CHAPTER 17
Civil War buffs who disagree on so much might agree on one proposition: they know less about the Gag Rule Controversy than about any other major slavery crisis. Antebellum specialists who can explain picky details of the Kansas-Nebraska and Fugitive Slave controversies might flunk an exam on such large gag rule questions as why South Carolina’s James Henry Hammond initiated the controversy by proposing unprecedently sweeping repression of congressional slavery debate in 1835, on how and why New York’s Martin Van Buren and Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan obtained different dilutions of Hammond’s undiluted silencer in 1836, and on how and why Maryland’s William Cost Johnson (who?!) secured Hammond’s pure gag in 1840. Civil War experts may also puzzle over why such matters are important.1
Contemporaries suffered no such puzzlement. Leaders and followers who failed to silence slavery controversies throughout the 1850s remembered gag contentions as baptisms in failure. Contemporaries understood that contests over gagging congressional slavery debates epitomized why Yankees previously hostile to abolitionists became furious about the Slavepower. Participants also comprehended that this first Jacksonian slavery controversy demonstrated why Jacksonian “Democracy” would become increasingly undemocratic. Contemporaries furthermore understood that the gag rule exposed the impossible plight of the Opposition/Whig Party, should slavery issues ever become paramount. These early scars on the body politic would be opened again and again during the better-known later crises on the road to disunion.
1
Nothing seizes attention like an unexpected explosion. The Gag Rule Crisis was the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy. No one anticipated any such convulsion. Rather, congressmen convening in December of 1835 expected a little spat over abolitionist mail.2
No one trembled over that expected disagreement. During the fall, most Northerners had learned they could live with southern censorship of Dixie, so long as censorship stayed South. Most Southerners had meanwhile learned they could live with northern sermons about southern sanitization, so long as Yankees did not interfere with the sanitizers.
President Andrew Jackson, in his annual message to Congress, made contention over antislavery mailings a little more heated than expected by demanding federal rather than southern hands on “fanatics.” The South’s most popular slaveholder called antislavery “unconstitutional and wicked.” America’s favorite Democrat would “prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in the southern states, through the mail, of incendiary publication.”3 This time, the President would deploy federal officials, not neighbors’ frowns, to keep dissenters from receiving abolitionist appeals.
By urging censorship among whites to consolidate despotism over blacks, Andrew Jackson violated the color line which defined Jacksonian Democracy no less than white men’s republicanism. Still, Jackson’s suggested censorship remained a brief aside, buried in a message emphasizing more democratic proposals. Furthermore, Jackson’s momentary tangent was swiftly defeated, with Old Hickory, the leader who usually screamed when crossed, voicing no protest.
President Jackson’s proposal remains important as a preliminary sign of what Jacksonian “Democracy” would soon become. That tiny crack in the color line would widen, with Jackson’s blessings, because of the mentality Jackson for the first time here exuded in a presidential message. The Tennessee planter, apostle of pure white republicanism, would never allow republican agitation to damage black slavery. Andrew Jackson, majoritarian supreme, would also encourage southern minorities to demand the force of law if control over blacks was threatened. Jackson’s proposal was closer to Calhoun’s views about northern threats, slavery’s weaknesses, and democracy’s limits than anything in Van Buren’s statecraft. In ensuing years, when this side of Jackson’s thought moved from an aside in a presidential message to front and center on Jackson’s own agenda, Van Buren’s ascendancy over Calhoun within the Jackson Party would be finished, not least because Jackson would undercut his former favorite.
In late 1835 and early 1836, Mr. South Carolina helped delay resurrection of a Jackson-Calhoun alliance by turning on the President’s censorship proposal. The nation’s most famous southern ultra may seem an improbable opponent of Andrew Jackson’s first proposed ultra proslavery law. The southern President, having previously called abolition Calhoun’s fantasy, was now giving public lessons on antislavery’s “wicked and unconstitutional” nature. The Tennessean was also now urging fellow Southerners to make demands on the North which might further Calhoun’s political agenda. If Northern Democrats rejected Jackson-sanctioned censorship, Southern Democrats might secede from the party. Seceders might even attend Calhoun’s southern convention. A pure states’ rights national organization might result. To a Carolinian desperate for an issue to restructure an establishment, Jackson’s suggestion might seem heaven-sent.
