia on an Italian villa. Its main house was three stories tall and had twenty-three rooms, elegant gardens, and a grand staircase descending from the second-floor entranceway. Here, if anywhere, were the mansions celebrated in Hollywood’s version of Gone with the Wind.
In some of the richest but more recently settled cotton-growing states, elite society was still too new and its members too preoccupied with assembling their slave workforces in 1860 to devote much time or money to elegance and ostentation. In northeastern Louisiana, for example, the Stone family was living in what its members considered a temporary dwelling on their Brokenburn plantation. It, too, was big, with long galleries and two great halls. But it was nothing compared with the structure they looked forward to building soon.28
Such “big houses” (as they were generally called) were not only grand; they were also furnished and filled “with everything that a hundred years or more of unlimited wealth could accumulate,” much of it purchased in the North and in Europe. So noted the assiduous diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, who was born into a prominent Mississippi planter family and who married James Chesnut, Jr.29 In addition to their rural residences, many of the larger low-country planters also owned stately town houses in cities such as Charleston, Augusta, Savannah, Natchez, Mobile, and New Orleans. Those urban abodes commonly featured impressive gardens fronted by high walls and large iron gates, all of which spared owners the proximity to and shielded them from the gaze of less privileged passersby.
In their free time, families like the Stones of Louisiana always had “something going on” (as Katherine put it). They entertained themselves with hunting, boating regattas, and horse races (using slave oarsmen and slave jockeys), lavish dinner parties, and balls. They summered at northern spas in Saratoga Springs, Cape May, Niagara Falls, Newport, and Montreal and at southern resorts such as Biloxi, Pass Christian, and the springs of western Virginia.
The southern states of the Union contained the nation’s least developed school system. But the planters’ children wanted for few educational advantages. Private tutors provided individual instruction. Daughters attended elite female academies. Sons went off to colleges in the South, in the North, and in Europe.30 A leisurely and luxurious “grand tour” of Europe often followed college, allowing future leaders of the southern elite to bathe in the high culture of the Old World.
At least as impressive as their sheer wealth and personal comfort was the slave masters’ political might. Robert E. Lee’s wartime aide-de-camp, Colonel Charles Marshall, later recalled “the controlling influence” that “the owners of slaves” enjoyed “in the management of affairs in the Southern States.”31 In the capitals of nearly every state that would go on to join the Confederacy, slave masters occupied at least half the legislative seats in 1860. In Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina, more than a third of those seats belonged to full-fledged planters. In South Carolina, planters claimed not a third but more than half of those positions.32
But the masters’ writ ran far beyond the confines of their own states. They also exercised tremendous power over the United States as a whole, and they had done so for generations. James Henry Hammond put it bluntly in his Senate speech of 1858. “We, the slaveholders of the South, took our country in her infancy,” led it to independence, and have since then continued “ruling her for sixty out of the seventy years of her existence.” Since the Revolution, in fact, nearly all the occupants of the White House had been either slave masters (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James Polk, and Zachary Taylor) or the allies and advocates of masters (Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan). The same kind of men consistently controlled both the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court.33
The masters used all this political power to secure and extend the economic system that gave them their wealth, authority, and comfort—a system squarely based on slave labor. The South’s four million slaves formed the core of its laboring population. “They are the source in large measure of our living, and comprise our wealth,” the Georgia planter and Presbyterian minister Charles Colcock Jones reminded his fellow churchmen in 1861. Slaves and the profits that their labor yielded paid for “our education, our food, and clothing, and our dwellings, and a thousand comforts of life that crowd our happy homes.” They also performed many other vital kinds of labor: From the slave quarters came “our boatmen … on the waters; our mechanics and artisans to build our houses, to work in many trades;… they prepare our food, and wait about our tables and our persons, and keep the house.”34
As Jones noted, slaves toiled in all sectors of the southern society and economy. Some worked in the region’s relatively small urban economy, in workshops, factories, and a variety of commercial establishments. Others labored as household servants in the masters’ homes in town or country or as artisans of various kinds on their farms and plantations. But the great majority, perhaps three-quarters, worked the land. As Jones put it, they were “our agriculturalists to subdue our forests, to sow, and cultivate, and reap our land; without whom no team is started, no plough is run, no spade, nor hoe, nor axe is driven.”35 The 1860 census estimated that one in every ten slaves cultivated tobacco (centered in parts of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri), another one in ten raised sugar, rice, or hemp (in Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina). And more than half worked in the cotton fields (especially in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana).
Katherine Stone noted some of the characteristics of slave labor that made it most attractive to landowners anxious to turn a profit. Slaves could be made to perform especially heavy, intensive, and continuous work in return for just “the bare necessities of life.” James Henry Hammond accounted for slavery’s importance in just those terms in a well-known open letter to British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. Only slaves, Hammond held, could be made to work as hard while costing the landowner so little. People who enjoyed the right to protest, resist, or simply refuse such terms would never tolerate such conditions.36
The South’s slaves worked very hard indeed. It was “no uncommon thing,” Katherine Stone remembered, for the more productive slaves in her family’s cotton fields to pick “five or six hundred pounds each day for maybe a week at a time.”37 That was almost three times as much cotton as agricultural workers would pick after slavery was abolished.
