CHAPTER 2
The slave drain carried slaves southwards except—except for the usual southern exception. South Carolina was especially exceptional in being a Deep South state hemorrhaging slaves. Differences between slave-exporting South Carolina and the slave-importing rest of the Deep South, while less important than dissimilarities between the less enslaved Upper South and the more enslaved Lower South, also threatened the unity and hegemony of the master class. Such east/west differences were omnipresent in a tour across the Lower South, from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Coast.
1
In the 1850s, a journey from New Orleans, king of the Mississippi, to Charleston, southern queen city on the Atlantic, was as difficult, appropriately, as moving between two suspicious European principalities. True, a steamboat sailed swiftly and easily from New Orleans through the Gulf, around Florida and up the Atlantic Coast to Charleston. But that sweep outside the Lower South precluded discovery of Souths between Louisiana and South Carolina. Seagoers especially failed to observe that most of the Lower South more resembled expansive New Orleans than contracting Charleston. Indeed, Charleston served so narrowly its contained coastal hinterlands, and New Orleans served so widely the expansive Mississippi River basin, that steamers between them were infrequent.
A mid-nineteenth-century inland traveler thought first of railroads.1 The thought led to unpleasant travel. Across the Lower South, the iron horse, symbol of a speeding new industrial age, dawdled at the pace of the largely pre-industrial communities it connected. A modern jet races over the approximately 650 miles between New Orleans and Charleston in a single easy hour. A modern automobile speeds over the approximately 750 miles of superhighway between the two cities in a single hard day. Mid-nineteenth-century trains could meander over the approximately 1000 miles of tracks between the two centers in a long, unforgettable week—if one made connections.
Connections alone made the week unforgettable. No railroad connected New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, or Mobile and Montgomery, Alabama’s capital. One had to take a steamer from New Orleans to Mobile, then transfer to a horse-drawn carriage at Mobile to traverse the 75-mile dirt road to Pollard, Alabama. Fairly direct train tracks to Montgomery and on to Atlanta, Georgia, and Charleston were then available. But one had to transfer successfully between six different railroad companies.
If one-third fewer connections seemed desirable, one could take a train from New Orleans to Jackson, Mississippi, then transfer to another railroad between Jackson and Meridian. Since Alabama and Mississippi lacked interest in connections, one then had to board a carriage to travel the 75 miles to Uniontown, Alabama. There one’s third railroad set off for Selma. No tracks connected Selma and Montgomery. So it was over to a steamboat for the 80-mile journey to the Confederacy’s future capital. There, it was hoped, one’s fourth train would be ready to meander towards Charleston.
A traveler who disliked interludes in horse-drawn carriages could go all the way, circuitously, by rail. One would then jolt from New Orleans hundreds of miles too far north to Grand Junction, Tennessee, then east to Chattanooga, then back down south to Atlanta, then east again to Charleston—provided one successfully juggled time schedules of nine different companies.
The 15- to 30-mile-per-hour pace, with stops at least once an hour, made meeting the next train nerve-wracking. Schedules warned of changes without notice. When schedules were unchanged, only a mathematician could make them jibe. The Deep South was so localized that each city was on its own time. One o’clock in Charleston was two o’clock in Augusta and three o’clock in Atlanta, although the sun rose and set at close to the same time throughout the 200-mile stretch. The Georgia Railroad, serving Atlanta and Augusta, was on Atlanta time; the Augusta and Savannah, uniting those two cities, was on Augusta time; the South Carolina Railroad, connecting Augusta and Charleston, was on Charleston time. Standing in Augusta, puzzling over three different time schedules setting forth departures at three successive hours, the brainstorm might strike that all three were leaving at the same moment.
Despite simultaneous arrivals or departures, no collisions need occur. Various companies’ tracks rarely touched or fitted each other’s. In Augusta, travelers had to drag suitcases a third of a mile from one company’s tracks to another’s. In Montgomery, those who had endured the 75-mile carriage ride from Mobile to catch the Pollard-Montgomery train found that the Montgomery-Charleston train required another carriage ride through muddy bottomlands. Anyone stuck in the Montgomery mud while the last train for the week crept off towards Charleston understood particularly well that the Lower South was no consolidated empire.