Calhoun would not touch the stuff. The Carolinian, enemy of southern moderation and division, risked further dividing the South by urging moderation on the President. A federal government now censoring antislavery mailings, Calhoun warned, might later censor proslavery mailings. Moreover, if Congress could now decide antislavery was incendiary, Congress could later determine repression of abolitionism was immoral. Jackson’s pro-southern law “virtually” would “clothe Congress with the power” to destroy Southerners’ “lives and property.” Calhoun asked instead that Congress authorize each state to censor federal mails within its boundaries.4
Southern disagreement over whether to support federal censorship meant that Northerners felt no pressure on the issue. Northerners could go forward to require delivery of the mail. In 1836, the resulting law forbade postmasters from unlawfully detaining mails. The question remained whether federal postal officials, when obeying state laws protecting the public safety from incendiary deliveries, acted unlawfully. Federal postmaster generals answered that local postmasters must obey local law.5
For the next quarter-century, a few Northerners sporadically protested when a few Southerners sporadically censored the mails. But so long as neither northern state governments nor the national government acted as censor, most Northerners felt theirgovernments remained democratic. Allowing dirty hands to exist in the South was the long-standing price of national Union. The mails controversy showed that most Yankees would pay that price, so long as southern mud stayed in the South. The only losers in the mails controversy, slaves’ usual unspeakable loss aside, were southern extremists, who had renounced the one miserable divisive issue they had anticipated when journeying to Congress in the fall of 1835.
2
Suddenly, in December of 1835, the apparently perfect issue descended into southern extremists’ hands. The unexpected bonanza would provide the ideal shock, so it seemed at first, to force Southerners out of compromising national parties. The surprise controversy, as it quickly turned out, instead showed dismayed radicals how thoroughly southern compromisers were stuck in the establishment.
The process began in the fall of 1835, after abolitionists realized that mailings could not convert Southerners. The North’s tiny minority of Theodore Dwight Welds hit upon the alternate tactic of sending antislavery petitions to Congress. The gambit was refined so that petitions did not seek the perchance unconstitutional and assuredly radical emancipation of millions of southern slaves. Rather abolitionists prayed for the arguably more constitutional and assuredly more conservative freeing of Washington’s several hundred bondsmen. The Constitution gave Congress legislative power over the District. The existence of the nation’s most anti-republican institution in the republic’s capital seemed particularly unfortunate. After a handful of slaves had been freed in this safe and salutory context, the national govenment might consider spreading abolitionism a mite southward.
That calm train of fiery thought, so congenial to Charles Finney’s impassioned style of reasoned revival, brought a blizzard of paper descending on Congress. The new avalanche, looked at closely, hardly seemed menacing. A small percentage of voters signed antislavery petitions. A large percentage of petitioners were not voters, for disenfranchised women and children signed. Petitions sometimes contained no signatures, just lists of citizens, cut out of newspapers and glued to petitions. Even at its most conservative, early abolitionism failed to attract widespread northern support.6
Nor did the petition debate start only after many petitions, however signed, descended on Congress. Representatives had traditionally tabled antislavery prayers or buried them in committee. On December 16, 1835, the House reaffirmed traditional procedures by tabling two petitions. Among those voting to table was South Carolina’s James Henry Hammond.7
On December 18, 1835, a third petition was presented. This time, young Mr. Hammond rose. The freshman congressman urged “a more decided seal of reprobation” for insults to the South. The Carolinian moved that antislavery prayers not be received in the House. Instead of considering and tabling abolitionist appeals, the Carolina reactionary would gag the libertarian subject before it even entered deomcracy’s doors.8
Southern moderates swiftly realized that James Hammond here wielded an extremist’s dream of an issue. Self-respecting Southerners could not ignore their fellow slaveholder’s call to defy an attack on their honor. A deliberate decision to allow fanaticism inside congressional chambers would also revive fears awakened during the previous fall’s post office crises. Slaves residing in or near Washington would again know about the attack on the Domestic Institution. Slaveholders speculating about easing slavery away would again be instructed that continuing the institution was immoral. An extreme idea catching mainstream attention everywhere in the Western World would again be presented in deceptively moderate form to northern—and southern—moderates.
Congressman Francis Pickens from the South Carolina upcountry, a contemptuous young squire destined to be one of Hammond’s rivals to become Calhoun’s successor, outdid Hammond in explaining why southern congressmen must gag this abstraction “at the threshhold.” Pickens called irrelevant the fact that abolitionists “are, at present,… small” in numbers. Fanaticism at first always seems “like a speck in the distant horizon,” to be “despised for its weakness.” But zealots’ “appeal to the passions of the heart” becomes unconquerable as “it spreads and widens.” Eventually, fanaticism “sweeps with the fury of the rushing tornado” over “those who at first felt… contempt for its impotence.”
