CHAPTER 6
According to one partially true myth, lynch mobs operated on the white side of the antebellum southern color line. Another such myth maintains that social control over white folk required their consent. The colliding half-truths show again that the color line was no impassable boundary.
The very word southern calls to mind Ku Klux Klans and tarrings and featherings, southern abolitionists fleeing north and northern abolitionists not daring to tiptoe south, bookburnings in front of schools and bonfires in front of post offices. The Ku Klux Klan was a postwar horror. But the Klan inherited a prewar tradition. Could an egalitarian republic remain democratic when lynchers flourished?
That question helped limit lynchers’ sway. The slaveholder as democrat could not endlessly terrorize white neighbors. Nor could neighborhood gangs terrorize other Southerners’ neighborhoods.
Still, sporadic physical violence did help restrain heretical opinion. Terroristic violence was also the natural extreme of a system which often used verbal intimidation to inhibit dissenters. On the white side of the color line, issues were debated, majorities were rallied, republicans did consent—but this was done within a shadow of coercive proscription supposedly reserved for the control of blacks.
1
Toleration of dissent draws another classic line between democracy and despotism. Democrats cherish a choice between options. Despots relish dictation of one option. Democrats protect the loyal opposition. Dictators jail dissenters.
This clear line becomes fuzzy when freedom seems threatened by external danger, as in national wars. Then, democrats legitimize repression. So too, legitimate liberty seems illegitimate license when used to foment murder or riot or insurrection. Democrats concede that freedom does not allow people to cry “fire” in a crowded theater. Free government institutionalizes not Anything Goes but freedoms voluntarily surrendered so that the community can endure.
No democratic proposition is simpler in theory. None becomes so tortured in practice. Lines between civil and uncivil freedom, liberty and license, patriotic and unpatriotic dissent, necessary and unnecessary repression are never easy to draw. Distinctions are hardest to formulate in hysterical crises, when dissent is most rampant and unity most vital. At such moments, the question becomes whether freedom under constraint is liberty at all.
The question is easier to answer when courts must sanction coercion. Totalitarian regimes are free to decide what procedures, if any, by what court, if any, must precede punishment. Democrats usually insist that courts try accused traitors. Writs of habeas corpus, rights to trial by jury, power to face and cross-examine accusers—such legal procedures customarily long survive edicts that disagreement is treason. When free speech is abridged without democratic justice, democracy and dictatorship become indistinguishable.
The Old South, as befit a regime both democratic and despotic, had built-in ways to blur but never to obliterate that saving line. The blurring came from slaveholders’ ability to call dissenting opinion incendiary. A dictatorship anxious to be a family could not cage blacks off from whites’ discussions. In parlors, at rallies, in churches, omnipresent “family friends” heard whites debate. Blacks also saw newspapers they allegedly could not read. This Peculiar Institution peculiarly could not separate the races.
A white dissenter thus could reasonably be heard not as disagreeing with white citizens but as provoking black insurrection. Dissenters could answer that debate was meant for whites. But they could not deny that blacks heard too. Where the unfree heard much said about freedom, talk about abolition became as insurrectionary as screaming “fire” in the proverbial theater.
Democratic courts still had to try accused white insurrectionists. The formula of slavery for blacks, democracy for whites demanded judicial process for white citizens. But a color-obsessed regime also required that only whites could testify against whites. Democratic courts were thus helpless if only blacks had heard whites foment insurrection.
In answer, slaveholders established quasi-despotic courts. Neighborhood patrols could legally maurade anywhere, including inside slave cabins, to investigate insurrection. The legal patrol, alias illegal lynch mob, stood “legally” organized to hear blacks’ illegal testimony against whites.
The accused still had to have a “legal” way of answering. Lynch mobs provided the solution: so-called kangaroo courts. Disreputable mobs customarily appointed reputable community leaders to judge those accused outside the courtroom. Democrats here struggled to combine justice and despotism.
Kangaroo courts twice bolstered the master’s mastery. Semi-open debate, potentially dangerous to a semi-closed system, could be stifled. Nonslaveholder jealousy, potentially disastrous to slaveholding minorities, could be deflected. Nothing excelled a lynching bee as high point of a dull rural week. Nothing better solidified a folk neighborhood than rich and poor united to tar and feather some alien threat to the public safety. Wealthy citizens, as kangaroo court officials, could point the poor towards purifying their betters’ domain. With that reconciliation of a divided neighborhood, a divided regime, and a divided mode of social control, the lynch mob brought horrors usually reserved for blacks down upon shuddering whites.
2
The shudder must be appreciated. Whites contemplating saying nay to Massa often had to weigh consequences not unlike the fears deterring Cuffee. While blacks suffered brutalization exceedingly more often, whites could also face horrifying brutality. At least The Man lashing his “boy” was sometimes responsible to paternalistic codes. At least when mobs hunted down blacks, white patriarchs remained responsible for protecting their dependents. White dissenters, however, risked the wrath of hundreds of rednecks, responsible only to a hysterical view of conformity. Mercy could come only from squires whose interest often lay with feeding the mob’s hysteria.
Responsible planters, judge and jury for the mob, felt least responsible for the most vulnerable whites: outsiders. Northerners or Europeans, recently come to the community and outside the folk nexus of commerce and blood, were particularly suspect. Lacking a protector, facing insiders’ fear of strangers, an accused outsider could be more hapless than Cuffee.
The best Cuffee-like role to assume, for non-Southerners under southern guns, was to be more southern than Southerners. Outsiders often passionately declared undying love for slavery and hatred for Yankee fanatics. Like genuine Cuffees and like genuine religious converts, these newly-fanatical new Southerners sometimes became their part. Like fake Cuffees, white superpatriots sometimes dissimulated superbly. Such deceptiveness could raise as exasperating questions about pretense as did black versions.
Dissenting insiders, because related by blood to the community, were less often forced to feign conformity. But they too sometimes shuddered at the mob’s definition of loyalty. They too could emulate Cuffee by keeping their disloyalty to themselves.
Some examples illuminate the fear that was responsible for much concealment of dissension. In late 1859, James Powers, an Irish stonecutter, was helping build South Carolina’s new capitol in Columbia. Blacks had only the “nigger work” of sweeping up the artisan’s rubble. Carolinians, when stopping to admire the rising symbol of whites’ republic, seemed a little overeager to find the Irishman’s brogue quaint. But they also seemed willing to make this stranger feel part of their racist civilization.