What was the secret of this enormous prewar cornucopia? How did masters manage to get so much work out of their human property? Perhaps, Stone suggested, the answer was to be found in the pleasure that slaves found in their work. “The Negroes really seemed to like the cotton picking most of all,” she later mused. And spurring that enthusiasm, Stone presumed, were the “prizes” awarded to the most productive—“money for the men and gay dresses for the women.”38
Some masters did offer modest rewards (what modern economic historians would call “positive incentives”) to encourage the hardest, fastest, and most continuous work. But masters did not have enough confidence in the persuasive power of these incentives to depend upon them alone.39 Field workers disinclined to chase after such prizes (just like those who tried but fell short) soon encountered “negative incentives”—especially the whips with which masters and supervisors inflicted “stripes” upon their bodies. In fact, the regular application of that kind of violence accounted for much of slavery’s extraordinary output. When some South Carolina masters wished to gift one another on special occasions, they gave cowhide whips.40
The northern traveler Frederick Law Olmsted witnessed this form of what masters called “slave management” in action one day. He was touring a plantation on horseback in the company of its overseer. As the two men rode along, they saw a black girl apparently trying to avoid her assigned tasks. The overseer promptly dismounted and “struck her thirty or forty blows across the shoulder with his tough, flexible, ‘raw-hide’ whip,” Olmsted recorded. “At every stroke the girl cringed and exclaimed, ‘Yes, sir!’ or ‘Ah, sir!’ or ‘Please, sir!’ ” Unsatisfied that the young woman had yet learned her lesson, the overseer made her pull up her dress and lie down on the ground facing skyward. He then “continued to flog her with the raw-hide, across her naked loins and thighs, with as much strength as before.” As he beat her, she lay “writhing, groveling, and screaming, ‘Oh, don’t, sir! Oh, please stop, master! Please, sir! Please, sir! Oh, that’s enough, master! Oh, Lord! Oh, master, master! Oh, God, master, do stop! Oh, God, master! Oh, God, master!’ ”
Unable to watch any longer, Olmsted spurred his horse away from the scene—though the sound of whip lashes, screams, and finally “choking, sobbing, spasmodic groans” continued to fill his ears. The overseer then caught up with his guest. Laughing at Olmsted’s squeamishness, he explained that the offending young woman had tried “to cheat me out of a day’s work.” But, the aghast visitor asked, “Was it necessary to punish her so severely?” “Oh yes, sir,” the overseer replied between additional chuckles. “If I hadn’t, she would have done the same thing again to-morrow, and half the people on the plantation would have followed her example.… They’d never do any work at all if they were not afraid of being whipped.”41
Olmsted supposed that the scene he had just witnessed was a common one, and in that he was quite correct. “It is true,” South Carolina lawyer and political leader William Harper readily acknowledged in an often-reprinted essay, “that the Slave is driven to labor by stripes.” And why? The answer was simplicity itself: because that was “the best method of punishment.”42 Daniel Hundley was a proud southern lawyer and writer who would eventually become a staunch Confederate. But even he complained in 1860 about the increasing number of money-hungry planters that he saw around him. On the farms and plantations of such men, he wrote, “the crack of his whip is heard early, and the crack of the same is heard late, and the weary backs of his bondmen and his bondwomen are bowed to the ground with over-tasking and overtoil, and yet his heart is still unsatisfied; for he grasps after more and more, and cries to the fainting slave: ‘Another pound of money, dog, or I take a pound of flesh!’ ”43
Hundley was anxious to attribute such conduct to only the greediest and cruelest masters. In fact, however, cracking whips and piercing cries were heard throughout the South. Robert E. Lee liked to think of himself as a humane owner. But he could react as fiercely as any other when his power and authority were challenged. In 1859, three of Lee’s slaves—Wesley Norris, his sister, and a cousin named Mary—attempted to escape from the Arlington plantation. Recaptured in Maryland, the unfortunate people were jailed there for two weeks and then delivered back into Lee’s hands. Promising to teach them a lesson they would not soon forget, Lee had them taken to the barn, stripped to the waist, and whipped between twenty and fifty times each on their bare flesh by a local constable named Dick Williams. As the punishment proceeded, Wesley Norris later related, Lee “stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to ‘lay it on well,’ ” which he did.44
Masters recognized clearly that legally free field laborers could not be worked as hard or forced to submit to such treatment. At the very least, they would simply abandon plantation labor. But flight was only one of the specters haunting the planters’ imaginations. Almost equally daunting was the thought of what legally free workers might do if they remained in the fields. William Harper dared his readers to “imagine an extensive rice or cotton plantation cultivated by free laborers who might perhaps strike for an increase of wages, at a season when the neglect of a few days would ensure the destruction of the whole crop.” Harper’s own imagination, he confessed, was not up to that challenge. After all, he asked, “What planter would venture to carry on his operations under such circumstances?”45 Without slavery, Harper therefore concluded, the plantation system would simply collapse, reducing the southern elite to “utter poverty and misery” and spreading “dissolution” throughout the land.46
