Abbreviations Used in Notes
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AHR |
American Historical Review |
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ALA |
Manuscripts Division, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery |
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BC |
Berea College Library, Berea, Kentucky |
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CU |
Manuscripts Division, Clemson University Library, Clemson, South Carolina |
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CWH |
Civil War History |
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DU |
Manuscipts Division, Duke University Library, Durham, North Carolina |
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EU |
Manuscripts Division, Emory University Library, Decatur, Georgia |
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FC |
Filson Club, Louisville, Kentucky |
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GA |
Manuscripts Division, University of Georgia Library, Athens |
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GHQ |
Georgia Historical Quarterly |
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JAH |
Journal of American History |
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JEH |
Journal of Economic History |
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JER |
Journal of the Early Republic |
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JNH |
Journal of Negro History |
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JSH |
Journal of Southern History |
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KHS |
Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort |
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LC |
Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. |
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LSU |
Manuscripts Division, Louisiana State University Library, Baton Rouge |
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MISS |
Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson |
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MO |
Manuscripts Division, University of Missouri Library, Columbia |
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MOHS, C |
Missouri State Historical Society, Columbia |
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MOHS, SL |
Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis |
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MOHR |
Missouri Historical Review |
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MVHR |
Mississippi Valley Historical Review |
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NC |
Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library |
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PMHB |
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography |
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SAQ |
South Atlantic Quarterly |
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SC |
South Carolina Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia |
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SCHS |
South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston |
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SCHM |
South Carolina Historical Magazine |
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SP |
Alexander Stephens Papers, Manhattanville College Library, Purchase, New York |
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SS |
Southern Studies |
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SWHQ |
Southwestern Historical Quarterly |
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THQ |
Tennessee Historical Quarterly |
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TN |
Tennessee Historical Society, Nashville |
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TU |
Manuscripts Division, Tulane University Library, New Orleans, Louisiana |
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TX |
Manuscripts Division, University of Texas Library, Austin |
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VA |
Manuscripts Division, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville |
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VHS |
Virginia Historical Society, Richmond |
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VMHB |
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography |
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VSL |
Virginia State Library, Richmond |
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WISC |
State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison |
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W&M |
Manuscripts Division, College of William and Mary Library, Williamsburg, Virginia |
|
W&MQ |
William and Mary Quarterly |
|
WVU |
Manuscripts Division, West Virginia University Library, Morgantown |
Preface
1. This interpretation is hardly my exclusive property. Some superb American historians have worked the southern materials, and I everywhere build on their insights. On general southern antebellum complexity and diversity, I think especially of David Potter, The South and the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge, 1968), and Carl Degler, The Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1974). The division between the Upper South and Lower South is an important theme in Michael Holt’s The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York and London, 1978) and pivotal in Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1989). Finally, my antebellum South bears its relationship to C. Vann Woodward’s postbellum South: the same presence of alternative visions, the same power of a wideawake establishment to stymie sometimes not-so-brave and not-so-liberal southern reformers, and the same threat that external forces may bring overmatched internal alternatives out in the open. See Woodward’s seminal The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1960) and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (2nd rev. ed., New York, 1966).
2. Here again, I value those who have earlier stressed somewhat similar viewpoints. On slavery and the Slavepower as a threat to white republicanism, see again Holt, Political Crisis; Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (New York, 1964); Russel B. Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830–1860 (East Lansing, 1963); David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge, 1969); Lee Benson, Toward the Scientific Study of History (Philadelphia, 1972), 307–26; Larry Gara, “Slavery and the Slave Power: A Crucial Distinction,” CWH, 15 (1969): 5–18; and most recently William E. Gienapp, “The Republican Party and the Slave Power” in New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America, eds. Robert H. Abzug and Stephen E. Maizlish (Lexington, Ky., 1986), 5178.
3. While Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens, Ga., and London, Eng., 1987) seems to me to err in denying that proslavery grew irrevocably out of peculiarities of southern society, Tise is correct that the doctrine was not widely established by the mid-1830s and correct that I contributed to the misunderstanding.
Prologue: The Spirit of Montgomery
1. New Orleans Delta, February 26, 1861, and Mobile Advertizer-Register, June 23, 1861, have excellent physical descriptions of Montgomery at the time of the inaugural. The best source on the mood in the capital is Thomas R. R. Cobb’s series of letters to his wife Marion in Cobb Paper, GA. See especially Cobb’s letters of February 4 and 15 on fears that divisions in Alabama and the South would lead to reconstruction of the Union.
2. T. R. R. Cobb to Marion Cobb, February 9, 1861, Cobb Papers; Robert W. Barnwell to James L. Orr, February 9, 1861, Orr Papers, NC; Duncan F. Kenner to A. B. Roman, February 9, 1861, Jean U. LaVillebeuvre Papers, LSU.
3. T. R. R. Cobb to Marion Cobb, February 18, 1861, Cobb Papers.
4. Ceremonies and festivities before Davis’s inaugural speech are nicely described in ibid.
5. Davis’s speech is in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy, Including Diplomatic Correspondence, 1861–1865, ed. James D. Richardson, 2 vols. (Nashville, 1905), 1: 32–36.
6. T. R. R. Cobb to Marion Cobb, March 6, 1861, Cobb Papers; Alexander Stephens to Linton Stephens, March 8, 1861, SP.
7. The Rhett clan’s distrust of Davis is revealed in Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr., to George W. Bagby, April 2, 1861, Bagby Papers, VHS.
Chapter 1. St. Louis to New Orleans
1. This chapter and the next rely heavily on travelers’ accounts. Pride of place belongs to Frederick Law Olmsted’s A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States … (New York and London, 1856); A Journey in the Backcountry … (New York, 1860); and A Journey Through Texas … (New York, 1860). Other important travel accounts include George William Featherstonhaugh, Excursion through the Slave States …, 2 vols. (London, 1844); Basil Hall, Travels in North America …, 3 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1829); Anne Royall, Mrs. Royall’s Southern Tour, 3 vols. (Washington, 1830–31); Mrs. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 2 vols. (London, 1832); J. S. Buckingham, The Slave States of America, 2 vols. (London, 1842); Charles Lyell, Travels in North America, 2 vols. (London, 1845); Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States, 2 vols. (London, 1849); Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 3 vols. (London, 1837); Alexander Mackay, The Western World, or Travels in the United States…, 3 vols. (London, 1849); Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2 vols. (New York, 1853); Charles Mackay, Life and Liberty in America …, 2 vols. (London 1859); Amelia M. Murray, Letters from the United States… (New York, 1856); James Stirling, Letter from the Slave States (London, 1857); and William Howard Russell, My Diary, North and South (New York and Toronto, 1863).
2. Bremer, Homes, 2:234: Gertrude Thomas Diary, entries for May 2, July 12, 1855, October 8, 1858, DU.
3. William Chambers, Things as They Are in America (Philadelphia, 1854), 269–86; Joseph Hott Ingraham, The South-West, by a Yankee, 2 vols. (New York, 1835), 2:19297; Samuel R. Latta Journal, entry for December 20, 1850, TU.
4. Olmsted, Seaboard, 16–20; C. Mackay, Life and Liberty, 2:43ff.
5. Russell, Diary North and South, 285.
6. On two brief occasions in this volume, a contemporary dialogue seemed to me the indispensable artistic way to evoke southern moods and emotions. Unfortunately, no one conversation recorded in the sources is complete enough to capture an encounter between northern visitors and southern planters, as conveyed here, or between nonslaveholders and planters, as conveyed in Chapter 3, pp. 46–47.1 have therefore in these two instances reconstructed a single dialogue from scattered sources, sometimes changing the phrasing slightly but never altering the tone or substance of surviving records. I use italics rather than quotation marks to indicate reconstructed dialogues. Footnotes indicate sources for my reconstructions.
The planter here speaking exudes the standard proslavery line of the late 1850s. The best sources on the substance and tone of that mentality include DeBow’s Review, 1856–60, especially the essays of George Fitzhugh and “Phyron,” and The Pro-Slavery Argument … (Philadelphia, 1853). For superb additional examples of the tone of proslavery dialectics, see Linton Stephens to Alexander Stephens, December 10, 1844, SP, and the Georgia newspaper quoted in Arthur C. Cole, The Irrespressible Conflict, 1850–1865) (New York, 1934), viii. On the context of Pompey’s speech, see Featherstonhaugh, Excursion, 36–38; for his actual words, Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York, 1956), 87.
7. All demographic statistics in this volume derive from The Statistics of the Population of the United States, comp. Francis A. Walker (Washington, 1872), 11–74; and from U.S. Bureau of the Census, A Century of Population Growth; From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790–1900 (Washington, 1909).
8. Good descriptions of the St. Louis scene are in James Neal Primm, “Yankee Merchants in a Border City: A Look at St. Louis Business Men in the 1850s,” MOHR, 78 (1984): 375–86; William Kingsford, Impressions of the West and South During a Six Weeks Holiday (Toronto, 1858), 29–37; C. Mackay, Life and Liberty, l:221ff. The files of The St. Louis Democrat are the best source on the St. Louis mentality and especially on the Blair viewpoint.
9. Among the better descriptions of steamboat culture are Olmsted, Seaboard, 6038; C. Mackay, Life and Liberty, 1:240–41, 294–95; Henry A. Murray, Lands of the Slave and Free …, 2 vols. (London, 1855), 1:220–34; “Steamboats of the 1850s-1860s: A Pictorial History,” comp. Mary K. Dains, MOHR, 67 (1973): 265–82.
10. Natchez Daily Courier, February 19, March 9, 1860; D. Clayton James, Antebellum Natchez (Baton Rouge, 1968).
11. Russell, Diary North and South, 270–71; Olmsted, Seaboard, 660–62; New Orleans Delta, December 7, 1849; Robert Toombs to Julia Toombs, May 3, 1857, Toombs Papers, GA; A. F. Pugh Diary, entries for January 29, February 4, 1859, March 3, 14, 15, 1860, LSU; F. M. Kent to Moody Kent, May 17, 1858, Amos Kent Papers, LSU; John H. Randolph to Moses Liddell, May 15, 1853, Liddell Family Papers, LSU.
12. Good sources on late antebellum New Orleans include the two major papers, The New Orleans Delta, especially December 5, 1858, and The Louisiana Courier, especially November 28, 1858, and September 26, 1859; Douglas M. Hamilton to William S. Hamilton, March 3, 8, 1853, Hamilton Papers, LSU; A. R. Reed Diary, November-December, 1860, passim, LSU; John R. Norris to My Dear Friends, January 13, 1847, Norris Papers, LSU; Gustave A. Breaux Diary, 1859, passim, TU; Robert Russell, North America, Its Agriculture and Climate … (Edinburgh, 1855), 255; Stirling, Letters, 153, 179.
Chapter 2. New Orleans to Charleston to Baltimore to St. Louis
1. The following account is drawn from antebellum travelers’ incessant complaints about southern railroads and from James A. Ward, “A New Look at Antebellum Southern Railroad Development,” JSH, 39 (1973): 409–20; Albert Fishlow, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Antebellum Economy (Cambridge, Mass., 1965); John F. Stover, The Iron Road to the West: American Railroads in the 1850s (New York, 1978); Eugene Alvarez, Travel on Southern Railroads, 1828–1860 (University, Ala., 1974); Robert C. Black, III, The Railroads of the Confederacy(Chapel Hill, 1972); and U. B. Phillips, A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860 (New York, 1908).
2. A nice feel for the sparseness of southwestern population and the tone of inhabitants is rendered in C. Mackay, Life and Liberty, 1: 36ff; Stirling, Letters, 177–81; Philip Henry Gosse, Letters from Alabama (London, 1859), 153–56; Olmsted, Backcountry, 20, 197–204.
3. Benjamin Yancey to Mrs. Yancey, December 8, 1849, Yancey Papers, NC; Charleston Mercury, April 9, 1859.
4. C. Mackay, Live and Liberty, 2: 34ff.; William E. Baxter, America and the Americans (London and New York, 1855), 238.
5. The lowcountry-Charleston mood is nicely illuminated in Jacob Schirmer Diary, SCHS, passim; Russell’s Magazine, 4 (1859): 471; George A. Gordon to Krilla, June 19, August 12, 1857, Gordon Papers, DU; John Berkeley Grimball Diary, passim, NC; C. Mackay, Life and Liberty, 1: 307; William Henry Trescot to William Porcher Miles, June 24, 1861, Williams-Chesnut-Manning Papers, SC.
6. Russell, Diary North and South, 87ff.
7. Olmsted is particularly helpful on the Virginia Tidewater scene in Seaboard, 4047, 88–92, 134, as is David W. Mitchell, Ten Years in the United States … (London, 1862), 5–50.
8. Good sources on Richmond include Richmond South, January 13, 1858; C. Mackay, Life and Liberty, 2: 8–13; Olmsted, Seaboard, 19–24; Mitchell, Ten Years in the United States, 57–80; and Chambers, Things in America, 271–80.
9. See, for example, Wilmington Republican, May 17, 1858; Delaware Gazette, November 29, 1859.
10. The files of the Baltimore American in the 1850s yield the best feel for this increasingly a-southern city. The best secondary account of ongoing changes is Barbara Fields’s fine Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London, 1985). Claudia Dale Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820–1860: A Quantitative History (Chicago and London, 1976), and Gary Lawson Browne, Baltimore in the Nation, 1789–1861 (Chapel Hill, 1980), are also helpful.
11. James R. Killick, “The Cotton Operations of Alexander Brown and Sons in the Deep South, 1820–1860,” JSH, 43 (1977): 169–94.
12. DeBow’s Review, 8 (1850): 363.
13. Edward Hungerford, The Story of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 2 vols. (New York, 1928).
14. Olmsted, Backcountry, 221–65.
Chapter 3. Mastering Consenting White Folk
1. This is written at a moment when a Marxist/non-Marxist squabble over which side of the slaveholder was most “natural” dominates the southern historiographical landscape. May the moment swiftly pass. As Marxists rightly emphasize, sloveholders’ class relationship with black dependents generated a world view about dependency which transcended race and led to haughtily hierarchical conceptions of the ideal white society too. As non-Marxists rightly counter, upper-class political relationship with white citizens generated a viewpoint about equality which emphasized race and reserved haughty hierarchy for non-whites. Which predominated? That depends on where in the South, and when. Which was most “natural”? That depends on the ideological prejudices one brings to the evidence, about whether one believes that class or racial-political systems most generate ideologies and institutions. Southern antebellum sources richly illuminate both phenomena. When these two historical camps realize that each has hold of a critical truth, scholars may yet become what their evidence cries for—synthesizers who find both sides of the ruling-class schizophrenia central in explaining the Old South.
The Marxist position is brilliantly elaborated in Eugene Genovese’s various books, especially Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974) and The World the Slaveholders Made (New York, 1969). Important replies include James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York, 1982); George Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1844 (New York, 1971); Frederickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism and Social Inequality (Middletown, Conn., 1988).
2. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967).
3. Frederickson, Black Image, ch. 4.
4. Michael Stephen Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767–1878 (Chapel Hill, 1988).
5. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (New York, 1946); Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1946); Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959); Carl Degler, Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, London, and Toronto, 1971); Charles Boxer, Race Relations in the Poruguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825 (London, 1963); John Russell-Wood, The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Brazil(London, 1982).
6. An influential book begs to be written on the extent of tenancy in the South and its implications for elitist and egalitarian republicanism. Important steps towards the big book on tenancy are taken in Frederick A. Bode and Donald E. Ginter, Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia (Athens, 1986), and Fredrika Teute, “Land, Liberty, and Labor in the Postrevolutionary Era: Kentucky as the Promised Land,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1988, chs. 6–7. These studies of two southern societies a half-century and half-continent apart both find tenancy rates massively higher than my ultra-conservative 20% estimate. On the other hand, Lacy K. Ford, Jr., Origins of South Carolina Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York, 1988), 83–88, thinks 20% is the upper and 12% the lower limit of tenancy rates in South Carolina. Ford seems aware that even 12–20% tenancy proportions pose a problem for his theory that nonslaveholding farmers escaped a dependency lethal to virtuous republicanism, as defined in the eighteenth century. More suggestive on the problem is Harry L. Watson, “Conflict and Collaboration: Yeomen, Slaveholders, and Politics in the Antebellum South,” Social History, 10 (1985): 273–98.
7. Folk culture as key to southern culture is richly conveyed in Potter, South and Sectional Conflict, ch. 1.
8. For examples of cotton ginning as class reconciliation, see James Hammond Plantation Diary, December 13, 1831, February 13, 1845, SC. A particularly insightful discussion of small borrowing and the resentment at dependency it caused is in J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta’s Hinterlands (Middletown, Conn., 1985), 95–100. See also Eugene Genovese’s “Yeoman Farmers in a Slaveholders’ Democracy,” Agricultural History, 49 (1975): 33142; and the more subtle rendition of similar ideas in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York, 1983), 249–64.
9. Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1985); William G. Shade, “Society and Politics in Antebellum Virginia’s Southside,” JSH, 53 (1987): 163–93; Robert C. Kenzer, Kinship and Neighborhood in a Southern Community: Orange County, North Carolina, 1849–81 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1987).
10. Pierre van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York, 1967); Fredrickson, Black Image; Kenneth Vickery, “Herrenvolk Democracy and Egalitarianism in South Africa and the United States South,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16 (1974): 309–28.
11. Otto H. Olsen, “Historians and the Extent of Slave Ownership in the Southern United States,” CWH, 18 (1972): 101–16.
12. Alexander Stephens Diary, entry for June 17, 1834, in GHQ, 36 (1952): 92.
13. William Thomson, A Tradesman’s Travels in the United States and Canada in the Years 1840, 1841, and 1842 (Edinburgh, 1842), 117; A Belle of the Fifties, Memoirs of Mrs. [C. C] Clay …, ed. Ada Sterling (New York, 1905), 217.
14. Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York and London, 1984); David O. Whitten, Andrew Durnford: A Black Sugar Planter in Antebellum Louisiana (Natchiloches, La., 1981); Larry Koger, Free Black Slavemasters in South Carolina, 1790–1860 (Jefferson, N.C., and London, 1985).
15. Ira Berlin’s Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974) is one of the most illuminating books on the Old South. See also Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York and London, 1984); Marina Wikramanayake, A World of Shadow: The Free Black in Antebellum South Carolina; and Gary B. Mills, The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge, 1977).
16. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (London and New Haven, 1981), 205.
17. For a different use of this intriguing document, by a historian who can see no ambiguity in the text, see Ford, Origins of South Carolina Radicalism, 372–73.
18. Fred Arthur Bailey, Class and Tennessee’s Confederate Generation (Chapel Hill, 1987), 20, 41, 69.
19. Olmsted, Backcountry, 197–204.
20. Dialogue adapted from Olmsted, Seaboard, 572–73.
21. Dialogue adapted from ibid., same pages.
22. A particularly nice description is in Ingraham, Southwest, 2: 159ff.
23. For a lovely example, see William M. Cooke to John Rutherfoord, November 26, 1850, Rutherfoord Papers, DU.
24. Gist’s Message #1 to the South Carolina legislature, quoted in Charleston Courier, November 27, 1860.
25. Ibid.; petition from Portsmouth mechanics, December 25, 1851, Legislative Petitions, Portsmouth City, VSL.
26. Points superbly made in Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York, 1983).
27. Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (Boston, 1967); and especially Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin’s fascinating The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké (Chapel Hill, 1974).
28. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, 1973); Nancy F. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977); Jeanne Boydston, Mary Kelley, and Anne Margolis, The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Women’s Sphere (Chapel Hill, 1988).
29. The big volume on the subject is Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1977).
30. Frederick Marryat, Second Series of a Diary in America (Philadelphia, 1840), 255.
31. For illustrations of permissive child-raising spreading South as well as North, see Lyell, Second Visit, 2: 168–69; Ray Mathis, John Horry Dent: South Carolina Aristocrat on the Alabama Frontier (University, Ala., 1979), 164–65.
32. One of the best recent books on the Old South is especially illuminating on this subject: Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982). Other key volumes on southern white upper-class relationships between the sexes include Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Families and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia (Cambridge, Eng., and New York, 1983); Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore, 1987); Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, 1980); Jane Turner Censer, North Carolina Planters and Their Children, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, 1984); Jean E. Friedman, The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill, 1985); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1988); and Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago, 1970). I am grateful to Anne Scott for a helpful reading of this chapter.
33. Gertrude Thomas Diary, entries for July 9, 1852, April 11, 1856, DU. This marvelous document will fortunately soon be published, fortunately with Professor Nell Painter as editor. For a suggestive essay on one aspect of its importance, see Mary Elizabeth Massey, “The Making of a Feminist,” JSH, 39 (1973): 3–22.
34. The Journal of Thomas B. Chaplin, Thomas B. Rosengarten, ed., published in Rosengarten, Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter (New York, 1986), entry for August 31, 1845.
35. Ibid., entry for May 15, 1851.
36. Allston to Mrs. Allston, March 11, June 2, 1850; same to Benjamin Allston, n.d. [March 1856], Allston Papers, SCHS.
37. Russell’s Magazine, 4 (1859): 472.
38. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. Woodward, 72. The best book on American miscegenation is Joel Williamson’s sensitive New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York, 1980). Degler, Neither White Nor Black, and Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1982), esp. 261, provide useful comparative perspectives.
39. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 29–31.
40. Russell, Diary North and South, 64–65. See also Elizabeth F. Borum to Henry A. Wise, August 29, 1856. Executive Papers, VSL.
41. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 168.
42. Gertrude Thomas Diary, entry for August 18, 1856, DU.
43. Ibid., entry for February 9, 1858.
44. Ibid., entry for February 12, 1858.
45. Ibid., entries for April 2, 1856, January 2, 1859 [misdated 1858].
46. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 169.
Chapter 4. The Domestic Charade, I: Massa’s Act
1. Comparative histories are expertly summarized in Peter Kolchin, “Reevaluating the Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective,” JAH, 70 (1983): 579–601, and in Kolchin’s illuminating recent volume Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1987). Important comparative studies include Elkins, Slavery; Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen; Degler, Neither Black Nor White; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death; Slavery in the New World, eds. Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969); and George Frederickson and Christopher Lasch, “Resistance to Slavery,” CWH, 13 (1967): 315–29.
2. A point nailed down in Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Consensus (Madison, 1969).
3. Willie Lee Rose, “Masters Without Slaves,” in Rose, Slavery and Freedom, ed. William W. Freehling (New York, 1982); James D. Roarke, Masters Without Slaves (New York, 1977); Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979); Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 97–112.
4. The somber tone of Kenneth M. Stampp’s seminal The Peculiar Institution, especially its defining Chapter Four, “To Make Them Stand in Fear,” is receding too much from post-Stampp studies. A perusal of James Breeden, ed., Advice Among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management in the Old South (Westport, Conn., 1980), shows that the most ideal regime conceived of automatic coerciveness as mandatory. See also “Agricola” in DeBow’s Review, 19 (1855): 362; William P. Rives, Jr., to N. B. Layne, February 3, 1857, Rives Papers, LC.
5. Olmsted, Backcountry, 85–90.
6. Charles Manigault to Anthony Barclay, April 15, 1847, Manigault Letterbook, SCHM.
7. Rose, Slavery and Freedom, ch. 2, nicely describes the change.
8. See Herbert Gutman’s persuasive analysis in Slavery and the Numbers Game (Urbana, III., 1975).
9. Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery … (New York, 1918), emphasized the paternalistic theme, and Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, has made the theme more sophisticated and compelling. Genovese emphasizes that paternalism need not connote kindness or permissiveness. But the specific parental permissiveness evolving in romantic America did increasingly involve such soft accents, and southern patriarchs did proudly display some newly softened conceptions of parenting. They also could be harsh, unsentimental, and unyielding, in the old parental style. Here, as everywhere, they wavered between worlds and centuries; and here their wavering helped turn paternalism into an ideal defectively achieved.
10. Yorkville Enquirer, September 20, 1860.
11. Austin State Gazette, July 22, 1854; Franklin Elmore to Whitemarsh Seabrook, May 30, 1849, Seabrook Papers, LC.
12. Linton to Alexander Stephens, February 20, 1857, SP.
13. Same to same, January 1, February 13, 1861, Stephens Papers, EU.
14. For some good examples, see Gustave A. Breaux Diary, January 1, 4, 1859; TU; Mrs. R. F. W. Allston to Benjamin Allston, July 1, 1857, Allston Papers, SCHS; and especially the largely trouble-free record of an embodiment of genial and generous slave management, the John C. Jenkins Diary, LSU. Masters’ use of religion is explored in Janet Cornelius, “God’s Schoolmasters: Southern Evangelists to the Slaves, 1830–1860,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., U. of Illinois, 1977. I will discuss this key subject at length in Volume II.
15. Charleston Mercury, June 2, 1858.
16. Clement Eaton, Growth of Southern Civilization (New York, 1961), 43, 316. Olmsted, Backcountry, 286, noticed that house servants joyously welcomed masters home from travels, but huge gangs of impersonal field hands barely noticed the arrival.
