CHAPTER 27
Southern debate about how to oppose the Wilmot Proviso resembled earlier strategic arguments. Once again, Democrats and Whigs differed over the best slaveholder defense. Once again in South Carolina, Calhounites disagreed with secessionists over how to get past the established political parties. But this time, South Carolina secessionists fought each other over how to accomplish disunion. And this time, Calhoun secured a southern convention—and prayed that some South might attend.
1
David Wilmot proposed his proviso in 1846. By 1848, the North-controlled House and South-controlled Senate were still stymied over the freesoil proposal. The question of whether to ban slavery from the Mexican Cession passed to the people, in a national presidential referendum.1
Southern voters had to choose between evasions. Neither major party could stand unqualifiedly for or against the Wilmot Proviso without self-destructing. On the Democratic side, Martin Van Buren and fellow Wilmot admirers would have relished a crusade against Slavepower expansion. But Southern Democrats would then have seceded from the party.
The Democracy’s southern wing preferred protection of slave property in the national domain. Alternatively, Southern Democrats would extend the 36°30′ line to the Pacific, submit to the Wilmot Proviso north of the line in the Mexican Cession, and settle for slavery being allowed southward. That compromise would erase Wilmot’s insult and might make southern California slave soil.
Most Northern Democrats feared political dangers in the North of inviting the Slavepower to seize half of California. But most of the northern faithful also feared that a party pledged to block slavery’s expansion would lose the South. The better way was to fudge. Democrat’s favorite fudge, variously labeled Popular or Squatter Sovereignty, sought to defuse nation-shattering controversy by moving contention from Congress to localities most involved. Instead of the House and Senate deciding on the Wilmot Proviso, settlers in the Mexican Cession should decide whether to allow slavery into their territories.
Popular Sovereignty grew out of earlier Jacksonian economic and slavery positions. Distrust for Big Brother/Distant Government had guided Jackson’s thrust against national banks, national roads, and other Adams-Clay nationalistic commercial measures. Disdain for congressional talk or action about slavery had inspired gag rules. Applying old Democratic Party solutions to new problems led the party to coalesce behind the presidential candidacy of Michigan’s Lewis Cass, an early apostle of Popular Sovereignty.
The decision to let settlers decide masked a strategic nondecision. To Northerners, Popular Sovereignty meant that territorial residents could ban slavery wherever they liked. To Southerners, Popular Sovereignty meant that squatters could abolish slavery only when their area was about to become a state. While a territory was in the national domain, so Southerners argued, the national Constitution dictated that slavery, like all citizens’ property, must be protected.
In 1848 and for years thereafter, Democrats ducked this North-South difference. Let-the-people-on-the-spot-decide became a magic formula for not deciding when to let local folk decide. Popular Sovereignty as the Democratic Party’s solution to the territorial controversy thus became akin to congressional nonsolution of the Texas Controversy. Then Northern and Southern Democrats, unable to agree over whether Texas should be admitted the Thomas Hart Benton northern way or the Milton Brown southern way, had agreed to give the President the option. Now Northern and Southern Democrats, unable to agree on when territorial settlers could vote slavery down, decided that a non-decision on timing would best maintain party unity.2
While National Democratic Party traditions yielded a program to evade decision, National Whig traditions yielded no program at all. Whigs had lately possessed an effective answer to Democrats’ no-congressional-decision-on-slavery-in-territories: No Territories, period. But No Territories had become irrelevant. Territory had been annexed. Northern Whigs would not allow slavery in annexed turf, just as they previously would not compromise on gag rules or Texas Annexation. And Southern Whigs, having learned from Texas the cost of caving in to their Yankee wing, would not compromise on the Wilmot insult.