The slaves’ centrality to southern prosperity did encourage masters to keep their field hands alive, if possible—and therefore to provide them, as Katherine Stone recalled, with at least “the bare necessities of life.” But with a sharp eye on the bottom line, as Stone also acknowledged, masters gave most of their poorly sheltered, coarsely clothed, and badly nourished human property little “hope of more” than that.47
This set of opposing impulses—one aimed at keeping slaves at least minimally fit, the other preoccupied with reducing the cost of their maintenance—governed the health of slaves. Masters profited when slaves became parents, so masters encouraged their slaves to have children. When Catherine Edmondston’s slave Vinyard delivered a male child, her mistress was delighted. “If the child lives I intend to bring him up as a table servant, have him in [service] by the time he can walk and talk & never let him be rusty.”48 James Henry Hammond was deeply disappointed when his slave Anny delivered a stillborn child. “Bad luck,” he grumbled about that loss of a hoped-for asset—a loss the more bitter because during the last months of her pregnancy Anny had “not earned her salt.”49
Anny’s tragedy was by no means unusual. The intensive labor that slave women performed, the unhealthy locales in which many plantations sat, the minimal quantity and quality of food, clothing, and shelter provided to slaves—all these things took a high toll. Throughout the South, one out of every three children born into slavery died before reaching his or her first birthday; a white infant’s chance of surviving was twice as good.50 Conditions were even harsher in the rice and sugar districts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana. On some sugar plantations, more than half of all slaves died during childhood.51 In the rice districts, two-thirds of all slave children died before reaching the age of sixteen. At Gowrie, one of Charles Manigault’s rice plantations, nine of every ten children suffered that fate.52
Slave owners commonly claimed to be paternalistic Christian masters. They used their power, they said, to improve the lives not only of themselves but of their dependents, black as well as white. James Henry Hammond and other champions of slavery thus claimed that masters made black families much stronger and more cohesive than they would have been in freedom.
In fact, however, masters broke up slave families all the time, tearing wives away from husbands and children away from parents as they sold off individual family members to slave traders or to other masters. Sometimes masters did this because they needed money. Slaves also found themselves sold as punishment, because they (or someone else in their family) had earned the master’s displeasure. And when a master died, heirs and creditors divided the deceased’s slaves among themselves like any other form of property, breaking up families as they saw fit. That is what happened, for example, when Katherine Stone’s uncle died of a fever in 1861. One heir received a woman named Sydney and her younger children. Sydney’s older children, however, went to another heir. This, Katherine acknowledged in her diary, was “a great grief” to Sydney and her family. Stone quickly added that it was also “a distress to us.” But the masters’ regret did not prevent the division from proceeding.53
The geographical expansion and migration that produced the states of the lower South tore apart an enormous number of slave families. Because the U.S. Congress had outlawed any further importation of slaves from Africa in 1808, slaves for the new states had to come from the old ones. Between 1820 and 1860, an average of two hundred thousand slaves were transported every decade from the more northerly situated slave states to those farther south and west.54 Other people were sold in large numbers from one part of the cotton kingdom to another. Most reached their destinations in “coffles,” long lines of men, women, and children (ranging in number from thirty to forty upward into the hundreds) who were roped, manacled, or chained together and marched on foot over their long journeys.55
Great numbers of them had first been separated from their parents, spouses, or children, never to lay eyes on their families again. Thomas Rutling was born into slavery in Tennessee in the 1850s. His earliest memory was of his mother being sold and sent away from him when he was still a small child. He remembered that “she kissed me and bade me good by, and how she cried when they led her away.” The last word that Thomas ever heard about his mother was that her new owner had whipped her “till she was almost dead.”56 The master of a Georgia woman sold her away from her baby in order to pay a gambling debt. The distraught mother could not sleep at night. “Every time I shut my eyes I hear my baby cry, ‘Take me wid you mamma; take me wid you!’ I put my fingers in my ears, but all the time I hear him just the same, crying, ‘Take me wid you, mammy; take me wid you!’ ”57
In North Carolina, the planter Joseph Thomas purchased a man named Sam from a slave trader. Thomas subsequently passed Sam on to his son and daughter-in-law, Jefferson and Gertrude. Subsequent sales then tore Sam’s family apart. He watched helplessly as his daughter was sold away from him, just as that daughter later suffered her children being taken from her. Hearing about all this from Sam, Gertrude Thomas found it “really interesting.” She coped with whatever distress it may have caused her by repeating one of the shibboleths dear to southern masters. People like Sam and his daughter, Gertrude assured herself, could cope with the serial destruction of their families more easily because “fortunately for them the Negro is a cheerful being.”58 And, anyway, whites commonly claimed, neither black men nor black women had strong parental feelings toward their offspring.