“The moral power of the world,” Pickens warned fellow Southerners, “is against us … England has emancipated her West Indies islands. France is also moving in the same direction.” Now the United States counterpart knocks on congressional doors. “Sooner or later, we shall have to contend” for “our consecrated hearthstones” or “abandon our country to become a black colony.” Better sooner than later. To conquer fanaticism, we must “meet it and strangle it in its infancy.”9
South Carolinians’ insistence that fanaticism be gagged in its infancy brought a far-off abstraction up close and personal to every southern congressman. James Hammond’s procedural motion challenged chummy rules of the clubbiest American political club, the United States Congress. Members’ respect for each other’s integrity, the source of club esprit, underlay Hammond’s insistence on change in club governance. Hammond would not allow insult inside the clubhouse. If you are as true to slavery as you claim, the South Carolina radical challenged southern moderates, you will not tolerate a petition calling you a sinner. You will insist that a dishonorable demand for a national hearing on your depravity be halted at the door, even if in the process you snap chummy club ties.
Once again, Francis Pickens outdid James Hammond in pressing the newest Carolina tactic on wary non-Carolinians. If any supposed representative “of the slaveholding race,” declared Pickens, “is so bowed down in subservience and servility to party discipline and party organization as to be drawn off this question, for the vile purpose of partisan ascendancy and political triumph in the miserable conflicts of the day, let me say to him, this is no place for him, unless he is prepared to cover himself with prostitution.” Nor is Congress any place for a southern gentleman aspiring “to please the dominant interests of this confederacy by sycophancy and flattery, for the purpose of clothing himself in the livery and trappings of office.” Any such recreant “is prepared to abandon the inheritance of the fathers, and cover his children with degradation and ruin.”10
Neither the congressional club nor party politicians who ran the shop could ever be the same after Hammond’s and Pickens’s challenge. In both sections, mainstream politicians were damned however they responded to the lunatic fringe. Southern congressmen could ignore or water down Hammond’s gag. They would thereby please northern political allies at the expense of seeming disloyal back home. Or southern representatives could insist on gagging the constituents of their northern allies. Southrons would thereby become true-blue southern at the expense of making their northern friends less electable in the North.
Yankee congressmen faced an equivalent no-win situation. Northerners could appease southern allies on gags, thereby saving their national political party but risking constituents’ displeasure. Or Northerners could defy southern colleagues, thereby appeasing their constituents but risking national political alliances. Hammond’s motion endangered every congressman’s local seat and national party—and thereby endangered national Union itself.
3
Nation-smashing, went up the almost immediate accusation, was exactly what James Hammond and Francis Pickens intended. John C. Calhoun, so it was widely charged, secretly conspired to put these young turks up to this assault on Union. Hammond, Pickens, and Calhoun were not the only “disunionist conspirators” suspected. If we could raid Hammond’s mailbox, became the northern chorus, we would find an undercover plot to destroy everything national.
Thus was nurtured the northern conception of a Great Slavepower Conspiracy, allegedly conspiring to dominate or destroy democratic Union. Thus ran the first explanation of why James Hammond initiated the Gag Rule Controversy. In discerning whether the first explanation was right, historians can use material that Northerners would have paid a fortune to secure. Hammond’s allegedly traitorous correspondence lies open for scrutiny in the Library of Congress, close to the legislative chamber where South Carolina’s supposedly treasonous plot reached public fruition. James Hammond was one of those rare leaders, God bless their souls, who saved everything. Hammond’s gag rule initiative was one of those rare moments when a culture’s way-out ultras captured the mainstream’s worried attention. Full sources plus supreme moment add up to rich opportunity. Posterity can discern whether, and if so why, the immoderate Mr. Hammond intended that his motion might push the moderate South down the road to disunion. We can also inquire whether, and if so why, conspirators put this inexperienced provoker up to his historic provocation, and whether, and if so why, John C. Calhoun was the chief Slavepower Conspirator.