With no middle ground on slavery available, Whigs concurred on the perfect candidate: a national hero with no program on slavery, General Zachary Taylor of Louisiana. Southern Whigs relished their resulting favorable position before the southern electorate. The Democracy’s ambiguity on Popular Sovereignty removed Southern Democrats’ advantage in 1844: that their party alone stood pledged to a clear-cut proslavery program. Meanwhile, Southern Whigs reclaimed their advantage of 1836 and 1840: that their man was to the manor born. Zachary Taylor, large slaveholder from the farthest South, looked safer for slavery than Michigan’s Lewis Cass, evasive politico from the farthest North. “Shall it be said,” asked Alexander Stephens of Georgia, “that the South can not trust their peculiar interest in the hands of a cotton and sugar planter of Louisiana, but must look for a man in Detroit, who has not a feeling in common with them?”3
Stephens’s question had a good answer: Whigs’ favorite southern general was as ambiguous as Democrats’ Popular Sovereignty principle. Zachary Taylor had never defined Whiggery. He hated agitation on slavery. Although served by over 100 bondsmen, his persuasion had always been nationalistic. His profession, the military, furthered interest in building national rather than sectional power. His area, the Louisiana black belt, had nourished the only significant Deep South nationalistic opposition to Jacksonian states’ rights principle in 1828. His favorite Whigs were Border South nationalists. Southern Whigs could no more be sure that their Deep South general would lead pro-southern campaigns than Southern Democrats could be sure that Lewis Cass’s Popular Sovereignty would be applied only in the post-territorial phase.4
Taylor’s ambiguity, however, had its Whiggish attractiveness. Southern Whigs’ longstanding pleas that their presidential candidates were the more promising sectional partisans had always collided with Whigs’ claims to be the more nonpartisan patricians. Taylor was devoutly nonpartisan. He even toyed with running as a No Party rather than the Whig Party candidate.5 The general’s contempt for partisans was a mood for this hour, a moment when two-party politicians were turning off constituents by offering no choices except evasions. Maybe the military hero as anti-politician might bring serenity to the nation—and peace with honor to Taylor’s own planting class.
In 1844, when James K. Polk defeated Henry Clay, the Tennessee Democrat had swept all Lower South states and secured 51.4% of southern popular votes. In 1848, the Whigs’ Zachary Taylor matched Polk’s section-wide popular vote and secured three Lower South states. The President-elect was the first from the Deep South (and the last until Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1960s). Southern Whigs were hopeful. After the horrors of the Texas issue, Zachary Taylor might yet make Whiggery safest for slaveholders.
2
Southerners outside the establishment saw no hope in the Election of 1848’s campaign or outcome. The contest between an uncertain man and an uncertain principle seemed to anti-party South Carolinians especially disastrous in the face of a growing third party. Martin Van Buren, still fuming that the Democracy had turned him down over Texas in 1844, left the National Democratic Party in 1848, at least temporarily, after the Wilmot Proviso was rejected. The Little Magician, who had long been attacked in the South as Cuffee-like pretender of friendship, accepted the Free Soil Party’s nomination. Van Buren ran on the Wilmot Proviso basis. He would not attack slavery in southern states. He would “only” keep it out of new territories.
This containment version of dislike for the bullying Slavepower won Van Buren one out of every seven Yankee popular votes. Because of the Magician’s support, in 11 of the 15 northern states the winning presidential candidate received less than 50% of voters’ accord. The South’s phony old friend apparently possessed leverage over the northern balance of power. In the face of this Free Soil Party, South Carolinians stormed, southern leaders betrayed slavery by debating whether an ambiguous principle or an ambiguous candidate could best save the South.
South Carolinians fell back on their old explanation for treachery at the top: politicos’ interest. Not slavery’s needs but spoilsmen’s appetites and mobocracy’s vulnerabilities governed southern politics. Demagogues, desiring national patronage, required national parties and therefore sectional lethargy. Leaders thus lulled the gullible electorate with soothing ambiguities. What might wake up the citizenry?
One answer, campaigns to perpetuate slavery, remained untested. Desire to diffuse slavery through a safety valve remained non-heretical in various Souths located north and west of South Carolina, as the late Texas annexation and Kentucky slavery debates had shown. Only in Carolina were proslavery craftsmen such as James Hammond and William Harper routinely polishing perpetual slavery polemics in the 1830s and ‘40s. “The greater part of” slaveholders outside Carolina, complained Robert Barnwell, Thomas Cooper’s respected successor as president of South Carolina College, were “mere negrodrivers, believing themselves wrong and only holding on to their negroes as something to make money out of.” Worse, Carolinians themselves had “retrograded … and must soon fall into the same category.”6 With Carolina becoming more like the South than the South was becoming like Carolina, politicians would eternally debate ambiguous solutions and voters would understandably snooze.