Just as masters congratulated themselves on shoring up slave families, so did they boast of the respect they showed for family integrity and spousal and parental rights. When slavery’s critics accused them of taking sexual advantage of their chattels, slave owners huffily dismissed the charges. Among southern whites, James Henry Hammond insisted, “there are fewer cases of divorce, separation,… seduction, rape and bastardy” than among any other population of the same size. “A decided proof” of the masters’ admirable sexual restraint, he added, was the fact that “very few mulattoes are reared on our plantations.”59
Hammond’s claim makes his own conduct especially instructive. Six years before he published those proud words, Hammond purchased eighteen-year-old Sally Johnson and her year-old daughter Louisa. Hammond first took Sally to his bed and then, years later, took Louisa as well. Hammond’s son Harry followed suit. In time, both Louisa and Sally bore Hammond’s (or his son’s) children, and those children, too, as a matter of course, became Hammond family property. The elder Hammond counseled the younger not to sell either of those youngsters. Slaves of “my own blood,” he felt, should be owned by none “but my own blood.” But neither did he free them. No, he announced; “slavery in the family will be their happiest earthly condition.”60
Hammond’s case was especially repulsive and hypocritical, but it was only an extreme example of a prevalent practice. Frederick Douglass’s father was his mother’s master—and, therefore, his own master as well. Gertrude Thomas was sure that both her father and her husband had sired children by slave women.61 Plantation mistress Mary Chesnut believed that her father-in-law had done the same thing. “Our men,” she confided to her diary, “seem to think themselves patterns—models of husbands and fathers.” But in reality, “like the patriarchs of old” they “live all in one house with their wives and their concubines,” and “the Mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children.”62 Judge Samuel S. Boyd, a prominent member of the Natchez district’s elite, for many years kept a slave mistress named Virginia, with whom he fathered three children, all of whom became his property. To avoid a possible scandal, Boyd eventually arranged to have Virginia and the children sent off to Texas for sale. Perhaps naïvely, Virginia expressed shock that “the father of my children” had so easily decided “to sell his own offspring yes his own flesh and blood.”63
Such conduct was clearly no secret to women of the slave-owning class. Many deeply resented it for undermining their own status in both their families and society at large. But that resentment led nearly none of them to oppose slavery itself, because it provided the basis for their own wealth, comfort, and social station. Many southern men turned a blind eye to the same kind of conduct among relatives and neighbors. Others, including Rev. Charles Colcock Jones and Robert Toombs, acknowledged that their society displayed some blemishes. They insisted, however, that those blemishes revealed nothing fundamentally unhealthy about the institution of slavery. They were only reminders that the South’s “peculiar institution,” like all others known to history, was administered by human beings—and humans were, of course, imperfect, fallible creatures.
The solution, they said, therefore lay not in wholesale emancipation but in introducing specific reforms. Enlightened individuals would simply explain patiently to excessively harsh, hard-hearted, or careless masters the error of their ways. Meanwhile, wise legislators would enact a few necessary changes in the law, some of which would protect slaves against gratuitous cruelty. Others would allow slaves greater liberty to participate in Christian religious life or repeal fear-inspired prohibitions against teaching slaves to read and write. Still others would forbid the forcible breakup of slaves’ families.
None of these changes, said the would-be reformers, would undermine, much less abolish, slavery itself. On the contrary, they continued, these laws would strengthen the ties binding slaves to masters. They would, Robert Toombs declared, prove “wise, proper, and humane” while transforming “the institution of slavery as it exists among us” in no basic way.64
But reality, it turned out, made it difficult to impose even such limited reforms. Although some laws defined the wanton killing of a slave as murder, for example, it proved almost impossible to convict a master of that crime. As for physical punishment of a slave short of murder, well, who could precisely point to the boundary between whipping that was necessary and proper and whipping that was excessive? Even most who thought they could do that were loath to interfere in the relations between other masters and their slaves.
Similarly, while many masters professed a general aversion to breaking up slave families, very few were prepared to rule it out absolutely—much less ban the practice legally. The freedom to sell any slave at any time to anyone was a natural extension of the master’s property rights, and it was integral to the functioning of the slave-labor system. “The owner of slaves,” reformer Edmund Ruffin noted simply, “must be free to dispose of them as future circumstances may require.”65
Most important of all, the sale of individual family members greatly increased what economists call “labor mobility”—in this case, the ease and cheapness with which masters disposed of or acquired just the kind of human property they needed or wanted. This should have been clear to reform advocate Toombs, who in the 1850s came out in favor of “laws forbidding, under proper regulations, the separation of families.”66 Some thirty years earlier, a boy named Garland White was born to a woman named Nancy just northwest of Richmond, Virginia. When Garland was about ten years old, his owner took him from Nancy and prepared him for sale into the lower South. The man who bought the boy was Robert Toombs. The forcible dismemberment of Garland White’s family enabled the up-and-coming Georgia lawyer and future politician to acquire someone who would eventually become a valued and trusted personal servant.67
Half a century after Appomattox, a historian sympathetic to the masters would say that in the prewar South, owning slaves was less a business than a way of life.68 It was, in fact, both. It certainly was a business. As a Montgomery, Alabama, editor explained, “The institution of slavery is simply a branch of the great political question of capital and labor.”69 The specific economic needs of southern farmers and planters gave rise to slavery, shaped the lives of slaves, and provided a compelling argument for preserving and expanding that system of unfree labor.