Let us ask questions about the conspiracy instead of dismissing it. Throughout the twentieth century, historians have ridiculed the nineteenth-century notion that a Great Slavepower Conspiracy existed. The scoffing correctly emphasizes that the South was too divided and unrevolutionary for a tiny revolutionary crew to plot every step toward revolution. Conspiratorial planning was not even always omnipresent at the most revolutionary moments. Carolina nullifiers had assuredly not secretly plotted strategy with non-Carolinians before moving to the brink of revolution in 1832–3, which is one reason these odd revolutionaries felt so vulnerable on the brink. The only southern conspiracy in the nullification winter involved Calhoun and Clay secretly negotiating on the Nullifiers’ non-negotiable demands. The only Great Slavepower Conspiracy in the pre-nullification year involved Virginia Governor John Floyd secretly seeking Deep South governors’ collaboration in easing slavery away after the Nat Turner uprising.
The possibility remains that these earlier debacles had taught Carolinians to plot before plunging. In most revolutions, more confident revolutionaries than these once-burned Nullifiers secretly plot first steps before risking revolutionary action. We will see that in 1850–1 and 1860–1 extremists used conspiratorial correspondence to avoid the kind of scary isolation the Carolinians felt during the nullification winter. Did any such secret plot lie behind James Hammond’s Union-threatening initiative of 1835–6?
The investigation of whether a Great Slavepower Conspiracy produced Hammond’s motion should begin with Hammond himself. Did this freshman congressman intentionally provide the connecting link between revolutionary planning in South Carolina and disruptive agitation in Congress? Were his world views and intentions identical with men from his state who had long plotted separation from the Union? What sort of character was this inexperienced hothead who precipitated one of the great slavery crises?
In a state where an incredible 96% of the population was homegrown, James Henry Hammond was about as close to an outsider as any insider could be. He was not to the manor but to the hut born. His father, Elisha Hammond, was a New England migrant who lived out his days in Carolina as an embittered, impoverished outsider. Elisha at various times was reduced to supplying wormy meat to South Carolina College students and to teaching squires’ urchins at the upcountry’s Mount Bethel Academy. His frayed self-respect hung on one ambition. He prayed that future generations of Hammonds would be in the Big House conceived.
The resentful father’s ambition, internalized by the son, led James Henry Hammond to Thomas Cooper’s South Carolina College during the 1820s. Here young Hammond’s anguish about being poorer than his fellows eventually drove him to academic achievement they envied. After college, Hammond for months was trapped in a poor lad’s profession: tutoring his betters’ offspring. The aspiring son seemed to be, even more bitterly, the lowly father reborn.
James Hammond would have none of this destiny. In pushing past Carolinians, he had one legacy of Elisha’s Yankee ancestry. Young Hammond possessed a capitalist’s force, a materialist’s energy, a male ruthlessness too overwhelming to settle for backwoods classrooms. He wanted to be as wealthy, as famous, as much a mover of events as were his rich classmates—and right now.
After his year of tutoring in the backcountry, the aspirant returned to Columbia. He studied law, eked out a small practice, and in early 1830 moved into the political establishment. He became editor of Thomas Cooper’s faction’s politically fiery newspaper. He now had position. With cash, he could soar.11
The quickest way to get rich was to say two words: “I do.” James Hammond may have had the most roving, raunchiest eyes in the antebellum South. He also may have toyed illicitly with the most women, black and white. But only one sort of wife would do for this chauvinist. She must be rich. Or rather, she must be fabulously rich.
Around the time he assumed his editorship, Hammond met the proper candidate. Fabulous riches were about all that Catherine Fitzsimons possessed, from a pushy male’s perspective. The young Charleston maiden was ugly. She was shy. Her father, an Irishman, was a whiskey importer.
James Hammond would suffer it all for her purse. Catherine’s family, including her famous brother-in-law, Wade Hampton II, demanded that she resist the fortune-hunter. Hammond pressed. Miss Fitzsimons, not used to such force focused on her retiring person, yielded.12
Hammond’s new Big House graced a huge upcountry plantation on the Savannah River, less than a hundred miles from the groom’s Columbia haunts. Hammond was disappointed only with the lowish profits “his” plantation yielded. He blamed disappointing yields of cotton on “his” slaves, who he thought had been treated too leniently. The man who would soon pose as paternalist supreme tightened screws on “his” slaves, in the manner of the most ruthless Yankee. As for the would-be gentleman, he was early on seducing “his” female blacks, though he was still years away from sleeping with his favorite black mistress’s daughter.13
This un-Carolina-like arriviste wished above all else to be Carolina’s hero. He captured that reputation as easily as he secured his heiress. He had a brilliant mind. He had learned, probably internalized, Carolina assumptions at South Carolina College. No writer wrote a purer Carolina political gospel than did this self-made saint. No Carolina elitist bragged more exultantly about the state’s ancient aristocracy than did this ex-impoverished offspring of a Yankee. No settled gentleman bought such expensive paintings or looked down his nose so triumphantly at plebeians who did not properly appreciate such trappings. No bright young Carolinian more buttered up Carolina’s titans than did this aspirant for their approval and position.