17. George Skipworth to John C. Cocke, July 8, 1847, in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge, 1977), 66–67; Charles and Tess Hoffman, “The Limits of Paternalism: Driver-Master Relations on a Bryan County Plantation,” GHQ, 67 (1983): 321–35; James Herbert Stone, “Black Leadership in the Old South: The Slave Drivers of the Rice Kingdom,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1976; James M. Clifton, “The Rice Driver: His Role in Slave Management,” SCHM, 82 (1981): 331–53; William L. Van Deburg, The Slave Drivers: Black Agricultural Labor Supervisers in the Antebellum South (Westport, Conn., 1979); Olmsted, Seaboard, 426–8; Charles Manigault to Anthony Barclay, April 15, 1847, Manigault Letterbook, SCHS.
18. William S. Pettigrew to James J. Johnson, May 11, 1856, Pettigrew Family Papers, NC.
19. Pettigrew to Moses, June 24, July 12, 1856, Pettigrew Papers.
20. Pettigrew to Moses and Henry, December 18, 1857, Pettigrew to Glasgow (Moses’s successor), July 4, 1860, Pettigrew Papers.
21. Thomas Affleck, “Duties of an Overseer,” in Affleck, The Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book, No. 3, Suitable for a Force of 120 or Under (New Orleans, 1859). For another good example, see “Plantation Rules” in William Tait Papers, TX.
22. For some spectacular examples of the overseer’s inevitable difficulties with such a precarious role, see Banjamin Roper to Ashbel Smith, June 23, 1852, Smith Papers, TX; A. B Layne (the overseer) to William Rives, July 4, 1856, and Rives back to Layne, July 7, 1856, Rives Papers, LC. The best published collection of overseers’ letters is The Southern Plantation Overseer as Revealed in His Letters, ed. John Spencer Bassett (Northampton, Mass., 1925). The fullest secondary account is William K. Scarborough, The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South(Baton Rouge, 1966). Mark S. Schantz has written a superb article on the subject: “‘A Very Serious Business’: Managerial Relationships on the Ball Plantations, 1800–1835,” SCHM, 88 (1987): 1–22.
23. For good examples of slaves and drivers exerting impacts on overseer reappointments, see R. F. W. Allston to Benjamin Allston, June 8, 1858, Allston Papers, SCHS; M. Gillis to John R. Liddell, October 22, 1856, Liddell Family Papers, LSU; William Elliott to Mrs. Elliott, February 3, 1859, Elliott-Gonzales Papers, NC; Southern Plantation Overseer, ed. Bassett, 55–65, 145, 153–54; William B. Hamilton to Father, November 26, 1858, William S. Hamilton Papes, LSU.
24. “System of Farming in Beaver Bend, Alabama,” ed. W. T. Jordan, JSH, 7 (1941): 80.
25. James P. Tarry to S. O. Wood, July 1, 1854, Samuel O. Wood Papers, DU.
26. James Hammond to N. B. Tucker, August 31, 1849, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W & M; Linton to Alex Stephens, January 18, 1855, SP.
27. Frederick Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South (Baltimore, 1931); Wendell H. Stephenson, Isaac Franklin: Slave Trade and Planter of the Old South (University, Ala., 1938).
28. For a good example, see The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, ed. Robert Manson Myers (New Haven, 1972), 183–85, 240–58, 267–71, 309–10.
29. James R. Johnston to William S. Pettigrew, November 16, 1855, Pettigrew Family Papers, NC; Charles Manigault to Mr. Haynes, March 1, 1847, Manigault Papers, SCHS.
30. Donald M. Sweig, “Reassessing the Human Dimensions of the Interstate Slave Trade,” Prologue, 12 (1980): 5–19; Michael Tadman, “Slave Trading in the Antebellum South: An Estimate of the Extent of the Inter-Regional Slave Trade,” JAH, 13 (1979): 195–220; Judith Kelleher, “New Orleans Slavery in 1850 as Seen in Advertisements,” JSH, 47 (1981): 32–56; John Withers Clay to C. C. Clay, February 8, 1855, C. C. Clay Papers, DU.
31. DeBow’s Review, 29 (1860): 368, summarizes and comments on the legal situation. For the best example of a conscientious paternalist wrestling with the problem—and another of the very best documents on this Peculiar Institution—see William S. Pettigrew to John Williams, November 4, 1852, Pettigrew Family Papers, NC. Other revealing examples include Albert T. Burnley to N. B. Tucker, December 22, 1846, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W & M; W. R. Wright to David F. Barrow, December 4, 1856, Barrow Papers, GA; Robert Toombs to Julia Toombs, November 11, 1854, Toombs Papers, GA; Jane L. Morgan to Pa, March 15, 1850, David Campbell Papers, DU; H. McLeod to Stephen Perry, April 23, 1859, James Perry Papers, TX.
32. Thomas Chaplin Journal, ed. Rosengarten, entries for May 3 and 5, 1846.
33. T. D. Jones to Eliza, September 7, 1860, Thomas Butler King Papers, LSU. This document, among the half-dozen most important for understanding antebellum slavery, had never been cited when I first saw it; I’ll never forget my excitement—and horror—upon “discovering” it. In the hopes of spreading knowledge of the letter widely, I gave it to my friend Willie Lee Rose to publish in her excellent A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (New York, 1976), 448–49. Unfortunately, I still have not seen the letter cited, some 14 years after Mrs. Rose published it. I pray that the emphasis on the letter here, plus the publication of Norrece T. Jones, Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanics of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina (Middletown, Conn., 1990), an overly-polemical but still penetrating book which shows slave sales as critical to slave control and destructive of “paternalistic compromises,” will enrich understanding of the real but tortuous paternalism which masters deployed.
34. Chaplin Journal, entry for May 19, 1849.
35. For some excellent examples, see J. E. Taliaferro to Governor John J. Pettus, August 21, 1860, C. C. Martin to Pettus, December 8, 1860, Governors’ Records, MISS; A. M. King to Floyd King, August 24, 1858, Thomas King Papers, GA; Samuel R. Latta Journal, entry for April 21–27, 1851, TU.
36. John A. Hamilton to William S. Hamilton, September 21, November 5, 1859, William S. Hamilton Papers, LSU.
37. John A. Hamilton to Father, July 29, 1851, Hamilton Papers.
38. John A. Hamilton to William S. Hamilton, November 5, 1859, Hamilton Papers.
39. As I will urge when discussing proslavery ideology in Volume II, the dogma was as much a call for slaveholders to achieve paternalism as it was a celebration of paternalism achieved. For shrewd comments on the subject, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Modernizing Southern Slavery: The Proslavery Argument Reinterpreted,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, eds. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York, 1982), 27–50.
40. Russell, Diary North and South, entry for August 17, 1861.
41. See, for example, “A Slaveholder,” in Baltimore American, February 14, 1860.
42. Good secondary accounts of the northern South slavery system include Charles B. Dew, “Sam Williams, Forgeman: The Life of an Industrial Slave in the Old South,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction, eds. Kousser and McPherson, 199–240; Loren Schweninger, “The Free-Slave Phenomenon: James P. Thomas and the Black Community in Antebellum Nashville,” CWH, 22 (1976): 293–307; John Hope Franklin, “Slaves Virtually Free in Ante-Bellum North Carolina,” JNH, 28 (1943): 284–310; John Hebron Moore, “Simon Gray, Riverman: A Slave Who Was Almost Free,” MVHR, 49 (1962): 472–84. Excellent examples from the primary sources include Mrs. Isaac B. Hilliard Diary, entry for June 19, 1850, LSU; David Campbell to My Dear Nephew, July 15, 1853, Campbell Papers, DU; John Morrow to John M. Bennett, August 28, 1859, Bennett Papers, WVU; Robert J. Breckinridge, Jr., to Robert J. Breckinridge, Sr., May 8, 1853, Breckinridge Family Papers, LC.
Chapter 5. The Domestic Charade, II: Cuffee’s Act
1. Particularly good examples include John Manning to Mrs. Manning, September 21, 1851, Williams-Chesnut-Manning Papers, SC; George Bryan to Stephen Perry, July 13, 1859, James F. Perry Papers, TX.
2. Particularly good examples include Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. Woodward, 112; A Confederate Girl’s Diary, by Sarah Morgan Dawson, ed. James I. Richardson (Bloomington, 1960), 45–46, 97; When the War Ended: The Diary of Emma Le Conte, ed. Earl Schenck Miers (New York, 1957), 41–49, 53–58.
3. Thomas Chaplin Journal, ed. Rosengarten, entry for May 9, 1846; Cecil Harper, Jr., “Slavery Without Cotton: Hunt County, Texas, 1846–1864,” SWHQ, 88 (1985): 399, has a lovely example of similar camaraderie out hunting.
4. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838–1839 (London, 1863), 67–68.
5. Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slaves in the Making of the New World (Baton Rouge, 1979); Kolchin, Unfree Labor, 244–52.
6. Historians have rightly emphasized that Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943) is a history not of revolts achieved but of alleged plans gone awry. The book, however, remains a valuable accounting of white fears—and of black potential stirring. Almost every one of Aptheker’s reported plots which I have examined turned out to have a degree of white exaggeration and a degree of unexaggerated fact. For a superb analysis of white exaggerations, see John Scott Strickland, “The Great Revival and Insurrectionary Fears in North Carolina: An Examination of Antebellum Southern Society and Slave Revolt Panics,” in Class, Conflict, and Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies, eds. Orville Vernon Burton and Robert C. McMath, Jr. (Westport, Conn., and London, Eng., 1982), 57–95. For an important demonstration that whites had something to fear, see Philip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1988).
7. I have analyzed the Vesey plot in detail in “Denmark Vesey’s Peculiar Reality,” in New Perspectives on Race and Slavery, eds. Abzug and Maizlish, 25–50. Readers will there find full documentation and, I hope, a convincing answer to Richard Wade’s onceinfluential “The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration,” Journal of Southern History, 30 (1964): 144–61. The best book on the subject is John Lofton, Insurrection in South Carolina: The Turbulent World of Denmark Vesey (Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1964). For key documents and an excellent introduction, see Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822, ed. Robert S. Starobin (Englewood, N.J., 1970). Starobin also analyzes the incident well in “Denmark Vesey’s Slave Conspiracy of 1822: A Study in Rebellion and Repression,” in American Slavery: The Question of Resistance, eds. John H. Bracey et al. (Belmont, Calif., 1971). The best primary source is Lionel H. Kennedy and Thomas Parker, An Official Report of the Trial of Sundry Negroes, Charged with an Attempt to Raise an Insurrection … (Charleston, 1822).
8. Genovese, Rebellion to Revolution, 8–10, makes this point particularly well.
9. Denmark Vesey, ed. Starobin, 141–42.
10. Johnson Ajibade Adefila, “Slave Religion in the Antebellum South: A Study of the role of Africanism in the Black Response to Christianity,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Brandeis U., 1975, nicely puts Vesey’s dual religious appeal in perspective.
11. Kennedy and Parker, Official Report, 75.
12. Ibid., 63.
13. I discuss this point at length in “Denmark Vesey’s Peculiar Reality,” 39–43.
14. Koger, Free Black Slavemasters, 42–43, 176–78.
15. Congressional Globe, 36 Cong., 1 sess. (December 8, 1859), 63.
16. Richmond Enquirer, February 27, 1860; Savannah Republican, February 27, 1860; Robert Barnwell Rhett to William Porcher Miles, January 24, 1860, Miles Papers, NC. For some other choice examples, see New Orleans Delta, April 1, 1859; Caroline Pettigrew to Louisa Pettigrew, February 24, 1858, Pettigrew Family Papers, NC.
17. Document B, copy 2, accompanying Gov. Thomas Bennett’s Ms., Message #2 to the Senate and House of Representatives, Legislative Papers, South Carolina Archives, June-July Trial, p. 21.
18. Martha Proctor Richardson to My Dear James, August 7, 1822, Arnold-Screven Papers, NC, printed in Denmark Vesey, ed. Starobin, 72.
19. The classic essay on the subject is Raymond A. and Alice H. Bauer, “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery,” JNH, 27 (1942): 318–419. Kenneth Stampp superbly elaborates the theme in ch. 3 of Peculiar Institution.
20. For some good examples, see R. F. W. Allston to his son, May 25, 1855, Allston Papers, SCHS; William H. Battle to Mrs. Battle, January 1, 1858, Battle Family Papers, NC; Manigault Plantation Diary, entry for March 22, 1867, NC.
21. Olmsted, Seaboard, 480; James Hammond Diary, entry for June 7, 1839, SC; Florida Plantation Records from the Papers of George Noble Jones, eds. Ulrich B. Phillips and James D. Glunt (St. Louis, 1927), 107–18.
22. Thomas Chaplin Journal, ed. Rosengarten, entry for June 2, 1855; David Campbell to My Dear Daughter, October 28, 1851, Campbell Papers, DU; D. G. Conaned to William S Pettigrew, November 6, 1857, Pettigrew’s memo of November 11, 1857, Pettigrew Family Papers, NC.
23. Olmsted, Backcountry, 77–79; William Hufford to R. J. Brackinridge [sic], June 22, 1853, Breckinridge Family Papers, LC.
24. George W. Neal to David Barrow, December 10, 1851, Barrow Papers, GA; Charles Pettigrew to Mrs. Pettigrew, June 4, 1856, Pettigrew Papers, NC; Mrs. William F. Battle to Mr. Battle, January 21, 1861, Battle Family Papers, NC; Wilmington Delaware Republican, April 11, 1859.
25. William K. Ruffin to Thomas Ruffin, January 31, 1850, Thomas Ruffin Papers, NC; S. A. Rees to John [Lamar], December 18, 1854, Cobb Family Papers, GA; Thomas Chaplin Journal, ed. Rosengarten, entries for June 18, 20, 1853.
26. Ibid., entries for March 5, 1851, July 10, 1855; Linton Stephens to Alexander Stephens, January 18, 1855, SP.
27. Manigault Plantation Journal, entry for March 22, 1867, NC.
28. E. Coles to John Rutherfoord, September 20, 1853, Rutherfoord Papers, NC; San Antonio Ledger, January 16, February 20, August 14, 1858; James A. Spratlin to David Barrow, April 27, 1860, Barrow Papers, GA; Texas State Gazette, September 23, 1854.
29. Wilmington Delaware Gazette, November 4, 1856.
30. G. M. Wharton to William F. Cooper, April 13, 1850, Cooper Papers, TN.
31. For a nice example, see Mrs. Charles Pettigrew’s rememberance of her missing handkerchief after the Panic of 1856 in her letter to Mr. Pettigrew, July 3, 1857, Pettigrew Family Papers, NC.
32. Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll remains the best synthesis of slave culture. Other key volumes in this historical reconsideration include Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York, 1987); John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972); Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness… (New York, 1977); Thomas L. Webber, Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831–1865 (New York, 1978); John B. Boles, Black Southerners, 1619–1869 (Lexington, 1983); Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Community (Urbana, III., 1984).
33. Levine, Black Culture and Consciousness, is especially fine on this point, as is Sterling Stuckey, “Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery,” in Black and White in American Culture: An Anthology from the Massachusetts Review, eds. Jules Chametzky and Sidney Kaplan (New York, 1971), 172–191; and Michael Flushe, “Joel Chandler Harris and the Folklore of Slavery,” Journal of American Studies, 9 (1975): 349–56. The best modern collection of folktales is American Negro Folktales, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Greenwich, Conn., 1967).
34. Levine, Black Culture and Consciousness, 107.
35. Ibid, 96–97.
36. Ibid., 116.
37. Ibid., 108.
38. Genovese makes the point admirably in Roll, Jordan, Roll, 168–83.
39. Peter Kolchin, First Freedom: The Response of Alabama Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Westport, Conn., 1972), 118; Raboteau, Slave Religion, 312; Levine Black Culture and Consciousness, 51.
40. W. F. Allen, et al., Slave Songs of the United States (New York, 1870), 1; C. V. Calverton, Anthology of American Negro Music (New York, 1929), 217; Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana, III., 1977).
41. Stuckey, Slave Culture, expertly takes the point as far as it can go.
42. Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain Folk Camp Meeting Religion, 1800–1845 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1974), esp. 53–54.
43. All references to Douglass’s Life and Times … are to the revised edition of 1892, as reprinted by Collier Books, with an introduction by Rayford W. Logan (New York, 1962). Helpful accounts of Douglass include Peter Walker, Moral Choices: Desire and Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Abolition (Baton Rouge, 1978); Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill and London, 1984); and Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore, 1980).
44. Douglass, Life and Times, 44.
45. Ibid., 27, 85–86.
46. Ibid., 31–33.
47. Ibid., 46–47.
48. Ibid., 76–77.
49. Ibid., 96.
50. Ibid., 78–79, 82, 86–87, 98, 101.
51. Ibid., 94.
52. Ibid., 127–33.
53. Ibid., 155–73.
54. Ibid., 183.
55. Ibid., 193–201.
56. Ibid., 150.
57. Ibid., 193.
58. Someday these words may be read as the common sense of the matter. At the moment this book is published, however, I will more likely be called too hard on slave culture, although critics may recognize that I am just as “hard” on slaveholder culture (see Chapter 13).
Ultimately, however, the question is not one of “hardness” or “softness” but of recognition that brutalization damages everyone it touches, both brutalizers and brutalized. Brave and sensitive men and women struggle against the consequences of their involvement in brutalization. Strugglers from below are up against infinitely more; their accomplishments are accordingly more remarkable. But let us remember antebellum slaves could only do so much. They lived under a grinding institution.
In a prescient review-essay a decade ago, Bertram Wyatt-Brown warned against excesses of the new glorification of slave life (“The New Consensus,” in Commentary 63 (1977): 76–78). Peter Kolchin’s important Unfree Labor issues a similar warning, as does Wyatt-Brown’s latest stimulating essay, “The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South,” AHR, 93 (1988): 1228–52.
59. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 120–23, 247.
Chapter 6. Democrats as Lynchers
1. Charleston Courier, December 19, 1859; James S. Guignard to James S. Guignard Ill, December 17, 1859, Planters and Businessmen: The Guignard Family of South Carolina, 1795–1930, ed. Arney R. Childs (Columbia, 1957), 81.
2. Levi H. Harris to William T. Walthall, November 29, 1860, Walthall Papers, MISS; New Orleans Delta, November 29–30, December 30, 1860.
3. Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography …, 2 vols. (Boston and New York, 1904), 1: 186–91; John d’Entremont, Southern Emancipator: Moncure Conway, the American Years, 1832–1865 (New York, 1987), ch. 3.
4. Bertram Wyatt-Brown has written a suggestive essay on these matters: “Community, Class, and Snopesian Crime: Local Justice in the Old South,” in Class, Conflict, and Consensus, eds. Burton and McMath, 173–206.
5. The following account is based on letters in the Pettigrew Family Papers, NC, especially William Pettigrew to David Clayton, December 2, 1852; same to James C. Johnston, December 23 and 24, 1852, January 27, 1853; Johnston to William Pettigrew, December 27, 1852; Johnston to James J. Pettigrew, January 1, 1853; William Pettigrew to James J. Pettigrew, January 1, 1853; T. G. Claughton to William Pettigrew, January 11, 1853; James W. Bell to William Pettigrew, May 2, 1853.
6. Caroline Pettigrew to James J. Pettigrew, September 12, 1860; same to William Pettigrew, September 17, 1860; same to Charles Pettigrew, November 17, 1860, Pettigrew Papers.
7. Charles Pettigrew to Caroline Pettigrew, November 14, 1860, Pettigrew Papers.
8. Malachi J. White to William Pettigrew, October 20, 1860, William Pettigrew to James J. Johnston, October 25, 1860, Pettigrew Papers.
9. Charleston Mercury, November 30, December 5, 1859. See also New Orleans Delta, December 7, 1860; Savannah Republican, April 9, 1960.
10. Thomas T. Gantt to Lisinka Brown, December 10, 26, 1856, Campbell, Brown and Ewell Papers, TN.
11. Linton Stephens to Alexander Stephens, February 3, 1860, SP.
12. Eaton, Freedom-of-Thought Struggle, 122–30.
13. Ibid., 130–37.
14. Samuel T. Janney, Memoirs (Philadelphia, 1881), 97–98.
15. Charleston Courier, January 14–15, 1861.
16. A rich literature is growing on this subject. Some of the most important studies include Daniel J. Flanigan, “Criminal Procedures in Slave Trials in the Antebellum South,” JSH, 40 (1974): 531–64; J. Thomas Wren, “A ‘Two-Fold Character’: The Slave as Person and Property in Virginia Court Cases, 1800–1860,” SS, 24 (1985): 417–31; Judith K. Schafer, “The Long Arm of the Law: Slavery and the Supreme Court in Antebellum Louisiana, 1809–1862,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Tulane U., 1985; and A. E. Kier Nash, “Fairness and Formalism in the Trials of Blacks in the State Supreme Courts of the Old South,” Virginia Law Review, 61 (1970): 197–242. These studies tend to concentrate on legal process towards blacks at the appellate level. Arthur Howington, What Sayeth the Law: The Trial of Free Blacks in the State and Local Courts of Tennessee (New York, 1986), shows a degree of justice at the trial level too.
17. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 34.
18. Quoted in Flanigan, “Criminal Procedures,” 558–59.
19. The following account is based on Samuel R. Latta Journal, entries for May 24, June 27–8, July 3, October 6, December 6, 1852, October 4–6, 1853, TU.
20. The following account is based on Christopher Morris, “An Event in Community Organization: The Mississippi Slave Insurrection Scare, 1835,” Journal of Social History, 22 (1988): 93–111; Edwin A. Miles, “The Mississippi Insurrection Scare of 1835,” JNH, 42 (1957): 48–60; Lawrence Shore, “Making Mississippi Safe for Slavery: The Insurrectionary Panic of 1835,” in Class, Conflict, and Consensus, eds. Burton and McMath, 96–127; and the most important source, Proceedings of the Citizens of Madison County, Mississippi at Livingston, in July, 1835 …, ed. Thomas Shackleford (Jackson, 1836). While my emphases differ slightly from his, I am particularly indebted to Mr. Shore, who has taught this professor once again that one’s best students can be one’s most illuminating teachers.
21. James Lal Penick, Jr., The Great Mississippi Land Pirate: John A. Murrell in Legend and History (Columbia, Mo., 1981).
22. The following account is based on Betty Fladeland’s excellent James Gillespie Birney: Slaveholder to Abolitionist (Ithaca, 1955) and especially on Letters of James Gillespie Birney, 1831–1857, ed. Dwight L. Dumond, 2 vols. (New York, 1938).
23. Birney to Ralph R. Gurley, July 12, 1832, April 13, 1833, ibid., 1: 9, 71.
24. Birney to Gurley, April 13, 1833, ibid., 1: 71.
25. Birney to Gurley, December 27, 1832, March 18, 1833, December 3, 1833, ibid., 1: 48–50, 59–63, 96.
26. Birney to Gurley, December 3, 1833, ibid., 1:97.
27. James G. Birney, Letter on Colonization, Addressed to the Rev. Thornton J. Mills (New York, 1834), esp. 7, 11, 13.
28. Birney to Gerrit Smith, March 21, 1835, Letters of Birney, 1: 190.
29. F. T. Taylor and others to Birney, July 12, 1835, ibid., 1: 197–200.
30. Fladeland, Birney, 116.
31. Birney to the Patrons of The Philanthropist, August 1835, Letters of Birney, 1: 232–34.
Chapter 7. Conditional Termination in the Early Republic
1. Those who have taught us about Jefferson’s limitations as “antislavery” man include John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York, 1977); Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), 430–36; William Cohen, “Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Slavery,” JAH, 66 (1969): 503–26; Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York, 1971), 88–97; Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia (Urbana, III., 1964); and David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca and London, 1975), 164–84.1 am particularly indebted to Professor Davis, not only for his magisterial volume but for his offering warm encouragement to a quarrelsome stranger at an important moment in the evolution of this book.
The latest and one of the most sensitive late twentieth-century exposures of “Jeffersonian antislavery” is Drew R. McCoy’s The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (New York and Cambridge, Eng., 1989). But even McCoy is in danger of driving the viewpoint too far, especially when he claims that “the dilemma of slavery undid” Madison (252). McCoy’s own text shows on the contrary that Madison, far from being undone, retained his belief that his republican legacy could, should, and would eventually lead blacks to be removed from republican America. Only by realizing the persistence of this (to us) noxiously anti-republican side of “Jeffersonian republicanism” can we understand why proslavery perpetualists feared they might be undone unless they screamed down such Jefferson-Madison proposals as using the massive proceeds from federal land sales to free and colonize blacks.