Most South Carolinians’ unambiguous preference remained the same: secede. Most Carolinians’ post-nullification deterrent to disunion also remained identical: too scary to secede alone. Only a few Carolinians remained dedicated to their little state forcing revolution on all other Southerners.7 The more popular secessionist solution in the late 1840s better fit Carolina’s reluctant revolutionary mentality. Carolina should secede, but only after waiting to ensure that several other states would cooperate.
James Henry Hammond, a leader of this Cooperative State Secession movement, epitomized the colliding precipitous and cautious impulses that informed the movement. Hammond was that precipitator of the gag rule who had fled to Europe when Southern Democrats compromised his initiative. Hammond’s 1836 conspiratorial correspondence with Thomas Cooper’s disunion crowd and with Virginia’s Beverley Tucker had yielded much provocative rhetoric but little sustained revolutionary planning. In 1842, Carolinians raised their favorite charger/retreater to the governor’s chair.
While sitting in that chair, Governor Hammond brought to a grotesque private climax the same passive/aggressive impulses which, when more attractively and publicly deployed, drew Cooperative Secessionists toward him. James Hammond’s four nieces, daughters of the powerful Wade Hampton, aged 13 to 18, made themselves available to the governor. These girls came “all of them rushing on every occasion into my arms and covering me with kisses, lolling in my lap, pressing their bodies almost into mine,… encountering warmly every part of my frame.” No man “of flesh and blood,” as the uncle defended his acquiesence in his nieces’ pleasure, could “withstand this.” He and they let his hands “stray unchecked over every part of” their bodies, including “the most secret and sacred regions—and all this for a period of more than two years continuously.” But the uncle with the straying hands would not go too recklessly far. His adventures stopped “short of direct sexual intercourse.”8
Suddenly, a niece seated atop the governor thought Hammond held back too little. She told her parents. Her father, Wade Hampton, privately declared Hammond beneath contempt. The contemptible uncle responded in his typically aggressive/passive manner. He wandered out-of-doors, making himself available for one of Hampton’s bullets. Nothing happened.9
After his term as governor was finished, James Hammond passively withdrew to his isolated swamps. He there wrote aggressive tracts in defense of that cause only Carolinians were much defending in the 1840s, perpetual slavery.10 Meanwhile, this impure author of the purest Carolina gospel awaited Carolinians’ next call to lead a charge ahead—but not all the way afield.
Debate between Hammond’s more numerous, more cautious Cooperative State Secessionists and Carolina’s more scarce, more precipitous Separate State Secessionists left the state’s most famous extremist isolated again. Against secessionists of various stripes in South Carolina and against ambiguities of various sorts in the Democratic and Whig parties, John C. Calhoun clung to his favorite post-nullification remedy. A southern convention should issue ultimatums. Then a South united could save itself, in the Union if possible, out of it if necessary.11
As usual in affairs southern, a divided society agreed best on what to be against. Democrats, Whigs, Calhoun, Cooperative State Secessionists, and Independent State Secessionists all concurred that Southerners must resist freesoilers. They also agreed that southern divisions undermined resistance. But how could divisions be ended?
3
Soon after the Election of 1848, Calhoun called a purely southern, nonpartisan congressional caucus to solve that problem.12 Alas, the South’s most committed party politicians were as distrustful as ever of his forays outside party. Georgia’s powerful youthful triumvirate—the Whigs’ Robert Toombs and Alexander Stephens and the Democrats’ Howell Cobb—led the southern congressional establishment’s opposition to Calhoun’s caucus. Toombs and Stephens urged southern colleagues to rally behind the Whig Party and their own native son, President-elect Zachary Taylor.13Cobb urged southern leaders to continue ruling the nation through the Democratic Party.14
This southern attachment to national parties, at a moment when neither party served the region’s anti-Proviso frenzy, showed the strength of the two-party system in the South.15 Both national parties, if unsatisfyingly equivocating on new slavery issues, called forth satisfying memories. So many treasured battles had been fought for so many years, at national and especially local levels, for and against individualism and community, a galvanizing presidency and a chaste Congress, entrepreneurial adventures and state-regulated commerce, Old Hickory the hero and King Andrew the Caesar. By saying no to Calhoun, national party leaders, speaking for a million southern voters out in the countryside, declared that party shrines remained too holy to be abandoned over this probably temporary crisis.