But for most masters, slaveholding was not simply an economic necessity. It was not only the source of their own wealth and physical comfort. It was not merely one possible enterprise, one possible investment, among many. It was, instead, the unique basis of the particular outlook, assumptions, norms, habits, and relationships to which masters as a social class had become deeply and reflexively attached. It defined their privileges and shaped their culture, their religion, and even their personalities.
In 1839, Abel P. Upshur, then a judge of the General Court of Virginia and later a U.S. secretary of state, enunciated the point clearly. The “domestic slavery” that formed “the great distinguishing characteristic of the southern states,” he explained, also “exerts a powerful influence in moulding and modifying both their institutions and their manners.”70 Benjamin Morgan Palmer, minister of New Orleans’s First Presbyterian Church and a prominent theologian, put the matter squarely in a major sermon two decades later. “This system is interwoven with our entire social fabric,” he emphasized. “It has fashioned our modes of life, and determined all our habits of thought and feeling, and moulded the very type of our civilization.”71
Over time, more and more masters came to agree. In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, slavery’s most common justification had been one articulated by Thomas Jefferson—namely, that although it was a poor system, one beset by social, economic, and political “evils,” it was still better than the alternative: emancipation. Because emancipation would impoverish the whites and unleash upon them a huge mass of uncivilized blacks. If slavery was an evil, therefore, it was a “necessary” one.
But during the following decades, growing numbers of slavery’s champions adopted a more aggressive line of argument, one associated most closely with South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun. Slavery was not an evil, insisted Calhoun, but “a good, a positive good.”72 To Calhoun and his colleagues, indeed, slavery came to appear to be the single, essential, irreplaceable foundation of any good society. It was “the principal cause of civilization,” William Harper claimed in 1838—even “the sole cause.”73 They believed, with Abel P. Upshur, that all civilizations rested on the proposition that “one portion of mankind shall live upon the labor of another portion.”74 Every advanced society in history, they affirmed, had achieved greatness by assigning its dullest, heaviest, most exhausting, and unrewarding (but no less necessary) labors to one portion of the people. Only such an arrangement could allow the development among another portion of the kind of intellectual, cultural, and political leaders that civilization required. “In all social systems,” James Henry Hammond declared, “there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.”
In the land-rich and labor-scarce Americas, this could be arranged only by legally fixing the drones in place. And, since it was neither possible nor desirable to deny freedom to white citizens of the republic, the enslavement of some other people was necessary.75“Fortunately for the South,” as Hammond put it in 1858, “she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand,” the children of Africa. Here was “a race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes.”76
Slave owners like these had also convinced themselves that slavery was the only secure foundation for a republican form of government—one in which a relatively large section of the population enjoyed the rights of citizens (to vote and hold office). Since ancient Greece and Rome, republican thinkers had worried and warned about the dangers inherent in conferring full citizenship upon those who performed the republic’s hardest, most disagreeable labor in return for the meanest standard of life. Wouldn’t such poor and unhappy citizens use their freedoms and civic rights to cause trouble? Wouldn’t they protest and act collectively to change their condition? Wouldn’t they elect to public office either one of their own—or some adventurer, some demagogue, some Caesar, who appealed to the mob’s resentments and frustrations in order to gain power for himself? Wouldn’t any of these outcomes doom the republic, just as it had repeatedly done in the ancient world? It was clear as day to Hammond that “slavery is truly the ‘corner-stone’ and foundation of every well-designed and durable ‘republican edifice.’ ”77
Indeed, slavery’s advocates demanded, wasn’t that also the experience of modern Europe and the free states of the North, where labor strikes, mass demonstrations, and other actions that challenged the prerogatives of the elite were becoming more and more frequent and where the unwashed and uneducated were acquiring an excessive say in political life? In those places, Hammond declared, the “reckless and unenlightened … are rapidly usurping all power.” The southern states, in contrast, were spared that fate because slavery deprived the potential troublemakers of the right and opportunity to make trouble. Republican government was secure from such dangers in the South because there “the poorest and most ignorant, have no political influence whatever.”78 Laws making it a crime to teach slaves to read or write, limiting and strictly supervising their religious activity, and creating roving citizen patrols to prevent slaves from moving about the countryside at will were thus only the necessary corollaries of republican liberty.