The great men of Hammond’s upcountry were two, Thomas Cooper and John C. Calhoun. Cooper, ruler of the college, was the only true outsider in South Carolina’s ruling class. He thrilled a generation of college boys with tales of their mission, through disunion, to thwart worldwide radicalism. Calhoun was the great politician of Hammond’s upper Savannah River section. He enchanted Hammond with talk of Carolina’s destiny, through political reorganization, to save slavery and Union too. Both leaders saw their admirer as a talent Carolina needed. James Hammond seemed to possess more drive, more intelligence, more ambition than anyone of his generation. Cooper and Calhoun both praised him as a coming disciple. Hammond cherished both men’s compliments. He made both believe he cherished their statecraft.
The upcountry establishment ratified Cooper’s and Calhoun’s approval, only several years after Hammond captured his heiress, by elevating him, in his first election to anything, into the National House of Representatives for the 1835–6 session. The youthful titan, having climbed so far so fast, had no intention of shrinking into a merely observing freshman congressman. He wanted it all, national notoriety immediately too. He would lead Carolina troops into battle, if he could only find the right issue.
The James Hammond looking for the disruptive issue in late 1835 was thus that weird combination, the ultra-Yankee ultra-Carolinian. He swelled up and postured, as did Carolinians he copied, like the patriarch above American vulgarity. He then seized what he desired, like vulgar capitalists he attacked. His heiress’s family rejected him. He still pushed himself upon her, always protesting he was the soul of chivalry. The wife who made him rich desired only a peaceful and respectable home. He still would not give up debauchery with his slavewomen, even while protesting that Yankees-come-South rather than true-blue Southerners bore responsibility for mulattoes. His slaves would not work hard enough. He lashed them into submission, gaining a reputation he confessed to despising above all others, all the time bragging that the southern patriarch was benevolence personified. He was a ruthless young egotist, at once irresistible and useless to resist within the contemptuous world he would personify and perpetuate. Even before he raced off to Congress, the whimpering Carolina gentry, energies depleted after nullification, inclined towards him as to a magnet.
After his gag rule initiative, fellows back home wrote to their suddenly prominent congressman, praising him for radicalizing the establishment. Over a dozen such letters survive in the Hammond papers. Northerners who believed in a Great Slavepower Conspiracy, if they could have read Hammond’s mail, would have felt vindicated. “We should have dissolved the union when Charleston was blockaded,” wrote Thomas Stark from Carolina. Hammond’s motion, prayed Stark, might now disrupt “this corrupt and no longer to be tolerated Union.”14
Thomas Stark and fellow upcountry elitists shared with Hammond a dismal view of mainstream southern egalitarians. National political parties bribed southern national spoilsmen to care more about party than slavery. Southern demagogues kept southern masses asleep to antislavery danger. Hammond’s motion, praised Hammond’s pals, might shame southern politicians into acting like Southerners should. Parties might dissolve. The southern rabble might wake up. “It is really necessary to alarm our people,” warned E. W. Johnston, editor of Cooper’s Columbia newspaper. The slavery question “does not give them half the apprehension it should.”15
Letters like Johnston’s, praying that Hammond’s initiative might awaken the South and lead to disunion, came to the congressman almost exclusively from Thomas Cooper’s Columbia, South Carolina, crowd. Only one non-Carolinian stands out among Hammond’s correspondents. Professor Beverley Tucker of William and Mary College wrote Hammond a spectacular disunion missive. “Now is the time and this is the topic,” the Virginia professor instructed Thomas Cooper’s student. “Let the decisive step be taken.” Yesterday, South Carolina should have stepped from nullification to secession over the tariff.