2
The happiest Lower South travelers ceased fighting nature. Plantations were erected wherever rivers enriched soil and eased transportation, and southwestern rivers flowed north-south, towards the Gulf. The best way to travel east-west, “unnaturally” between north-south rivers, was to ride on horseback.
High points of slow trips through a spottily settled agrarian civilization occurred along rushing streams. Here population was denser, prosperity more evident. In areas of Mississippi near the Pearl and the Mississippi, in areas of Alabama near the Tombigbee and Alabama river systems, in areas of Georgia near the Chattahoochee and Flint river basins, the words “black belt” seemed appropriate. Population in river counties tended to be around 50% slaves.
But black belts came to seem as thin as river lines on the map. Between rivers, one rode through virgin territory, searching out isolated nonslaveholders or small slaveholders who could supply shelter. Farmers would share rundown cabins and bitter coffee, if enough pennies were offered. But they seemed suspicious of outsiders and determined to talk as little as possible.2
Nearer rivers, that mood of sullen struggle remained omnipresent. Tightlipped nonslaveholders were far more numerous here than expansive planters, and many wealthier planters lived like and sounded like nonslaveholders. Ostentatious planters and fancy houses proved to be exceptions, even on lush river bottoms.
The talk within cramped cabins, if strangers could stimulate talk, was of hurricanes and floods, price of cotton and of slaves, cost of land and yield per acre, making a killing before cotton killed the soil. These agriculturalists’ enterprises were more contracted than the New Orleans variety. Although they too were of Gulf rivers, they paid little heed to Gulf imperialism. They had no interest in joining Louisianians in capturing Nicaragua. Nor would they join Missourians in marching on Kansas.
Their South, the Deep South where slaveholders were most frequent, cared most about its immediate neighborhood. The issue was whether to buy a neighbor’s extra acre. The enemy was some local tax collector or mortgage holder. The oppressor was unrelenting rains or searing droughts. The indignity was plunging markets. These Southerners sought slight leverage to raise tiny prospects. They could not bear the thought that outsiders might abolish their prospects altogether.
Hospitality toward strangers was more gracious in those infrequent Greek Revival mansions. But even Big House residents, though sometimes affecting to be English country gentlemen, were provincial American strivers. Pages in lovely leather-bound volumes appeared to be uncut. Issues of local newspapers looked well-thumbed. Idle chatter about yesterday’s fox hunt would quickly veer off into intense speculation about tomorrow’s cotton prices. Indifferent musing about New Orleans’s latest foray to capture Cuba would digress into involved discussion of next week’s slave auction. Their success in the New Orleans cotton and slave markets, not New Orleans’s success in capturing a Gulf empire or Missouri’s success in seizing Kansas, was the true interest of these parochial lords of Gulf rivers.
3
After tourists moving east had reached Georgia’s Flint River, they could cease fighting geography. In eastern Georgia, rivers at last flowed east-west, towards the Atlantic. Little else changed. Again, population between rivers was sparse. Again, many struggling farmers and few ostentatious planters occupied river bottoms. Again, river boats transported largely cotton, this time towards the Atlantic. One passed the Ogmulgee-Oconee-Altamaha river system, then the Ogeechee River basin, then rode alongside the Savannah River.
Across the Savannah and inside upcountry South Carolina, much seemed different. The Carolina upcountry, meaning the hilly piedmont territory up and away from the lowcountry coastal plain, looked to be suffering from a hangover after a spree. Unlike virgin lands between southwestern rivers, upcountry South Carolina soil looked overused. Broomsedge and briar as well as deserted houses and tumbling fences littered the countryside. It was as if an army had ravaged, then roamed off in search of richer pickings.
An entrepreneurial army had indeed lately roamed away from South Carolina. Upcountry Carolina, the Lower South cotton land nearest to the Atlantic, was the first early nineteenth-century area to enjoy the cotton boom. It consequently became the first Lower South region to suffer cotton soil debilitation. Rather than continuing to till earth drained of nutrients, many slaveholders pushed slaves west, to farm the next Lower South frontier.
Those who stayed preferred declining soil to endless unsettlement. Their profits might be less. Their lives would be richer. They would prove that cotton and slaves could generate more than more cotton and more slaves. They aimed not at reckless gambling but at restrained greatness.