2. For an illustration of misunderstandings an author invites by using the word and concept “antislavery” too loosely, see my own first attempt at formulating the thesis in this chapter: William W. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers and Slavery,” AHR, 77 (1972): 81–93.
3. Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 168, points out that my “Founding Fathers” article falls toward that trap.
4. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966).
5. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb, Library Edition, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1903), 1: 34. Hereafter cited as Jefferson’s Writings, ed. Lipscomb, and not to be confused with Jefferson’s Writings, ed. Ford, full citation in note 14 below.
6. Ibid., 2: 226.
7. Ibid., 1: 72, and 9: 418.
8. Ibid., 1: 73.
9. Ibid., 2: 193–94, and 8: 241–42.
10. Ibid., 2: 192.
11. Ibid., 14: 296–97.
12. Ibid., 15: 249.
13. The most balanced treatment of Sally Hemings is in Williamson, New People, 42–48. Jordan, White Over Black, 429–81, brilliantly analyzes the racial context.
14. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, 10 vols. (New York and London, 1892–99), 8: 352. Hereafter cited as Jefferson’s Writings, ed. Ford, and not to be confused with Jefferson’s Writings, ed. Lipscomb, full citation in note 5 above.
15. Edward Coles to Thomas Jefferson, July 31, 1814, in “Letters of Governor Edward Coles Bearing on the Struggle of Freedom and Slavery in Illinois,” JNH, 3 (1918): 158–60.
16. Coles to Jefferson, September 26, 1814, in ibid., 3: 160–62; Jefferson to Coles, August 25, 1814, in Jefferson’s Writings, ed. Ford, 9: 476–79.
17. Ibid., 9: 477.
18. Edgar J. McManus, Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse, 1973), is the best general account of northern slavery, while Arthur Zilversmit’s The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, 1967) expertly synthesizes the demise of Yankee bondage. Emma L. Thornbrough, “Negro Slavery in the North: Its Legal and Constitutional Aspects,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., U. of Michigan, 1946, contains excellent materials.
19. A point well made in Gary B. Nash, “Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial Philadelphia,” W&MQ, 30 (1973): 223–56.
20. Quoted in Zilversmit, First Emancipation, 182.
21. Lorenzo J. Green, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York, 1942).
22. Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (New Haven, 1950); Sydney V. James, A People Among Peoples (Cambridge, Mass., 1963); Edward R. Turner, “The Abolition of Slavery in Pennsylvania,” PMHB, 36 (1912): 129–42.
23. Simeon Moss, “The Persistence of Slavery and Involuntary Servitude in a Free State (1685–1866),” JNH, 35 (1950): 289–314.
24. Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse, 1966); McManus, “Antislavery Legislation in New York,” JNH, 46 (1961): 207–16.
25. Claudia Dale Golden, “The Economics of Emancipation,” JEH, 33 (1973): 70.
26. Zilversmit, First Emancipation, 217.
27. Journal and Essays of John Woolman, ed. Amelia Mott Gummere (New York, 1922).
28. Virginia is discussed in detail below in Chapter 9. South Carolina in Chapters 12 and 13. Excellent histories of the colonial period in these states include Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill and London, 1986); and Robert M. Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History (New York, 1983).
29. Jefferson’s Writings, ed. Lipscomb, 1: 28.
30. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrard, 4 vols. (New Haven, 1966), 2: 371–75. Paul Finkelman, generally illuminating “Slavery and the Constitutional Convention: Making a Covenant with Death,” in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, eds. Richard Beeman et al. (Chapel Hill and London, 1987), 188–225, seems to me too cynical when dismissing South Carolina’s threats as mere attempts for commercial concessions. I believe that Carolinians meant their ultimatum—and that the majority of convention delegates so believed too. Finkelman’s only evidence to the contrary, that the minority against caving in to Carolina dismissed Carolina threats, hardly illuminates why the majority voted to appease those threatening.
31. See Patrick S. Brady’s excellent “The Slave Trade and Sectionalism in South Carolina, 1787–1808,” JSH, 38 (1972): 601–20.
32. In the nineteenth century, the British navy’s efforts to suppress the African slave trade drove up the New World price of African imports. But Brazilian and Cuban masters still paid much less for Africans than Lower South slaveholders paid for Upper South slaves. Compare David Eltis’s excellent Economic Growth and the Ending of the Tranatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987), esp. 280, with Lewis Gray’s classic History of Agriculture in the Southern United States, 2 vols. (Washington, 1933), 2: 663–67, and with Robert Evans, Jr.’s sophisticated “The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” in Universities National Bureau Committee for Economic Research, Aspects of Labor Economy (Princeton, N.J., 1962), 216.
33. Quoted in Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (New York, 1970), 283.
34. Paul Finkelman, “Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity,” JER, 6 (1986): 343–70, makes this point especially well. Finkelman’s essays and Peter Onuf’s fine Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Indianapolis, 1987) have much influenced this section. While I think Finkelman and Onuf too much discount the role of ideological forces in ridding the Midwest of slavery, they show that my first formulation, “Founding Fathers and Slavery,” too much discounted material forces. For a nicely balanced appreciation/critique of the Finkelman position, see David Brion Davis, “The Significance of Excluding Slavery from the Old Northwest in 1787,” Indiana Magazine of History, 84 (1988): 75–89.
35. William Grayson to James Monroe, August 8, 1787, in Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, ed. Edmund C. Burnett, 8 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1921–36), 8: 631–33.
36. The petitions are usefully collected in Kaskaskia Records, 1778–1790 (Springfield, III., 1909), 485–93, and especially in Jacob Piat Dunn, “Slavery Petitions and Papers,” Indiana Historical Society Publications (Indianapolis, 1894), 2: 443–529. These petitions are extensively discussed in Paul Finkelman’s illuminating “Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” JER, 9 (1989): 21–51.
37. The best secondary sources on this critical episode are the Finkelman and Onuf studies cited above and John D. Barnhart, Valley of Democracy (Lincoln, Neb., 1970), esp. chs. 9, 11–13; E. B. Washborne, Sketch of Edward Coles … (Chicago, 1882); and Kurt E. Leichtle, “Edward Coles: An Agrarian on the Frontier,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., U. of Illinois at Chicago Circle, 1982. Useful personal papers of Coles can be found in the Edward Coles Papers, Princeton University Library and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
38. Southern Intelligencer, May 21 and June 24, 1824.
Chapter 8. The Missouri Controversy
1. Annals of Congress, 15 Cong., 2 sess. (February 13, 1819): 1166, 1170.
2. Harold A. Ohline, “Republicanism and Slavery: Origins of the Three-Fifths Clause in the United States Constitution,” W&MQ (1971): 563–84.
3. These questions are superbly explored in Arthur F. Simpson, “The Political Significance of Slave Representation, 1787–1821,” JSH, (1941): 315–42.
4. The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, ed. Charles R. King, 6 vols. (New York, 1894–1900), 6:324–25, 690–703; Annals of Congress, 15 Cong., 2 sess. (February 16, 1819): 1203–14; Robert Ernst, Rufus King: American Federalist (Chapel Hill, 1968).
5. By far the best account of the Missouri Crisis, though one that leaves room for a new monograph, is Glover Moore, The Missouri Controversy, 1819–1821 (Lexington, Ky. 1953).
6. Annals of Congress, 15 Cong., 2 sess. (February 16, 1819): 1214–15.
7. Ibid. (February 17, 1819): 273; Moore, Missouri Controversy, 54.
8. Annals of Congress, 15 Cong., 2 sess. (February 19, 1819): 1273–74; ibid. (March 1, 1819): 274; William R. Johnson, “Prelude to the Missouri Compromise: A New York Congressman’s Effort to Exclude Slavery from Arkansas Territory,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly, 48 (1964): 31–50.
9. Annals of Congress, 15 Cong., 2 sess. (January 26, 1820): 259–75, esp. 268.
10. Richmond Enquirer, February 10, 1820.
11. Annals of Congress, 15 Cong., 2 sess. (February 1, 1820), 1025.
12. Ibid. (February 17, 1820): 1382–94.
13. Ibid. (February 16, 1820): 424–27.
14. Nathaniel Macon to Boiling Hall, Febraury 13, 1820, Hall Papers, AL.
15. Annals of Congress, 16 Cong., 1 sess. (February 17, 1820): 428.
16. Ibid. (March 2, 1820): 1586–87.
17. Jefferson to Holmes, April 22, 1820, Jefferson’s Writings, ed. Ford, 10:157–58; Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 184. Davis’s broader conclusion, that southern “questioning of slavery” ultimately led to “a resolution … which committed the entire society to a moral defense of the slaveholder” (212), seems to me to homogenize a culture which remained subtly divided. This problem, I must add, is but a chink in the armor of the best book on American slavery in the early republic.
18. Jefferson to Gallatin, December 26, 1820, Jefferson’s Writings, ed. Ford, 10:175–78.
19. Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1820–21 (Richmond, 1821), 10; William H. Gaines, Jr., Thomas Mann Randolph, Jefferson’s Son-in-Law (Baton Rouge, 1966).
20. Jefferson to Sparks, February 24, 1824, Jefferson’s Writings, ed. Ford, 10: 289–92.
21. Phillip J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865 (New York, 1961).
22. Life and Speeches of Henry Clay, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1853), 1: 267–85.
23. State Documents on Federal Relations …, ed. Herman V. Ames (Philadelphia, 1906), 203–4.
24. Ibid., 204–8.
25. William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York, 1966), 122–24.
26. Southern Review, 1 (1828): 229–30.
27. Brutus [Robert J. Turnbull], The Crisis … (Charleston, 1827), 64, 128. Turnbull’s Crisis and Whitemarsh J. Seabrook’s A Concise View of the Critical Situation and Future Prospects of the Southern States … (Charleston, 1825) are the two most important sources on the radical Carolinian vis-à-vis the Colonization Society.
28. Columbia Telegraph, August 20, 1833.
Chapter 9. Class Revolt in Virginia, I: Anti-Egalitarianism Attacked
1. The case for the nineteenth-century South as an emerging herrenvolk commonwealth is taken as far as it can go in our best political history of an antebellum southern state: J. Mills Thornton III, Power and Politics in a Slave State: Alabama, 1800–1860(Baton Rouge, 1978).
2. Fletcher Green, Constitutional Development in the South Atlantic States, 17761860 (Chapel Hill, 1930); Ralph A. Wooster, The People in Power: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Lower South, 1850–1860 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1969); Wooster, Politicians, Planters, and Plain Folk: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Upper South, 1850–1860 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1975).
3. Virginia sectional differences, geographic and demographic, are described in Alison G. Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831–1832 (Baton Rouge and London, 1982). While my sources and interpretations are not quite the same as my wife’s, much of this chapter and the next draws on her findings.
4. I recognize, with Sidney Fiske Kimball, that Jefferson as designer was partly responding to other designs, in this case Palladio’s European buildings. I also recognize, with Silvio A. Bedini, that Jefferson’s architectural tricks displayed a mind exuding the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century infatuation with invention and gadgets. But in architectural as in literary criticism, I believe the study of texts sheerly as response to other texts, or of invention sheerly as love of exercising virtuosity, misses the cultural imperatives driving the artist towards creating his own version of inherited forms. As I enjoy Monticello, I most see an aristocrat as democrat shaping European prototypes with a highly revealing personal accent. Fiske, Thomas Jefferson, Architect … (Cambridge, Mass., 1916); Bedini, Thomas Jefferson and His Coping Machine (Charlottesville, 1984). The latest study of Monticello is Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York, 1988).
5. Jefferson’s version of Enlightenment political theory is most elegantly elucidated in his correspondence with John Adams: The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, 1959), esp. 2: 388–89.
6. Leonard Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).
7. Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, Jefferson’s Writings, ed. Ford, 10: 37–49.
8. A. Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution, 43–44.
9. Ibid., 44–48.
10. Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention of 1829–1830 (Richmond, 1830), 83–89.
11. Ibid., 257–94.
12. Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Convention of 1829–30 and the and the Conservative Tradition in the South (San Marino, Calif., 1982); Fred Siegel, “The Paternalist Thesis, Virginia as a Test Case,” CWH, 25 (1979): 246–61.
13. 1829 Proceedings, 65–79 (Upshur), 151–74 (Leigh), 312–21 (Randolph).
14. Ibid., 158.
15. Ibid., 321.
16. Ibid., 76.
17. Ibid., 172.
18. Ibid., 319.
19. Ibid., 76.
20. Ibid., 315–16.
21. Ibid., 173.
22. Upshur to Francis W. Gilmer, July 7, 1825, Gilmer Papers, VA; Frank F. Mathias, “John Randolph’s Freemen: The Thwarting of a Will,” JSH, 39 (1973): 263–72.
23. A. Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution, 65.
24. Ibid., 66–69.
25. 1829 Proceedings, 87.
Chapter 10. Class Revolt in Virginia, II: Slavery Besieged
1. William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner: A Novel (New York, 1966); William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, ed. John Henrik Clarke (Boston, 1968).
2. This account of the Turner revolt is particularly drawn from Nat Turner’s own confession, conveniently reprinted in ibid., 102–4. Also helpful in reconstructing the trauma are The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material, comp. Henry J. Tragle (Amherst, Mass., 1971); Richmond Constitutional Whig, September 3, 1831; Nat Turner, comp. Eric Foner (Englewood Cliffs. N.J., 1971). I am indebted to Professor Foner for incisive criticisms of this chapter.
3. The panic is best illustrated in Governor John Floyd’s incoming mail, September–November, 1831, Floyd Executive Papers, VSL. For other choice examples, see Helen Read to Louisa Cocke, September 17, 1831, Mrs. M. F. Robertson to Louisa Cocke, September 24, 1831, Cocke Family Papers, VA.
4. Jane Randolph to Sarah Nichols, undated, Edgehill-Randolph Papers, VA.
5. Thomas Jefferson Randolph to Jane Randolph, January 29, 1832, Edgehill-Randolph Papers.
6. Ibid.
7. The Speech of Thomas J. Randolph, in the House of Delegates … on the Abolition of Slavery (Richmond, 1832).
8. Richmond Enquirer, January 12, 19, 1832; Richmond Constitutional Whig, January 19, 1832.
9. Floyd to Hamilton, November 19, 1831, Floyd Papers, LC.
10. The Speech of James McDowell, Jr. (of Rockbridge) in the House of Delegates … on the Slavery Question (Richmond, 1832), esp. 14–15, 19–20, 27–29.
11. The Speech of William H. Brodnax (of Dinwiddie) in the House of Delegates … on the … Colored Population (Richmond, 1832), esp. 25–26.
12. Speech of McDowell, 9.
13. Speech of Brodnax, 11.
14. Ibid, 13–16.
15. Ibid., 34.
16. See James Gholson in Richmond Enquirer, January 21, 24, 1832; The Speech of John Thompson Brown, in the House of Delegates, … on … Abolition … (reprinted Richmond, 1860); and William O. Goode in Richmond Constitutional Whig, March 28, 1832.
17. Speech of Brodnax, 21–22.
18. Speech of Randolph, 8.
19. Richmond Enquirer, February 14, 1832.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.,; The Speech of Charles Jas. Faulkner (of Berkeley) in the House of Delegates of Virginia, on … Her Slave Population (Richmond, 1832), 21.
22. Faulkner’s and Summers’s speeches, cited above.
23. A. Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution, 159–63, analyzes these votes.
24. Richmond Enquirer, January 17, 1832.
25. A. Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution, 164–65.
26. Thomas Jefferson Randolph to Jane Randolph, January 29, 1832, McDowell to T. J. Randolph, April 18, 1832, Randolph Family Papers, VA.
27. Speech of Brodnax, 41–44.
28. Richmond Constitutional Whig, January 31, 1832.
29. A. Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution, 182–93.
30. Stephen Scott Mansfield, “Thomas Roderick Dew: Defender of the Southern Faith,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1968.
31. Dew’s Review was conveniently and accurately reprinted in The Pro-Slavery Argument, 287–490.
Recent reinterpretations of Dew, each different but all useful, include Lawrence Shore, Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832–1885 (Chapel Hill and London, 1986), 24–28, revealing on the Adam Smith theme; Eugene Genovese, Western Civilization Through Slaveholding Eyes: The Social and Historical Thought of Thomas Roderick Dew (New Orleans, 1986), and Allen Kaufman, Capitalism, Slavery, and Republican Values: Antebellum Political Economy, 1819–1849 (Austin, 1982), chs. 5–6, both insightful on the class proslavery theme; and A. Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution, 203–8, penetrating on the too far north theme. These extremely different interpretations, all viably based on Dew’s text, reveal the largest importance of the man: this alleged embodiment of the moment when the South became one mind instead exemplified why contradictory tendencies could not this early be molded into a single mentality.
32. Pro-Slavery Argument, 319, 459.
33. Quoted in Genovese, Dew, 14–15.
34. Pro-Slavery Argument, 451–53.
35. Ibid., 482.
36. Ibid., 483–84.
37. Ibid., 482–84.
38. Ibid., 446–47, 478–80.
39. Jesse Burton Harrison, “The Slavery Question in Virginia,” in Aris Sonis Focisque, The Harrisons of Skimino, ed. Fairfax Harrison (n.p., 1910), esp. 343–48.
40. A. Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution, 216–20.
41. Ibid., 221–28.
Chapter 11. Not-So-Conditional Termination in the Northern Chesapeake
1. The economic transformation is masterfully explicated in Paul G. E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grain (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1980).
2. Barbara Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, is the best history of Maryland slavery’s decay.
3. [Annapolis] Maryland Gazette, November 10, December 1, 1831; Baltimore American, March 6, 1832.
4. Manuscript Federal Census of 1830, Charles County, 121, copy in Maryland Hall of Records, Annapolis.
5. This critical document for understanding the Border South establishment was printed in [Annapolis] Maryland Gazette, March 22, 1832.
6. Journal of the Proceedings of the House of Delegates of the State of Maryland, Dec. Sess., 1831 (Annapolis, 1831), 524–26.
7. [Annapolis] Maryland Gazette, March 29, 1832.
8. Penelope Campbell, Maryland in Africa: The Maryland State Colonization Society, 1831–1857 (Urbana, Ill., 1971), 177.
9. The post-1831 story is told in ibid, and can be filled out with the superb Maryland State Colonization Society Papers, 1831–1858, Maryland Historical Society.
10. [Annapolis] Maryland Gazette, March 29, 1832.
11. Richard Fuller, Our Duty to the African Race … (Washington, D.C., 1851); Hall in Maryland Colonization Journal, 9 (1858): 289–303.
12. Ibid., 10 (1859): 1–13.
13. Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 209; Edmund Ruffin Diary, entry for September 12, 1859, LC.
14. Delaware Journal, February 23, 1847; Delaware Gazette, February 23, 26, 1847.
15. Ibid., February 23, 1847.
16. Ibid., May 22, November 20, 1857.
17. Delaware Republican, October 6, 1859.
18. Jackson Semi-Wekly Mississippian, February 21, 1860.
Chapter 12. Origins of South Carolina Eccentricity, I: Economic and Political Foundations
1. T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in Eliot, Collected Poems, 1809–1835 (New York, 1930), esp. 104.
2. Daniel C. Littlefield, Race and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge, 1981), 74–114; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 35–62.
3. The rice plantation is expertly described in David Doar, Rice and Rice Planting in the South Carolina Lowcountry (Charleston, 1936), and in Duncan Clinch Heyward, Seed from Madagascar (Chapel Hill, 1937). Day-to-day rice activities can be followed in The South Carolina Rice Plantation, as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston, ed. J. H. Easterby (Chicago, 1945).
4. Dr. S. H. Dickson, “Essay on Malaria,” in The Proceedings of the Agricultural Convention and the State Agricultural Society of South Carolina (Columbia, 1846), 169.
5. William H. Trescot to William Porcher Miles, December 4, 1853, Miles Papers, NC.
6. Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of Revolution (New York, 1980), 258–341, 343–74.
7. H. Roy Merrens and George D. Tracy, “Dying in Paradise: Malaria, Mortality, and the Perceptual Environment in Colonial South Carolina,” JSH, 50 (1984): 533–50; Sherman L. Ricards and George M. Blackburn, “A Demographical History of Slavery: Georgetown County, South Carolina, 1850,” SCHM, 76 (1975): 215–24.
8. Of many contemporary accounts of Charleston, my favorites include Charleston Courier, February 13, 1860; C. Mackay, Life and Liberty, I: 307; Philo Tower, Slavery Unmasked … (Rochester, N.Y., 1856), 106–15. Illuminating latter-day interpretations include Kenneth Severns, Charleston Architecture and Civic Destiny (Knoxville, Tenn., 1988); Samuel G. Stoney, This Is Charleston … (Charleston, 1976); William H. and Jane H. Pease, The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828–1843 (New York, 1985). But the best source is Charleston itself, a wonderfully preserved museum of olden times.
9. Legaré to Isaac Holmes, October 2, 1832, Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, ed. Mary Legaré, 2 vols. (Charleston, 1845–46), 1: 207.
10. While the best books on Charleston indoors are Henry F. Cauthen, Jr., Charleston Interiors (Charleston, 1979), and E. Milby Burton, Charleston Furniture 1700–1825 (Columbia, 1955), neither fully explores wider implications of the city’s material culture. So too John T. Kirk, American Furniture and the British Tradition to 1830 (New York, 1982), commences but does not bring to satisfying conclusion the analysis of that rich subject.
11. Featherstonhaugh, Excursion Through the Slave States, 157; Hugh Legaré to his sister, August 4, 1833, Legaré Papers, SC; William H. Trescot to William Porcher Miles, June 24, 1861, Williams-Chesnut-Manning papers, SC.
12. Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808, (Chapel Hill, 1990), tells the story expertly.
13. The transition is obvious in Family Letters of the Three Wade Hamptons, 17821901, ed. Charles E. Cauthen (Charleston, 1953).
14. Sacred and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder, ed. Carol Bleser (New York, 1988), entry for March 31, 1841.
15. These changes in the Carolina agrarian order are nicely described in Majorie S. Mendenhall, “A History of Agriculture in South Carolina, 1790 to 1860,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., U. of North Carolina, 1940.
16. William A. Schaper, Sectionalism and Representation in South Carolina, in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1900, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1901): 1: 237–463.
17. William Henry Trescot, Memorial of the Life of J. Johnston Pettigrew … (Charleston, 1870), 29–33.
18. See Kenneth S. Greenberg’s superb “Representation and the Isolation of South Carolina, 1776–1860,” JAH, 64 (1977): 723–43.
19. William Henry Trescot to Miles, September 16, 1855, Miles Papers, NC.
20. Same to same, September 6, 1835, Miles Papers.
21. Trescot to James Hammond, April 15, 28, 1860, Hammond Papers, LC.
22. Hammond to Edmund Ruffin, October 10, 1845, Ruffin Papers, VHS; Hamilton to Stephen Miller, August 9, 1830, Chesnut-Manning-Miller Papers, SCHS. The haughty tone was so much Carolina leaders’ sense of the matter about vulgar mobocracy that illustrations could be multipled endlessly. For some other choice examples, see Alfred Huger to William Porcher Miles, December 12, 1849, Miles Papers, NC; same to Mr. Wickham, June 2, 1858, Huger Papers, DU; David Gavin Diary, NC, passim; Russell, Diary North and South, 2–3.
23. Lacy Ford’s Origins of South Carolina Radicalism is the most important book on antebellum Carolina published in some years, a volume which in its fresh information, scope, and prime thesis invites comparison with Mills Thornton’s magisterial study of antebellum Alabama. But Ford stretches beyond his evidence in denying that Carolina had an aristocratic political order, in claiming that the upcountry originated South Carolina radicalism, in affirming that upcountrymen were addicted to the ideal of all white men being independent country-republicans and thus needing no civic virtue imposed from above—in short, in confusing South Carolina with Mills Thornton’s herrenvolk Alabama.
Ford argues that South Carolina was the first Old South state to approve universal male suffrage, that barbecues to court voters were commonplace in the upcountry, that common voters had to approve big decisions such as secession, and that some upcountry leaders sought both popular election of presidential electors and a one-white-man, onevote legislative reapportionment. All these good points show that Carolina oligarchs, however addicted to an eighteenth-century tradition of elitist republicanism, did have to live in the new century and did have to rally egalitarian yeomen addicted to nineteenthcentury egalitarian republicanism. Those necessities, as we will soon see, confused Carolina’s elitist mentality.