No matter. Tomorrow, South Carolina could safely secede over slavery. Other Southerners would “see that an attempt to use coercion against” South Carolina “would light the flames of a servile war.” Perhaps the non-Carolina South could force the general government to allow South Carolina to secede safely. Other states would then follow. If, on the other hand, non-Carolina slaveholders failed to stop coercion, “they would be constrained to join you, or see their own dwellings consumed by the flames kindled to destroy you.” Either way, exulted Tucker, the ensuing southern confederacy “would be the most flourishing and free on earth.” The North “would break to pieces.”16
Hammond used Beverley Tucker’s letter the way a believer in a Great Slavepower Conspiracy would have predicted. The Carolina congressman sent the Virginian’s letter to others who might be prodded towards disunion—i.e. to pals residing near Thomas Cooper. South Carolina’s governor, George McDuffie of Forty Bale fame, exemplified the response. The governor thanked Hammond “for Judge Tucker’s letter…. I entirely concur with him.” We must exorcise the demon, if the magic circle is drawn in blood.” Professor Cooper was particularly quick to advise his former student. “I foresee it will end in a dissolution of the Union,” counseled Cooper, “for we have no safety in any other measure. But I fear the Southern Van Burenites.”17
Thomas Cooper sent instructions for the next step toward disunion, should his fears be justified. “Your table will be loaded with insolent petitions,” predicted the professor. Eventually, the House northern majority will vote to receive antislavery appeals and refer them to committee. Even a committee report “strongly in favour of the South” must not be tolerated. A House committee which now reported against antislavery could later report against slavery. Southern representatives should accordingly en masse “leave the House.” Secession of southern congressmen might lead to secession of southern states.18
There it was, the smoking gun, the revolutionary plot, the proof of a conspiracy to break up the Union. None other than South Carolina’s Professor of Revolution, the very Thomas Cooper who had first calculated the value of Union back in 1827, was here using secret letters to coach his student, the provoker of the Gag Rule Controversy, towards revolution. But this undeniable proof of revolutionary plotting best shows why revolution was still a quarter-century away. Cooper plotted an initial walk out of the House, not the Union. And what congressman beyond the Carolina delegation would follow Hammond? Southern compromisers were more likely to say good riddance when Nullifiers departed Congress. Thomas Cooper’s smoking gun of a letter ultimately displayed not revolutionaries leading the South but conspirators plotting their own exile.
The Cooper crowd’s letters reveal another reason why rebellion was far off in 1835. Carolina’s secessionists, however desperate about their isolation in the South, were most vicious when cutting up other Carolinians, especially John C. Calhoun. Northerners would have been flabbergasted to learn that revolutionary plotters despised “The Father of Secession” for being so cursedly unrevolutionary. Professor Cooper, not Senator Calhoun, sent James Hammond the disunion advice, and Congressman Hammond shared his teacher’s distrust of Calhoun. In 1831, Hammond had helped push Calhoun out of hiding on nullification. In 1833, Thomas Cooper had been one of the few Carolinians who castigated Calhoun for negotiating on non-negotiable demands. In 1836, Hammond privately predicted to E. W. Johnston, Cooper’s editorial mouthpiece, that Calhoun would again retreat from radicalism. “Your views about Calhoun,” Johnston answered, are “stolen, I think, from myself. I have been, for the last 3 years, steadily cursing Calhoun…. We work on here, and make a doctrine popular. Of a sudden, he comes forward, seizes it, … and ruins the impression which might have been made on the country, by stitching the whole affair to his own political kite-tail.’19
While Hammond’s mail reveals a Carolina disunion plot not involving Calhoun, did Cooper and fellow conspirators influence James Hammond’s gag rule initiative? If the question is posed broadly, in terms of whether Hammond’s relations with Cooper and other Columbia ultras helped produce a disruptive attitude, the answer must be, of course. A revolutionary conspiracy, whether or not it causes a revolution, is itself the effect of a revolutionary mentality already successful enough to produce plotting. Hammond’s correspondents illuminate Hammond’s own isolation from the southern mainstream, his distrust of mobocratic politicians who were allegedly selling out the South, his determination to goad the South out of Union-saving parties. The conspiratorial atmosphere around Thomas Cooper’s hothouse college, when combined with Hammond’s ambition, yielded a young man in a great big hurry to provoke trouble.
But if the conspiratorial question is posed narrowly, in terms of whether Cooper’s coaching directly produced Hammond’s provoking motion, the answer must be, no. Cooper conspired. But Hammond acted. The crucial action came before the conspiracy. No evidence exists, in a cache of letters full of conspiratorial evidence, that anyone suggested before the event that Hammond help break up the Union by moving that petitions not be received. The evidence proves on the contrary that a major event involving antislavery petitions was unexpected.