Listening to great magnates in great upcountry houses, houses more elegant and talk more polished than anything this side of Natchez, one realized how much this gentry loathed Southerners infatuated with mere dollars. According to ubiquitous Carolina snobbery, crude southwest cotton snobs, concerned only with crass profits, deserted not so much South Carolina as a worthwhile southland. The southern way involved perfecting a family rather than filling a wallet, treating servants mildly rather than exploiting laborers tyrannically, writing a literature rather than gutting a wilderness.3
Such talk could sound a little hypocritical. Library shelves revealed uncut pages here too. Gentlemen’s desks again displayed well-thumbed plantation accounts. Paintings on walls revealed much spending, little taste. This was a second-generation aristocracy, a little removed from obsessions with cash, a little advanced towards elegant taste, yet still too nouveau-riche to be comfortably aristocratic and too financially unsure to be carelessly forgetful of money-grubbing.
Talk of South Carolina superiority also sounded forced. Braggarts failed to mask their fear that too many dollars and people had ebbed away for those left behind to command those marching ahead. The tone hinted not at a culture proudly in the vanguard but at a civilization edgy about losing its way.
The note of aging, of outliving one’s time, became more noticeable on the Carolina coast, amidst lowcountry squires. Sojourners who traveled towards those most famous Disunionists encountered additional geographical barriers to a single South. A dense pine barren separated upcountry and lowcountry Carolina.4 Beyond the almost uninhabited forest lay lightly inhabited lowcountry swamps. Coastal wetlands looked fertile in a way pine barrens were not. Dank swamps were also forbidding in a way no pine forest could be. Huge trees blocked out the sun. Spanish moss hung low and eerie. Pools of water were blackest black, suggestive of death and dissolution.
Then one suddenly discovered a clearing with living folk, largely black folk. No other southern black belt was remotely as black as this. Skins were blacker, suggesting how relatively few whites had been around. Dialects seemed more African, also suggesting relatively little interracial contact. Population ratios were incredible, not one black for one white, as in southwestern black belts, but ten blacks for one white, assuming a white could be found.
In the summer, whites were especially scarce. Planters, fleeing omnipresent malaria, often left black drivers in charge of the exceptional crops this exceptional land yielded. Inland, expensive gangs of slaves labored over expensive rice fields. On sea islands along the coast, armies of slaves grew the world’s most luxurious strand of cotton. Nowhere in the South did the investment seem so huge. Nowhere in the South were investors so far away from investments.
Lowcountry planters could often be found in Charleston.5 Absentees were relieved to be removed from malaria, proud to be away from being an entrepreneur. Here they entertained in rarified English-style drawing rooms and exchanged latest London gossip.
Here, bragging about being English gentlemen rather than American gogetters rang a little truer. Newspaper writers warned absentee anti-entrepreneurs about their economic risks. Other articles spoke of younger sons, who preferred dissolute idleness to disgusting careerism. The economic question here was whether big spenders and nonmanagerial managers could glean lush enough profits from rice and luxury cotton planting.
As befitted an aristocracy contemptuous of the go-getting nineteenth century, these Anglophiles were as disdainful of galloping egalitarianism as of gauche expansionism. The intolerable error of slavery, southwestern style, they urged, was not so much that slaveholders were money machines as that slavery was considered safe inside a mobocracy. Jealous masses would demolish so aristocratic an institution unless slaveholders insisted on aristocratic republicanism. King Cotton’s republic must contain bulwarks against King Numbers.
These gentlemen were contemptuous of other southern solutions. Annex Caribbean commercial culture? The South already was disgustingly Yankee. Seek new southwestern lands? The New South already was forgetful of old traditions. Move and expand? Better to stay put and conserve. How to eliminate nineteenth-century evils? Adopt state constitutions that gave the rich a veto against the numbers. Amend the national constitution to allow the minority to nullify the majority. Otherwise secede, secede, secede. Secede from the Union. Secede from the century. Secede from the scummy herd. Re-establish an aristocratic republic that would make England envious.