But that upper-class world view and its unique sway over this unique state cannot be minimized. Ford’s own text shows that in the early 1850s, the lowcountry was hotter for secession, that those upcountrymen hottest for democratizing the state in the mid-1850s were coolest on South Carolina’s ultimate radicalism, disunionism, that the democratizing campaign lost every time it sought to bring nineteenth-century republican institutions, à la Alabama, to South Carolina, and that efforts for popular presidential elections, a one-white-man, one-vote apportionment, etc., lost not least because upcountrymen did not sufficiently rally behind them and because that upcountry hero, John C. Calhoun, favored the older, anti-egalitarian tradition of patriarchal republicanism. (See Ford, pp. 191, 285–91). Furthermore, the yeoman republican style which Ford emphasizes did not much touch the region he ignores—a lowcountry which did have much—I would say most—to do with originating South Carolina radicalism. Stephanie McCurry’s brilliant “The Culture of Inequality: Class, Gender, and the Yeomanry of the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1820–1861,” unpublished paper presented to the Organization of American Historians’ Convention, April 1988, indicates that whatever might be true in upper reaches of Lacy Ford’s upcountry, anti-egalitarian republicanism dominated political practices in the coastal swamps. All fanciers of Carolina history await McCurry’s book on the subject, which will be based on her 1988 State University of New York at Binghamton Ph.D. thesis.
For an elucidation closer to McCurry than to Ford on how South Carolina’s radical alias reactionary republican tradition originated in the needs and world views of its imperiously old-fashioned master class, see Kenneth S. Greenberg’s Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore, 1985). Greenberg confuses matters a bit by sometimes writing as if his elitist political culture was southern rather than South Carolinian. But almost all his examples involve South Carolinians, which is not surprising in a rewrite of a Ph.D. dissertation exclusively on that state. Greenberg’s contribution is to highlight why these masters were not the statesmen to allow white men’s egalitarianism to master them.
24. Excellent discussions of Carolina’s economic decline include George C. Rogers, Jr., Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (Norman, Okla., 1969); Peter Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Life and Death in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670–1920 (New York, 1988); Alfred G. Smith, Jr., Economic Readjustment of an Old Cotton State: South Carolina, 1820–1860 (Columbia, 1958).
25. Southern Agriculturalist, 1 (1828): 255.
26. Ibid., 4 (1831): 505–15, 2 (1829): 1–7.
27. M.J. Manigault to [Gabriel] Henry Manigault, December 6, 1808, Louis Manigault Papers, DU.
28. Robert F. W. Allston to Mrs. Allston, April 24, 1858, Allston Papers, SCHS.
29. Charles Manigault to Alfred Huger, April 1, 1847, Manigault Letterbook, SCHS.
30. Ibid.
31. Allston to Mrs. Allston, May 7, 1854, Allston to J. W. Smith, November 25, 1859, Allston Papers, SCHS.
32. W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 36–39.
33. Tommy W. Rogers, “The Great Plantation Exodus from South Carolina, 1850–1860,” SCHM, 68 (1967): 14–21.
Chapter 13. Origins of South Carolina Eccentricity, II: Cultural Foundations
1. James Hammond to [John] Walter, December 26, 1835, Hammond Papers, LC; James Edward Calhoun Diary, entry for January 25-February 1, 1826, SC. I am grateful to John Higham, David Moltke-Hanson, and Kenneth Lynn for their comments on this chapter.
2. Russell, Diary North and South, entry for April 27, 1861; William Elliott, Carolina Sports by Land and Sea (Charleston, 1846).
3. Ford, Origins of South Carolina Radicalism, tells this side of the Carolina story brilliantly well.
4. David Moltke-Hansen, “The Expansion of Intellectual Life: A Prospectus,” in Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston, eds. Michael O’Brien and David Moltke-Hansen (Knoxville, Tenn., 1986), 3–44. While this unusually fine collaborative volume contains a number of excellent essays on the Charleston Renaissance, my favorite is Michael O’Brien’s exquisite “Politics, Romanticism, and Hugh Legaré: ‘The Fondness of Disappointed Love,’” 123–51, which transcends its subject to supply an acute image of the city’s stymied cultural flowering. See also O’Brien’s fuller but perchance less affecting A Character of Hugh Legaré (Knoxville, 1985).
5. The latest and fullest account of Allston is in William H. Gerdts and Theodore Stebbins, Jr., “A Man of Genius”: The Art of Washington Allston (1779–1843) (Boston, 1979). John R. Welsh, “Washington Allston: Expatriate South Carolinian,” SCHM, 67 (1966): 84–98, argues cogently but I think unsuccessfully that not one Allston painting “portrays anything distinctly southern.”
6. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Carol Royen, and Trevor J. Fairbrother, Masterpieces of American Painting, 1760–1910 (Boston, 1983), supplies a sophisticated overview and an excellent bibliography. Fine volumes on paintings of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance include the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Paradise: The Work of the Hudson River School (New York, 1987) and American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875, ed. John Wilmerding (Washington, D.C., 1980).
7. The Allston quote comes from William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (first published, 1834; reprinted in 3 vols., New York, 1965), 2:297–98. Allston’s ghost-ridden image of boo-hags and boo-dadies haunting a mortal, mournful swampland is akin to the tone replete in Nancy Rhyne, Tales of the South Carolina Lowcountry (Winston-Salem, 1982), and Julian S. Bolick, Ghosts from the Coast: A Collection of Twelve Stories from Georgetown County, South Carolina (Clinton, S.C., 1966).
Those who would base artistic/literary criticism exclusively on texts as reaction to other texts will see Allston’s several darker landscapes as a response to a well-established Gothic artistic tradition rather than as a response to his ancestral milieu. Allston, a highly self-conscious artist, assuredly did know all about Gothic formulas, just as Thomas Jefferson knew all about Palladian architectural formulas. (See above, Chapter 9, note 4.) But here again, I believe that artists are not merely disembodied text-readers, that they are also people responding to social/cultural situations, and that the imperatives of an upbringing help explain why an Allston responded to certain texts rather than others.
8. Quoted in William P. Trent, William Gilmore Simms (Boston and New York, 1892), 16–17. Trent’s, still helpful volume can usefully be supplemented by the introduction to The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, eds. Mary C. Simms Oliphant et al., 5 vols. (Charleston, 1952); by J. V. Ridgely, William Gilmore Simms (New York, 1962); by Jon L. Wakelyn, Politics of a Literary Man (Westport, Conn., 1973); and most recently by Mary Anne Wimsatt’s slightly disappointing The Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms (Baton Rouge, 1989). John McCardell is writing an eagerly awaited new biography; for his preliminary assessment, see “Poetry and the Practical: William Gilmore Simms,” in Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston, 186–210.
9. William Gilmore Simms, Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and Fiction, ed. C. Hugh Holman (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 34.
10. Simms, Views and Reviews, 49. Simms’s use of history is well explored in David Moltke-Hansen, “Ordered Progress: The Historical Philosophy of William Gilmore Simms,” in Long Years of Neglect: The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms, ed. John Caldwell Guilds (Fayetteville, Ark., 1988), 126–47.
11. Simms to James Hammond, December 24, 1847, Letters of Simms, 2: 515.
12. Among the best books on the wider American Renaissance are F. O. Matthiessen, The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941); R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1968); Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York, 1950); and Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America (New York, 1981).
13. Simms, Views and Reviews, 269–73; C. Hugh Holman, “The Influence of Scott on Cooper and Simms,” American Literature, 29 (1951): 203–18; Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge, 1989), 103–26.
14. Simms’s slant on these questions is placed in perspective in Dixon D. Bruce, Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin, 1979). See also Michael E. Stevens’s excellent “The Hanging of Matthew Love,” SCHM, 88 (1987): 55–61.
15. Simms, Richard Hurdis (first published 1838; reprinted New York, 1964), esp. 14–17, 25, 56, 66–67, 137.
16. Simms, The Partisan (New York, 1835), esp. 21, 117.
17. Simms, The Yamassee (first published 1835; reprinted New York, 1856).
18. Simms, Guy Rivers (New York, 1834), esp. 34; Simms, Mellichampe (New York, 1836).
19. Simms, The Yamassee, 326.
20. Ibid., 437–38.
21. Ibid., 170–77.
22. That Simms was answering Stowe seems clear to me in Simms to Hammond, December 15, 1852, Letters of Simms, 3: 222–23. James B. Meriwether has lately denied that contention. He points out that Simms’s book was published after Stowe’s book. But as Meriwether himself concedes, Stowe’s book appeared in serial form at the very time Simms was writing—and writing, as Meriwether points out, explicit references to Uncle Tom into Woodcraft. Meriwether finds decisive the negative evidence that nothing about the serial publication of Uncle Tom appears in Simms’s extant letters. But Simms, a Southerner notoriously aware of the national literary scene, hardly has to demonstrate to us an awareness of a notorious national literary event. See Meriwether, “The Theme of Freedom in Simms’s Woodcraft,” in Simms, ed. Guilds, 20–36.
23. Simms, Woodcraft (first published 1852, reprinted New York, 1856), 52.
24. The quotation is from Simms, Katherine Walton (Philadelphia, 1851), reprinted in Hugh W. Hetherington, Cavalier of Old South Carolina: William Gilmore Simms’s Captain Porgy (Chapel Hill, 1966), 155. Hetherington’s volume usefully collects and delightfully admires Simms’s scattered Porgy scenes.
25. Simms, Woodcraft, 449.
26. Charles S. Watson, “Simms’s Answer to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Criticism of the South in Woodcraft,” Southern Literary Journal 9 (1976): 78–90; John R. Welsh, “William Gilmore Simms, Critic of the South,” JSH, 26 (1960): 201–14.
27. Simms, Woodcraft, 509.
28. Ibid., 325.
29. Southern Literary Messenger, 3 (1837): 641–57.
30. Simms, Woodcraft, 513. For a fine appreciation of Eveleigh, see Meriwether, “The Theme of Freedom in Simms’s Woodcraft,” in Simms, ed. Guilds, 20–36.
31. Legaré to I. E. Holmes, April 8, 1833, Writings of Legaré, 1: 215.
32. In a scintillating but I believe misleading commentary on Woodcraft, William R. Taylor argues that Simms’s novel ridicules Carolina’s Hamlet-like indecision about secession. According to this viewpoint, Porgy’s endless stalling for time in the novel, especially the fat man’s delaying about choosing between his two ladies, dooms him to failure. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York, 1957), 268–98.
The interpretation ignores Eveleigh’s reason for rejecting Porgy’s belated offer: she calls the suitor too imperious, not too vacillating. The Hamlet interpretation also ignores the reason for Porgy’s successes in the novel: lacking good choices about how to rescue his estate or his slaves, he creatively stalls, waiting for options to improve. Simms, who constantly praised Porgy in the novel for this manipulating “to gain time,” wished Carolina leaders to follow the same stalling tactics. “In politics,” he wrote Hammond in 1858, “if you cannot gain the victory, you have only to gain time. Time is everything.” Woodcraft, like everything Simms wrote, votes for order and calm and deliberation and time, the very reluctant side of the Carolina reluctant revolutionary which led to Hamlet-like inaction. Woodcraft, 384, 454; Letters of Simms, 4:19. For a splendid discussion of this particular subject and the most penetrating overall analysis of Simms I have seen, enjoy Simeone Vauthier, “Of Time and the South: The Fiction of William Gilmore Simms,” Southern Literary Journal, 5 (1972): 3–45.
33. Mary Chenut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward, 366. The best biography of the diarist is Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, Mary Boykin Chesnut (Baton Rouge, 1981).
34. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, xv-xxix.
35. Ibid., 37, 63, 597.
36. Ibid., 408, 412.
37. Ibid., 794.
38. Compare ibid., 488 and 641.
39. Ibid., 209–11.
40. Ibid., 211–12.
41. Ibid., 29.
42. Ibid., 488.
43. Ibid., 59.
44. Ibid., 690.
45. Ibid., 815.
46. Ibid., 125.
47. William Henry Trescot to William Porcher Miles, August 20, 1853, Miles Papers, NC.
48. Alton Taylor Loftis, “A Study of Russell’s Magazine: Ante-Bellum Charleston’s Last Literary Periodical,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1973.
49. Russell’s Magazine, 5 (1859): 385–95.
50. This discussion is drawn from Porcher’s essays in ibid., 1 (1857): 97–107, 2 (1858): 193–204, and 6 (1860): 436–45.
51. Charleston Courier, May 21, 1859. On Lowndes and the golden age of Carolina republicanism, see Carl J. Vipperman, William Lowndes and the Transition of Southern Politics, 1782–1822 (Chapel Hill, 1989).
52. Francis Pickens to Beaufort Watts, January 24, 1854, Watts Papes, SC.
Chapter 14. The First Confrontation Crisis, I; Calhoun Versus Jackson
1. This story is more thoroughly told and documented in my Prelude to Civil War, 111–16. See also Alan F. January, “The South Carolina Association: An Agency for Race Control in Antebellum Charleston,” SCHM, 78 (1977): 191–201.
2. John T. Schlotterbeck, “The ‘Social Economy’ of an Upper South Community: Orange and Greene Counties, Virginia, 1815–1860,” in Class, Conflict, and Consensus, eds. Burton and McMath, 3–28.
3. My discussion of the lowcountry economy in Prelude to Civil War too much minimizes this problem. See Dale E. Swan, The Structure and Profitability of the American Rice Industry, 1859 (New York, 1975); and Coclanis, South Carolina Lowcountry. Vipperman, Lowndes, is especially good on the hurricane problem and correct to criticize me for failing to mention that Gray, History of Southern Agriculture, 2:1031–32 demonstrates declining rice exports at the turn of the 1820s. But Gray’s statistics also show spectacularly rising rice exports in the late 1820s and beyond, the very years when most lowcountry squires seized on nullification. Another look at Gray’s statistics thus raises the same old question: Why should lowcountry rice planters whose yields and markets were better than upcountry cotton planters’ have moved just as swiftly and angrily to the brink of revolution? One answer is that lowcountry squires faced other economic problems, partly of their own making. Another answer involves the lowcountry’s special sensitivity to the first signs of the slavery issue, a sensitivity which made any decline in gentlemen’s economic power the more unbearable.
4. Patrick S. Brady, “Political and Civil Life in South Carolina, 1787–1833,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 1971, pp. 160–66.
5. William Elliott, Address to the People of St. Helena Parish (Charleston, 1832), 4.
6. On McDuffie and his Forty Bale theory, see my Prelude to Civil War, 145–48, 193–96.
7. On Cooper and his “calculate” speech, see ibid., 128–31; Dumas Malone, The Public Life of Thomas Cooper, 1783–1839 (New Haven, 1926); Stephen L. Newman, “Thomas Cooper, 1759–1839: The Political Odyssey of a Bourgeois Ideologue,” SS, 24 (1985): 295–305.
8. Calhoun’s draft and the final committee version of the Exposition and Protest are usefully reprinted side by side in The Papers of John C. Calhoun, eds. Robert L. Meriwether, W. Edwin Hemphill, and Clyde Wilson, 18 volumes to date (Columbia, S.C., 1959–88), 10:442–534. Volume 1 of Calhoun’s Works …, ed. Richard Crallé, 6 vols. (New York, 1854–57) prints the last version of Calhoun’s political theory.
9. William W. Freehling, “Spoilsmen and Interests in the Thought and Career of John C. Calhoun,” JAH 52 (1965): 25–42; J. William Harris, “Last of the Classical Republicans: An Interpretation of John C. Calhoun,” CWH, 30 (1984): 255–67.
10. Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York, 1965), 76–77. Bemis’s excellent biography containg the best discussion of Adams’s presidency, while Robert V. Remini, The Election of Andrew Jackson (Philadelphia, 1963), is the best account of how and why that presidency ended.
11. We are fortunate to have excellent three-volume modern biographies of both these men. Both biographies, like all histories, contain debatable interpretations. But each gives a warmly sympathetic portrait of their protagonist’s viewpoint and a richly full account of the life and times. Charles Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, 3 vols. (Indianapolis, 1944–51); Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire 1767–1821 (New York, 1977); Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832 (New York, 1981); Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845 (New York, 1984). Unless otherwise noted, biographical facts in the following account can be found elaborated in these volumes.
12. A point well emphasized, maybe a little over-emphasized, in Michael Paul Rogin’s Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York, 1975).
13. Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 142.
14. Hammond to Isaac Haynes, August 21, 1831, Hammond Papers, SC. The Clay quote comes from Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (Vintage ed.; New York, 1955), 74.
15. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams …, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 12 vols. (Philadelphia, 1874–77), 5: 361.
16. A Compilation of Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, ed. James D. Richardson, 11 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1910), 2: 1001, 1011–12; The First Forty Years of Washington Society in the Family Letters of Margaret Bayard Smith, ed. Gaillard Hunt (first printed 1906, reprinted New York, 1965), 290–96.
17. Calhoun to John McLean, September 22, 1829, Calhoun’s draft of the South Carolina Nullificaton Convention’s “Address to the People of the United States,” November 1, 1832, The Papers of Calhoun, 11: 75–77, 674–75.
18. Those who have clarified the peculiar strength of anti-partyism in South Carolina and its relationship to older exaltations of independent country patricians include James M. Banner, “The Problem of South Carolina,” in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, eds. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (New York, 1974), 60–93; Robert M. Weir, ‘“The Harmony We Are Famous For’: An Interpretation of South Carolina Politics,” W&MQ, 26 (1969): 473–80; Weir, “The South Carolinian as Extremist,” SAQ, 74 (1975): 86–103; R. Nicholas Olsberg, “A Government of Class and Race: William Henry Trescot and the South Carolina Chivalry, 1860–1865,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., U. of South Carolina, 1972, 74–76, 101–17; George P. Germany, “The South Carolina Governing Elite, 1820–1860,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., U. of California at Berkeley, 1972, 73–88, 222–46; and Mark D. Kaplanoff, “Charles Pinckney and the American Republican Tradition,” in Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston, eds. O’Brien and Moltke-Hansen, 85–122. A long, loving, and one-sided elaboration of relationships between secession and the older republican tradition is provided in Walter K. Wood, “The Union of the States: A Study of Radical Whig-Republican Ideology and Its Influence Upon the Nation and the South, 1776–1861,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., U. of South Carolina, 1978.
19. See here again Rogin, Fathers and Children, and also Francis Paul Prucha, “Andrew Jackson’s Indian Policy: A Reassessment,” JAH, 56 (1969): 527–39; William S. Hoffman, “Andrew Jackson, State Rightest: The Case of the Georgia Indians,” THQ, 11 (1952): 329–45; Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jackson Era (Lincoln, Neb., 1975); Arthur H. DeRosier, The Removal of the Choctaw Indians (Knoxville, Tenn., 1970).
20. Messages and Papers of the Presidents, ed. Richardson, 2: 1000, 1012–13, 108688. Professor Michael Holt has suggested to me that Jackson from the beginning positioned himself on the tariff to slam back at Calhoun, a policy in keeping with the President’s very early determination to isolate his Vice President. Holt’s interpretation, while unprovable, squares with the provable facts that Jackson’s hatred for Calhoun preceded presidential tariff pronouncements, transcended Peggy Eaton, and found expression in presidential lines urging against Union-straining agitation on an overwrought subject. Holt’s commentary here is typical of his superb critique of my whole manuscript, for which I am very grateful.
21. The Bank and Peggy Eaton stories are told more fully elsewhere, including in my Prelude to Civil War, 186–92.
Chapter 15. The First Confrontation Crisis, II: South Carolina Versus the South
1. Calhoun to Samuel D. Ingham, May 4, 25, 1831, Papers of Calhoun, 11: 377–80, 390–94; Memorandum by James Hammond dated March 18, 1831, in “Letters on the Nullification Movement in South Carolina, 1830–1834,” AHR, 6 (1901): 741–44.
2. James Hamilton, Jr., to Hammond, May 3, 1831, ibid., 6 (1901): 745; George McDuffie, Speech … at … Charleston, S.C., May 19, 1831 (Charleston, 1831).
3. Charles Fenton Mercer to John Hartwell Cocke, April 19, 1818, Cocke Papers, VA. The Mercer Bill and Carolina’s reaction to it are more fully discussed in W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 196–99.
4. Calhoun to Virgil Maxcy, September 11, 1830, Papers of Calhoun, 11: 229.
5. Charleston Mercury, August 4, 1830.
6. William Preston to Waddy Thompson, February 14, 1830, Preston Papers, SC.
7. W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 202–13.
8. Messages and Papers of the Presidents, ed. Richardson, 2: 1119; Jackson to Van Buren, November 14, December 17, 1831, Jackson to John Coffee, July 17, 1832, Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, ed. John Spencer Bassett, 7 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1826–35), 4: 373–74, 383–85, 462–63; Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights, and the Nullification Crisis (New York, 1987), 68–73.
9. James Hamilton, Jr., to James Hammond, January 16, 1832, AHR, 6 (1901): 74849; Hamilton to Edward Harden, August 31, 1832, Harden Papers, DU.
10. Register of Debates, 22nd Cong., 1 sess. (June 20, 1832): 1116–17.
11. James Hamilton, Jr., to John Taylor et al., September 14, 1830, in Charleston Mercury, September 28, 1832. Every important South Carolina Nullifier echoed such sentiments. W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 255–59; Major L. Wilson, “A Preview of Irrepressible Conflict: The Issue of Slavery During the Nullification Controversy,” Mississippi Quarterly, 19 (1966): 184–93; David F. Houston, A Critical Study of Nullification in South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass., 1896), 48–52; Frederick Bancroft, Calhoun and the South Carolina Nullification Movement (Baltimore, 1928), 19–20, 115; Charles M. Wiltse, The New Nation, 1800–1865 (New York, 1961), 115–17, 121.
12. Calhoun to Francis Pickens, August 1, 1831, Papers of Calhoun, 11: 445–46.
13. Columbia Telescope, June 19, 1831.
14. The Fort Hill Letter is reprinted in Papers of Calhoun, 11: 413–39.
15. Calhoun to Samuel Ingham, July 31, 1831, ibid., 4: 441–45.
16. This account of the Carolina election of 1832 has been influenced by excellent criticism of my imperfect formulation in Prelude to Civil War, 252–56, 365–69. Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, “The Economics and Politics of Charleston’s Nullification Crisis,” JSH, 47 (1981): 335–62, offers a far more sophisticated vote analysis of the city than mine. On the rest of the state, I, not surprisingly, prefer Paul H. Bergeron’s argument that my voter analysis is somewhat inconsistent, to J. P. Ochenkowski’s argument that my analysis is altogether botched. I have nonetheless exploited Ochenkowski’s best insights to help straighten out inconsistencies Bergeron accurately describes. Bergeron, “The Nullification Controversy Revisited,” THQ, 35 (1976): 263–75; Ochenkowski, “The Origins of Nullification in South Carolina,” SCHM, 83 (1982): 121–53.
While the 1832 voter analysis in Prelude is not my favorite part of the book, I am more unhappy with my explanation of what still seems to me right: nullification as, in part, South Carolina’s very early response to the slavery issue. I called that response an “overreaction” and explained it as a manifestation of extraordinary fear of slave revolt and guilt about holding slaves. I still think the lowcountry’s especially dense black population made emancipation seem especially disastrous and Conditional Termination special folly. I also still think fallout from Denmark Vesey put the coastal gentry on the road to nullification in the Negro Seamen’s Controversy. But the Nullification Controversy came almost a decade later; and Carolina’s response to the immediately preceding Nat Turner Revolt consisted mostly of concern that fears far-off in the Chesapeake were causing some guilt-ridden Virginia and Maryland gentlemen not to stonewall against nonslaveholder attack.
That Carolina stance was an understandable early response, from the state most hard in its commitment to slavery, to potentially debilitating softness elsewhere. In the wider perspective of continual colonization proposals in national and Upper South state politics in the 1830s, a perspective too much lacking in my narrowly focused localistic study of South Carolina, Carolinians had reason to worry that all the southern world might not be South Carolina. They also had reason to worry about an internal economy more seriously depressed than those in newer southern states, a depopulation foreign to the rest of the Cotton South, and an old republican ideology becoming anachronistic amidst Andrew Jackson’s wave of the southern mobocratic future. Crazed overreactors? No way. Rather, desperate old seers, desperate most that their little cockpit of a state might be too divided and debilitated to say NO to the (from their perspective) disastrous trends of American and southern history.
17. State Papers on Nullification … (Boston, 1834), 28–33.
18. James Hamilton, Jr., to Richard Crallé, February 6, 1833, Crallé Papers, CU.
19. All the quotes in this paragraph are from Ellis, Union at Risk, 78.
20. Register of Debates, 22 Cong., 2 sess. (Feb. 4, 1833): 338–43. For other examples, see Mississippi’s George Poindexter, ibid. (January 22, 1833): 179–83; Alabama’s Gabriel Moore, ibid. (February 13, 1833): 490–91; Virginia’s John Tyler, ibid. (February 6, 1833): 371–78. That South Carolina was not hopelessly isolated from other Southerners is endlessly demonstrated in Ellis’s important Union at Risk.
21. Jackson’s maneuvers to enforce the laws, together with South Carolina Unionists’ and Sugar Jimmy’s responses, is discussed and documented more fully in W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 278–92.
22. Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 2: 1203–19.