Then another stranger, the Yankee would-be emancipator John Brown, raided Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, seeking to rally slave resistance. Carolina patrolmen, some unemployed, some drunk, all up for gang sport, descended on James Powers. These defenders of community values now heard his brogue as a traitor’s. Someone urged that hands be laid on the fanatic.
Powers fled. He put nine miles between himself and his tormenters. Then he heard their voices. Nine miles had become a hundred yards. He ran. They attacked. They hauled him back to Columbia, then thrust him in a nine-foot jail cell.
Nine feet of safety were not enough. Rednecks returned. They dragged Powers to the city square. Whites packed the place. Patrolmen called their victim worse than “nigger.” They handed lashes to two blacks. Lashers, indistinguishable from slaves lately whipped into sweeping up his debris, now stripped him. Revengeful slaves sent cords singing 29 savage times. Powers’s blood ran from wounds too painful to count.
Whites lit a bonfire, heated a kettle, and splattered boiling black tar in his cuts. They smeared his uncut skin with burning sludge. They made him do a drunken dance of pain. They exulted that his reeling black face was now “nigger” outside as well as in.
On second thought, they wanted him worse than “nigger.” They stuck chicken feathers in the steaming tar. They hooted at their “chicken nigger.” They shouted to his bloodied, blackened face that his supposedly white head would roll if he returned.
Returned! He prayed for the mercy of leaving. They mercifully pitched him on the night train to Charleston. Every click of the wheels carried him away from the white state capital. Every tick of the clock found him closer to the rice tyrant’s center.
The train arrived. A Charleston mob flung him into jail. For several days they came to hoot, jeer, threaten. Then they came to cart him off. They marched him past taunting crowds. They shoved. He stumbled. He was on the train to New York.1
3
Months later, amidst secession rather than Harper’s Ferry hysteria, Levi H. Harris came to know the same helpless fear. Harris, a Marylander representing a Philadelphia patent medicine house, had stopped in New Orleans to peddle drugs. This typical borderite would tolerate sectional differences in hopes of enjoying national commerce. Up north, the Marylander urged sympathy for the South. Down south, Harris urged understanding of the North. Everywhere the neutral sought to make dollars rather than speeches.
In November of 1860, with Abraham Lincoln elected President, New Orleans vigilantes demanded statements from foreign peddlers. It was necessary to root out incendiaries “unsafe for a community to have in its midst.” Whites who secretly supported Black Republicanism must reveal their secrets. Outsiders must prove their right to be inside the South.
Rumors flew up and down Canal Street about the Black Republican from Philadelphia. A self-appointed mob selected a committee of “the most respectable” to investigate. “Respectables” visited Harris. They demanded proof he was respectably southern.
A frightened Harris knew not how to answer. If he fulminated like a proslavery zealot, those who viewed him “as a northern man would very naturally suspect me of dissimulation.” If he soothed in the manner of a non-political Union-saver, he would be suspected of appeasing Black Republicans. He was damned, in this secessionist inquisition, whichever role he played.
He saw a pose to strike. He approved, he said, of a Black Republican’s election. Now the South would secede! After secession, Northerners, seeing the South was in earnest, would grant every concession. Secessionists would return. In a reconstructed Union, Levi Harris said, two sections would at last become one nation.
A member of the committee dashed out. He announced that Harris welcomed Lincoln’s election. The mob rushed at the traitor. The committee of respectables haplessly conceded inability “to convince the excited mob of the facts.” Insiders urged the outsider to flee on the next train.
How? A ticket was expensive. His accounts were unpaid. A customer, perhaps to escape his bill, had first sicked the mob on him. Now all who owed him money knew he could not chase them down. He lacked enough pennies to run away from debtors running away from him.
A customer, taking mercy, shoved a $100 loan into his hand. The mob, showing no mercy, threw him into a carriage. The carriage sped away. He knew not whither he was racing. The carriage stopped. He was at the railroad depot. They were allowing him a “coward’s” exile.2
4
The process of exile worked less violently but maybe more painfully on those rarer occasions when the victims were insiders. In the tiny eastern Virginia hamlet of Falmouth, for example, the man bearing the name Moncure Daniel Conway possessed triple proof of belonging. Moncures, Daniels, and Conways had long been First Families of Virginia. Walker Conway, Moncure Daniel Conway’s father, embodied patriarchal paternalism. Lordly and despotic, protector of his own and proud to be proslavery, he personified the master who would command the world.
He could not master his son. Moncure Daniel Conway, who loved the patriarch, followed a torturous path towards repudiation of patriarchy. The journey outside southern orthodoxy had many orthodox stopping places: orations on slavery’s genius, articles on blacks’ inferiority, blasts at Yankee abolitionists.
But he never felt comfortable with his father’s hard bluster. Ultimately he felt more comfortable with his mother’s gentle qualms. She privately deplored the institution which her husband publicly defended. In the early 1850s, while preaching in Washington, D.C., Moncure Conway went public with his doubts. Then the new heretic contemplated journeying back to Falmouth for a visit.
The head of the family was apprehensive, not least about the family. “If you are willing to expose your own person recklessly,” wrote Walker Conway, “I am not willing to subject myself and family to the hazards of such a visit.” Moncure Conway came home anyway. He “was affectionately received by my parents, and all seemed about to go smoothly.”
Then the son caught hint of a hazard not even the father suspected. Twice blacks stopped Moncure. They whispered that they were aware that he was antislavery. They inquired if he would lead an insurrection.
The next morning, Moncure Conway reported, “a number of young men, including former schoolmates,” surrounded him. They called him “an abolitionist.” They demanded he leave. Rougher sorts crowded in. They threatened expulsion. Moncure shuddered, but not because of the “little danger of violence to myself.” His numerous, highly placed blood relations, “whatever their disagreements from me, would have seriously resented any injury.” When the folk community coerced one of its own, a war between families might ensue.