Only after Hammond moved rejection of the petitions did Cooper and his followers send secret advice to their favorite congressman. We will soon see that in 1836, after Cooper’s predicted setback occurred, James Hammond paid no attention to the professor’s projected next step. Before and after his historic motion, Hammond followed his own wavering instincts rather than the professor’s conspiratorial directives.
Indeed, like most of Cooper’s students, Hammond wavered on the big question: whether the professor was right that only revolution would suffice. Cooper and Hammond had come to Carolina radicalism from too different a direction. Cooper had arrived in Carolina after storming the Bastille in Paris. Hammond had taken the Yankee rather than the Jacobinical road to Carolina power. His capitalist’s caution about adventurism meshed with other Carolinians’ fear of revolutionary disorder. James Hammond was a bit too much like the conservative Calhoun to be Cooper’s perfect clone. He was also a bit too much like the precipitous Cooper to be Calhoun’s fondest admirer.
Hammond’s in-between position was obvious in key sentences written to a congressional colleague right before the Gag Rule Controversy. It is “barely possible,” Hammond declared, that “abolitionists may be alarmed. It is equally possible that Northern states may legislate them down.”20
Calhoun would have rid Hammond’s sentence of that “barely.” Mr. Nullifier considered it very possible that a creditable disunionist threat would arouse Northerners to censor abolitionists. Cooper would have rid Hammond’s sentence of that critical “possible.” Carolina’s arch-secessionist considered it impossible for the South to defy world-wide antislavery inside the Union.
After Congress passed a gag rule softer than Hammond’s, Hammond again wavered between Cooper’s and Calhoun’s brands of toughness. In June of 1836, Hammond wrote Beverley Tucker that “I have scarcely a hope … the dissolution of the Union” can be avoided. In a “purely SpoilsGovernment,” only a “little hope existed” for a party based on “Principle.”21
Calhoun would have called those “scarcely a hope”s and “little hope”s too pessimistic. Cooper would have called any hope too optimistic. Thomas Cooper clearly controlled not only too little of the South and too little of South Carolina but also too little of his pupils’ mentality to mastermind events. James Hammond, disunion conspirators’ closest thing to a point man in Washington, was no puppet.
Rather, Hammond’s motion, like the rest of his meteoric rise, came precisely because he clamored ahead without premeditated plot or traditional scruples or inherited positions. Nowhere did old codes inhibit this nouveau pusher. Back home, he seized a wife, slept with “wenches,” drove field hands, always with only a thin veneer of gentlemen’s scruples. So too in Congress, he seized on a new procedure for destroying petitions, with scarcely a thought of old mechanisms. Since he was a freshman congressman, his mind was not cluttered with memories of how petitions had always been treated. Innocence of precedent gave him the mental flexibility to see an “impromptu” way, suddenly and spontaneously, to condemn antislavery petitions in a new and total way.22 His attempt to galvanize the South was the instinctive gesture of a radicalized arriviste, in a rush to see if Calhoun or Cooper—or James Hammond—would be the prophet of southern salvation. A world generating such a loose cannon was perchance a worse threat to Union than any tightly controlled conspiracy could have been.
4
If tired old Carolina radicals rallied with relief behind this fresh new spirit who charged, for a Carolinian, so spontaneously ahead, the nervous gentry found Hammond more attractive still when he displayed the uncertainty hidden behind his boldness. James Hammond, more even than John C. Calhoun, was destined to become the archetypal South Carolina reluctant revolutionary. The reluctance soon to paralyze his actions and already defining his mentality was first obvious in his first full-scale congressional oration, defending his gag rule initiative.
On February 1, 1836, Hammond claimed the House floor for an appeal to authoritarians to conquer King Numbers.23 Hammond’s oratory carried Carolina upper-class consciousness to a color-blind anti-egalitarian extreme. This upper-class position left racist slaveholders, devotees of egalitarian republicanism for whites, too far behind to follow. And then in oratory, as he would in action, Hammond finished the Carolina act. Having charged recklessly ahead to base slavery on universal subordination of all lower classes, he slunk cautiously back to base a Peculiar Institution on racial inequality.
“Domestic slavery,” began James Henry Hammond the charger, “produces the highest toned, the purest, best organization of society that has ever existed on the face of the earth.” The Slave South, bragged Carolina’s nouveau aristocrat, has “a government of the best, combining all the advantages, and possessing but few of the disadvantages, of the aristocracy of the old world.” Slaveholders lacked “the exclusiveness, the selfishness, the thirst for sway, the contempt for others, which distinguish the nobility of Europe.” Slaveholders had a European gentry’s “education, their polish, their minificence, their high honor, their undaunted spirit. Slavery does create an aristocracy—an aristocracy of talents, of virtue, of generosity and courage.”