The contrast with other drawing rooms in other Lower Souths was striking. Charleston’s finest scorned new pretensions that rich and poor whites were equal. Southwesterners scuttled old presumptions that poor whites needed guidance from above. South Carolina wanted out of everything modern, not least the Union. Louisiana wanted more of all things contemporary, not excluding possibilities emanating from Washington. South Carolina wished expansion to give way to consolidation, copying English models in the Old World across the Atlantic. Louisiana wished conservatism laced with imperialism, seeking new additions in the New World across the Gulf. South Carolina had the hopelessness of the reactionary so desperate as to be revolutionary. Louisiana had the hopefulness of the tycoon so confident as to be progressive. These colliding gentries agreed that slavery must be perpetual. But they were as far apart as the Atlantic is from the Mississippi on how to bring off a South.
4
Charleston’s gentlemen, while a century removed from Lower South slavocracies to their west, were even more distinct from Atlantic Coast squires to their north. Disconnected railroads again underlined the gentry’s isolation. Traveling northward, meandering iron tracks stretched the slightly more than 300 miles between Charleston and Richmond into well over 400 miles. This time, one had to juggle schedules of five different companies. This time no single iron horse could make the trip. Tracks switched from being 4′8″ wide to being 5′ wide. Richmond, soon to be meeting ground of the Southern Confederacy’s government, displayed the ultimate symbol of a divided South. Six different railroad lines left Richmond, fanning out in a 360-degree wheel, heading for Souths to the north, south, east, and west. Nowhere in Richmond did any line touch another.
The discontinuity in transportation mirrored the discontinuity in terrain between Charleston and the Upper South. North of Charleston lay more swamps. Again the sun rarely penetrated overgrown foliage. Again, almost all residents were blackest black. Again dark pools seemed more like oil than water. Again the humid air seemed heavy with the danger that sent whites to Charleston.
Across the North Carolina border loomed a jungle ranker still. No cleared plantations relieved North Carolina’s alligator-infested Dismal Swamp. The few visitors occasionally glimpsed the most desperate Southerners: fugitive slaves hiding in this dank wetland.6
On the Virginia side of the Dismal Swamp, the world lightened and brightened. Glaring sun scorched cleared terrain. The coastal plain had a wearying, comforting sameness. Many white nonslaveholders worked the flat land. Much now suggested a yeoman’s midwestern frontier.7
But large plantations, interspersed among more numerous small farms, created a more proper image of a diluted aristocratic culture. Nothing was frontier-like or midwestern about occasional eighteenth-century plantation mansions. These elegantly balanced Georgian brick edifices denoted an older, more settled gentry than did southwestern wooden palaces. Inhabitants’ viewpoints recalled Charlestonian hauteur. Southwestern upstarts, scoffed eastern Virginia patricians, tended to be crude, materialistic nigger-drivers. Southwestern plans to expand by reopening the African slave trade were loathsome. Gulf crusades to grow by pirating the Caribbean were criminal. Southerners, Tidewater Virginians rather agreed with coastal South Carolinians, should move less and perfect more.
Yet tobacco patriarchs were hardly to be confused with Charleston’s absentee dandies. Virginia magnates actively managed their decaying estates. They used profits from selling slaves to set other slaves to work fertilizing worn soil. While these survivors were not reaping southwestern-style profits, the worst of a long economic depression seemed behind them.
Eastern Virginia squires’ political talk, like their economic enterprises, had the feel of an old order painfully adjusting to a new century. Gentlemen proud of eighteenth-century ancestors, in Virginia as in South Carolina, often expressed contempt for the new mobocracy. Virginia’s First Families, like Carolina’s, often bragged about ancient state constitutional restraints on herd rule. But Virginia’s elite, with few exceptions, loathed South Carolina disunionism no less than New Orleans imperialism. A little compromising, gentlemen urged, could save Union and slavery. Virginia’s eastern gentry also talked more about lessening state constitutional restraints on Virginia’s masses. South Carolina oligarchs scorned Virginia gentlemen for considering giving an inch.
South Carolinians also disliked Virginia gentlemen’s tone on slavery. Vague approval of ending bondage, assuming proper conditions, could be heard under proper circumstances in proper Virginia drawing rooms. Proper circumstances meant no “outside agitators” present. Right conditions meant removal of free blacks. But Virginia squires occasionally speculated that their blacks might someday be diffused to Africa or drained to the south, with whites streaming to Virginia to take slaves’ place. Lowcountry South Carolinians, in contrast, could not conceive that whites would stream toward malarial swamps.