Walker Conway wanted no part of that bloodletting. Neither did his son. A man who loved parents, brothers, cousins, Moncure Conway declared, “had no right to entangle them in quarrels.” A dissenting son also had no right, however inadvertently, to give blacks ideas about slaying a beloved, if misguided, father. The next day, “humiliated and weeping,” he exiled himself. For all their more physically awful humiliations, James Powers and Levi Harris shed no more frustrated tears about a republic made partially unrepublican by the mob.3
5
Quantity of whites lynched, like number of blacks whipped, was irrelevant to quality of terror produced. One white tarred and feathered, like one black bleeding from 39 lashes, could cow multitudes into at least pretenses of submission. Many a Yankee migrant to the South, who in a more relaxed regime might have become leader of white resistance, concealed dissension or returned North. Many a southern wanderer from orthodox truth, who in a more tolerant atmosphere might have sought to rally his fellows, exiled himself or shrilly proclaimed pro-southern dogma or feigned indifference to such questions.
Still, the right to dissent, while distorted almost beyond a pure republican’s recognition, was rarely totally destroyed. In some areas under some conditions, dissenters dared to challenge the system. Then social control sometimes had to be consolidated the democratic way, often in very tense public discussion.
Twentieth-century totalitarians help put nineteenth-century lynchers in perspective. No southern horror visited upon whites compares with latter-day terrors such as concentration camps or pogroms or secret police. Late nineteenth-century southern ugliness supplies another perspective on mid-nineteenth-century violence. Although the antebellum South’s slavery was more dictatorial than the postbellum South’s sharecropping, prewar lynchings were pale precursors of the postwar Ku Klux Klan’s more frequent, more murderous ceremonies.
Some 300 lynchings of whites transpired between 1830 and 1860. Many years, no lynching occurred. Lynchings abounded only in moments of hysteria, either during insurrection or secession scares. Such moments passed so swiftly—and with such shamed faces—that “only” one white was usually lynched. “Only” once did a community lynch as many as seven. Victims were almost always Northerners or newcomers or other outsiders. Almost all “outside agitators” violated were exiled rather than hanged. Inside agitators sometimes had to be defeated at the polls. Why, then, did lynch mobs not terrorize more systematically?
One revealing answer is that the Old South’s exaltation of the local neighborhood severely limited mob violence. The modern totalitarian nation seeks to coerce various people and vast areas into one totality. In the Old South, tiny clusters of white folk presumed they alone could spill their neighbors’ blood.
That cherished conception left no room for coercing many localities into a South. Lynching could not ease the South’s gravest internal problem, geographic divisions. No bureaucracy, country-wide or state-wide or region-wide, governmental or extra-governmental, existed to fuse many folk neighborhoods into one. No local patrol could terrorize someone else’s locality. No patrol of slaveholders could shed a drop of blood in nonslaveholder communities. All the lynching imaginable could yield no greater unity than each neighborhood unified to be different from each other.
The central despotic institution inside black-belt neighborhoods, the plantation, limited purification of even minuscule locales. A tyrannical lynch mob invading a plantation could destroy the tyrant’s control within his gates. Rednecks, often resenting squires and detesting “niggers,” could gain revenge by kicking and lashing “truths” out of patriarchs’ blacks.4
A patrol, once arrived upon a plantation to help govern slaves, itself insulted a planter’s government. If slaves were out of control, the slaveholder must be overly permissive. Masters, stung by that judgment and anxious to protect dependents, could turn the pack aside with slander about some allegedly still more permissive neighbor. Nonslaveholders then ended up deciding whose “boys” most needed a lynching. No wonder that coercive slaveholders often moved to dissolve rather than deploy mob coerciveness.
During the Christmas season of 1852, for example, 17 North Carolina slaves allegedly conspired to murder Massa Josiah Collins’s overseer.5 Collins either believed the allegation or felt compelled to sell off “villains.” Collins’s enchained slaves alarmed local townsmen while passing through. Serviles sang and danced a Christmas frolic. They mouthed “great detestation and contempt” for Massa’s “half-hearted” punishments. Collins, known for “good management” and “religious ministrations” to slaves, stood accused of sickly leniency.
A mob came to see if Collins had healthily clamped down. He informed vigilantes that his neighbor, Charles Pettigrew, was the real softheart. Collins reported he had inquired if his “people” knew of insurrections. Collins had been told, “without,” he maintained, “leading questions being asked,” that two Pettigrew slaves had killed Pettigrew’s father. He urged folks to investigate.
Upper-class acquaintances of both slaveholders scoffed at the charge. “We all know,” wrote a prominent doctor, that slaves constantly employ “false accusation” to avert master’s violent displeasure. Collins believes, diagnosed the doctor, because “of his own displeasure … for selling or otherwise punishing his slaves.”
Collins’s lower-class listeners suspected otherwise. They wanted at Charles Pettigrew’s “niggers.” Pettigrew let it be known they were not welcome. Whether his “boys” had killed his father was his business and his patriarchal responsibility.
Another large planter congratulated Pettigrew on his paternalism. You must be “there,” wrote James C. Johnston, “to protect your own.” Without Pettigrew’s presence, gloomed Johnston, “an army” could have driven “negroes into the lake.” The incident, continued Johnston, showed that the propertyless would “believe any tale, however absurd,” and murder any black suspect, however helpless. Mobs rose “for two reasons: to destroy the property of the master and from hatred to the slaves.”
Pettigrew answered that masters must indeed protect slaves from “wicked white people.” He ridiculed charges that his father had been murdered. “If I would listen to Collins,” wrote the patriarch, “I would probably hang one half my negroes and sell the other half, and be the laughing stock of the whole community.” Still, Pettigrew sold one accused black down river. He was too jealous of his reputation to be out-Collinsed by Collins—or to let mobs master his dependents.
Eight years later, during the 1860–1 secession crisis, Pettigrew again pitted paternalism against hysteria. Rumors again abounded. Slaves supposedly believed Abraham Lincoln would emancipate them. Whites allegedly infected blacks with hopes. One Cuffee supposedly told his female owner that 300 slaves massed in the swamp and would soon be marching near her house. Another “poor lady and her family” fled “to the hotel to spend the night, being afraid to remain in her own house.” Still another lady, Charles Pettigrew’s wife’s aunt, dared not journey home. Aunt Mary considered her “people … the most innocent.” But she feared an “old miscreant” nonslaveholder. The fellow had “prowled around the country since last January,” inciting blacks to rise.