Understanding what he was up against, Calhoun wrote a Southern Address long on ambiguous language. Southerners should unite, went the phrasing, “on all necessary measures. Beyond this,” Calhoun lamely prayed, “it would not be necessary to go.”16 But most of Dixie’s most powerful leaders would go nowhere with John C. Calhoun. After three angry meetings and a final caucus vote, less than 40% of southern congressmen rallied behind Calhoun’s vague Southern Address.
Calhoun, perhaps realizing that this fight was his last, determined to appeal over congressmen’s heads. The South, he urged in a region-wide correspondence, must at last convoke that southern convention. An ultimatum from a united South might give Northerners pause. That remedy “might yet save the Union, or failing to do that, the South and its institutions.”17
First, some South had to call a convention. South Carolinians, the only Southerners eager for a new beginning, could not take the lead, lest they thereby brand a southern convention as a prelude to secession. Nor could Carolina extremists openly urge others to step forward, lest that effort too damn the movement. They had to lay low. If they laid too low, no southern convention might be called.
The best non-Carolina hope for a call lay in the Mississippi Slaveholders Convention, meeting in response to Calhoun’s Southern Address in October 1849. Calhoun instructed Mississippi correspondents to initiate a southern convention. Mississippi delegates to the Slaveholders Convention kept his instructions under wraps. “We adopted the idea with ardor,” Calhoun was told. “But all concurred in opinion, that if we should proceed on a course recommended from South Carolina, we should fail.”18 For the same reason, South Carolina’s semi-official secret agent to the Slaveholders Convention declined an invitation to speak. The agent had to work around Mississippians’ “dread” of committing “themselves to any mode of action having its origin in South Carolina.”19
A Carolinian for once did not need to lead. Mississippi’s General E. C. Wilkinson, giving the Mississippi conclave’s only elaborate address, summed up the need for a southern convention. Wilkinson called California perfect for slave labor. But with no territorial slave code and much “bluster and menace” against slavery, slaveholders felt more comfortable risking fortunes elsewhere.
In California and throughout the Union, lamented Wilkinson, events were moving towards “a speedy annihilation of slavery.” Black bondage “is openly talked of everywhere, even among the slaveholders themselves, as a doomed institution.” Slaveholders “usually excused” bondage as a lamentable necessity and “scarcely ever thought of vindicating it.” Once concede slavery is wrong, warned Wilkinson, “and you admit” you must “get rid of it as soon as you safely can.”
While slaveholders were becoming more and more demoralized, slavery was becoming “more and more circumscribed.” At the time of the American Revolution, eleven of thirteen states were slaveholding. By 1849, five of the eleven had rid themselves of the institution. Delaware would soon join the nonslaveholding majority. Kentucky would not be far behind. Everywhere in more northern climes, agitation, violence, impotent fugitive slave laws, and sale of slaves southwards led masters to abandon the cause. In the Upper South, those who stuck it out were confronted with decreasing slaves, increasing nonslaveholders, and the cry of “down with the privileged few.” That cry had resounded with Cassius Clay, and “let no one imagine it is forever dead. It is soon to be revived under a new and more terrible form, and is just as certain ultimately to prevail.”
In six to eight years, predicted Wilkinson, what with emancipated states and new states, the North would possess the three-fourths’ majority needed for a constitutional amendment. By then, Lower South blacks, augmented by slaves sold from the Upper South, would outnumber whites. Freedmen crowded in black belts would precipitate race war. Only an immediate southern convention could avoid catastrophe.20
The Mississippi Slaveholders Convention, accepting Wilkinson’s remedy, called all southern states “to counsel together for their common safety.” A southern convention, resolved the Mississippians, should meet in Nashville, Tennessee, on the first Monday of June 1850.21 Calhoun, jubilant that his own brainchild was coming to pass for the first time since nullification, urged Southerners to descend on Nashville. “The course adopted by Mississippi,” he wrote Florida’s David Yulee, is “the only one that affords any prospect of saving the Union; or if that should fail, of certainly saving ourselves.”22
James Hammond, distrustful of Calhoun’s Union-saving, would use the southern convention to secure Cooperative State Secession. “If the Convention does not open the way to dissolution,” he wrote one of Virginia’s very few secessionists, Edmund Ruffin, “I hope it shall never meet.”23At the convention, several states could pre-agree on secession. Then Union could be safely sundered.24
Before anything precipitous could be safely accomplished, enough Southerners had to attend the Nashville Convention. Two-party politicians who resolved to stay away formed a Who’s Who of southern leaders. The entire Border South, Louisiana, and North Carolina sent nary a delegate. Texas dispatched one, Arkansas scraped up two, Virginia and Florida a bare half-dozen each. Ninety-five percent of Georgia voters stayed home when asked to select representatives. Only South Carolinians marched on Nashville with a full delegation and a fair sampling of state leaders. The southern establishment had expected just such a South Carolina over-representation, which is why the great southern middle remained anchored in Washington.