The distance from South Carolina seemed to grow greater when one approached Richmond.8 The state capitol could be seen from afar, towering above the industrial smog, apparently an up-to-date seat of power in an up-to-date metropolis. Illusions disappeared upon entering the city. Richmond’s streets were unpaved, half her shops uninhabited. The capitol, atop Shockloe Hill, needed repair. The most extensive bands of slaves were at the slave auction, destined to be dispatched to New Orleans. Despite attempts at becoming a wide-awake metropolis, Richmond, like the Virginia countryside, remained half aging and half asleep. The trip from Carolina to Virginia resulted in a sense not of passing through a consolidated Old South empire but of moving halfway towards the North.
5
While Richmond was less southern than Charleston, points further north became not very southern at all. At Delaware, the coastal South’s northeastern edge, southernness almost evaporated. By 1850, Delaware’s proportion of slaves had sunk well under 3%, down from 15% in 1790. Wilmington, Delaware’s largest city and best tourist attraction, had all of four slaves. In Wilmington and along the Delaware countryside, few cared whether quartets of bondsmen were free.9
Maryland, just west from Delaware in the Chesapeake Bay region, was also debatably southern.10 The debate was relatively new. In 1790, the state’s over 100,000 slaves had comprised a third of the population. Maryland’s Eastern and Western Shore residents had been among the richest, most sophisticated Chesapeake Bay tobacco planters. The state’s metropolitan center, Baltimore, had been in the take-off phase of urban development, economically and artistically. In ensuing years, no southern and few northern cities would grow so fast.
In the entire antebellum period, no southern craftsman would produce anything as glorious as Baltimore’s late eighteenth-century Hepplewhite furniture. The style, closer to English conceptions than to colonial cabinetry to the north, was refined with an exquisiteness of line and an intricacy of inlaying foreign to plain New England. The sophistication of Baltimore’s nonslaveholding artisans meshed with tastes of their delighted customers, the slightly Anglicized, ultraelegant gentlemen who kept 10% of the urban population enchained.
By the 1850s, Maryland’s creativity was flowing into different endeavors. An important social experiment involved ending slavery without removing blacks. On the eve of the Civil War, Maryland’s absolute number of slaves was under 100,000, down 14% from 1790. Her relative percentage of slaves was under 13%, down almost 300% from 1790. Her free blacks almost outnumbered her slaves.
The slave labor system was especially waning in booming Baltimore, the South’s largest and the nation’s third largest city. Baltimore’s 25,000 free blacks contrasted with the city’s 2000 slaves. Artistry, like the changed black population, now served a crude new industrialism. No more solitary eighteenth-century cabinetmakers could be found, crafting a little gem of a Hepplewhite sofa. Instead artistic creativity exuded from huge shipbuilding factories. Here the world-famed China clipper was built to serve an increasingly nonslaveholding world economy. No city in the South and few in the nation milled so much flour, finished so much tobacco, distilled so much liquor. Every other southern city whined about colonial dependence on “vulgar” northern capitalists. Baltimore, thanks to the mighty banking firm of Alexander Brown and Sons, loaned excess capital to Yankee vulgarians.11
Mid-nineteenth-century conversations in the city’s lavishly furnished Victorian drawing rooms sounded hardly different from Victorianism, free-state style. Baltimoreans pointed out proudly that while some of Maryland’s slaves had been sold south and a few had been sent to Africa, more had been freed to remain in Maryland. Freedmen had proved that slavery was counterproductive. Capitalists preferred “the well-trained free black, subject to dismissal for misconduct,” to “the slothful slave, who has no fear of loss of place.”12
Entrepreneurs with these attitudes allowed slaves some freedom. The most fortunate bondsmen hired themselves out, splitting wages with masters and slowly saving to buy freedom. Why was Baltimore the most flourishing southern metropolis? Because, to hear Baltimore’s titans tell it, only Baltimore had cast off slavery’s restrictions on capitalism. If that view of capitalism sounded more like New York’s than New Orleans’s—well, which southern city was most successfully chasing New York?