Pettigrew’s wife waxed hysterical about the white Cuffee. He fooled everyone by “pretending to be a fool.” The wise fool had “every intercourse with … negroes, and now his plan is nearly ripe for execution.” Mrs. Pettigrew begged her husband to buy revolvers.6
Charles Pettigrew begged his wife to remember the real difficulty. We must “keep the miserable and low whites from shooting the innocent negro, who is only anxious to keep his lazy bones from labor.” Our blacks, he affirmed, are “in infinitely more danger than you are.” A nearby community, Pettigrew lamented, put 17 negroes in jail “to keep them from being killed by the negroless.”7
That danger led blacks to beg another patriarchal Pettigrew to come home. When William Pettigrew answered the summons, his “obedient and industrious” people were relieved to see him. They consider “their master,” trumpeted Massa, “their best protector.” Rednecks had “much alarmed” them. Their alarm convinced this Pettigrew too that “negroes are in much more danger from the nonslaveholding whites than the whites are from the negroes.”8 Even with Lincoln’s army looming, even with females demanding revolvers, even with white incendiaries allegedly prowling, even with nonslaveholders resenting the wealthy, private patriarchs stood ready to abort the lynch mob, their only instrument for imposing coercive conformity.
6
The very nature of localistic community and private despotism, then, always stopped section-wide violence and sometimes aborted neighborhood-wide lynchings. But the color line between democracy and despotism limited terrorizing on the local level still more. While white pressures on blacks could legitimately be despotic, white relationships with other whites were illegitimate unless democratic. Democratic law demands democratic courts. Kangaroo courts are not democratic courts. Extralegal violence made law-abiding democrats squirm.
Such squirming could be seen in revealing places at revealing times. Fireeaters, even when anxious to foment popular hysteria, had doubts about employing hysterical mobs. Thus in late 1859, the Charleston Mercury, for 30 years leader of secessionist zealotry, was squeamish about zealous vigilanteeism. “In our indignation at … the North,” warned the editor, Robert Barnwell Rhett, “we are in danger of” declaring men “guilty without proof.” Rhett approved of extralegal repression when “necessary to security” and when responsibly administered by “older and discreet men.” But “illegal violence on mere suspicion” would “not stand the test of reason and justice.”9
Private dismay about kangaroo courts matched public pleas for caution. Thomas T. Gantt of St. Louis, for example, when “quite assured” that some “monster” had instigated “negroes to massacre and rapine,” was “very little disturbed” to see a white arbitrarily tortured. But Gantt found it “shocking to think of an innocent man being scourged out of his life.” Brutalizing “a suspected person in order to make him confess, until he dies under the torture, is really horrible.”10
Linton Stephens provides a second example of a man trying to reconcile the unreconcilable. Stephens cherished extralegal savaging of troublesome outsiders. He rejoiced to see Northerners “shot across Mason and Dixon’s Line blazing in a coat of tar and feathers.” He loved to see fanatics “hop like popcorn.” Still, Linton Stephens would not administer extralegal violence himself.
A proslavery friend called Linton’s refusal to lynch incompatible with approval of lynching. Linton, stung, struggled to justify himself to his famous brother, Alec. “I might be unwilling to clean out a gentleman’s privy,” Linton wrote, “because the disagreeable work is ungentlemanly. But I might still be glad the disgusting work was done, because he would have a much more comfortable time of it.”11
Republicans who considered violating whites analogous to cleaning outhouses preferred to cleanse the regime inside democratic courthouses. Southern laws endlessly sought to wrench jurisdiction over white sedition from lynch mobs. State after state declared antislavery seditious because productive of slave insurrection. The Virginia legislature in 1832, for example, outlawed “advising” blacks “to commit insurrection or rebellion.” Maryland in 1836 outlawed declarations “having a tendency” to arouse blacks. South Carolina in 1859 found seditious “tendency” in anything “calculated to disaffect any slave.” By widening regular courts’ license over advice, tendencies, calculations, lawmakers sought to make kangaroo courts unnecessary.12
By narrowing the range of sedition laws, however, southern judges sought to protect freedom of speech. In 1839, the Virginia Supreme Court limited the potentially seditious to actual members or agents of abolitionist societies. In 1848, the same court liberated a prisoner convicted of calling slavery “merely” morally wrong. Repression of moral judgment violated freedom of religion. Only preaching against a legal right to slaves could be seditious.13 Two years later, Samuel Janney, a Virginia heretic, escaped courts altogether by proving he had explicitly upheld the legalexistence of slavery. He had “merely” attacked southern morals. Judges haplessly could only give the fanatic a moral lecture.14
Even when sedition laws were more broadly construed, inciting blacks remained the sole seditious act. Even if white discussion had incited black listeners, the accused incendiary could urge he never had any “intention” or “tendency” to influence blacks. His sedition consisted of trying to win the next election. No republican court could call that “tendency” unrepublican.
In mid-January 1861, some South Carolina legislators climactically tried to give republican courts power to coerce heretical citizens. Representative John Harleston Read would outlaw the poisoning of “the minds of those who do not hold slaves against those who do.” That sedition, declared Read, was “well calculated to raise in arms an enemy who might be the most injurious.” In upper Carolina, said Read, “a large portion” of whites had “no negroes and no interest in them.” South Carolina needed “a law on our Statute Books” against inciting nonslaveholders.
Read’s proposal could appear only in South Carolina. No other state had such strong tendencies for dictatorial proclivities to combat democratic sensibilities. Yet South Carolina also had a powerful republican impulse. Representative Plowden Weston answered Read by scorning this “most extraordinary Bill that has ever come before” an elected legislature. The bill would jail “the very men who govern at the ballot box, the very men who put us here to govern the country.” Weston “had always” put “great faith in free discussions.” A republic, concluded this democrat, could not “keep one class down by the strong arm of the law.”15
Weston’s scruples prevailed. Read’s bill was tabled. Read’s exasperation was not so easily tabled. Dictators hamstrung before republican judges would have to deploy lynch mobs—if they could tolerate the unrepublican stench.
7
The irony was that the very white courts losing jurisdiction over white citizens were capturing a bit of jurisdiction over black noncitizens.16 Not that the tale of criminal justice for slaves is any savory story. Republican trials for slaves violated the great divide between private dictatorship over blacks and republican government for whites. Masters thus “tried” 99.9% of slave “criminals.” Republican courts usually only heard extreme cases involving black threats to the public safety.
Nor was justice inside courtrooms any joy for the enslaved. Blacks in Mississippi courts were told, on taking the witness stand, that perjury would result in an ear nailed to the wall for an hour and then sliced off. Continued perjury would bring nail and sword upon the other ear. Mississippi did not have to invent all aspects of Reconstruction’s brutal “Mississippi Plan” after blacks were free.