4
South Carolina’s reactionary revolutionaries should have returned home after their first glimpse of Nashville.25 Tennessee’s capital city, situated in the middle of the Middle South, epitomized why the southern center half-wished South Carolina would drift off to sea. To the north of Tennessee loomed Cassius and Henry Clay’s Kentucky. To the south lay William L. Yancey’s Alabama and Jefferson Davis’s Mississippi. Traveling east in Tennessee from Nashville, one soon came upon mountainous terrain and rednecks fond of Cassius Clay. Traveling west in the state, one edged towards the Mississippi River and planters worshipful of Jefferson Davis. Nashville, hub of so-called Middle Tennessee, was a nondescript, pleasant enough little place, indistinguishable from a dozen other southern—and northern—towns.
Indistinguishable except for the capitol building, pride of Nashvilleans and symbol of their neutralities. The structure, still being finished as the Southern Convention met, towered atop Billy Goat Hill, the highest eminence to be found. To decorate a summit snatched from goats, Nashvilleans imported a Philadelphian, William Strickland. To shape his design, Strickland imported a dab of Greek and a smattering of Scottish. The capitol’s exterior was classically Athenian, with a Doric base, Ionic porticoes, and a graceful rectangular shape.
Graceful, if someone had chopped off the top. Strickland crowned his flowing rectangular with a constricted round Greek monument, slapped on a crabbed square base. Inside, the building featured its library, an exact replica of Sir Walter Scott’s eighteenth-century study. Strickland’s jumbling of other people’s styles hinted at a town too much in the middle of other worlds to define its own identity. Strickland’s conglomerate also prefigured that equally symptomatic moment, a half-century hence, when Nashvilleans would select, as their Centennial project, a perfect plaster cast model of the imperfect Parthenon.
In the mid-nineteenth century, as in the mid-twentieth, rhythms of the countryside best defined Nashville’s native mentality. A few miles down the road lay the Hermitage, long Andrew Jackson’s home, now his graveyard. The Big House here was classically Greek too. But lines were simple, without monuments to warriors. One caught few hints of the epic Jackson, massacring the English at New Orleans, slaughtering Indians in Florida, demolishing Nicholas Biddle and aspiring to hang John C. Calhoun.
The Hermitage’s atmosphere was surprisingly domestic. Rooms were cramped, windows small, furnishings typified by Jackson’s undersized bed. Jackson’s original Hermitage dwelling, that lovingly patched and expanded log cabin, remained as relic of ruder, harder, equally pleasant times. Near the house survived Rachel Jackson’s garden. Here the old gentleman had spent hours every night, pruning his flowers and mourning his woman. Jackson’s basic passions—for his rustic wife, for southwestern opportunity, for American Union and National Democratic Party and the Great White Race—lived on here as naturally as evergreens and cedars lining his driveway. Jackson had left behind a monument, declaring that the southern center stood not for Cassius Clay or John C. Calhoun, not for Athenian democracy or Sir Walter Scott, but for family, party, neighborhood—and against Disunionists who dared to draw near.