Hammond moved from praise of upper-class Southerners to advocacy of an alliance with upper-class Northerners. He sounded like the Calhoun who briefly considered linking Yankee capitalists and southern planters in a reactionary Opposition/Whig regime. Emancipation, warned Thomas Cooper’s prize pupil, is “a mere ramification of the great controversy between hereditary power and ultimate agrarianism.” The “sans-culottes,” proclaiming “equality to all mankind,” would soon hunt down northern squires. “On the banks of the Hudson, the Ohio, and the Susquehanna—on the hills, and in the vales of New England—they are mustering their hosts.” Gentlemen “of substance” in the North had better look out, for the “bloodhounds they are settling upon us” will “desolate” and “overturn” them.
There spoke a man who considered slaveholding not some peculiar institution on one side of a color line but a typical form of human domination. There was expressed a theory legitimating color-blind, upper-class hegemony over all majorities and all mobs. Hammond here riveted the idea of slavery to a dominator’s world view, a conception growing out of slaveholders’ rule over their slaves and leading to patriarchal control of all folks poorer. Why was undemocratically gagging belief in abolitionism right in an egalitarian republic? Because the upper class must decide for the masses, lest the masses bring proletarian revolution to America.
Hammond’s trouble was that this class-based natural outcome of a slaveholders’ world view was unnatural to race-obsessed slaveholders beyond South Carolina. Most North American slaveholders, to say nothing of the nonslaveholder majority North and South, considered an aristocratic outcome most unnatural in an egalitarian republic. Their ruling idea was Andrew Jackson’s: domination of blacks must exist alongside of equality for whites. Most Southerners wished a democracy without aristocrats, save for an aristocracy of color.
Hammond swiftly acknowledged the southern majority’s hegemony. Perhaps he realized that, after a little indiscreet adventuring, the general had better get back with the troops. Perhaps this elitist general, like so many Carolinians, was partially caught up in the troops’ egalitarian ideology. Like the Thomas Dew who first called slavery universally right and then called Virginia too far north for bondage, like the John C. Calhoun who first called for a North-South upper-class alliance and then urged a northern lower class/southern upper class combination, James Hammond could not sustain an elitist’s color-blind posture.
James Hammond’s praise for upper-class aristocracy thus became, in the next sentence, a hosannah for a classless white democracy. “In a slave culture,” he claimed, “every freeman is an aristocrat. Be he rich or poor, if he does not possess a single slave,” a white man born with the right skin had “all the natural advantages.” So wavered the arriviste who, when a poor freeman, had lusted to be a rich aristocrat and who now, as a newly crowned aristocratic prince, was determined to keep poorer whites outside the Carolina legislature.
At least, defense of racial aristocracy was bringing Hammond back in sight of those he would lead. The Carolina orator continued his retreat by claiming race domination, not class hegemony, was most at stake. “Sir,” warned Hammond, emancipation would instantly provoke “civil war between the whites and blacks.” Whites would win, but at fearful cost to themselves and zero benefit for disinterested benevolence. “Blacks would be annihilated or once more … reduced to slavery.”
Let gentlemen not scoff, warned Hammond, that abolitionists were too few to bring off such riot. The New England Anti-Society was ridiculed, but four years ago, because only eleven formed it. National antislavery societies were scoffed at, only two years ago, because scarcely sixty existed.
Now look! Over 300 societies flourished in 1836. They contained over 100,000 members. Some 300 petitions were in Washington. Some 40,000 fanatics signed them. “The deep, pervading uncontrollable excitement,” spreading “like wildfire in the prairies,” throws “its red glare up to heaven.” In the face of that glare, “loyal” Southerners must stand and deliver. “He who shrinks from taking the boldest ground at once is a traitor! A traitor to his native soil!” A traitor to his glorious ancestors. “A traitor to his helpless offspring.”
That challenge, coming from a class-ridden zealot who twisted back to emphasize mainstream southern racial fears, had to be met. But did slaveholders, to be true to slavery, have to go as far as a contemptuous squire whose anti-egalitarian attitudes seemed inimical to a slaveholding democrat? And did slaveholders, to be loyal to race control, have to destroy national political parties and menace the Union too? Hammond’s motion for an extreme gag on white men’s democratic discussion had to be faced—and finessed.