23. Van Buren to Jackson, December 27, 1832, February 10, 1833, Correspondence of Jackson, 4: 506–8, 5: 19–21.
24. Jackson to Van Buren, January 13, 25, 1833, ibid., 5: 2–4, 12–13.
25. State Papers on Nullification, 327–35.
26. The critical tale of southern Jacksonians’ partial disenchantment with Jackson and partial sympathy with the Nullifiers is elaborated in Ellis’s Union at Risk, chs. 3–6.
27. Register of Debates, 22 Cong., 2 sess. (January 28, 1833): 246.
28. Calhoun to William Preston [ca. February 3, 1833], Papers of Calhoun, 12: 37–38.
29. The tale of the Verplanck Bill and the Calhoun-Clay negotiations is told and documented fully in Merrill D. Peterson’s useful Olive Branch and Sword: The Compromise of 1833 (Baton Rouge, 1982) and in Peterson’s still more useful The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun(New York, 1987), 212–33.
30. Abbott Lawrence to Henry Clay, March 26, 1833, Works of Henry Clay, ed. Calvin Colton, 7 vols. (New York, 1897), 4: 357–58.
31. Register of Debates, 22 Cong., 2 sess. (February 25–26, 1833): 1771–1807 (March 1, 1833): 809.
32. Speeches Delivered in the Convention… March, 1833… (Charleston, 1833); 346.
33. Ibid., 25–26.
34. Jackson to John Crawford, April 9, 1833, Correspondence of Jackson, 5: 56.
35. Richard B. Latner, “The Nullification Crisis and Republican Subversion,” JSH, 43 (1977): 18–38, is good on Jackson’s misunderstanding of Calhoun. Jackson’s incredulity that Nullifiers sought protection of slavery reflected his Middle South world’s utter inability to see a slavery issue yet. See Paul H. Bergeron, “Tennessee’s Response to the Nullification Crisis,” JSH, 39 (1973): 23–44.
Chapter 16. The Reorganization of Southern Politics
1. Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, ed. William G. McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass., 1960); Finney, Memoirs … (New York, 1876); Keith J. Hardman, Charles Grandison Finney, 1792–1875: Revivalist Reformer (Syracuse, 1987).
2. Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom’s Ferment … (Minneapolis, 1944).
3. Robert H. Abzug, Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform (New York, 1980); Gilbert H. Barnes, The Anti-Slavery Impulse (New York, 1933).
4. Anthony J. Barker, Captain Charles Stuart: Anglo-American Abolitionist (Baton Rouge, 1986).
5. Louis Filler, The Crusade Against Slavery (New York, 1960); Ronald Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830 (Baltimore, 1976); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland, 1969).
6. “Postmaster Huger and the Incendiary Publications,” ed. Frank Otto Gattell, SCHM, 64 (1963): 193–201.
7. Charleston Mercury, July 30–31, 1835; Charleston Southern Patriot, July 30, 1835; Jacob Schirmer Diary, entry for July 29, 1835, SCHS; Eaton, Freedom-of-Thought Struggle, 196–215.
8. Jackson to Kendall, August 9, 1835, Correspondence of Jackson, 5: 360–61.
9. Congressional Globe, 24 Cong., 1 sess, 9.
10. The best source for southern meetings’ resolutions and northern meetings’ answers is The United States Telegraph, August through November 1835. This Calhounite newspaper, edited by Duff Green, was obsessed with the subject, reporting its development fully and commenting on its meaning affectingly.
11. Arthur P. Hayne to Andrew Jackson, November 11, 1835, Jackson Papers, LC.
12. Henry J. Nott to James Hammond, March 8, 1836, Hammond Papers, LC.
13. United States Telegraph, September 4, 1835.
14. The United States Telegraph throughout the fall of 1835 reported on northern anti-abolitionist meetings. For the wider and longer lasting northern distrust of abolitionism, see Leonard L. Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing … (New York, 1970); Merton L. Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy: Abolitionist Editor (Urbana, III., 1961); Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States (Chicago, 1961).
15. For some good examples, see Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (Chicago, 1957); George Fort Milton, The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War (Boston and New York, 1934).
16. Boston Mercantile Journal, reprinted in United States Telegraph, September 16, 1835.
17. Hammond to M. M. Noah, August 19, 1835, Hammond Papers, LC.
18. Duff Green to Beverley Tucker, November 9, 1833, in “Correspondence of Judge Tucker,” WMQ, 12 (1903): 88–89.
19. William J. Cooper’s The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828–1856 (Baton Rouge and London, 1978) first traced the politics of loyalty and remains an important volume on antebellum southern political history. But Cooper’s thesis that slavery was always the issue misses the way slavery matters slowly evolved towards overshadowing everything else. To argue that the slavery issue was from its inception continually dominant in southern politics, Cooper has to define the Border South out of the South. The thesis can also only be argued by ignoring local contests over local issues occurring between presidential-election campaigns’ eruptions over loyalty. The thesis finally cannot account for the enormous amount—often the greater amount—of rhetoric devoted to other themes even in presidential years, rhetoric, for example, which makes Southern Whigs’ focus on economic nationalism in the mid-1840s hardly the aberration Cooper thinks it.
20. The following account is based on my own reading of Southern Whig sources, on conversations with Michael Holt, who is writing what promises to be the book on American Whiggery, and on the burgeoning secondary literature on the subject, including Thomas Brown, Politics and Statesmanship: Essays on the American Whig Party (New York, 1985); Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago and London, 1979); Arthur C. Cole, The Whig Party in the South (Washington, D.C., 1913); Harry L. Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina (Baton Rouge, 1981); Marc W. Kruman, Party and Politics in North Carolina, 1836–1865(Baton Rouge, 1983); Paul Murray, The Whig Party in Georgia (Chapel Hill, 1948); Herbert J. Doughty, Jr., The Whigs of Florida, 1845–1854 (Gainesville, 1959); John Mering, The Whig Party in Missouri (Columbia, Mo., 1967); William H. Adams, The Whig Party in Louisiana (Lafayette, La., 1973); and especially Charles Grier Sellers, Jr.’s seminal “Who Were the Southern Whigs?,” AHR, 59 (1954): 335–46.
21. Thomas B. Alexander, Sectional Stress and Party Strength: A Study of Roll-Call Patterns in the United States House (Nashville, 1967).
22. Points well made in Richard P. McCormick, “Was There a Whig Strategy in 1836?,” JER 4 (1984): 47–70.
23. Niles’ Weekly Register, May 2, October 18, 1835; and all the voluminous mail coming to Van Buren from southern supporters in 1835, Van Buren Papers, LC.
24. This warfare can be followed particularly clearly in the Richmond Whig and Richmond Enquirer throughout 1835–36.
25. Historians, while recognizing the paranoid theme in American politics, have underestimated the American resistance to that mentality. See William W. Freehling, “Conspiracy and Conspiracy Theories,” in Encyclopedia of American Political History: Studies of the Principal Movements and Ideas, ed. Jack P. Greene, 3 vols. (New York, 1984), 1: 367–74.
26. Calhoun to A. H. Pemberton, November 19, 1838, Papers of Calhoun, 14: 472–75.
27. Calhoun to James Edward Calhoun, February 8, 1834, same to Duff Green, August 30, 1835, ibid., 12: 231–32, 547–48.
28. Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, ch. 4.
29. Calhoun to Duff Green, July 27, 1837, Papers of Calhoun, 13: 525–28.
30. Calhoun to Robert Y. Hayne, November 17, 1838, ibid., 14: 465–68.
31. Calhoun to Francis W. Pickens, January 4, 1834, ibid., 12: 196–98.
32. Hammond to William C. Preston, November 14, 1835, Hammond Papers, LC.
Chapter 17. The Gag Rule, I: Mr. Hammond’s Mysterious Motion
1. The best gag rule history is but a slight article: George C. Rable, “Slavery, Politics, and the South: The Gag Rule as a Case Study,” Capital Studies, 3 (1975) 69–88. One of our best Jacksonian era historians, Lee Benson, is drafting the needed big book on the subject. Some of Benson’s intriguing ideas are presented in his Toward the Scientific Study of History, 319–23.
2. Any historian who says not a solitary example can be found invites someone to find one. But I have not uncovered any premonition in any congressman’s papers which I have examined.
3. Senate Journal, 24 Cong., 1 sess., 31.
4. Papers of Calhoun, 13: 53–67.
5. Eaton, Freedom-of-Thought Struggle, ch. 8.
6. These petitions, an unexplored treasure chest for many sorts of inquiries, are fortunately preserved in the Legislative Papers, 24 Cong., 1 sess., RG 233 (House Petitions), RG 36 (Senate Petitions), National Archives, Washington, D.C.
7. Register of Debates, 24 Cong., 1 sess. (December 16, 1835): 1961.
8. Ibid. (December 18, 1835): 1966 ff.
9. Ibid. (January 21, 1836): 2242–43.
10. Ibid.
11. Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge and London, 1982), 7–44.
12. Ibid., ch. 4.
13. Hammond to John Walker, December 27, 1836, Hammond Papers, LC; same to Harry Hammond, February 19, 1856, Hammond Plantation Diary, entry for January 8, 1838, Hammond Papers, SC.
14. Thomas Stark to Hammond, April 14, 1836, Hammond Papers, LC.
15. Edward W. Johnston to Hammond, March 9, 1836, Hammond Papers, LC.
16. Beverley Tucker to Hammond, February 17, 1836, Hammond Papers, LC.
17. Hammond to Tucker, March 1, 1836, McDuffie to Hammond, March 11, 1836, Cooper to Hammond, January 8, 1836, Hammond Papers, LC.
18. Ibid. See also Cooper’s letters to Hammond dated December 15, 17, 1835, February 6, 12, March 2, 20, 27, 31, April 7, 11, 1836, same collection.
19. Johnston to Hammond, February 28, 1836, same collection. See also Johnston’s letters of February 20, March 9, 24, 1836, same collection; Cooper to Beverley Tucker, July 27, 1838, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M.
20. Hammond to I. W. Hayne, September 1, 1835, same collection.
21. Hammond to Tucker, June 5, 1836, same collection. See also Hammond to Tucker, March 11, 1836, same collection.
22. The “impromptu” word is Hammond’s. James Hammond to M. C. M. Hammond, December 25, 1835, Hammond Papers, SC.
23. Register of Debates, 24 Cong., 2 sess. (February 1, 1836): 2448–66. To watch another young Carolina hotspur slipping and sliding around defense of an upper-class-based Slavepower, see Francis W. Pickens in ibid. (January 21, 1836): 2249–51.
Chapter 18. The Gag Rule, II: Mr. Pinckney’s Controversial Compromise
1. Papers of Calhoun, 13: 22. Calhoun’s emphasis on honor, omnipresent here as in much of southern rhetoric on gag rules and other slavery questions, raises the question of why arguments which stressed honor were so frequent. I cannot agree with Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s otherwise admirable Southern Honor that the concept operated independently of southern rage that specifically slavery was being called dishonorable. While Wyatt-Brown is right that concern about honor preceded concern about abolitionists, rhetoric about honor escalated enormously after southern morality came under attack. “Honor,” like “loyalty” and “soundness,” seems to me a loaded vocabulary for talking about slaveholders’ predicament, within and without the South.
2. Ibid., 13: 25.
3. Ibid., 13: 22–23.
4. Ibid., 13: 77.
5. Ibid., 13: 23.
6. Ibid., 13: 104–5.
7. Register of Debates, 24 Cong., 1 sess. (February 12, March 2, 1836): 496, 679–89.
8. Papers of Calhoun, 13: 104–5, 111–12.
9. William Preston to Beverley Tucker, February 28, 1836, W&MQ, 12 (1903): 92–94.
10. Register of Debates, 24 Cong., 1 sess. (March 9, 1836): 779.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid. (March 14, 1836): 810.
13. George W. Owens to Martin Van Buren, May 16, 1836, Van Buren Papers, LC.
14. Register of Debates, 24 Cong., 1 sess. (February 4, 1836): 2482–84.
15. Ibid. (February 8, 1836): 2491–2502.
16. Robert Y. Hayne to Hammond, January 18, 1836, Hammond Papers, LC; Hammond to M.C.M. Hammond, February 21, 1836, Hammond Papers, SC. For a stimulating reassessment of Pinckney, see George C. Rogers, Jr., “Henry Laurens Pinckney—Thoughts on His Career,” in South Carolina Journals and Journalists, ed. James B. Meriwether (Spartanburg, S.C., 1975), 163–75.
17. Register of Debates, 24 Cong., 1 sess. (February 8, 1836): 2491; Pendleton Messenger, February 26, 1836; Henry L. Pinckney, Address to the Electors of Charleston District, South Carolina, on the Subject of the Abolition of Slavery (Washington, D.C., 1836).
18. Quoted in Lawrence T. McDonnell’s suggestive “Struggle Against Suicide: James Henry Hammond and the Secession of South Carolina,” SS, 22 (1983): 109–37, esp. 125. See also Secret and Sacred Diaries of Hammond, ed. Bleser, entry for December 16, 1849; Hammond to William Gilmore Simms, October 26, 1858, Hammond Papers, LC; Hammond to M.C.M. Hammond, April 30, 1859, Hammond Papers, LC; Faust, Hammond, 181–85.
19. Register of Debates, 24 Cong., 1 sess. (February 15, 1836): 2533–35.
20. Abel P. Upshur to Beverley Tucker, March 8, 1836, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M.
21. Pinckney, Address to the Electors of Charleston, 7–8; Register of Debates, 24 Cong., 1 sess. (May 18, 1836): 3756–58.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid. (May 18, 1836): 3759–61.
24. Ibid. (May 19, 1836): 3772–78.
25. Ibid. (May 19–25, 1836): 4010–30.
26. Ibid. (May 25, 1836): 4029–31.
Chapter 19. The Gag Rule, III: Mr. Johnson’s Ironic Intransigence
1. Thomas Cooper to William Preston, December 31, 1837, Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
2. George McDuffie to James Hammond, December 19, 1836, Hammond Papers, LC. See also future Governor Whitemarsh B. Seabrook to Richard Crallé, January 15, 1837, January 10, 1838, Crallé Papers, CU.
3. John C. Calhoun to Francis W. Pickens, August 17, 1836, Papers of Calhoun, 13: 278–80.
4. John C. Calhoun to Anna Maria Calhoun, January 25, 1838, ibid., 14: 107–8.
5. This analysis of the presidential campaign of 1836 is based on the following southern newspapers, September and October 1836: Richmond Enquirer, Richmond Constitutional Whig, Lexington Kentucky Gazette, Louisville Daily Journal, Raleigh Register, Nashville National Banner, and Daily Advertizer, Huntsville (Alabama) Weekly Democrat, Huntsville Southern Advocate, Savannah Daily Republican, Augusta Chronicle, Milledgeville, Georgia Southern Recorder, Milledgeville Federal Union, New Orleans Bee, and Little Rock Arkansas Gazette. Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, 94–97, splendidly illustrates but perhaps slightly exaggerates the omnipresence of the slavery issue, while Edwin A. Miles, “The Whig Party and the Menace of Caesar,” THQ 27 (1968): 361–79, nicely analyzes that intrusive theme.
6. Joel H. Silbey, “Election of 1836,” in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., 4 vols. (New York, Toronto, London, and Sydney, 1971), 1: 577–640, records the election statistics and expertly analyzes them.
7. This statistical analysis is based on “Candidate and Constituency Statistics of Elections in the United States, 1788–1985,” ICPSR Study Number 77–57, originally collected and made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, P. O. Box 1248, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48106. Of course the Consortium bears no responsibility for my interpretation of their extremely useful statistics. I am grateful to Ms. Robin Kolodny of the Johns Hopkins University for correlating the Consortium’s raw data.
8. Quoted in Samuel Flagg Bemis’s superb biography of this, I think, greatest of American antebellum statesmen: John Quincy Adams and the Union, 150–51.
9. Memoirs of Adams, 5: 210 (entry for November 19, 1820).
10. Bemis, Adams, 331.
11. Ibid., 331–32. In addition to the Bemis, Leonard L. Richards, The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams (New York, 1986), is fine on its subject.
12. Register of Debates, 24 Cong., 1 sess. (May 25, 1836): 4029–31.
13. Ibid., 24 Cong., 2 sess. (February 6, 1837): 1587.
14. Ibid., 1591.
15. Ibid., 1595–98.
16. Ibid., 1679.
17. Bemis, Adams, 343–47.
18. Congressional Globe, 25 Cong., 1 sess. (December 21, 1837): 44; ibid., 25 Cong., 2 sess. (December 12, 1838): 26.
19. John C. Calhoun to Duff Green, July 17, 1837, Calhoun to William C. Daniels (?), October 26, 1838, Papers of Calhoun, 13: 525–28, 14: 444–48.
20. Congressional Globe, 27 Cong., 1 sess. (June 1, 1841): 9.
21. Waddy Thompson to Beverley Tucker, November 10, 1841, WMQ, 12 (1904): 150–51.
22. Congressional Globe, 26 Cong., 1 sess. January 14, 1840): 121.
23. Ibid. (January 27, 1840): 132.
24. Ibid. (January 27, 1840): 146–47.
25. William Cost Johnson, Speech … on the Subject of … Petitions for the Abolition of Slavery … January 25, 27, and 28, 1840 (Washington, D.C., 1840).
26. Congressional Globe, 26 Cong., 1 sess. (January 18, 1840): 151.
27. This along with all subsequent analyses of House of Representative roll call votes in this volume are based on “United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789–1986 [House of Representatives],” ICPSE Study Number 0004, data collected and made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. I must once again absolve the Consortium from any errors stemming from my analysis of its data and once again thank Ms. Robin Kolodny for correlating the statistics.
28. Congressional Globe, 27 Cong., 1 sess. (June 7, 14, 16, 1841): 27–28, 51, 63.
29. Ibid., 27 Cong., 2 sess. (January 24, 1842): 168.
30. Ibid. (January 24, 1842): 168.
31. Ibid. (January 25, 1842): 170.
32. Ibid. (February 3, 1842): 208.
33. Ibid., 27 Cong., 3 sess. (December 12, 1842): 42.
34. Ibid., 28 Cong., 1 sess. (February 28, 1844): 343.
35. Ibid., 28 Cong., 2 sess. (December 3, 1844): 7.
Chapter 20. Anti-Annexation as Manifest Destiny
1. The classic account of Manifest Destiny remains Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny, a Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Baltimore, 1935). The subject is approached with more irony and sophistication in Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (New York, 1963).
Thomas R. Hietala’s Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandisement in Jacksonian America (Ithaca, 1985) turns the Manifest Destiny argument around, urging that anxiety and racism, not confidence and democratic mission, fueled not-very-democratic expansionism. Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981) strikes a similar note. I feel that Hietala’s and Horsman’s racist emphasis, like many a useful corrective, goes rather too far; a chauvinistic version of democratic idealism appears to have been important in some quarters, especially among New York City intellectuals and midwestern farmers. See especially Norman A. Tuturow, Texas Annexation and the Mexican War: A Study of the Old Northwest (Palo Alto, 1978). I also think the racism label, because conflating racist expansionists North and South, obscures where the greatest pressure for annexation originated: from Southerners specifically anxious about the slaveholding form of racial control. The Hietala racist thesis, like the notion that the Civil War came from southern efforts to preserve a herrenvolk republic of equal whites and unequal blacks, also misses key attempts of color-blind dominators, including the single most important annexationist, Abel P. Upshur, to drive preservation of bondage past “mere negro” slavery to consolidate patriarchal hierachy for all colors. Still, Merk, Hietala, and Horsman, by making inescapable the limits of the Manifest Destiny explanation, have reopened the field for all who come after.
I am indebted to Professor Bradford Perkins for a discerning critique of my Texas chapters.
2. Federick Merk, Fruits of Propaganda in the Tyler Administration (Cambridge, Mass., 1971); Merk, Slavery and the Annexation of Texas (New York, 1972).
3. John H. Schroeder, “Annexation or Independence: The Texas Issue in American Politics,” SWHQ, 90 (1985): 137–64, emphasizes the central importance of the slavery issue. Gerald Douglas Saxan, “The Politics of Expansion: Texas as an Issue in National Politics, 1819–1845,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., North Texas State University, 1979, shows that most politicians’ Manifest Destiny was to avoid the issue. While Eugene C. Barker, “The Annexation of Texas,” SWHQ, 50 (1946): 49–74, remains useful, fuller scholarly accounts are in David M. Pletcher’s rather unimaginative The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (Columbia, Mo., 1973) and in Charles Sellers’s superb James K. Polk, Continentalist, 1843–1846 (Princeton, 1966). Still, I learned as much from two volumes written early in the twentieth century, not to be missed just because they are older: Justin H. Smith, The Annexation of Texas (New York, 1911), and Ephraim Douglass Adams, British Interests and Activities in Texas, 1838–1846 (Baltimore, 1910).
4. The best biography is Oliver Perry Chitwood, John Tyler: Champion of the Old South (New York, 1939). Also useful is Robert Seager II, and Tyler Too, a Biography of John and Julia Gardiner Tyler (New York, 1963).
5. Calhoun to Duff Green, July 27, 1837, Papers of Calhoun, 13: 525–28.
6. Congressional Globe, 25 Cong., 3 sess., (February 7, 1839): Appendix, 354–59.
7. Abel P. Upshur to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, August 1, 1838, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M.
8. The background for and details of Clay’s defeat are illuminated in Arthur C. Cole, The Whig Party in the South (Washington, 1913), 1–55; Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Life of Henry Clay (Boston, 1937), 320–27; Robert G. Gunderson, The Log Cabin Campaign (Lexington, Ky., 1957), 41–77.
9. Accounts of Tyler’s nomination include Seager, and Tyler Too, 134–35; Lyon G. Tyler, “John Tyler and the Vice-Presidency,” Tyler’s Quarterly …, 9 (1927): 89–95.
10. Chitwood, Tyler, 190.
11. My account of the presidential campaign of 1840 is based on the newspapers cited above, Chapter 19, note 50. Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, ch. 4, expertly discusses although I think a tad over-emphasizes slavery themes; while Michael F. Holt, “The Election of 1840, Voter Mobilization, and the Emergence of the Second American Party System: A Reappraisal of Jacksonian Voting Behavior,” in A Master’s Due: Essays in Honor of David Herbert Donald, ed. William J. Cooper et al. (Baton Rouge, 1985), is excellent on economic issues.
12. Contrast the string of letters from Mangum in 1841, as published in volume 3 of The Papers of Willie Person Mangum, ed. Henry Thomas Shanks, 5 vols. (Raleigh, 195056), with the letters from Upshur over the same period in Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M. Accounts of the Tyler-Clay split include George Rawlings Poage, Henry Clay and the White Party (Chapel Hills, 1936), chs. 3–7, and Richard Gantz, “Henry Clay and the Harvest of Bitter Fruit: The Struggle with John Tyler, 1841–1842,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., University of Indiana, 1986.
13. Accounts of colonial Texas-Mexican relations include Donald J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Alburquerque, N.M., 1982), and Eugene C. Barker, Mexico and Texas, 1821–1835 (Dallas, 1928).
14. Alleine Howren, “Causes and Origin of the Decree of April 6, 1830,” SWHQ, 16 (1913): 378–422; Ohland Morton, Terán and Texas: A Chapter in Texas-Mexican Relations (Austin, 1948).
15. William Campbell Binkley, The Texas Revolution (Baton Rouge, 1952); Stanley Siegel, A Political History of the Texas Republic, 1836–1845 (Austin, 1956), 3–37.
16. Good statistics on Texas population during the republic period are impossible to procure; hence the vague language in the text. But I have used Barnes F. Lathrop, Migration into East Texas, 1835–1860: A Study from the United States Census (Austin, 1949); The Handbook of Texas, eds. Walter P. Webb and H. Bailey Carroll, 2 vols. (Austin, 1952), 1: 321; Albert T. Burnley to Beverley Tucker, June 6, 1841, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M. Especially fine, although still uncertain, on elusive black population figures is Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1989), 54–80.
17. Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Agriculture of the United States … Compiled from the … Census (Washington, 1864), 222.
18. Smith, Annexation of Texas, 52–62; Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 362–68.
19. James C. Curtis, The Fox at Bay: Martin Van Buren and the Presidency, 1837–41 (Lexington, Ky., 1970), 152–56, 166–69; Major L. Wilson, The Presidency of Martin Van Buren (Lawrence, Kan., 1984), 149–50.
20. Quoted in Smith, Annexation of Texas, 103.
21. Ashbel Smith to Isaac Van Zandt, January 25, 1843, in Diplomatic Correspondence of the Republic of Texas, ed. George Pierce Garrison, published as the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Years 1907, 1908, 3 vols. (Washington, 1908–11), 2: Part 2, 1103–7.
22. Issac Van Zandt to Anson Jones, March 13, 1843, ibid., 2: Part 1, 132–38.
23. Gilmer’s letter, originally printed in the Washington Madisonian, January 23, 1843, is reprinted in Merk, Slavery and Annexation, 200–204. For Adams’s rebuttal, see ibid., 205–7.