Last but not least, these masters deemed black slavery the only tolerable and humane arrangement in a biracial society. Believing that civilization required enslaving African laborers, they were also sure that living alongside Africans was possible only if those people were kept enslaved. Blacks, Gertrude Thomas and Catherine Edmondston wrote in their diaries, were a “degraded race,” “an inferior race.”79 Had whites not enslaved them, affirmed Professor Joseph Jones (Rev. Charles Colcock Jones’s second son), “the African” would have “remained in the deepest degradation of ignorance, vice, and superstition.”80 Too stupid, primitive, and childish to care for themselves, Charles’s wife, Mary Jones, reminded herself, they were “incapable of self-government.”81 Robert E. Lee was simply echoing conventional wisdom when he wrote that “the relation of master and slave, controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and enlightened public sentiment, is the best that can exist between the white and black races.”82
In their hearts, blacks understood the favor that slavery and slave owners did them by supervising their lives, and they were grateful for that service. Or so, at least, claimed planter spokesmen like Jefferson Davis. “Their servile instincts rendered them contented with their lot,” Davis was still affirming after the Civil War, and “a strong mutual affection” between master and slave “was the lasting effect of this lifelong relation.”83
If stripped of their shackles, however, William Harper and others warned, the Africans’ innate primitiveness would reassert itself. They would then pillage, rape, and murder. And when whites fought back in self-defense, as they certainly would, the result would be a bloody race war that would inevitably end in the extermination of the inferior blacks.84
For all these reasons, slavery appeared an essential and irreplaceable fixture of southern society. It was inseparable from everything that masters knew and valued.
And in truth, its influence went even deeper than that. Owning other human beings outright shaped the very core of the typical planter’s personality. At home, after all, they were at once employers, legislators, policemen, prosecutors, judges, juries, jailers, and executioners. They dominated those who labored for them not only economically but also legally and politically. As a Tennessee editor and Protestant minister put it, every southern plantation was a kingdom unto itself in which “the master is armed with magisterial power, by the laws alike of God and man.”85
This system and the tremendous power it bestowed fostered personalities quite different from those of most northern businessmen, whose workforces consisted of legally free wage laborers. Visiting English journalist James Silk Buckingham was taken with the way that members of the American planter elite exercised a degree of “arbitrary power” that left them “always accustomed to command.”86 A generation later, Katherine Stone made the same point about her own family and her planter neighbors. Their domination of other human beings had made them “a race of haughty” and “waited-upon people,” she noted, who expected to have their way in all things.87
Thomas Jefferson, who owned about two hundred slaves, had put the matter even more bluntly. Masters, he unhappily acknowledged in 1787, exercised “the most unremitting despotism” over their slaves that gave free rein to “the most boisterous passions.” Having and wielding that kind of despotic power, Jefferson continued, imbued masters with a deep-seated belief in their own inherent superiority and their natural right to impose their will upon others. That belief and the personal qualities that it encouraged then passed from one generation to the next. When we dominate and abuse our slaves, he wrote, “our children see this,” and they “cannot but be stamped by it.” They are “nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny.”88 Mary Chesnut saw the deep marks that such a life had left on her father-in-law, the great South Carolina planter James Chesnut, Sr. He was “as absolute a tyrant as the Czar of Russia, the Kahn of Tartary, or the Sultan of Turkey,” she wrote. He and others like him “would brook no interference with their own sweet will by man, woman, or devil.”89
The cast of mind here described included a quickness to react harshly to any challenge from any quarter, a casual attitude toward employing brutality generally, and an angry indignation when either neighbors or public officials tried to interfere with their prerogatives, especially concerning their human property.