More rural portions of elderly Maryland sounded more southern than Baltimore. Among large tobacco planters lining the Chesapeake Bay’s Western and Eastern Shores, percentages of slaves and attitudes about bondage were less changed from the eighteenth century. These titans enjoyed superb eighteenth-century Georgian architecture and elegantly appointed Hepplewhite drawing rooms little different from those still to be found in Tidewater Virginia—and once found in Tidewater Baltimore.
Eastern and Western Shore magnates, like planters everywhere in more northern portions of the older South, occasionally pleased a sympathetic visitor with talk about freeing slaves, under right conditions. For now, they found conditions wrong. They talked of residing in an exposed outpost of slavery, of living too close to Yankees who aided fugitive slaves. How was border slavery to last, they wondered, if blacks only half enslaved had to dash but a mile to freedom? A few planters, enraged about runaways, sought re-enslavement of free blacks. That proposition, like Missouri slaveholders’ resolve to capture Kansas, indicated that if slavery was doomed in Border South not-so-black belts, its demise could come only after a terrific struggle.
6
Travel northward from Baltimore to the free states was simple, too simple from a southern diehard’s perspective. But the better trip, for those who wished to grasp southern complexity, was to complete the southern circle by journeying back to the Border West. Just as traveling between New Orleans and Charleston illuminated east-west differences within the Deep South, so traveling between Baltimore and St. Louis clarified east-west differences within the Border South.
The westerly route out of Baltimore, like the northern, was easy, almost too easy to be southern. Instead of antiquated Deep South modes of journeying, railroad transportation in the most northern South was modern, efficient, a Yankeefied dream.
Southern Yankees in Baltimore had realized the dream. Baltimoreans, anxious to cash in on America’s westward thrust, had been determined to rival New York, with its fine canal system, and New Orleans, with its splendid Mississippi River system, as entrepôt of the new West. The only way, for a city commanding the constricted Patapsco River, was an avenue of iron out to western waters.
Not even the title of the railroad—the Baltimore and Ohio—quite caught the imperial dream. Baltimoreans indeed deployed tracks to the Ohio River: to Wheeling and to Clarksburg in western Virginia, then again to Cincinnati. But from Cincinnati, tracks were also constructed out to St. Louis, collecting port of the upper Mississippi Valley. From the banks of the Patapsco, dreamed audacious Baltimoreans, they could dominate the Mississippi.
Construction of the Baltimore and Ohio commenced in 1830. The railroad, 1500 miles long with the same gauge throughout, was completed in 1857. Customers could speed from the Atlantic to the Mississippi in slightly over two days. Down in the Deep South, meandering from the Mississippi to the Atlantic via many railroad companies had taken a long week.13
The terrain and people along the Baltimore and Ohio did not seem overly southern. Less than 100 miles out of Baltimore, the iron horse sliced inside the rugged green Allegheny Mountains. This vast mountainous locale segregated western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and eastern Tennessee from planters who thought themselves the South.
Isolated mountaineers regarded strangers with a suspicion recalling slaveholders’. They also often looked upon slaveholders with a distaste rivaling Yankees’. They sometimes threatened to attack slavery, if slaveholders perpetuated white men’s political inequality in state governments. They continually promised to seize arms, if slaveholders tore down their beloved Union.14
Up at the Wheeling, Virginia, terminus of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad spur, this least southern argument was most omnipresent. Wheelingites, at the geographic latitude of Pittsburgh, warned that if despots wanted tyranny over blacks, they must stop tyrannizing whites. Slaveholders in eastern Virginia, so it was angrily claimed, contrived to restrict white democracy in the state out of fear of the nonslaveholding majority. Slaveholders down South, so it was more angrily claimed, continued to manipulate the Union out of fear of the national nonslaveholding majority. Tyrants, so far as Wheelingites were concerned, could keep their “niggers,” if whites could keep Union abroad and gain freedom in Virginia. Or, in other words, Wheeling was neutral about slavery if—if slaveholders did nothing to protect minority power, state and national, against that great god: white egalitarian republicanism. Or, to sum up the conclusion Virginia slaveholders came to: if the large minority of black-belt counties dared lift a finger for slavery, the large minority of mountain counties might slap on northern handcuffs.