To nearby Nashville the handful of Southern Convention delegates straggled, to reconsider the verities Tennessee’s hero held most dear.26 South Carolinians came on tiptoe, as if half-afraid Jackson might be there. “Our policy,” James Hammond reported, was “to remain quiet.” South Carolinians had to shed their reputation as hotheads and “show that we were reasonable and ready to go as far back to unite with any party of resistance as honor and safety would permit.”27
By shrinking from initiatives, South Carolina ultras cleared the way for Virginia’s Beverley Tucker to become the Convention’s notorious extremist. The aging Tucker’s new notoriety delighted James Hammond. Of all those unlucky enough to draw breath outside South Carolina, only Edmund Ruffin seemed so delightfully Carolinian.28
Beverley Tucker had been writing disruptive missives ever since sending Hammond that disunionist tome of a letter in gag rule times. In The Partisan Leader, a prophetic novel about disunion published in 1836, Tucker had made conspiratorial correspondence the key to Cooperative State Secession. “There had been,” the novelist fantasized, “a preconcert among the leading men of the several States.” Southern statesmen, seeing “that secession must come,” had “consulted much together.” They had secretly arranged a “nearly simultaneous revolution.” Virginia had lagged behind. But the Lower South had “determined to wait for her no longer.” The Cotton Kingdom had revolted and kicked Virginia into resistance.29
Beverley Tucker’s conspiratorial gag rule correspondence with Hammond, advising the congressman to get on with secession, was an early attempt to forge history rather than scribble fantasy. In the early 1840s Tucker, once again playing professor guiding patriots, counseled his Whiggish Virginia friends, President John Tyler and Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur, on Texas. The above-the-battle intellectual feared that mobocratic politics had corrupted Tyler and might infect Upshur. But he saw some hope Upshur would influence Tyler to take on the mob. Tucker also prayed the Secretary could save Texas from England and in the saving salvage Tucker’s Texas slaves.
In the late 1840s, having lost his pipeline to the White House, Beverley Tucker resumed his disunionist correspondence with James Hammond. South Carolina, reiterated the Virginian, must secede and thereby force the Upper South to fight. Tucker prayed “to God I were with you in S.C. It is a theatre where a man can act.” If South Carolinian disunionists failed, “the doom of Sodom is upon us.”30
This South Carolina view of alternatives was based on a South Carolina-like dismay about egalitarian republicanism. The Virginia aristocracy was more ancient than the Carolinian. Beverley Tucker’s forbears had been distinguished in the days when gentlemen ruled Virginia and Virginians ruled the nation. The shift from Jefferson to Jackson seemed to the latest Tucker a plunge from natural aristocrat to demagogic despot. The Jacksonian mass, “uninstructed as the mass always is,” and “exposed to the cant of demagogues about the inherent right of a majority to govern,” would inevitably plunder the rich and usher in anarchy.31
Tucker ridiculed those who relied on the “quaking bog” of popular virtue. “Virtue? O Yes! The Virtue of the people!!!.”32 Like friend Upshur, he prayed that Virginia would never “relinquish her limitations on the right of suffrage” and “her little harmless aristocracy.”33 But unlike Upshur, Tucker believed that only secession could save national patriarchal republicanism from egalitarian infestation.
Tucker’s South Carolina opinions were always tinged with Virginia qualifications. Beverley respected his father, St. George Tucker, Virginia’s most thoroughgoing abolitionist in the Age of Jefferson. He also worshipped his half-brother John Randolph of Roanoke, who combined hatred of unchecked majority rule with inclination to manumit his slaves. The tension between hidebound political conservatism and incipient social radicalism, already implicit in Randolph, became a hallmark of Beverley Tucker. The William and Mary law professor told one correspondent that “civilization cannot exist in southern latitudes without slavery.” He told another that “I care as little about the property as any man, and if a pledge were demanded would emancipate all I have.”34Despite his conspiring with Carolinians, Beverley Tucker remained a son of the Middle South on slavery.
When Tucker claimed the podium at Nashville, he was 65 years old, tall and slender, socially as “vain as a peacock,” oratorically as savage as Randolph. He exuded both the frost of an upper-crust patriarch and the bitterness of a self-appointed seer long consigned to the sidelines. Here again, he resembled his late friend Upshur, who had long cursed that he was “almost somebody.” For over two decades, Tucker had lectured at youngsters, written bad novels, moaned that he would die unheard. Now, as the Southern Convention prepared to listen, his voice was almost a whisper. His lifelong stutter, which had reduced him to waging war with pen alone, made his whisper even harder to fathom.35
He was worth straining to hear.36 Tossing aside discretion, almost choking on his own exaltation, Beverley Tucker displayed the fury of the revolutionary. In Virginia, he said, humane whites elevate black barbarians to Christian civilization. In Ohio, inhuman bosses drag whites into the pigsty. A compromise with Yankee slime, he said, was like a compact with the Devil. The South signed with blood. The North signed with invisible ink—the latest invention emanating from the cesspool.