This emphasis on the master’s control over those around him also nourished a definition of manhood and a code of “honor” that the southern elite copied from European aristocrats. According to this code, a gentleman of publicly acknowledged authority, social standing, and reputation must be ready and able to repel all challenges to those attributes. And he defended his honor not with recourse to laws, courts, or police officials but personally, by asserting his individual martial prowess. The more promptly he responded to such confrontations, the more respect that prowess earned and the less likely he was to face challenge in the future. So it was, as James Silk Buckingham discovered, that members of the planter elite were prone to seek “instant retaliation, for any injury, real or supposed.”90
The most obvious and dramatic expression of this code was the duel. Earlier embraced by upper-class males throughout the republic, it swiftly declined in the North during the early nineteenth century. During that same period, however, the duel became steadily more popular among members of the South’s planter class.91
The reflection of these values in politics was the insistence that government be kept as weak as possible—at least in its ability to interfere with the masters’ power. A proslavery theorist gave tongue to this attitude in the 1830s when he advised both “the imprudent philanthropist” and “the rash legislator” not to “attempt to interpose too often … between master and slave.”92 Frederick Porcher, a planter and professor of history and literature at the College of Charleston, later noted more delicately but also more generally that being answerable only to themselves left slave masters “little regardful” of the “claims of society.”93
It was this great constellation of economic interests, political values, and personal characteristics that Mary Chesnut invoked when she referred to someone as “a genuine slave-owner born and bred.”94 Catherine Edmondston meant the same thing when she called herself and other masters of her acquaintance “slaveholders on principle.”95 Such people felt in the very marrow of their bones, as William Harper declared, that slavery’s survival was essential to “all that is dear to us,” including “human civilization” itself.96 They were, James Henry Hammond announced, “perfectly satisfied” with their system and saw “nothing to invite” them to exchange it for any other kind. “On the contrary,” they saw “everything to induce us to prefer it above all others.”97 Like him, therefore, they were “determined to continue [as] masters.”98 Professor Porcher spoke for these people when he declared in the 1850s that “the fact of slavery is here” and here “it must remain,” not only in the immediate future but “until the end of time.”99 Georgia’s Howell Cobb struck the same note in 1856, declaring that so far as slavery was concerned, “We do not see ‘the beginning of the end,’ ” but instead “regard it as permanent—perpetual.”100
Not all slave owners spoke in such categorical terms. Thomas Jefferson had earlier predicted that slavery, though necessary at present, would someday wither away. Some masters continued to repeat such phrases down through the 1850s. But the timeline that they envisioned for the system’s eventual demise reduced to zero their practical differences with those who regarded slavery as permanent.
A prime example was Robert E. Lee. In 1856, he wrote a letter to his wife, Mary, in which he called bondage “a moral and political evil.” But, Lee promptly added, it was “useless to expatiate on its disadvantages” because “the painful discipline” that the slaves “are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race.” It was just as pointless to ask when slavery might disappear. Just “how long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence,” Lee pronounced, and he expressed no impatience with the pace of that providential process. “We must leave the progress as well as the result in his hands who sees the end; who Chooses to work by slow influences; & with whom two thousand years are but a Single day.”101
Through the workings of a wise, merciful providence or otherwise, some black southerners—about six out of every hundred, or some 262,000 people in all—had managed to leave the ranks of the slaves by 1860. Some had escaped from their masters or been freed by them during or shortly after the Revolutionary War. Others had been permitted to purchase their freedom with money acquired in one way or another. A majority of these freed blacks now lived in the countryside of the upper South, especially in Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Delaware. Most of the rest lived in Louisiana and the Carolinas. A fraction of this already small minority had managed to acquire some significant property and a degree of legal and even social toleration from their white neighbors.
Life was best for free blacks in the areas that were more recently acquired from France and Spain (notably Louisiana, Florida, and part of Alabama), in whose empires racial barriers had long been more porous than elsewhere in North America. Aspiring above all to gain fuller legal and social acceptance, members of that free-black elite did whatever they could to distance themselves from enslaved blacks and prove their loyalty and dependability to their white neighbors.102
But most free blacks were poor, eking out their livings as farm tenants, farmhands, casual laborers, factory workers, peddlers, maids, and washerwomen. Whites generally treated them as social pariahs and suspected them of sympathizing with the slaves and sometimes of actively conspiring with slaves against the masters. The rights of most non-slave black southerners, therefore, were sharply circumscribed, especially in periods when the white majority felt most insecure. But whether well-to-do and eager to gain greater social acceptance or poor, vulnerable, and closely watched, the South’s free blacks posed little threat to the social order before the Civil War.
As noted, the great majority of southern whites—three-quarters of them in 1860—did not belong to the dominant slave-owning class.103 But by the last decades of the prewar era, the adult men of this huge group had gained the right to vote, which made them a force to be reckoned with politically.
This large group was by no means uniform in either condition or outlook. Some, such as urban and rural day laborers and tenant farmers, were poor, propertyless, and had scant prospects of improving their condition significantly. But others were better-off craftsmen, small merchants, and—most numerous of all—independent (“yeoman”) farmers. Slavery affected this heterogeneous white majority in various, complex, and often contradictory ways. Attitudes toward large planters and their human property were equally diverse.
Some of these so-called common whites lived in the low-country “black belt” that took its name from the rich black soil on which the largest plantations rested. Others lived in the South’s “up-country” regions (the foothills, plateaus, and mountains) and had much less to do with large plantations and the market economy generally, raising crops primarily for their own consumption and buying very little from others.