Still, while blacks were enslaved, Mississippi led in giving accused slave criminals a little white justice. This southwestern stronghold of rough cotton tycoons guaranteed some indicted slaves jury trials and defense attorneys. This so-called closed society also stripped squires of acquitted slaves, unless the owner paid his slaves’ lawyer. The Mississippi High Court of Errors and Appeals several times squashed convictions based on guilty pleas because a defendant was not told of his rights before the pleas.
White judges throughout most of the South sometimes similarly protected black defendants. Such protection extended from right to be informed of indictment through right to appeal to the highest court. State supreme courts took appeals from blacks seriously. Between 1834 and 1861, 31 cases involving blacks allegedly murdering whites came to the highest courts of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Sixteen—over 50%—of the convictions were overturned.17 As the Tennessee Supreme Court summed up the world view yielding such statistics, democratic courts must take “the slave out of the hands of his master,” then give him every legal protection “which jealousy of power and love of liberty have induced the freeman to throw around himself.”18
To which one can almost hear James Powers, Levi Harris, and Moncure Daniel Conway screaming, what about whites?
8
Judges heard. Courts, having stopped some violations of slaves, could hardly ignore all violations of citizens. Judge Lynch’s victims could sue for damages. Such suits, although academic while mobs closed courts, could later become embarrassingly expensive. Vulnerable pocketbooks joined vulnerable consciences to check neighborhood violence.
A memorable incident in Dyersburg, Tennessee, illustrates the deterrent effect.19 In May 1852, a white allegedly heaved clods of dirt at a slave named Ned. The black allegedly heaved his hoe in retaliation. The weapon found its target. The white died from a broken neck.
The white community, significantly, did not instantly hang the black by his neck. Instead, white democrats placed Ned in prison, pending court trial. A month later, Ned escaped, allegedly with someone’s help.
A patrol hunted Ned down. Patrolmen strung him from a tree. They asked Ned who had aided his escape. The terrified black at length nodded to their suggestion that a white man named “Hook, a grocer of low character,” was the culprit. Ned, barely breathing, was cut down and returned to jail.
Hook proved harder to jail. Ned, being black, could not testify against a white in white court. Citizens found this paralysis insufferable. Hook had long been detested as a marginal member of white society and an intimate of blacks. He had long been suspected of supplying slaves with liquor and heaven knows what else. Now he stood suspected of freeing a black who had slain a white. Yet whites could not legally touch the “outside troublemaker.”
Whites instead instituted lynch law. Governmental officials, fearing extra-governmental injustice, put Hook in jail “to shield him from popular violence.” The mob resolved to attack the jail. The government, to protect Hook, would have to shoot its own constituents.
Instead, officials reluctantly surrendered the outsider. The mob, after being given the go-ahead by the kangaroo court’s “respectable” leaders, drove 60 lashes into Hook’s back. They ordered him to leave in 60 hours.
Vigilantes then raced back to the state jail. They demanded that Ned reveal who else had helped him escape. Ned named a highly respectable insider, J. M. Ridens.
Ridens! Incredulous vigilantes dragged Ned from jail and strung him up on a tree again. Who had helped him escape? Ridens. Who? Ridens. Who? Ridens. They sliced down Ned’s barely breathing body. He was returned for trial.
Magistrates sought to try Ridens. But they could not legally listen to Ned’s testimony. The mob would again have to supply so-called justice. Many wanted to slash Ridens. But the respectable feared a second shredding of respectable law. Ridens, although supposedly known to be guilty, remained free from legal or illegal justice.
A few months later the community had double reason to thank its leaders for returning to rule under law. Ned, after court trial, received a court-sanctioned deterrence. In the public square, huge irons shaped M and S (for manslaughter) were rendered red hot and seared into Ned’s cheek. The smoking victim then staggered off to 30 years in prison.
Thrills of savagery legally administered contrasted with consequences of savagery illegally deployed. Hook returned. He sued for damages. The court had to listen. Judges ruled that the community had to bestow a cash settlement on its victim.
So the black, Ned, who all assumed had murdered a white, had not lost his life. The outsider, Hook, who all assumed had let the “nigger” loose, had moved back inside the community and had made insiders pay for defying democracy. The insider, Ridens, who most “knew” had violated the color line, had been rendered untouchable by democracy’s line against despotism. Even in moments of terrifying arbitrariness, those wielding violence had eventually remembered—and had paid for momentarily forgetting—that they were accountable citizens too.
9
Restraints on violence also conditioned the white South’s two worst sprees of lynch mobs. The Mississippi slave insurrection scare of 1835 set a never-to-be-broken antebellum record for lynching whites. The alleged expulsion of James Birney from Kentucky in the same year offered the most famous illustration of supposedly violent purification. But checks on lynching, emanating as usual from both democratic and dictatorial sides of southern sensibility, left Mississippi and Kentucky, even at these two coercively closed moments, somewhere in the middle on closed/open and consent/coercion spectrums. Equally significant, Cotton and Border Souths, even during a shared hysterical moment, occupied different spots on a totalitarian spectrum. During its purest reigns of terror, as during everything else, the geographically divided South was no purely closed society—nor a single society of any sort.
The year 1835 was the perfect time for Southerners to experiment with pure totalitarianism. The Mississippi frontier was the perfect spot to make violence unlimited.20 Immediate abolitionism had just been proposed in the North. The move for permanent slavery had not yet swept the South. A runaway expansionism had recently swirled through central Mississippi, then the South’s wildest west. Unruly residents of Hinds and Madison counties in central Mississippi possessed maximum inclination to gun down their enemies.
Between 1830 and 1840, these two counties’ slave proportion exploded from 39 to 69%. On this newly opened frontier, churches and schools were few. Duels were frequent. This brawling world was replete with remorseless slaveowners and surly slaves, jealous rednecks and frontier hangers-on. A violent-prone region with an unruly constituency was just the place to pour conformity down nonconformist throats.
Throats first became endangered in Madison County immediately before liberty’s birthday, July 4, 1835. Rumors of slaves plotting a new Independence Day caused appointment of the usual extralegal committee of investigation. A slaveowner reported to the committee that his slave, under heavy lashing, had implicated one of Ruel Blake’s slaves.