How different it would be amidst “the magnificent future and glorious destiny of a Southern Confederacy.” The new nation would be a natural union based on homogeneous institutions. It would be encircled by a natural boundary, from the Gulf and the Mississippi around to the Ohio, the Potomac, and the Atlantic. It would contain “no compact between power and weakness, simplicity and craft, generosity and selfishness.” It would be the greatest nation on the face of the globe.
Southerners shrunk from their destiny, explained Tucker, only because they feared disunion meant war. But Yankees were too crafty to commit suicide. Manufacturers could not support war against their southern suppliers and customers lest economic chaos and lower-class revolt ensue. As for England, if her cotton looms stood “still for one month,” not a single “stone” would be “left standing” in her “whole political and social fabric.”
South Carolina extremists must have beamed as Tucker anointed cotton as world-wide king. They could not have been quite so happy about the Virginian’s addendum. In a southern confederacy, believed Tucker, the South could at last work out the “destiny and destination of the negro race.” Slavery was designated by God as “a school of civilization and Christianity.” Since Providence demanded that every African be elevated, and since all could not be enslaved in America, uplifted slaves must eventually return as missionaries to their homeland. “The Colonization Society is a feeble, premature, and abortive attempt at this. The Negro has learned but half the lesson.”
Graduation required not only catechism in Christianity but also training in freedom. A southern confederacy, within five years, would establish a colony for freedmen on the Gulf. There, isolated from Yankee agitators, “protected, regulated, and controlled by a Southern Confederacy,” American blacks would learn their final lessons. “A time would come (and it will come, Sir) which none of us will live to see, when established in complete independence, they will be in condition to go forth from this normal school, and settle colonies of their own on all the coasts of Africa.” A southern confederacy would thus enable slavery to “endure until it shall have accomplished that to which it was appointed.” Beverley Tucker’s revolution would yield St. George Tucker’s emancipation.
Tucker’s Virginia twist to a South Carolina tirade showed how badly Carolinians were isolated. If so sublime a spirit as Professor Tucker renounced perpetual slavery, who outside of Professor Cooper’s graduates was sufficiently Carolinian? That question became more unanswerable as the Southern Convention dragged on. No speaker hit Beverley Tucker’s mark. Most delegates aimed at some new national compromise.
By dropping back with the pack, Carolina precipitators ended up provoking nothing. The convention resolved to reconvene after Congress adjourned. Delegates also declared that though slavery should be protected in all territories, they would settle for protection south of the 36°30′ parallel.37 They would settle, that is to say, for half of California and of other Mexican Cession territories. Nothing was added—and no agreement could have been reached—on what the South should do if the North refused to hand over half an empire.
After traveling home from Nashville and squiring Tucker around Carolina, James Hammond tried to be optimistic. At last, he wrote, the South had resolved. From such a base, Cooperative State Secession could spring.
Hammond knew better. Most Southerners had refused to meet in Nashville. The rump convention had secured unity by papering over divisions. Resulting resolutions were representative of no one. The southern establishment was working in Washington for compromise and party.
Still, at midcentury, as in gag rule times, mainstream politicians had to pay attention to extreme voices. The Howell Cobbs and Alexander Stephenses knew that the territorial issue, if unresolved, could threaten the southern middle. Northern centrists knew that southern moderates, if left emptyhanded, might be helpless against revolution. Everyone knew that Wilmot’s insulting Proviso lent fresh credibility to frayed Carolinians. Should the territorial issue be settled David Wilmot’s way, the James Hammonds might yet make a revolution.
But if southern politicos secured honorable compromise, South Carolina would remain isolated. After the Nashville fiasco, Beverley Tucker’s Partisan Leader continued to read like implausible fiction. James Hammond was again at bay in his swamps, waiting like Cuffee for Massa’s Washington decree.