Many, especially those in low-country plantation districts, looked with envy and admiration upon masters (who were sometimes also their kinfolk) and hoped someday to cross into their charmed circle. Savvy masters understood that they needed the support of these voters in order to reinforce their own domination of political life, so they encouraged these yeoman aspirations and affinities. They rented or lent slaves to yeomen and assisted them in other ways as well, employing them or their sons as overseers, lending them money, ginning their cotton, and transporting their harvested crops to market on generous terms. Whites of small means regularly served as the urban and rural patrols that sought out and summarily punished slaves found off their masters’ property without written permission.104
Among other whites with little property, distaste for slavery and especially resentment of big slave owners was more common. When employers forced white wageworkers, urban or rural, to compete with or work beside despised blacks, whether slave or free, white employees commonly responded with outrage. Members of the elite who ostentatiously flaunted their great wealth and treated poor and middling whites high-handedly could also provoke antipathy. In a few cases, such antipathy nourished a clear opposition to slavery. William H. Younce, who was raised in the hills of North Carolina, recalled later in life that he had become “more and more convinced in my own mind” that slavery “was wrong.”105 Basil Armstrong Thomasson, a small farmer who lived just a few counties away from Younce, anticipated in the 1850s that “the time is coming when they [the slaves] will be free.” And Thomasson prayed that such a time would “come quickly. Amen.”106
But even those who found slavery repulsive usually balked at advocating (or even hoping for) its abolition, especially because of their long-inculcated and now deep-seated aversion to blacks. In 1860, nearly all whites regarded African Americans as inherently inferior, degraded, and dangerous, and found the idea of living alongside them as anything like equals simply inconceivable.
Frederick Law Olmsted discovered as much during his travels through the inland South in the mid-1850s. A number of farmers who owned no slaves spoke freely with him about the subject. One white Mississippian pronounced slaves “a great cuss to this country” and even expressed sympathy for the slaves themselves. But he would not countenance any talk of abolition: “ ’Twouldn’t do to free ’em; that wouldn’t do no how!” Free the slaves, he was sure, “and they’d steal everything we made. Nobody couldn’t live here then.” Olmsted reported hearing substantially the same thing during more than a dozen conversations with “people of this class.”107
Masters and their spokesmen worked tirelessly to reinforce those beliefs. Preserving slavery benefited all whites, they declared, including whites who owned no slaves and might never do so. In the American South, they explained, the enslavement of blacks spared poorer whites from having to perform the most degrading tasks and from the social stigma that attached to such work. It turned their white skins into guarantees—badges—of not only freedom but also social equality. It was only “by the existence of negro slavery,” Jefferson Davis typically declared in 1860, that “the white man is raised to the dignity of a freeman and an equal.” Such equality among all whites regardless of wealth was possible only because “your own menial who blacks your boots, drives your carriage, who wears your livery, and is your own in every sense of the word, is not your equal.”108
Even the up-country contained some whites of small means who readily adapted to slavery and proved as anxious to climb the ladder of economic and/or political success in slave-based society. A prime example was Georgia’s Joseph E. Brown, an ambitious young man from the Blue Ridge Mountains who set out at age nineteen to obtain an education. He soon became a teacher, an attorney, a state legislator, and ultimately the state’s governor. Along the way, he purchased a few slaves and became an ardent defender of the institution.
Brown was especially adept at selling slavery to the non-slaveholding majority. His argument essentially echoed the one advanced by planter spokesmen like Jefferson Davis, but Brown’s humble origins lent his words greater weight. Since “with us, every white man … feels and knows that he belongs to the ruling class,” Brown would explain, “it is … the interest of the poor white laborer to sustain and perpetuate the institution of negro slavery.”109 Furthermore, he warned hill-country farmers, it was only slavery that kept most blacks out of their hills: “So soon as the slaves were at liberty,” he predicted, “thousands of them would leave the cotton and rice fields in the lower part of our State, and make their way to the healthier climate in the mountain region. We should have them plundering and stealing, robbing and killing; in all the lovely vallies of the mountains.”110
A majority of southern voters, most of them men without slaves, accepted this view of things, which helps to explain why they regularly gave slave owners and their advocates control of the state governments.111 David W. Siler, who belonged to one of North Carolina’s wealthiest slaveholding families, was elected and reelected to that state’s legislature during the 1850s by the voters of a mountain county (Macon) that contained relatively few other masters.112 The hill country of eastern Tennessee launched the political career of Andrew Johnson, who rose steadily from the state legislature to the U.S. House of Representatives, to the governor’s mansion, and then to the U.S. Senate. Slavery, Johnson intoned, was the inevitable outgrowth of human inequality and “is in perfect harmony” with democracy.113
During the 1850s, this combination of economic, social, and cultural security seemed to assure slavery’s survival and the slave owner’s supremacy indefinitely. “Stability, progress, order, peace, content and prosperity reign throughout our borders,” Robert Toombs bragged in 1856. “Not a single soldier is to be found in our widely-extended domain to overawe or protect society. The desire for organic change nowhere manifests itself.”114 The fact that the price of slaves soared during that decade seemed both to confirm and guarantee that prospect. It meant masters and would-be masters were confident enough of the system’s future to bid against one another for those bound laborers. Southern editor and statistician J.D.B. DeBow felt confident in predicting in 1854 that “our domestic institutions will remain as they are,” that he and his neighbors would continue to “enjoy the advantages of our labor”—indeed, that they would do so “forever.”115
In fact, the world that DeBow enthused about would be gone in little more than ten years’ time.