Blake refused to let investigating whites lash his slaves. When an accuser complained that Blake was too much a nigger-lover to whip forth the truth, a brawl ensued. Blake fled. He was captured. More slave confessions jailed other whites. Thousands of lashes slicing dozens of blacks yielded the story whites wished (and dreaded) to hear. Slaves accused not only the “soft” Ruel Blake but also the hardbitten Drs. Joshua Cotton and William Saunders of plotting insurrection.
The two seedy white doctors epitomized disreputable types omnipresent on a not-quite-reputable frontier. Cotton and Saunders practiced the slightly quack profession of “steam doctoring,” promising miracles from hot applications. The shady miracle workers had long been suspected of unseemly rendezvous with blacks. Saunders had been so dissipated as to be expelled from a disreputable boarding house.
Madison County folks, realizing that white courts would not admit black testimony against whites, still wished accused whites to have “something like a trial, if not formal, at least substantial.” A new committee of safety, composed of the customary “richest and most respectable,” was appointed. The committee’s members owned an average of 44 slaves. The only nonslaveholder “trying” the quack doctors was the town’s most respectable physician.
After rounding up, torturing, and “trying” Blake, Cotton, and Saunders, lawbreaking law enforcers elicited a frightful plot “justifying” a frightful inquisition. The two quack doctors were allegedly implicated in John Murrell’s gang of Tennessee white desperadoes, who allegedly sought to free every southern slave.21 The revelation about Tennessee satisfyingly blamed agitation on outsiders even further outside the nexus of Mississippi respectable folk than these disreputable quacks.
More horrifying, and not at all so satisfying, was proof that Ruel Blake, the man so soft as not to whip slaves hard, was indeed “sickly sentimental” on slavery. Just before swinging from the gallows, this “traitor” freed all his blacks. Most horrifying of all, some blacks “confessed” intention to slay “all the whites, except some of the most beautiful women, who they intended to keep as wives,” as “white men had told them they might do.”
The many-layered horror of outside agitators, inside softhearts, and defiled color lines threw Madison County into hysteria. Women and children were gathered up and garrisoned. Blacks and whites were hunted down and savaged. White after white, seven in all, the all-time antebellum southern record, swung from the gallows. Many more than seven blacks hung lifeless in the sky.
What ultimately stopped this terroristic purification was Madison County’s attempt to purify Hinds County. Among the over 50 alleged insurgents named by Saunders and Cotton were two nonslaveholders who lived across the county line in Hinds, outside the turf Madison County mobs could “legitimately” intimidate. The Madison County Committee of the Respectable, seeking to pass respectable limits, dispatched its cavalry. Armed Madison horsemen, led by a small slaveholder named Hiram Perkins, demanded the right to extradite accused nonslaveholders over the county line.
At stake in Madison County’s demand on Hinds County was the right to terrorize beyond local limits. At stake in Hinds County’s response was the southern belief that only local folk could coerce each other. Patrick Sharkey, a powerful Hinds County slaveholder and justice of the peace, moved to take care of his folk, black and white. The justice of the peace declared his neighboring whites innocent. He sent Hiram Perkins and friends emptyhanded back to their folk.
The returning horsemen’s tale enraged Madison County’s Committee of the Respectable. The kangaroo court ordered a beefed-up cavalry to procure the accused “at all hazards.” Patrick Sharkey also must be extradited for “trial.” A man so protective of suspected insurrectionists was probably “soft on slavery” and an “enemy of Mississippi.”
Patrick Sharkey proved not soft on anything. Such incredible suspicions of such a credible Southron illustrated why democrats demanded restraints on terrorists. Justice of the Peace Patrick Sharkey’s cousin was William Sharkey, chief justice of Mississippi’s highest court. Both Sharkeys exemplified a ruling class determined to rule its turf.
Patrick Sharkey placed his fight for local folks’ turf and for private dictators’ noblesse oblige in a strange garrison. Or rather, Sharkey’s fort was appropriate for a class sometimes equating mob justice with privies. The justice of the peace barricaded himself and his family in his outhouse. There he waited to ambush invading horsemen.
Hiram Perkins and his Madison County gang galloped onto Sharkey’s property. Perkins trotted past an outhouse window. Sharkey fired. Perkins tumbled. The battle of the privy was on.
Madison County cavalrymen poured bullets in the offending window. The offended Hinds County patrician stuck out his gun and returned fire. A blast shattered Sharkey’s gun hand. Shifting hands, he fired, fired, fired. One victim, thigh gushing, tumbled almost atop the dying Hiram Powers. Another invader, collar ripped off his coat, had reason to thank heaven for losing but a garment. Another half-inch and the chief justice’s cousin’s bullet would have ripped the governor’s nephew’s jugular.
Invaders had seen enough of the gunman of the outhouse. Picking up dying commander and wounded fellows, they retreated across the county line. Sharkey knew they would return. He rode over to his county seat to request protection from his folk.
Hinds County’s own “Committee of Safety” moved to “try” Patrick Sharkey, its own alleged traitor. Madison County citizens rode over to demand extradition of the accused. Chief Justice William Sharkey moved in to represent his cousin. The chief justice lamented his court’s temporary powerlessness. He urged Hinds County folk to protect “citizens of their own county from trial beyond its confines,” until regular courts could reconvene. Sharkey’s neighborhood, rallying behind its own, armed to defend. Madison citizens armed to lynch. “A civil war must ensue,” cried a handwringing observer.
The imminent showdown, no longer a pitched battle between the chief justice’s and the governor’s folk, would be a brothers’ war between two slaveholding communities. The contest would involve not whether one slaveholder was loyal to slavery but whether folk could violate other folk. The warfare might indicate whether violent means of social control would be narrowly confined to a neighborhood or pass beyond county lines.
The battle became the most significant war never fought in the Old South. Vigilantes never passed that county line. Madison County citizens, although bent on blood revenge, ultimately honored local limits on folk bloodletting. They disarmed. Hysteria ended. Tyranny over whites could not be extended to other folks’ terrain.
Madison residents subsequently discovered that they had gone further than democratic despotism could sanction. Once Chief Justice William Sharkey’s court system resumed operations, Justice of the Peace Patrick Sharkey strode inside the courthouse. The commander of the outhouse sued Madison County assailants for damages. Through the legal system, Sharkey could exert leverage across county lines, the very power extralegal mobs lacked.
Sharkey won. His assailants had to pay $10,000. Whether in Mississippi in the 1830s or Tennessee in the 1850s, whether victims were disreputable grocers or respectable titans, extralegal terrorists might find violating democratic law to be very expensive.