24. Issac Van Zandt to Anson Jones, April 19, 1843, Diplomatic Correspondence of Texas, ed. Garrison, 2: Part 1, 164–67.
25. Interesting studies of Sam Houston include Llerna Friend, Sam Houston: The Great Designer (Austin, 1954); M. K. Wisehart, Sam Houston, American Giant (Washington, 1962); Marquis James, The Raven … (Indianapolis, 1929); George Creel, Sam Houston, Colossus in Buckskin(New York, 1928); Jack Gregory and Rennard Strickland, Sam Houston with the Cherokees, 1829–1833 (Austin, 1967); Stan Hoig, “Diana, Taina, or Talihina? The Myth and Mystery of Sam Houston’s Cherokee Wife,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, 64 (1986): 53–59.
26. Smith, Annexation of Texas, 43–45; Anson Jones to Issac Van Zandt, July 6, 1843, Diplomatic Correspondence of Texas, ed. Garrison, 2: Part 1, 195.
27. Van Zandt to Anson Jones, April 19, 1843, ibid., 2: Part 1, 164–67.
Chapter 21. An Extremist’s Zany Pilgrimage
1. Stephen F. Austin to Thomas F. Learning, July 14, 1830, “The Austin-Learning Correspondence, 1828–1836,” ed. Adreas Reichstein, SWHG, 88 (1985): 269.
2. The best biography is Madeleine B. Stern, The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews (Austin, 1968). Useful information is also in Charles Shively, “An Option for Freedom in Texas, 1840–1844,” JNH, 50 (1965): 77–96, and in Harriet Smither, “English Abolitionism and the Annexation of Texas,” SWHQ, 32 (1929): 193–205.
3. Elgin Williams, The Animating Pursuit of Speculation: Land Traffic in the Annexation of Texas (New York, 1949).
4. Quoted in Madeleine B. Stern, “Stephen Pearl Andrews, Abolitionist, and the Annexation of Texas,” SWHQ, 57 (1964): 499.
5. The courthouse speech is described in Stephen Pearl Andrews, “A Private Chapter of the Origin of the War,” Third Paper, 1–3, unpublished ms. in Andrews Papers, W.
6. The steamboat trip is described in Andrews, “Private Chapter,” Third Paper, 3–5.
7. The Galveston sojourn is described in Andrews, “Private Chapter,” Third Paper, 5–12, and in Joseph Eve to Daniel Webster, March 29, 1843, in Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Inter-American Affairs, 1831–1860, ed. William R. Manning, 12 vols. (Washington, 1932–39), 12:283–84.
8. Andrews, “Private Chapter,” Fourth Paper, 1–5.
9. Ibid., 5; Stern, Andrews, 42.
10. Andrews, “Private Chapter,” Fourth Paper, 5.
11. Biographical details are from Clagette Blake, Charles Elliot, R.N., 1801–1875, A Servant of Britain Overseas (London, 1960).
12. Charles Elliot to H. U. Addington, November 15, 1842, in British Correspondence Concerning the Republic of Texas, 1836–1846, ed. Ephraim Douglass Adams (Austin, 1917), 125–30.
13. Andrews, “Private Chapter,” Fourth Paper, 5–8.
14. Charles Elliot to H. U. Addington, March 26, 1843, British Diplomatic Correspondence Concerning Texas, ed. Adams, 165–69.
15. Elliot to Lord Aberdeen, June 8, 1843, in SWHQ, 16 (1912): 200–202.
16. One exception is Justin Smith, who with less information at his disposal than later historians understood this affair rather better. See Smith, Annexation of Texas, 11216.
17. Andrew Yates to Charles Elliot, July 15, 1843, SWHQ, 17 (1913): 77–80.
18. The Yates letter, printed first in the Boston Post, June 21, 1843, was strategically reprinted again and again in southern newspapers. See New Orleans Republican, July 3, 1843; Galveston Civilian, August 9, 1843. In his Reminiscences of the Texas Republic(Galveston, 1872), 56, Ashbel Smith claimed that he maneuvered Duff Green into leaking the letter to the press. That latter-day claim jibes with Smith’s spy-caper explanation to fellow Texan J. P. Henderson on November 14, 1843, Smith Papers, TX: “Inter nos, it was I who took care to have our friend Yates’ letter published.”
19. Ashbel Smith to John C. Calhoun, June 19, 1843, Papers of Calhoun, 17: 252–53.
20. Andrews, “Private Chapter,” Fourth Paper, 10–11, Andrews Papers, W; Stern, Andrews, 45–46; Wyatt-Brown, Tappan, 250–52; Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, 11: 380.
21. For the Aberdeen-Tappen-Andrews meeting, see Andrews, “Private Chapter,” Fifth Paper, Andrews Papers, W; Lewis Tappan Diary, entry for June 19, 1843, LC; Stern, Andrews, 48–49; Smither, “English Abolitionism,” 195; Mary Lee Spence, “British Interests and Attitudes Regarding the Republic of Texas and Its Annexation by the United States,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., U. of Minnesota, 1956–57, 44–58; Wyatt-Brown, Tappan, 252–53.
22. Wilbur Devereux Jones, Lord Aberdeen and the Americas (Athens, Ga., 1958), gives a nice perspective on the Scotsman, as does E. D. Adams, British Interests, passim.
23. Ashbel Smith to Anson Jones, July 2, 1843, Diplomatic Correspondence of Texas, ed. Garrison, 2: Part 2, 1099–1103.
24. Duff Green, amazingly, still awaits his biographer. A start is made in Fletcher Green, “Duff Green, Militant Journalist of the Old School,” AHR, 52 (1947): 247–54. Frederick Merk acidly analyzes Green as a diplomatic reporter in The Monroe Doctrine and American Expansionism, 1843–1849 (New York, 1963), 11–15.
25. Joe Wilkins, “Window on Freedom: South Carolina’s Response to British West Indian Slave Emancipation, 1833–1834,” SCHM, 85 (1984): 135–44.
26. Green to Upshur, July 3, 1843, reprinted in Merk, Slavery and Annexation, 22124.
Chapter 22. The Administration’s Decision
1. The best biography, Claude H. Hall’s Abel Parker Upshur: Conservative Virginian, 1790–1844 (Madison, Wis., 1964), is adequate but leaves room for another full-scale foray.
2. My favorite Upshur essay on the connection between proslavery social theory and anti-herrenvolk political theory is “Domestic Slavery, as It Exists in Our Southern States, with Regard to Its Influence upon Free Government,” Southern Literary Messenger, 5(1839): 677–87. Upshur’s better-known but I think more turgid theoretical formulation is in his pamphlet A Brief Enquiry into the True Nature and Character of Our Federal Government; Being a Review of Judge Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (Petersburg, Va., 1840).
3. Richmond Enquirer, February 10, 13, 1827.
4. Proceedings of the Virginia Convention of 1829–30, 65–79.
5. Upshur to Tucker, March 8, 1836, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M.
6. [Abel P. Upshur], “The Partisan Leader. A Tale of the Future. A Review of the Work of that Title,” Southern Literary Messenger, 3 (1837): 73–89.
7. Abel P. Upshur to Beverley Tucker, January 12, 1840, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M.
8. Upshur to Tucker, February 1, 1841, February 14, 1839, December 14, 1840, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M. While Upshur was only on the edges of Drew Faust’s A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Baltimore, 1977), Faust’s intellectual history illuminates the psychology of such thwarted men of mind. Still, I feel that Upshur, as well as such Faust insiders as James Hammond, cannot be understood as writing and publishing because of feeling hopelessly thwarted politically. The more accurate formulation is that they wrote in order to cut past infuriating but passable political barriers. A better formulation still is that writing and politicking were both activities aimed at bringing right ideas and therefore right politics before a culture where men of mind usually painfully did not but could—in the case of Upshur, finally did—immensely matter.
9. Upshur to Tucker, October 21, 30, 1841, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M.
10. Upshur to Tucker, March 13, 1843, Tucker-Coleman Papers.
11. Upshur to William S. Murphy, August 8, 1843, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, ed. Manning, 12: 44–49.
12. Lewis Tappan Diary, entry for July 12, 1843, LC.
13. Ashbel Smith to Anson Jones, July 31, 1843, Diplomatic Correspondence of Texas, ed. Garrison, 2: Part 2, 1116–19.
14. Stern, Andrews, 53–55.
15. Quoted in Smith, Annexation of Texas, 93, and discussed in Adams, British Interests, 130–31.
16. Ashbel Smith to Anson Jones, July 31, 1843, full citation above, note 13.
17. Adams, British Interests, 138–39.
18. Smith to Anson Jones, July 31, 1843, Smith to William Henry Daingerfield, June 28, July 6, 1843, Diplomatic Correspondence of Texas, ed. Garrison, 2: Part 2, 1098–1103, 1109, 1116–19; Elizabeth Silverthorne, Ashbel Smith of Texas: Pioneer, Patriot, Statesman, 1805–1886 (College Park, Texas, 1982).
19. A. T. Burnley to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, September 9, 1843, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M.
20. John Tyler to Waddy Thompson, August 28, 1843, W&MQ, 12 (1904): 140–41.
21. Issac Van Zandt to Anson Jones, September 18, 1843, Diplomatic Correspondence of Texas, ed. Garrison, 2: Part 1, 207–10.
22. London Morning Chronicle, August 19, 1843.
23. Smith, Annexation of Texas, 123.
24. Isaac Van Zandt to Anson Jones, October 16, 1843, Diplomatic Correspondence of Texas, ed. Garrison, 2: Part 1, 221–24.
25. John C. Calhoun to Abel P. Upshur, August 27, 1843, Papers of Calhoun, 17: 381–83.
26. Smith, Annexation of Texas, 94.
27. Edward Everett to Abel P. Upshur, November 3, 16, 1843, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, ed. Manning, 7: 246–48, 251.
28. Quoted in Herbert Gambrell, Anson Jones: The Last President of Texas (New York, 1948), 294.
29. Abel P. Upshur to John C. Calhoun, August 14, 1843, WMQ, 16 (1936): 554–57.
Chapter 23. Southern Democrats’ Decision
1. Virgil Maxcy to Calhoun, December 10, 1843, Works of Calhoun, 17: 599–602.
2. Abel P. Upshur to Beverley Tucker, October 10, 1843, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M.
3. Upshur to Isaac Van Zandt, October 16, 1843, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, ed. Manning, 12: 53–54.
4. Van Zandt to Anson Jones, October 16, 1843, Diplomatic Correspondence of Texas, ed. Garrison, 2: 221–24.
5. Murphy’s letter of September 23, 1843, to Upshur along with the leaked secret correspondence is printed in Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, ed. Manning, 12: 299–309.
6. Upshur to Murphy, November 21, 1843, ibid., 12: 55–58.
7. Anson Jones to Upshur, December 13, 1843, Diplomatic Correspondence of Texas, ed. Garrison, 2: Part 1, 232–35.
8. Andrew Jackson to Aaron V. Brown, February 9, 1843, Correspondence of Jackson, ed. Bassett, 6: 201–2.
9. Robert Walker to Andrew Jackson, January 16 [misdated January 10], 1844, ibid., 6: 255–56.
10. See ibid., 6: 264–65, for proof that Jackson did Walker’s bidding.
11. Isaac Van Zandt to Anson Jones, January 20, 1844, Diplomatic Correspondence of Texas, ed. Garrison, 2: Part 1, 239–43.
12. Upshur to Murphy, January 16, 1844, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, ed. Manning, 12: 59–65.
13. Murphy to Upshur, February 15, 1844, ibid., 12: 329–31.
14. Murphy to Anson Jones, February 14, 1844, ibid., 12: 327–29.
15. Anson Jones to J. Pinckney Henderson, February 15, 1844, Jones to Van Zandt, February 15, 1844, Jones to Henderson and Van Zandt, February 25, 1844, Diplomatic Correspondence of Texas, ed. Garrison, 2: Part 1, 252–53, 259–60.
16. Hall, Upshur, 209–12, describes Upshur’s death.
17. Smith, Annexation of Texas, 174–76; Van Zandt to Anson Jones, March 5, 20, 25, April 12, 1844, Diplomatic Correspondence of Texas, ed. Garrison, 2: Part 1, 261, 263–65, 269–73.
18. John Tyler to Andrew Jackson, April 18, 1844, Correspondence of Jackson, ed. Bassett, 6: 279.
19. For the Pakenham exchange, see Lord Aberdeen to Richard Pakenham, December 26, 1843, Richard Pakenham to Abel P. Upshur, February 26, 1844, in British and Foreign State Papers, 1844–1845, 33: 232; John C. Calhoun to Richard Pakenham, April 18, 1844, Senate Documents, 28 Cong., 1 sess., 50–53. See also Bruno J. Gujer, Free Trade and Slavery: Calhoun’s Defence of Southern Interests Against British Interference, 1811–1848 (Zurich, 1971).
20. Chitwood, Tyler, 354.
21. Whigs’ long-standing opposition to annexation is discussed many places, perhaps best in Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission, passim, and in Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, 449–500.
22. Massachusetts Acts and Resolves, 1843, 1844, 1845 (Boston 1845), 79; Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 1 sess. (December 21, 1843): 60, 63–67, 73; House Documents, 28 Cong., 1 sess., 1–24.
23. Adams quoted in Smith, Annexation of Texas, 221; Boston Atlas, March 10, 21, 30, 1844.
24. Van Buren’s Hammet Letter is conveniently reprinted in A History of American Presidential Elections, ed. Schlesinger, 1: 822–28.
25. Speeches of the Hon. Albert G. Brown …, ed. M. W. Cluskey (Philadelphia, 1859), 64–65.
26. Rives’s speech was widely reprinted, including in Raleigh Standard, June 26, 1844.
27. Houston to Jackson, February 16, 1844, Correspondence of Jackson, ed. Bassett, 6: 260–64; Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 353–66.
28. Jackson to William B. Lewis, March 28, 1844, ibid., 6: 275–76.
29. Jackson to Lewis, December 15, 1843, Jackson to Francis P. Blair, May 18, 1844, ibid., 6: 249, 294.
30. Jackson to the editors of the Nashville Union, May 13, 1844, Jackson to Francis Blair, May 18, 1844, ibid., 6: 291, 294.
31. Jackson to Lewis, September 18, April 8, 1844, Jackson to Francis P. Blair, May 11, 1844, ibid., 6: 230, 278, 286.
32. Francis P. Blair to Jackson, May 7, 1844, ibid., 6: 283–84.
33. Jackson to Blair, May 7, 11, 18, June 25, 1844, ibid., 6:283–85, 193–94, 298.
34. Walker’s Letter … Relative to the Annexation of Texas …, first printed in Washington in 1844, is conveniently reprinted in Merk, Fruits of Propaganda, 221–52.
35. The standard biography is James Patrick Shenton, Robert John Walker: A Politician from Jackson to Lincoln (New York, 1961).
36. Letter of Arthur P. Bagby, Senator in Congress, to the People of Alabama (Washington, 1845).
37. Niles’ Weekly Register, 16 (1844): 316–19.
38. This argument has a long history, dating back to antebellum times, but the fullest modern rendition is in Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, 1965).
39. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 2 sess., Appendix (January 14, 1845): 108.
40. Ibid., 28 Cong., 2 sess., Appendix (February 22, 1845): 283–88.
41. Ibid., 28 Cong., 2 sess., Appendix (January 11, 1845): 93.
42. Hoke’s speech of June 3, 1844, was printed in Raleigh Standard, June 12, 1844.
Chapter 24. The Electorate’s Decision
1. The salient parts of Clay’s Raleigh Letter are conveniently reprinted in History of Presidential Elections, ed. Schlesinger, 1: 814–17.
2. Southern Democrats’ reaction to Van Buren’s Hammet Letter is nicely illustrated in “Virginia and Texas,” in John P. Branch Historical Papers of Randolph-Macon College, 4 (1913): 116–37.
3. Thomas Ritchie to Martin Van Buren, May 4, 1844, ibid., 3 (1911): 250–51.
4. R. Hubbard to Thomas Ritchie, May 18, 1844, John R. Edmunds to Ritchie, May 12, 1844, ibid, 4 (1913): 130–36.
5. Silas Wright to B. F. Butler, May 20, 1844, Wright-Butler Papers, New York Public Library.
6. The best discussion of the Democratic Convention of 1844 is in Sellers, Polk, Continentalist, ch. 3. Also useful is James C. M. Paul, Rift in the Democracy (Philadelphia, 1951).
7. The vote is accurately recorded in History of Presidential Elections, ed. Schlesinger, 1: 829, although the totals of the two columns have been switched.
8. The various presidential roll-call votes can be followed in ibid., 1: 830–36, 840, 849.
9. Quoted in Sellers, Polk, Continentalist, 97.
10. Polk’s a-southern expansionist thinking is obvious in his April 23, 1844, public letter to S. P. Chase, et al., Niles’ Weekly Register, 16 (June 8, 1844): 228–29. Polk did not go public with his designs on California until the second year of his presidency. But his private outburst to George Bancroft, about the time of his inauguration, indicates that his continentalism early extended to the soon-to-be Golden State. See Bancroft, “Biographical Sketch of J. K. Polk,” p. 25 of typescript, Bancroft Collection, New York Public Library. The background for California fever is conveyed in Norman A. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific: A Study in American Continental Expansion (New York, 1955).
11. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 1 sess. (June 8, 1844): 698.
12. Ibid. (June 8, 1844): Appendix, 720–27.
13. Messages and Papers of the Presidents, ed. Richardson, 3: 2176–80.
14. Niles’ Weekly Register, 16 (August 24, 1844): 421–24; Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 1 sess. (June 10, 1844): 699–703.
15. Ibid., Appendix (May 23, 1844): 529–33.
16. The scene is well described in Smith, Annexation of Texas, 287.
17. Andrew Jackson to John Y. Mason, August 1, 1844, Jackson to William B. Lewis, August 1, 1844, John Tyler to Jackson, August 18, 1844, Correspondence of Jackson, ed. Bassett, 6: 304–8, 315.
18. Aberdeen’s new departure is detailed in Pletcher, Diplomacy of Annexation, 156–62, and Adams, British Interests, 156–80.
19. Aberdeen to Pakenham, June 3, 1844, quoted in ibid., 173.
20. Pakenham to Aberdeen, June 27, 1844, quoted in ibid., 178–80.
21. Richmond Enquirer, June 29, 1844.
22. Albert Burnley to Beverley Tucker, October 13, 1844, March 21, 1845, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M. See also David Hayden’s fascinating report in Little Rock Banner, May 1, 1844.
23. The salient parts of this Alabama Letter, July 27, 1844, addressed to Thomas M. Peters, et al., is in History of Presidential Elections, ed. Schlesinger, 1: 855–56.
24. Ibid., 1: 857–58.
25. See the Fall 1844 files of the Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, Milledgeville Southern Recorder, Richmond Whig, Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor, New Orleans Bee, Raleigh Register, and Vicksburg Weekly Whig.
26. Robert Toombs to John M. Berrien, January 28, 1844, Berrien Papers, NC.
27. Election results are conveniently reprinted in History of American Presidential Elections, ed. Schlesinger, 1: 861.
28. My analysis of the North in the election of 1844 is based on the most up-to-date secondary sources, especially Sellers, Polk, Continentalist, ch. 4.
29. Washington Madisonian, September 21, 1844.
Chapter 25. The Congressional Decision
1. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 2 sess. (January 13, 1845): 129–30. The final wording of the Brown Amendment is conveniently reprinted in Merk, Slavery and Annexation, 289–90.
2. Joseph Peyton to William B. Campbell, February 16, 1845, Campbell Family Papers, DU. I managed to miss this wonderful document when going through the Campbell Papers, but fortunately Michael Holt brought it to my attention.
3. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 2 sess. (January 13, February 27, 1845): 127–28, 359–60.
4. Ibid., 28 Cong., 2 sess. (January 25, 1845): Appendix, 309–14. Five years later, Stephens was still privately confessing that he held “no very distinct opinions” about the problems and future destinies of slavery. Alexander Stephens to Linton Stephens, March 25, 1850, SP.
5. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 2 sess. (January 25, 1845): 193–94.
6. Ibid., 28 Cong., 1 sess. (June 6, 1844): Appendix, 693–96.
7. Ibid., 28 Cong., 2 sess. (February 28, 1845): Appendix, 326–30. For another illuminating speech with a thesis close to Archer’s, see Virginia’s William C. Rives in ibid., 28 Cong., 2 sess. (February 25, 1844), Appendix, 378–82.
8. For Barrow’s speech, see ibid., 28 Cong., 2 sess. (February 19, 1845): Appendix, 390–94. For Berrien’s best speech, see ibid., 28 Cong., 1 sess. (June 8, 1844), Appendix, 701–4, reiterated in ibid., 28 Cong., 2 sess. (February 25, 1845): Appendix, 383–87.
9. Ibid., 28 Cong., 2 sess. (February 21, 1845): Appendix, 229–33.
10. Ibid., 28 Cong., 2 sess. (February 20, 1845): Appendix, 406–10.
11. Ibid., 28 Cong., 2 sess. (February 27, 1845): 223–24.
12. For an illuminating example of Southern Whigs’ predicament, see John C. Inscoe, “Thomas Clingman, Mountain Whiggery and the Southern Cause,” CWH, 33 (1987): 42–62.
13. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 2 sess. (December 11, 1844): 19.
14. Washington Globe, August 29, 1844.
15. John M. Niles to Gideon Welles, January 12, 25, 1845, Welles Papers, LC. Niles’s many letters to Welles during this congressional session offer the best guide to the Van Burenite mentality.
16. Local Laws and Private Acts of the State of Missouri Passed at the First Session of the 13th General Assembly, 1844–1845 (Jefferson, Mo., 1845), 403–4.
17. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 1 sess. (February 5, 1845): 244.
18. Sellers, Polk, Continentalist, 205–20, expertly describes these maneuvers and shrewdly analyzes the President-elect’s dissimulation.
19. Congressional Globe, 28 Cong., 2 sess. (February 27, 1845): 362.
20. Ibid., 28 Cong., 2 sess. (February 28, 1845): 372.
21. Sellers, Polk, Continentalist, 215–16; Lyon G. Tyler, Letters and Times of the Tylers, 3 vols. (Richmond, 1884–96), 2: 447–48; John C. Calhoun to Andrew J. Donelson, March 3, 1845, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, ed. Manning, 12: 8385.
22. James K. Polk to Andrew J. Donelson, March 7, 1845, Donelson Papers, LC.
23. Seller, Polk, Continentalist, 217; James Buchanan to Andrew J. Donelson, March 10, 1845, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, ed. Manning, 12: 85–88.
24. James K. Polk to William H. Haywood, Jr., August 9, 1845, Polk Papers, LC.
25. Merk, Slavery and Annexation, 168–70.
26. Ibid., 171.
27. ibid., 174.
Chapter 26. Loaded Words, Loathsome Collaborations
1. A. J. Donelson to James Buchanan, April 12, 1845, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, ed. Manning, 12: 400–402; James K. Polk to Sam Houston, June 6, 1845, Polk Papers, LC.
2. Sellers, Polk, Continentalist, 227–30, 398–409, expertly traces these matters. See also Glenn W. Price, Origins of the War with Mexico: The Polk-Stockton Intrigue (Austin, 1967).
3. Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 2 sess. (May 11, 1846): 792–94, (May 12, 1846): 795–804; Charleston Mercury, May 15, 1846.
4. Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission, 149–56, 169–72; John H. Schroeder, Mr. Polk’s War: Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848 (Madison, 1973).
5. Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, 57–58.
6. Greenville Mountaineer, October 15, 1847.
7. Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 2 sess. (February 9, 1847): Appendix, 323–27, 30 Cong., 1 sess. (January 4, 1848): 96–100; Ernest M. Lander, Jr., Reluctant Imperialists: Calhoun, the South Carolinians, and the Mexican War (Baton Rouge, 1980).
8. Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission, 107–43; John D. P. Fuller, Movement for the Acquisition of All Mexico, 1846–48 (Baltimore, 1936).
9. A sharp short treatment is in Sellers, Polk, Continentalist, 476–84. The best full account is Chaplain W. Morrison, Democratic Politics and Sectionalism: The Wilmot Proviso Controversy (Chapel Hill, 1967). The best biography is Charles Buxton Going, David Wilmot, Free-Soiler … (New York, 1924). A valuable essay is Eric Foner, “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited,” JAH 46 (1969): 262–79. Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1970) and Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: American Antislavery Politics in the United States (New York, 1976) provide perspectives on northern opposition to Slavepower expansionism.
10. Congressional Globe 29 Cong., 2 sess. (February 8, 1847): Appendix, 314–18. For the ferocity of Wilmot’s sheerly political hatred of the Slavepower, see Wilmot to Franklin Pierce, July 13, 1852, Pierce Papers, New Hampshire Historical Society.
11. Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission, 180–88.