7
The few border slaveholders in the mountains, sharing with nonslaveholders a region where slavery was waning and considered dispensable, cared more about other matters. Their occasional talk about slavery always began with affirmations that the subject was no outsider’s business—and sometimes ended with whispers that insiders might terminate bondage, under the right conditions. Those whispers indicated yet another time that, in a section-wide perspective, slaveholders’ problem was within as well as without their class—that different geographic regions led to different upper classes with different views of upperclass futures.
The difference between squires in the most northern South as opposed to titans in the more southern South concerned whether bondage was temporary or permanent in their area. Few in the South’s most northern reaches believed that slavery in the most southern South would ever end. But even fewer borderites could conceive that their locale would remain enslaved forever.
Strategies for ending enslavement changed as one went west in the Border South. The ideology no less than the terrain shifted when the train left the mountains and invaded the midwestern plains. Border Southwesterners had little use for the Maryland-Delaware conception that blacks could be freed without removal, and not much more enthusiasm for the idea of removing blacks to Africa.
In Kentucky and Missouri, heretics urged a legislative decreee of future emancipation. Slaveholders, sensible fellows, would beat the deadline by selling or moving slaves southwards. On the appointed day, neither slaves nor blacks would remain. Free whites would pour into a lily-white midwestern mecca.
The western border establishment favored a less heretical way to drain slaves elsewhere. A governmental declaration of future emancipation, so the Kentucky-Missouri “proslavery” crowd believed, would impose on nature. The Upper South should instead continue to sell slaves slowly, naturally, down river. Then over many decades, the Lower South would be the only slave South—and the only South with blacks.
Whether border Southerners preferred to sell slaves southwards or to enact future emancipation or to dispatch blacks to Africa or to control blacks without slavery, almost all whites agreed on slow termination, without outside acceleration. This consensus left no room for William Lloyd Garrison’s notion of immediate abolitionism. But the border consensus had no space for Robert Barnwell Rhett’s notion of immediate disunion either. In its slaveholder ideology, as in its geographic position, the Border South was a world between.
8
After travelling around the many Souths, what survived of first impressions that a master class dominated a South? Plenty. Even where bondage was waning, slaveholders endured. Masters still lashed serviles in barely-enslaved Delaware and in half-free Maryland. Beyond this manumitting corner of the South, slavery’s termination was called conditional on blacks’ removal. Few hustled to hasten removal. African colonization was a dribble. Slave sales southwards still left many enslaved northward. Decrees of future emancipation floundered in state legislatures. When outside agitators proposed speedier terminations, borderites objected. The South was a South in the most crucial consensus, an agreement that Southerners must unhurriedly decide the South’s fate for themselves.
Southerners divided, however, on goals and tactics. In Upper South relatively slaveless areas, few hoped to perpetuate bondage forever. In Lower South black belts, few agreed about how to perpetuate the Peculiar Institution. South Carolinians and Southwesterners were like those Deep South railroads running towards nary a connection. Even if the South’s feuding tropical domains could permanently unite in the same uncompromising campaign for slavery, ideological, political, or military, their less tropical outposts might compromise in Congress or desert on battlefields.
Despots have a classic response to insufficient unity and commitment. Where consent softens, coercion hardens. Many travel memories suggested that slaveholders could coerce fellow citizens. Whites were sometimes lynched. White legislatures were sometimes gerrymandered. South Carolinians and eastern Virginians urged that perpetuating black slavery required constricting white republicanism. Missouri ruffians turned Kansas democracy into a half-dictatorial fortress.
Another stream of travel recollections, however, indicated that dictatorial imposition on whites had limits. Virginia squires were not successfully stonewalling against a more democratic legislature. Virginia mountain folks were threatening to attack dictatorship over blacks unless slaveholders surrendered aristocratic control over whites. Lower South dictators had no dictatorial power—little power of any sort—over far-off Border South regions with different priorities than perpetuating slavery. The big question was whether authoritarians’ modes of social control, half-democratic, half-despotic, could consolidate an ill-connected and sprawling realm, in some spots passionately for slavery—and in some spots content, in a passionless way, to watch slaves dribble away.