10
The most notorious antebellum example of supposed forced exile illuminated the same principle. According to James Birney of Kentucky, unlimited mob power drove him to the North in 1835. The half-truth helped Birney gain nomination in 1840 and again in 1844 as a northern antislavery party’s first presidential candidate. For a historic nominee, the candidate was drab, unemotional, colorless—in a word, unhistoric.22
But Birney had made himself an epic symbol of slavery gutting democracy. The Kentuckian projected the image of a native Southerner and emancipating slaveholder who had fled his region because he was to be lynched. What really happened was more complex and revealing.
James Birney was almost bred to wonder if despotism and democracy were compatible. Doubts about slavery had led Birney’s slaveholding father to ask the Kentucky legislature to abolish it. The senior Birney, an Irish immigrant, had come to the Kentucky frontier not to abolish slavery but to rise in the ranks of its gentry. Starting out as a lowly peddler, he had ascended to a plush Bluegrass estate. His white Georgian mansion, up the hill from Danville’s developing society, was proof of the newcomer arrived. That a proud climber should deplore the fruits of his climb illustrated how sincere Border South qualms about slavery could be.
The senior Birney also displayed the conservatism balancing the qualms. He intended to retain his slaves until the government instructed him to emancipate. Government never came close to so instructing. James Birney, Jr., future slaveholder and emancipator both, was raised not only to free but also to own slaves and to know how profoundly James Birney, Sr., was involved in having it both ways.
Birney the younger could not succeed at enslaving or freeing until he overcame the effects of his father’s indulgent pampering. Given a black playmate when he was only six, the spoiled young heir descended on Princeton University in his teens, armed with fancy clothes and blooded horses and crammed wallet. He drank, caroused, partied his way to two suspensions before graduating.
Neither undergraduate suspensions nor postgraduate law studies under Philadelphia conservatives dulled Birney’s raw edges. Home from the staid North, he marched on the swashbuckling South. In the 1820s on the Alabama frontier, Birney gambled away his fortune playing cards with frontier sharks. Before he could catch himself, he had to sell his plantation and almost all his 40 slaves. Merchandizing those “family friends” helped reduce Birney to the self-loathing necessary for spiritual conversion.
He was converted to the Do-Good Christianity rampant in the American 1820s. The new teetotaler began his career in disinterested benevolence by urging everyone else to stop drinking. The old slaveholder then embarked upon an antislavery career. In 1832, he became agent of the American Colonization Society. He was paid $1000 a year to publicize colonization of blacks in Africa, which he considered a viable mode of antislavery.
Birney left antislavery outside his colonization pitch to Alabamians. He instead urged that the Border South’s favorite reform would conserve the Deep South social order. The dissimulating reformer explained that the Border South could not use slaves as profitably as the Deep South. Witness the sale of blacks southward. But because the Border South retained some blacks, white frontiersmen preferred the Border North. Before long, Birney warned Alabamians, Upper South developers would expel their insufficient number of blacks to gain sufficient numbers of white.
Blacks expelled would be either dumped South or deported to Africa. Your interests, said the ex-Kentuckian to fellow nouveau Alabama slaveholders, is that my old area not drown our new area in excesses of resentful blacks. Join with me, then, climaxed the Kentuckian turned Alabamian, in turning Kentucky blacks towards freedom in Africa rather than towards insurrection in Alabama.
In private, Birney whispered other purposes. Slavery, secretly wrote this public champion of strengthened slavery in Alabama, is an “odious relation which my soul hates.” The paternalist was “fully convinced of the corrupting influences of slavery” on children, “especially those of our own sex.” He had six boys. He wanted to raise them in virtuous Illinois.23
Then why stay in depraved Alabama and agitate to consolidate depravity? Because a native son hiding his real purposes could best talk to touchy Southerners. If slaveholders could now be convinced that colonization would “give them a more quiet and undisturbed possession of their slaves,” they would subsequently discover that colonization also offered a “quiet and undisturbed” way to terminate bondage.24
Birney’s position illustrated the way a clever faker, black or white, could slide around slaveholders. His problem, like Cuffee’s, was whether resistance so disguised could effectively destroy. The answer was that as destructive agitation, Birney’s camouflaged heresy was ahead of its time. Although the Kentuckian hardly invented the arguments, he here presciently advocated two ideas destined to be dangerously stimulating a decade later: the Border South economic argument for deporting slaves down south and the Deep South racist fear of being imprisoned with hordes of blacks arrived from up north.
In the early 1830s, Birney’s Alabama auditioners found these visions too remote to be scary. By hiding antislavery in a speculation that some economic crisis somewhere up north might someday bring too many blacks down south, Birney became a bore. His Mobile harangue led to “great satisfaction at my manner of treating the subject”—but few friends for the cause. His Tuscaloosa and Huntsville exertions led to an “altogether discouraging … deadness to the subject.” His address in New Orleans left a large audience “deplorably inert.” His almost desperate arguments in Nashville were “so much bolder” that he expected complaint. None developed.25
This allegedly practical politician’s career seemed impractical whatever he did. If he hid behind colonization, everyone yawned. If he dropped the camouflage, mobs might mass. Since nothing effective could “be done South of Tennessee,” Birney decided to move north to Kentucky.26
Within a year of returning home, James Birney publicly renounced colonization and embraced abolition. Emancipation, he explained, when conditional on not-yet-achieved colonization, encouraged sinners to continue sinning. Say to a slaveholder he may in “present circumstances hold slaves” and you supply “an opiate to the consciences.” Unless future colonization gave way to immediate emancipation, those preaching benevolence in a slaveholding ocean would have the impact “of a popgun on the beach.”27
The new immediate emancipator remained armed with popguns. After dropping colonization disguises, he became even more wary of mobs. But he still produced mostly yawns. Antislavery in Kentucky, if more thinkable than in Alabama, remained too apparently remote to provoke excitement here and now.
The careerist had at least not lost a career by renouncing colonization. Having quit the pay of the American Colonization Society, he now cashed checks from the American Antislavery Society. The renowned Yankee philanthropist, Arthur Tappan, signed over the funds. Alabamians would not have tolerated Tappan’s salaried organizer. Yet in Kentucky, abolitionists’ undisguised employee organized a Kentucky State Antislavery Society. He audaciously called it “Auxiliary to the American Antislavery Society.” The “proceedings,” reported Birney, were “harmonious among ourselves and uninterrupted from without.”28
Then Birney inspired some excitement in the neutralist Border South. In the summer of 1835, he announced an August inaugural issue of the Philanthropist. The weekly newspaper would urge immediate abolition. Samuel S. Dimukee, an experienced printer, would own the press.