12. Greater Whig scoffing at slavery’s practicality in the Mexican Cession is obvious in important Whig newspapers such as the Richmond Whig, Milledgeville Southern Recorder, New Orleans Bee, and Raleigh Register, 1847–48, and in the Toombs and Stephens letters expertly collected in The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander Stephens and Howell Cobb, ed. Ulrich B. Phillips (Washington, 1913), 61–104, and in the 1847–48 John M. Clayton and John C. Crittenden Papers, LC. The greater Democratic sense that the Cession might prove helpful, and that the Lower South must not be hemmed in, and that Upper South whites, selling ever more slaves southwards, might adopt ever more insidiously northern opinions is obvious in The Montgomery Advertizer and Jackson Semi-Weekly Mississippian. On the whole problem, see Desmond D. Hart, “The Natural Limits of Slave Expansion: The Mexican Territories as a Test Case,” Mid-America, 52(1970): 119–31.
13. This interpretation of the South and the Proviso follows, with qualifications, the currently burgeoning republicanism thesis about the causes of the Civil War, an interpretation sweepingly defended in Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, and more narrowly for Alabama by Thornton, Power and Politics in Alabama, and for South Carolina by Ford, Origins of South Carolina Radicalism. Like the earlier so-called Revisionist historians, these scholars would revise away notions that moral passion to abolish slavery swept up the North or that attempts to save slavery explain political behavior in the South. But republicanism theorists reject Revisionists’ conclusion: that given the alleged emptiness of slavery issues in the antebellum period, irresponsible politicians must have caused needless Civil War. Rather, republicanism theorists explain politicians’ stridencies in terms of political world views, particularly the ideology of egalitarian republicanism. Northerners came to believe, runs this theory, that the haughty Slavepower unacceptably threatened a sound republic. Southerners meanwhile came to believe that the North’s anti-Slavepower haughtiness unacceptably condemned Southerners as unequal republicans.
Readers of these pages will know that I find this viewpoint extremely helpful in explaining the North, less often the key to understanding the South. On the southern side, elitists scornful of egalitarian republicanism precipitated many crises, including secession. Furthermore, the nature of slavery as a social system led to some not-very-egalitarian-republican means of southern internal control, especially physical violence, verbal proscriptions, and malapportioned legislatures. In the federal sphere, these dubiously egalitarian-republican attitudes spilled over into imperiously demanding southern political styles, censured mails, gag rules, three-fifths clauses, not-so-democratic fugitive slave laws, and draconic sedition laws in bleeding Kansas. These differences between northern and southern styles of republicanism are precisely why anti-Slavepower compaigns in the North, so well explained by republicanism theorists, were so powerful.
Above all else, the egalitarian-republican thesis so useful about the North cannot be as universally applied to the South because the South’s highly inegalitarian Peculiar Institution could not be altogether walled off from white men’s egalitarian political institutions and attitudes. Republicanism theorists assume that the color line was an impenetrable wall, that black slavery’s only impact on white politics was to make white egalitarians more passionately protective of their own equality. The burden of my social history chapters is that the color line could not always hold, that control over blacks often conditioned control over whites and vice versa, that white egalitarianism inevitably acquired some coloration of domineering styles towards blacks. The burden of my political history chapters is that the resulting mongrelized form of social control in the South had its perceived limits, that limits were perceived as most intrusive in the southern hinterlands, and that most antebellum political crises, including Missouri, Gag Rule, Texas, Fugitive Slave, and Kansas controversies began with southern attempts to find practical remedies for these perceived weaknesses at the fringes. That these forays in practicality turned out to be impractical illuminates the comic irony in so much human striving—and the intractable social situation which made southern politics transcend the political.
This line of analysis has a degree of applicability to the Proviso crisis. Particularly among Lower South Democrats and especially among those early tending towards disunion, Yankees who would cordon Southerners off from expanding and Border South reformers who would push blacks onto the contained Lower South came together in southern visions of imminent catastrophe. Deep South Democrats also often saw particularly California as practical for slavery and one way to win relief from containment. But even these gentlemen talked more often of David Wilmot’s insult than about his immediate practical danger; and for the larger number of moderates who thought the diagnosis exaggerated, California was too far off, Border South reform was too distant, and the resulting claustrophobia was too dim to make for an immediate practical crisis. For these centrists, and especially for Whigs, drives to protect their equality from Wilmot’s insult was pivotal. Michael Holt’s The Political Crisis of the 1850s, 49–56, splendidly drives that republicanism thesis home.
As will soon be clear, I also think the republicanism thesis helps explain why those Southerners who doubted that Kansas would prove useful to slavery still supported precipitators who called Kansas-Nebraska an indispensable slaveholder practicality. Egalitarian republican explanations sometimes help bypass the “needless war” thesis precisely because the Slave South was deeply implicated in American egalitarian culture. But the democrat as slaveholder was also a quirky American egalitarian. The dialectic between the typicality and the quirkiness reveals ever so much about this slavocracy, and about the national egalitarian and especially Jacksonian strains which this regional variation did centrally imbibe, influence—and violate too.
14. Alexander Stephens to Linton Stephens, January 21, 1850, SP.
15. Quoted in Morrison, Democratic Politics and Sectionalism, 65.
16. Quoted in ibid., 66.
17. Edgefield Advertizer, November 28, 1860; Charleston Mercury, December 4, 1860.
18. See for example Joseph E. Brown in the Georgia state senate in 1850 as quoted in Ulrich B. Phillips, The Life of Robert Toombs (New York, 1913), 92; James Hammond to Beverley Tucker, March 25, 1850, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M; Jefferson Davis to M. D. Haynes, August 18, 1849, in Supplement to Jackson Semi-Weekly Mississippian, October 1849; Montgomery Advertizer, November 20–21, 1849.
19. Congressional Globe, 29 Cong., 2 sess. (February 19, 1847): 454.
20. The latest full-scale history is Harold D. Tallant, “The Slavery Controversy in Kentucky, 1829–1859,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986, but still useful is Asa Martin, The Anti-Slavery Movement in Kentucky Before 1850 (Louisville, 1918).
21. The best biography is David L. Smiley, Lion of White Hall: The Life of Cassius M. Clay (Madison, 1962). A cautionary note is sounded in Stanley Harrold, “Cassius M. Clay and Slavery and Race: A Reinterpretation,” Slavery and Abolition, 9 (1988): 42–56.
22. The Writings of Cassius Marcellus Clay …, ed. Horace Greeley (New York, 1848), 174.
23. Smiley, Lion of White Hall, 48.
24. Writings of Cassius Clay, ed. Greeley, 211–373; Speech of C. M. Clay at Lexington, Ky., Delivered August 1, 1851 (n.p., n.d.; copy in LC).
25. John M. Fee to Cassius Clay, August 17, 1849, Fee Papers, BC.
26. Writings of Cassius Clay, ed. Greeley, 214.
27. Ibid., 337–38.
28. Cassius Clay to John M. Fee, July 8, 1855, Fee Papers, BC.
29. Writings of Cassius Clay, ed. Greeley, 285.
30. Ibid., 308.
31. Ibid., 289; Speech of Clay, August 1, 1851, 15–18.
32. Louisville Journal, January 29, 1849.
33. Louisville Courier, May 3–4, 1849.
34. Ibid., July 4, 1849. For other prime examples of this omnipresent line of argument, see the files of the Louisville Examiner, 1847–49, and the Louisville Courier, 1849.
35. Frankfort Yeoman, November 30, 1848. The files of the Yeoman, 1848–49, best illustrate the tone of the establishment’s campaign. See also George Prentice’s illuminating editorials in Louisville Journal, January 23, February 23, 1849.
36. Louisville Courier, June 25, July 10, September 1, 1849; A. G. Hodges to Orlando Brown, June 18, 1849, Brown Papers, FC.
37. Louisville Courier, September 1, 1849.
38. Frankfort Yeoman, November 22, 1849.
39. Ibid., December 20, 1849.
40. Ibid., October 18, 1849.
41. Ibid., December 20, 1849.
42. Ibid., February 10, 1860.
43. Cassius Clay to Mrs. G. O. Smith, April 20, 1851, Clay Papers, FC.
44. Quoted in Smiley, Lion of White Hall, 142. Clay’s most important newspaper backer put the case against constant agitation the same way. Louisville Courier, March 3, 1851. For a good example of the intense pressure to conform, see J. G. Davis to Robert C. Breckinridge, June 27, 1851, Breckinridge Family Papers, LC. For a superb analysis of how the same pressures to conform worked in the postbellum South, see C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge, 1986), 14–17.
45. Cassius Clay to Robert M. Breckinridge, February 7, 1851, Breckinridge Family Papers, LC.
46. Cassius Clay to Salmon P. Chase, August 12, 1851, Chase Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
47. Wilson Lumpkin to John C. Calhoun, January 3, 1849, Calhoun Papers, CU.
48. DeBow’s Review, 7 (1849): 205.
49. James L. Hammond to John C. Calhoun, March 5, 1850, in Correspondence of John C. Calhoun, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (Washington, 1900): 1211.
50. C. R. Clifton to Calhoun, January 30, 1849, Calhoun Papers, CU; Henry L. Benning to Howell Cobb, July 1, 1849, Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, ed. Phillips, 168–72; David Johnson to Calhoun, October 18, 1848, Calhoun Papers, CU; M.C.M. Hammond to James Hammond, December 17, 1849, Hammond Papers, LC. See also Jeremiah Clemens to Calhoun, January 8, 1849, Calhoun Papers, CU.
51. For a good example of this frequent theme in the Democratic establishment press, see Jackson Semi-Weekly Mississippian, March 9, 1849.
52. Speeches of Brown, ed. Cluskey, 324.
Chapter 27. Southern Convention, Without a South
1. Good accounts of the election of 1848 include Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington, Ky., 1970); Holman Hamilton, “Election of 1848,” in History of American Presidential Elections, ed. Schlesinger, 2: 865–96; Norman Graebner, “1848: Southern Politics at the Crossroads,” The Historian, 25 (1962): 14–35.
2. The ambiguous doctrine is fully discussed in Milo Milton Quiafe, The Doctrine of Non-intervention with Slavery in the Territories (Chicago, 1910), and succinctly defined in David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York, 1976), 58–60.
3. Alexander Stephens to I. W. Harris, February 11, 1848, Stephens Papers, LC. Southern Whigs’ loyalty campaign in Taylor’s behalf is well explored in Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, 244–68.
4. Holman Hamilton, Zachary Taylor, Soldier in the White House (Indianapolis, 1951), 38–133, is good on the Taylor candidacy.
5. Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, 62–63, expertly lays out the No Party aspect of the Taylor movement.
6. Robert Barnwell to Robert Barnwell Rhett, November 11, 1844, in “Hamlet to Hotspur: Letters of Robert Woodward Barnwell to Robert Barnwell Rhett,” SCHM, 77 (1976): 251–52.
7. The battle between these two sorts of secessionists is detailed in Chauncey S. Boucher, “The Secession and Co-operation Movements in South Carolina, 1848–1852,” Washington University Studies, 5 (1918): 67–129. The fullest version of Carolina’s midcentury crisis can be found in John Barnwell, Love of Order: South Carolina’s First Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1982). The best biography of Rhett is Laura A. White, Robert Barnwell Rhett: Father of Secession (New York, 1931). Rhett’s spirit suffuses Rhett to Armistead Burt, March 18, 1845, Burt Papers, DU, and Rhett to Robert M. T. Hunter, August 30, 1844, in Correspondence of Robert M. T. Hunter, 1826–1876, ed. Charles H. Ambler (Washington, 1918), 70–71.
8. Sacred and Secret Diaries of Hammond, ed. Bleser, 173–75.
9. Ibid., 171.
10. James Hammond, Two Letters on Slavery in the United States, Addressed to Thomas Clarkson, Esq. (Columbia, 1845). For an extremely revealing Hammond letter on diseased opinion, even in proslavery circles beyond South Carolina, see Hammond to Calhoun, August 18, 1845, Correspondence of Calhoun, ed. Jameson, 1045–49.
11. Calhoun to John H. Means, April 13, 1849, Correspondence of Calhoun, ed. Jameson, 764–66; Calhoun to Maryland Governor Thomas, January 5, 1850, Calhoun Papers, SC.
12. Wiltse, Calhoun, Sectionalist, 377–88.
13. Robert Toombs to John J. Crittenden, January 3, 22, 1849, Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, ed. Phillips, 139, 141; Alexander Stephens to Crittenden, January 17, 1847, Stephens Papers, DU.
14. Howell Cobb to John B. Lamar, January 16, 24, 1849, Cobb Papers, GA; Cobb to his wife, February 8, 1849, Cobb et al. to their constituents, February 26, 1849, both in “Howell Cobb Papers,” ed. R. F. Brooks, GHQ, 5 (1921): 38–52.
15. See Joel H. Silbey, “John C. Calhoun and the Limits of Southern Congressional Unity, 1841–1850,” The Historian, 30 (1967): 58–71, and more broadly, Silbey’s very important and aptly entitled The Shrine of Party: Congressional Voting Behavior, 1841–1852 (Pittsburgh, 1967).
16. The Works of John C. Calhoun, ed. Richard K. Crallé, 6 vols. (New York, 185457), 6: 185–313.
17. John C. Calhoun to Henry W. Conner, February 2, 1849, Calhoun to J. R. Mathews, June 20, 1848, Calhoun Papers, DU.
18. A. Hutchinson to John C. Calhoun, October 5, 1849, Calhoun Papers, CU.
19. D. Wallace to Whitemarsh Seabrook, October 20, November 7, 1849, Seabrook Papers, LC.
20. Jackson Weekly Mississippian, November 30, 1849.
21. Ibid., October 5, 1849.
22. Calhoun to David L. Yulee, October 19, 1849, Yulee Papers, University of Florida Library.
23. James Hammond to Edmund Ruffin, February 8, 1850, Ruffin Papers, VHS.
24. Hammond to Beverley Tucker, May 14, 1850, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M.
25. Good descriptions of antebellum Nashville include Mary Ellen Gadski, “The Tennessee Capitol: An Architectural History,” THQ, 47 (1988): 67–120; James H. Atherton to Mary Anne Atherton, November 24, 1831, A. T. Hamilton to John Hamilton, March 10, 1859, both in correspondence by subject file, TN; Olmsted, Texas, 35–36. But the best way to visualize the area is to go see it, especially Strickland’s capitol building and Jackson’s Hermitage.
26. By far the best secondary account is Thelma Jennings, The Nashville Convention: Southern Movement for Unity, 1848–1851 (Memphis, 1980). By far the fullest and most valuable account by a participant is William F. Cooper to D. R. Arnell, June 18, 1850, in Cooper Letterbook, 1848–61, TN.
27. Secret and Sacred Diary of Hammond, ed. Bleser, entry for August 10, 1850. See also D. F. Jamison to Isaac Holmes, September 20, 1850, Holmes Papers, LC.
28. Robert J. Brugger, Beverley Tucker: Heart Over Head in the Old South (Baltimore, 1978) is one of the best biographies of a southern fire-eater.
29. Edward William Sidney (pseud, for Beverley Tucker), The Partisan Leader: A Tale of the Future, 2 vols. (Washington, 1836), I: 42–43, 65–66.
30. Tucker to Hammond, December 27, 1849, Hammond Papers, LC.
31. Tucker to St. George Tucker, March 10, 1822, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M.
32. Tucker to James Hammond, February 17, 1836, Hammond Papers, LC.
33. Tucker to St. George Tucker, March 10, 1822, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M.
34. Tucker to Hammond, April 15, 1850, Hammond Papers, LC; Tucker to Thomas Smith, May 15, 1829, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M.
35. Good descriptions of the very tense, very haughty Tucker, as he with “great fear,” despite “want of voice,” voiced the speech of his life (Tucker to Lucy Ann Tucker, June 8, 1850, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M), include Hammond to William Gilmore Simms, June 16, 1850, Hammond Papers, LC; Nashville Convention Ms. in Robert F. W. Allston Papers, SCHS.
36. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, Prescience: A Speech Delivered by the Hon. Beverley Tucker of Virginia, in the Southern Convention Held at Nashville, Tennessee, April 13, 1850 (Richmond, 1862).
37. Jackson Weekly Mississippian, June 21, 1850.
Chapter 28. The Armistice of 1850
1. I take my chapter title from my favorite chapter in my favorite synthesis of the late antebellum period, David Potter’s The Impending Crisis. The occasion gives me an opportunity to note the direct impact of an indirect influence which pervades these pages in ways I cannot trace, much less fully acknowledge. When I was first formulating this project, I had several long conversations with Professor Potter. I was then a fledgling and he a titan in our profession. He nevertheless always had the time, patience, and sensitivity to focus unendingly on my notions. His gentle rebukes were always the same. That subtle and complex antebellum world sprawls beyond any simplistic formula. His own book, published posthumously, brilliantly perpetuates that spirit.
2. William Henry Ellison, A Self Governing Dominion: California, 1849–1860 (Berkeley, 1950); Cardinal Goodwin, The Establishment of State Government in California, 1846–1850 (New York, 1914).
3. Loomis Morton Ganaway, New Mexico and the Sectional Controversy, 1846–1861 (Albuquerque, 1944); Kenneth F. Neighbours, “The Taylor-Neighbors Struggle Over the Upper Rio Grande Region of Texas in 1850,” SWHQ, 61 (1958): 431–63.
4. Holman Hamilton, “Texas Bonds and Northern Profits,” MVHR, 43 (1957): 579–94.
5. Paul Finkelman, “Prigg v. Pennsylvania and Northern State Courts: Anti-Slavery Use of a Pro-Slavery Decision,” CWH, 25 (1979): 5–35.
6. Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780–1861 (Baltimore, 1974).
7. Robert Toombs to John J. Crittenden, January 3, 1849, Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, ed. Phillips, 139; Alexander Stephens to Crittenden, January 17, 1949, Stephens Papers, DU.
8. Hamilton, Taylor, is particularly fine on this point. For a later but not necessarily better biography, see K. Jack Bauer, Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest (Baton Rouge, 1980).
9. Zachary Taylor to?, August 16, 1847, Taylor Papers, LC.
10. Messages and Papers of the President, ed. Richardson, 3: 2556–57. See also Taylor’s special message of January 23, 1850, ibid., 3: 2564–68.
11. Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, 72–76, makes this point very well.
12. Quoted in Potter, Impending Crisis, 92n.
13. Mark J. Stegmaier, “Zachary Taylor Versus the South,” CWH, 33 (1987): 21941.
14. The Papers of Henry Clay, eds. James F. Hopkins, et al., 9 volumes published to date (Lexington, Ky., 1959–88), 1: 3–8.
15. Henry Clay to Richard Pindall et al., February 17, 1849, in Louisville Journal, March 5, 1849, reprinted in Works of Clay, ed. Colton, 3: 346–52.
16. Ibid., 3: 61–69.
17. Unless otherwise noted, this discussion is based on Clay’s resolutions and short comments upon introducing them [Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 sess. (January 19, 1850): 244–47] and his major speech in their behalf [(ibid., February 5–6, 1850): Appendix, 115–27]. The best book on the congressional deliberations is Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington, Ky., 1964).
18. The exact language of Clay’s resolution on this point: The Texas boundary should run up the Rio Grande River “to the southern line of New Mexico; and thence with that line eastwardly, and so continuing in the same direction to the line as established between the United States and Spain.” Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 sess., Appendix, 115. The exact language of Clay’s explanatory speech of January 29, 1850: The Texas boundary shall follow the Rio Grande “to where it strikes the southern line of New Mexico and then … follow on in that direction until it reaches the line as fixed by the United States and Spain in their treaty of 1819.” Ibid., text page 245.
19. The Clay quote is from ibid., 245. See the useful comparative maps in Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict, 57.
20. William C. Pool, A Historical Atlas of Texas (Austin, 1975), and especially William Thorndale and William Dollarhide, Map Guide to the U.S. Federal Census (Baltimore, 1987), are useful in locating counties.
21. Clay made this important point in separate comments to the Senate on May 13. Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 sess., Appendix, 572.
22. Two books place Jefferson Davis’s plantation practices in perspective: James T. Currie, Enclave: Vicksburg and Her Plantations, 1863–1870 (Jackson, Miss., 1980) and Janet T. Hermann, The Pursuit of a Dream (New York, 1981).
23. Davis’s speech can be found in Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 sess. (February 13–14, 1850): Appendix, 149–57.
24. For Clay’s explanation, see ibid. (June 7, 1850): 1155. On whether Congress meant to declare Popular Sovereignty operative in the territorial phase, I agree with Potter, Impending Crisis, 117n, that a law without any declaration on the subject does not declare a policy operative, especially since congressmen declared that a hopelessly divided Congress was in no position to affirm anything more than Popular Sovereignty in the statehood phase. The contrast with the Kansas-Nebraska Act is instructive; there Congress explicitly declared Popular Sovereignty could be exercised on slavery in the territory or the statehood phases. For a well-argued contrary view, see Robert R. Russel, “What Was the Compromise of 1850,” JSH, 22 (1956): 292–309.
25. Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 sess. (August 19, 1850): Appendix, 1588.
26. Ibid. (August 19, 1850): Appendix, 1583.
27. Ibid. (August 19, 1850): Appendix, 1588.
28. Some southern congressmen so realized. See Richard Parker to Charles Faulkner, June 20, 1850, Faulkner Papers, WVU.
29. A point wonderfully made in one of the most important essays on antebellum politics: Arthur Bestor, “State Sovereignty and Slavery: A Reinterpretation of Proslavery Constitutional Doctrine, 1840–1860,” Illinois State Historical Society Journal, 64 (1961): 117–80.
30. Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 sess. (August 21, 23, 1850): Appendix, 1601, 1622.
31. Ibid. (August 20–21, 1850): Appendix, 1590–1605.
32. For some fine examples of the fugitive slave affair raising basic questions about the Border South, see William S. Beard to R.J. Breckinridge, July 1, 1850, Breckinridge Family Papers, LC; Charleston Mercury, July 8, 1857; Charles J. Faulkner in the Virginia House of Delegates, December 15, 1848, quoted in Henry Shanks, The Secession Movement in Virginia, 1847–1861 (Richmond, 1934), 39–40; E. H. Gouldring to My Dear Friend, August 11, 1848, Gouldring Papers, University of Kentucky Library.
33. David Outlaw to his wife, July 29, August 8, 10, 1850, Outlaw Papers, NC.
34. Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 sess. (August 22, 1850): Appendix, 1614.
35. Ibid. (August 20, 1850): Appendix, 1591.
36. Ibid. (August 21, 1850): Appendix, 1603.
37. Ibid. (August 20, 22, 1850): Appendix, part 2, 1598, 1616.
38. Ibid. (August 22, 1850): Appendix, 1617.
39. Ibid. (August 22, 1850): Appendix, 1614.
40. Ibid. (August 22, 1850): Appendix, 1609.
41. Ibid. (August 1, 1850): Appendix, 1485.
42. Ward M. McAfee, “California’s House Divided,” CWH, 33 (1987): 115–30; Paul Finkelman, “The Law of Slavery and Freedom in California, 1848–1860,” California Western Law Review, 17 (1981): 437–64.
43. Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 sess. (August 1, 1850): Appendix, 1485–86.
44. Ibid. (August 1, 1850): Appendix, 1486–90.
45. Ibid. (August 2, 1850): Appendix, 1504.
46. Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict, chs. 6, 8, follows the unraveling of the Omnibus and Douglas’s rescue job deftly.
47. Ibid., 191–94, prints the Senate roll calls.
48. Ibid., 195–200, prints the House roll calls.
49. Potter, Impending Crisis, 113, makes this excellent point.
Chapter 29. The Paralysis of the Old Order
1. The most accessible sources on the convention debates are the 92 convention supplements printed in Richmond newspapers. LC has a good run, and fuller files still are in VSL and W&M. The fullest treatment of the Convention is Francis P. Gaines, Jr., “The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1850–1: A Study in Sectionalism,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1950. The best short discussion is Craig Simpson, “Political Compromise and the Protection of Slavery: Henry A. Wise and the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1850–51,” VMBH, 83 (1975): 387–405.
I am indebted to Professor Simpson for his comments on this chapter.
2. Willey’s speech of February 24, 1851, and Summers’s of June 17, 1851, were printed in supplements 14 and 43 respectively. Revealing runs of letters from western Virginia constituents to Willey and to his convention ally, Gideon Camden, are in the Willey Papers and the Camden Papers, WVU.
3. Goode’s speech of April 16, 19, 1851, was printed in supplement 40.
4. Barbour’s speech of February 27, 1851, and Garnett’s of April 14, 1851, were printed in supplements 15 and 45 respectively. Garnett’s speech is a special reactionary republican statement. Even more special is Garnett’s pamphlet The Union Past and Future: How It Works and How to Save It (Washington, 1850; published under the pseudonym “A Citizen of Virginia”). A fine string of private letters to and from Garnett is in the William Garnett Chisolm Papers, VHS. See also William J. Robertson to M.R.H. Garnett, March 16, 1850, Garnett-Hunter Papers, VA.
5. On Wise, one of the most important southern antebellum politicians, we fortunately have one of the best southern biographies: Craig M. Simpson, A Good Southerner: The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1985). A good physical description of Wise the orator is in John P. Little, History of Richmond (Richmond, 1933), 261–66.
6. The quote is from Wise’s speech of March 27, 1851, printed in supplement 29.
7. The quotes in these two paragraphs are from ibid., from Wise’s speech of May 5, 1851, printed in supplement 38, and from his illuminating exchange with the western Virginia reformer George Summers and the eastern Virginia conservative Robert E. Scott on February 17, 1851, printed in supplement 13. Wise’s five-day speech to the convention of April 23–28 was unfortunately never printed, but an incomplete version is in Wise Papers, NC.
8. The convention votes and final wordings are expertly followed in Simpson, Wise, 83–85.
9. M.R.H. Garnett to William Henry Trescot, February 16, 1851, William Garnett Chisolm Papers, VHS.
10. Trescot to Garnett, March 14, 1851, Chisolm Papers, VHS.
11. Marilyn McAdams Sibley, “James Hamilton, Jr., Versus Sam Houston, Repercussions of the Nullification Controversy,” SWHQ, 90 (1985): 164–80; Lawrence S. Rowland, ‘“Alone on the River’: The Rise and Fall of the Savannah River Rice Plantations of St. Peter’s Parish, South Carolina,” SCHM, 88 (1987): 121–50, esp. 142–43.
12. Works of Calhoun, ed. Crallé, 4: 542–73.
13. Ibid., 4: 574–78.
14. Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond of South Carolina (New York, 1866), 233–301, esp. 262.
15. Works of Calhoun, ed. Crallé, 1: 1–406. For a more extensive discussion of the interpretation outlined here, see my “Spoilsmen and Interests in the Thought and Career of John C. Calhoun,” JAH, 52 (1965): 25–42.
16. The best biography is Archie Vernon Huff, Jr., Langdon Cheves of South Carolina (Columbia, 1977). For Cheves’s oration, see Speech of Langdon Cheves in the Southern Convention at Nashville, Tennessee, November 14, 1850 (n.p., 1850; copy in LC).
17. Whitemarsh Seabrook to Peter H. Bell, September 11, 1850, Bell Papers, TX.
18. Seabrook to the governors of Alabama, Virginia, and Mississippi, September 20, 1850, Seabrook Papers, LC.
19. G. W. Towns to Seabrook, September 25, 1851, Seabrook Papers, LC.
20. Seabrook to Towns, October 8, 1850, Seabrook Papers, LC. See also Seabrook to John A. Leland, September 18, 21, 1850, same collection.
21. John Quitman to Whitemarsh Seabrook, September 29, 1850, Seabrook Papers, LC. Quitman’s 1850–51 correspondence with Seabrook is conveniently available in almost-complete form in J.F.H. Claiborne, Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman, 2 vols. (New York, 1860), 2: 36–40, 123–43. But enough bits and pieces are missing, including some lines here quoted, so that citing the originals seems preferable.
22. Seabrook to Quitman, October 23, 1850, Claiborne Papers, MISS.
23. Quitman to Robert Barnwell Rhett, November 30, 1850, Seabrook Papers, LC: Seabrook to Quitman, December 17, 1850, Claiborne Papers, MISS.
24. Barnwell, Love of Order, 138–41, expertly analyzes the legislative proceedings. Seabrook’s pleasure with himself is clear in his December 17, 1851, letter to Quitman, Claiborne Papers, MISS.
25. Quitman to John S. Preston, March 29, 1851, Quitman to J. H. Means, May 25, 1851, Claiborne, Quitman, 2: 123–27, 135–36.
26. Helpful works on the Georgis crisis of 1850, aside from the biographies cited below, notes 27–29, include Richard H. Shryock, Georgia and the Union in 1850 (Durham, N.C., 1926); John T. Hubbell, “Three Georgia Unionists and the Compromise of 1850,” GHQ, 51 (1967): 307–23; Horace Montgomery, “The Crisis of 1850 and Its Effect on Political Parties in Georgia,” GHQ, 24 (1940): 293–322; Montgomery, Cracker Parties (Baton Rouge, 1950); R. P. Brooks, “Howell Cobb and the Crisis of 1850,” MVHR, 4 (1917): 279–98.
27. The best biography, but one leaving room for yet another, is John Eddins Simpson, Howell Cobb: The Politics of Ambition (Chicago, 1973).
28. While William Y. Thompson, Robert Toombs of Georgia (Baton Rouge, 1966), has probably superseded Phillips, Toombs, a yet finer biography seems possible.
29. Despite the recent appearance of Thomas E. Schott, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography (Baton Rouge, 1988), my favorite Stephens biography remains perhaps the best unpublished biography of an antebellum Southerner: James Z. Rabun, “Alexander H. Stephens, 1812–1861,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., U. of Chicago, 1948.
30. The best private letters on the resistance-is-not-secession theme include Alfred Iverson to John M. Berrien, October 23, 1850, Berrien Papers, NC, and John Forsyth to Wilson Lumpkin, October 14, 1851, Keith Read Papers, GA. My favorite Georgia resistance pamphlet is Mirabeau B. Lamar, Letter to the People of Georgia (n.p., n.d.; copy in LC). The best resistance newspapers include the Macon Journal and Messenger, Milledgeville Federal Union, and Columbus Times.
31. Alexander Stephens to John J. Crittenden, October 24, 1850, Stephens Papers, DU. See also Stephens to Crittenden, November 11, 1850, same collection; Francis S. Bartow to John M. Berrien, August 14, 1851, Berrien Papers, NC. The best Unionist Georgia sources include the Milledgeville Southern Recorder and the Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, ed. Phillips, 163ff.
32. Debates and Proceedings of the Georgia Convention, 1850 (Milledgeville, 1850).
33. On the intriguing debate within the Unionist Party over whether secession was constitutional, see Stephen to Cobb, June 23, 1851, Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, ed. Phillips, 237–38; Toombs to Cobb, June 9, 1851, GHQ, 5 (1921): 45–46.
34. The best monograph is the old but informative Cleo Hearon, “Mississippi and the Convention of 1850,” Mississippi Historical Society Publications, 14 (1914): 7–229.
35. John A. Quitman, Message to the Special Session of the Legislature, November 18, 1850 (Jackson, 1850). Quitman’s private correspondence shows his total belief in this cause. See Quitman to his wife, September 21, 1850, and to his daughter, October 1, 1850, Quitman Papers, NC. The best biography is Robert E. May, John Quitman: Old South Crusader (Baton Rouge, 1985). Also useful is John McCardell, “John A. Quitman and the Compromise of 1850 in Mississippi,” Journal of Mississippi History, 37 (1975): 239–66.
36. J. P. Walworth to his son, 1850, Samuel Cartwright Papers, in private hands. For an agonized admission that Mississippi must simmer down despite the intolerable socalled compromise, see Jacob Thompson, Address of Hon. Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, to His Constituents(Washington, 1851). For a more conventional Unionist statement, see Samuel S. Boyd, Speech of Hon. Samuel S. Boyd Delivered… on the 10th Day of October, 1851 (Natchez, 1851).
37. J. W. McDonald to Quitman, April 3, 1851, Claiborne Papers, MISS.
38. The governor’s cynical strategy of making demands in the Union which could not be met and would thus lead to “a new confederacy” is admitted in Quitman to Whitemarsh in Seabrook, June 26, 1851, Seabrook Papers, LC.
39. Jackson Mississippian, July 18, 1851; A. Hutchinson to Charles Fontaine, May 20, 1851, Fontaine Papers, MISS.
40. John A. Quitman, “To the People of Mississippi, July 19, 1851,” broadside in Quitman Papers, LSU.
41. Jefferson Davis to Samuel Cartwright, June 10, 1849, in The Papers of Jefferson Davis, eds. Haskell M. Monroe, Jr., et al. 6 vols. to date (Baton Rouge, 1971–89), 4: 2123.
42. Davis to James S. Pearce, August 22, 1852, ibid., 4: 300–301.
43. Journal of the Convention of the State of Mississippi and the Act Calling the Same, 1851 (Jackson, 1851).
44. Proceedings of the Meeting of Delegates from the Southern Rights Association of South Carolina. Held at Charleston, May, 1851 (Columbia, 1851); D. F. Jamieson to Isaac Holmes, June 16, 1851, James Hammond Papers, LC. See also William Henry Trescot to M.R.H. Garnett, May 15, 1851, William Garnett Chisolm Papers, VHS.
45. Triweekly South Carolinian, August 22, 1850; Daniel Wallace, Letter … to His Constituents (n.p., n.d.; copy in LC); Rutledge (pseudonym for W. D. Porter), Separate State Secession … (Edgefield, S.C., 1851).
46. Points especially strongly made in the two pamphlets cited above, note 45.
47. W. S. Lyles to James Chesnut, July 1, 1851, Chesnut-Miller-Manning Papers, SCHS.
48. Cooperation Meeting Held in Charleston, S.C., July 29, 1851 (Charleston, 1851).
49. James Hammond to Beverley Tucker, December 18, 1850, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M.
50. The best statements of the Cooperationist case, besides those cited below, notes 51–53, include W. A. Owens, An Address to the People of Barnwell District … (Charleston, 1851); William J. Grayson, Letter to … Whitemarsh B. Seabrook … on the Dissolution of the Union (Charleston, 1850); files of the Greenville Southern Patriot and Charleston Standard, July-October, 1851; and the superb Benjamin F. Perry Papers, ALA, 1851–52.
51. John Townsend, The Southern States, Their Present Peril, and Their Certain Remedy (Charleston, 1850); Southern Rights and Cooperation Documents. No. 3 (Charleston, 1851).
52. James L. Orr, Speech … in Charleston, May, 1851 (Charleston, 1851).
53. C. G. Memminger, Speech … in Charleston, Sept. 23, 1851 … (Charleston, 1851).
54. James Hammond to Beverley Tucker, April 18, 1851, Tucker-Coleman Papers, W&M. See also the following letters of Hammond to Tucker, same collection: October 1, November 8, 1850, January 24, 1851.
55. Secret and Sacred Diary of Hammond, ed. Bleser, 220–21.
56. Greenville Southern Patriot, July-December, 1851, esp. June 6, July 25, 1851. The Benjamin F. Perry Papers, 1851–55, ALA, are also full of superb material on this subject. For good perspectives, see Ford, Origins of South Carolina Radicalism, and Chauncey S. Boucher, Sectionalism, Representation and the Electoral Question in Ante-bellum South Carolina (St. Louis, 1916).
57. Brutus, An Address to the Citizens of South Carolina (n.p., n.d.; copy in SC). Brutus was actually no upcountry nonslaveholder, but William Henry Brisbane, formerly a lowcountry slaveholder who had freed his slaves and had been routed from the state when trying to convert others. See Blake McNulty’s intriguing “William Henry Brisbane, South Carolina Slaveholder and Abolitionist,” in The Southern Enigma: Essays on Race, Class, and Folk Culture, eds. Walter J. Fraser and Winifred B. Moore, Jr. (Westport, Conn., 1983).
58. Barnwell, Love of Order, 198–99, makes detailed election results conveniently available.
59. Trescot to M.R.H. Garnett, May 6, 1852, William Garnett Chisolm Papers, VHS.
60. Maxcy Gregg to Hammond, November 14, 1851, Hammond Papers, LC; Secret and Sacred Diary of Hammond, ed. Bleser, 238–50.
61. Charles J. Colcock to William H. Branch, October 29, 1851, Branch Family Papers, NC.
62. William H. Trescot to M.R.H. Garnett, November 16, 1851, William Garnett Chisolm Papers, VHS.
63. William Foran’s unpublished “James L. Orr: Pragmatist in Wonderland,” typecopy in SC, was the projected kernel of one of the most important books never finished on the Old South. Foran’s short piece remains as useful as Roger P. Leemhuis, James L. Orr and the Sectional Conflict(Washington, 1979). Ford, Origins of South Carolina Radicalism, again provides good perspective.
64. Orr to Benjamin F. Perry, December 9, 1853, Perry Papers, ALA.
65. The best biography is John Witherspoon DuBose, The Life and Times of William Lowndes Yancey, 2 vols. (Birmingham, 1892). While Thornton, Power and Politics in Alabama, supplies the best account of and perspectives on Alabama mid-century politics, Lewy Dorman, Party Politics in Alabama from 1850 Through 1960 (Wetumpka, Ala., 1935), and Clarence P. Denman, The Secession Movement in Alabama (Montgomery, 1933), are still useful.
66. Indispensable sources on the Yanceyite position include the Montgomery Advertizer and Eufaula Spirit of the South. Yancey’s opponents’ case is clear in F.A.P. Barnard, An Oration Delivered … July 4, 1851 (Tuscaloosa, 1851), and in the files of the Mobile Advertizer. A good short overview is provided by Henry Mayer, “‘A Leaven of Disunion’: The Growth of the Secession Faction in Alabama,” Alabama Review, 22 (1969): 83116.
67. William Lowndes Yancey to Joel E. Mathews et al., May 10, 1851, Yancey Papers, ALA. See also Yancey to Benjamin Yancey, November 17, 1851, Yancey Papers, NC.
68. Yancey to Benjamin Yancey, September 15, 1852, Yancey Papers, NC: Dorman, Party Politics in Alabama, 78ff.
Chapter 30. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, I: Confrontation in Missouri
1. Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860 (Chapel Hill, 1968).
2. Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington, 1961), is particularly good on the necessity to separate myth from reality in understanding why this subject was explosive.
3. Campbell, Slave Catchers, 148–51.
4. Ibid., 151–52; W. U. Hensel, The Christiana Riot and the Treason Trials of 1851: An Historical Sketch (Lancaster, Pa., 1911).
5. Campbell, Slave Catchers, 154–57; W. Freeman Galpin, “The Jerry Rescue,” New York History, 43 (1945): 19–34.
6. Quoted in Campbell, Slave Catchers, 126.
7. Ibid., 124–32; Charles Emery Stevens, Anthony Burns, a History (Boston, 1856); Samuel Shapiro, “The Rendition of Anthony Burns,” JHN; 44 (1959): 34–51; Jane H. and William H. Pease, The Fugitive Slave Law and Anthony Burns (Philadelphia, 1975).
8. For a wonderful discussion of American Boosterism, see Daniel M. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York, 1965), 113–68.
9. Harrison A. Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 1804–1865 (Baltimore, 1914); Robert William Duffner, “Slavery in Missouri River Counties, 1820–1865,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., U. of Missouri, Columbia, 1974.
10. Lloyd A. Hunter, “Slavery in St. Louis, 1804–1860,” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society, 30 (1974): 233–65. For a broader perspective, see Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (New York, 1964).
11. Two good complementary modern biographies fortunately exist: William Nisbet Chambers, Old Bullion Benton, Senator from the New West… (Boston, 1956), and Elbert B. Smith, Magnificent Missourian: The Life of Thomas Hart Benton (Philadelphia, 1958).
12. Quoted in Chambers, Benton, 338. On Benton’s nickname, see ibid., 230; on his senatorial manner, William J. Grayson Autobiography, 215ff, ms. in SC.
13. Thomas Hart Benton, Speech … Delivered… at Jefferson City, May 26th, 1849 (n.p., n.d.; copy in LC); Benton, … Speech at Fayette … the 1st of September, 1849) (n.p., n.d.; copy in MOHS, SL). For descriptions of the campaign, see William L. Williams to John C. Calhoun, July 31, 1849, Samuel L. Treet to Calhoun, August 22, 1849, Calhoun Papers, CU.
14. James S. Green, Letter… Dated December 10, 1849 to Messrs. John S. Farish et al…. (n.p., n.d.; copy in MOHS, SL).
15. Frank P. Blair, Jr., Remarks … on the Repeal of the … Resolutions (Jefferson City, Mo., 1853). For perspective, see William Ernest Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics, 2 vols. (New York, 1933). The Blair faction’s open attempt to rid Missouri of slavery after 1855 is obvious in the important Blair Family Papers, LC.
16. A good biography is William E. Parrish, David Rice Atchison of Missouri, Border Politician (Columbia, Mo., 1961).
17. P. Orman Ray, The Repeal of the Missouri Controversy (Cleveland, 1909), is an older study which, like Justin Smith’s Annexation of Texas, seems to me more on the right track than some newer volumes. Useful broader perspectives on origins of Kansas-Nebraska include James Malin, The Nebraska Question, 1852–1854 (Lawrence, Kansas, 1853), and James A. Rawley, Race and Politics: “Bleeding Kansas” and the Coming of the Civil War (Philadelphia and New York, 1969). Useful perspectives on the Atchison-Benton clash include Barbara Layenette Green, “The Slavery Debate in Missouri, 1831–1855,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., U. of Missouri, Columbia, 1980; Donnie D. Bellamy, “Slavery, Emancipation, and Racism in Missouri, 1850–1865,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss., U. of Missouri, Columbia, 1971; Benjamin C. Merkel, “The Slavery Issue and the Political Decline of Thomas Hart Benton, 1846–1956,” MOHR, 38 (1944): 388–407; and Joan E. Lampton, “The Kansas-Nebraska Act Reconsidered: An Analysis of Men, Methods, and Motives,” unpubl. Doctor of Arts thesis, Illinois State University, 1979.
18. Quoted in Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York, 1973), 399400. This masterful biography provides by far the best explanation of Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska motives.
19. A factor somewhat over-emphasized in Frank H. Hodder’s still useful “The Railroad Background of the Kansas-Nebraska Act,” MOHR, 12 (1925): 3–22.
20. The Senate’s consideration and Atchison’s surrender can be followed in Congressional Globe, 32 Cong., 2 sess. (March 3, 1853): 1111–17.
21. Missouri Republican, August 31, 1853; Jefferson Inquirer, July 9, December 17, 1853. For Benton’s answer see ibid., August 13, 1853.
22. E. A. Hannegan to Davy Atchison, September 1, 1853, Atchison Papers, MOHS, C.
23. C. F. Jackson to Davy Atchison, January 18, 1854, Atchison Papers, MOHS, C.
Chapter 31. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, II: Decision in Congress
1. For a description of this mess and its inhabitants, see A. P. Butler to Davy Atchison, March 5, 1856, Atchison Papers, MOHS, C. For an indication of the sectionalizing of messes in general, see C. C. Clay, Jr., to C. C. Clay, Sr., December 11, 1858, Clay Papers, DU. The nature and influence of the F Street mess is most fully laid out in Roy F. Nichols’s superb “The Kansas-Nebraska Act: A Century of Historiography,” MVHR, 43 (1956): 187–212.
2. A. P. Butler to William Elliott, February 5, 1854, Elliott-Gonzales Papers, NC: Congressional Globe, 33 Cong., 1 sess. (May 19, 1854): 903–8 (Goode), (February 24, 1854): 221–26 (Hunter): Charleston Courier, August 3, 1857 (Mason).
3. Hunter’s speech, cited above, comes down hard on this point. Butler’s senatorial speech, unlike his private letter cited above, stresses the symbolic rather than the practical, even making the old Carolina point that slavery expansion, even when apparently practical, could be impractical if it depopulated the elderly coastal South. Congressional Globe, 33 Cong., 1 sess. (February 24, 1854): 232–40. Atchison’s position clearly intrigued, influenced, but did not always persuade his messmates.
4. Jefferson (Missouri) Inquirer, February 17, 1853.
5. Quoted in Johannsen, Douglas, 411. Where Roy Nichols, “A Century of Historiography,” makes F Streeters the crucial force in the wording of “Douglas’s” bill, Johannsen calls that view “exaggerated” and entitles his chapter on Kansas-Nebraska “I Passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act Myself,” the transcendent “I” being Douglas, whose own conceptions of strategy, according to Johannsen, controlled the evolving wording of his bill.
Until January 11, the truth lies between these extremes. Johannsen concedes the critical point: that unless the Illinoisan and the Southern Democrats came to an accommodation, neither could secure a law that both, for different reasons, desperately wished. As to who held the upper hand in that accommodation, the evidence between January 7 and January 10 seems to me inconclusive. While I think Nichols is likely right that Southerners pushed the pre-statehood legislature’s right to decide from the accompanying report, where it lay buried on January 7, into the proposed statute’s text, where it appeared on January 10, Johannsen may be right that Douglas himself decided that correction of this “clerical error” was the best strategy for passing the law. Unfortunately for the Johannsen theory, however, far more than strategy was involved in the far more crucial decision during the following week to declare the Missouri ban “inoperative and void” in Kansas-Nebraska: a southern demand which Johannsen’s own text shows that Douglas opposed as long and as hard as he dared.
6. Washington Sentinel, January 14, 1854.
7. On Phillip Phillips’s activities in January 1854, see his papers, LC, and Henry B. Learned, “The Relation of Phillip Phillips to the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854,” MVHR, 8 (1922): 303–17.
8. This Whig motive is particularly obvious in the candid correspondence of Alexander Stephens, floor leader of Kansas-Nebraska forces in the House. See Stephens to Linton Stephens, November 20, 1853, January 25, March 4, May 23, 1854, SP.
9. Good discussions of the 1852 presidential elections include Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, 119–30, and Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, 323–40.
10. Ibid., 340–44, nicely analyzes the Whig congressional debacle of 1853.
11. Congressional Globe, 33 Cong., 1 sess. (February 4, 1854): Appendix, 140–45. The official Dixon line on why he acted is in Mrs. Archibald Dixon, The True History of the Missouri Compromise and Its Repeal (Cincinnati, 1899).
12. William H. Seward to Thurlow Weed, January 7, 8, 1854, Weed Papers, Universtiy of Rochester; Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York, 1967), 150.
13. A point well made in Cooper, South and the Politics of Slavery, 379.
14. Maneuvers in the crucial last week, although devastating to the Johannsen thesis of Douglas-in-control, are faithfully followed in Johannsen, Douglas, 411–16.
15. Congressional Globe, 33 Cong., 1 sess. (March 4, 1854): Appendix, 407–15. In the same vein, see Thomas Hart Benton in ibid. (April 25, 1854): Appendix, 557–61; Sam Houston in Austin State Gazette, November 23, 1855; and John Minor Botts, Letters … on the Nebraska Question(Washington, misdated as 1853).
16. The Douglas-Wade exchange is in Congressional Globe, 33 Cong., 2 sess. (February 23, 1855): Appendix, 216.
17. A useful discussion of House-Senate maneuvers is Gerald W. Wolf, The Kansas-Nebraska Bill: Party, Section, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1977). Particularly good on the House side is Roy F. Nichols, Blueprints for Leviathan: American Style (New York, 1963), 104–20.
18. The admirable recent effort to show that nonslavery issues such as temperance and nativism helped erode Whiggery in the North before the Kansas-Nebraska Act runs the danger of obscuring how profoundly the slavery issue finished off Whiggery in the South. See Williams E. Gienapp’s fine The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York, 1987), 66, for an example of how such minimizing of slavery’s contribution to destroying the Second American Party System can go a little too far.
19. First stages of the anti-Nebraska northern movement are skillfully portrayed in Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 254–65. Lincoln’s early role is nicely described in Don E. Fehrenbacher’s Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (Stanford, Calif., 1962). The sources of Lincoln’s Republicanism in Henry Clay-like southern apologetics is analyzed in perhaps the most important neglected article on the coming of the Civil War, George M. Fredrickson’s “A Man But Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality,” JSH, 41 (1975): 39–58.
20. Robert R. Russel, “The Issues in the Congressional Struggle Over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 1854,” JSH, 29 (1963): 187–210, correctly notes that southern speeches went both ways on the question of whether Kansas was practical for slaveholders. For some examples of southern congressmen who thought Atchison would make Kansas practical, in addition to F Streeters cited above, note 2, see South Carolina’s W. W. Boyce in Charleston Standard, October 6, 1854, and L. M. Keitt in ibid., October 11, 1854. For some examples of southern congressmen who thought symbolic equality was most at stake, see John Kerr of North Carolina in Congressional Globe, 33 Cong., 1 sess. (February 17, 1854): Appendix, 166–68, and Wm. B. W. Dent of Tennessee to Hershel V. Johnson, June 13, 1854, Johnson Papers, DU.
The last word in these professional notes properly belongs to my indispensable fellow professionals. My revisions have been skillfully rendered intelligible by Catherine Grover, Susan Mabie, and especially Joanne Bracken. Joanne and Mike Holt each in their own ways made the final months of revising a time of especially rich fulfillment. Sheldon Meyer then gave the manuscript the sort of rich editorial scrutiny which I had thought perished decades ago. My thanks to these special friends, and to others, cited above, who commented on chapters and sections, and to the many monographers, also noted above, whose collective insights have made this field a triumph of American historical scholarship over the past quarter-century.