Some powerful Kentuckians preferred to coerce James Birney. The usual public committee of the “most prominent and influential” organized the usual mass meeting. Vigilantes urged Birney to suspend publication for several months. These opponents conceded that slavery was “a moral and political evil,” albeit a “temporary necessity.” They simply asked “outside agitators’” paid agent to delay his legal publication until the state legislature could reconsider the law.29
A Deep South slave community would have shunned such delaying apologetics. But Alabamians could not coercively lay down rules for consent in Kentucky, any more than Madison County, Mississippi, residents could establish codes for folks in Hinds County, Mississippi. Each neighborhood mob had to obey its community’s sense of legitimate coercion.
In Kentucky, the anti-Birney mob delayed partly because no neighborhood consensus developed. After one mob formed to lynch Birney, another formed to lynch the lynchers. Violate James Birney, said the ultra respectable Joseph J. Bullock, and you must mob me and hundreds of others. In the “case” of James Birney, as in the “case” of Patrick Sharkey, two kangaroo courts ended up stymied against each other.30
Birney became judge of last resort. His publisher, Samuel Dimukee, having lately procured the press from one J. J. Polk, still owed Polk part of the purchase price. The press was Polk’s collateral. Neither Dimukee nor Polk felt comfortable betting their dollars on Birney’s future. Such mercenary considerations led Dimukee to sell the press back to Polk and Polk to propose a resale to Birney, if Birney still wished to publish.
Everything about this practical agitator mitigated against gambling his cash on so risky a venture. Despite experiments with camouflaged antislavery in the Deep South, despite espousing uncamouflaged abolitionism in the Border South, Birney had nowhere moved southern masses. Better finances, more followers, less mobs, and a more moral upbringing for his children might reward his decision not to buy out J. J. Polk. He decided to shut up—in the frustrating, perhaps lynching, Southland. He decided to let others put up—in the freer North.31
Birney spent several months arranging what he called “exile.” In the interim, he anticipated an attack. None transpired. A mob had only asked him to delay. After he decided not to publish at once, he could freely go or stay.
11
The decision to leave was hardly cowardly and assuredly productive. James Birney could never have run for the White House from his homeland. He could never have been an influence at home unless he renounced Arthur Tappan’s cash. He might have been tarred and feathered even if he had repudiated Tappan’s funding.
On the other hand, Birney’s neighbors might have protected him. If he had been lynched, he might have received damages in court. All these mights indicate that in the case of James Birney versus the never-lynching-mob, final cards were never played.
Enough tactics were deployed to show that undemocratic pressures had limited Birney’s prospects. Southern coercers’ most determined drive was always to cordon off outsiders, lest cautious insiders grew bolder. Antebellum Northerners could theoretically move South and help agitate from within. Southerners could theoretically stay South and accept outsiders’ paychecks.
Southern violence squashed those theories. Yankees come South had to watch every word, as Levi H. Harris could testify. The Southerner paid by Yankees had to risk his own cash, as James Birney prudently refused to do. Given all these and more impositions on attempts to persuade, was not the Old South a closed society?
A somewhat closed society the South assuredly was. But the slavocracy could not quite keep insiders from ducking and weaving and continuing to fight. In Kentucky in the mid-1830s, James Birney could have resumed national colonization alliances, if he had cut his ties to Arthur Tappan. Birney also could have returned to his Alabama pretenses, preaching that slavery violated Kentucky whites’ economic interests. We will watch Cassius Clay seize these positions in the same state—and stare down all mobs.32
We will also watch coercion influence Clay’s no less than Birney’s decisions. Physical and especially verbal violence would get to Cassius Clay’s followers, pushing less committed admirers into hiding. But frustrated reform leaders still retained choices. Birney chose to leave. He ended up running for president. Clay chose to stay. He ended up running for governor.
Clay could have run for nothing in the Deep South. But Deep South lynchers could not touch the Border South. No dictatorial violence ousted Cassius Clay, or deterred him from seeking collaborators up north, or prevented timid followers from lying in wait for northern support to develop. The world of the democratic despot remained a somewhat open society, particularly at the South’s northern extremities.
12
That vulnerability aside, slaveholders achieved vast social control over the democratic/despotic South. Such antithetical governing systems as egalitarian republicanism and perpetual slavery theoretically needed total separation to coexist, which helps explain why the southern color line was so sacred and miscegenation such a horror. But a little unsanctioned mixing of theoretically unmixable regimes actually somewhat consolidated ruling class control. Coercive lynching helped split white dissenters from outside agitators, just as genial persuasion helped split loyal servants from black rebels. Only where areas were whiter, despotic sanctions softer, and slave removal more plausible did slaveholders’ power begin to fray.
An intriguing comparison across the color line sums up the large strength and uncertain weakness in ruling class power. Differences abounded between the border’s James Birney, the white citizen supposedly hounded off tyrants’ turf, and the border’s Frederick Douglass, the supposed black dashing beyond tyrants’ grasps. Dissimilarities, however, obscured revealing similarities. Douglass’s skin color, allegedly black, was actually halfway towards Birney’s whiteness. Birney’s real reason for leaving, somewhere between the half-push of dictatorial mobs and the half-pull of democratic opportunity, blurred with Douglass’s successful run from loose enslavement.
Both dissenters were most hapless when furthest south. Douglass, symbol of the fugitive slave danger, ran from Edward Covey only to Massa when down in southern Maryland. Birney, epitome of northern cash infecting southern politics, could not dent public consciousness down in Alabama. Both began to break free only after moving to the South’s northern edge.
Birney and Douglass still decided that the system at its most open remained too closed. Both learned that the confused mix of the democratic and despotic could prevent as well as invite resistance. Douglass’s attempt to rally group runaways collided with both slaves’ fear of white coercion and a betrayer’s retreat to white patronage. Birney’s attempt to rally white dissent encountered difficulties both in persuading citizens and in defying mobs. Douglass and Birney came to the same conclusion: freedom required departure.
Other dissenters stayed. Immersion in democracy abroad, they hoped, might someday lessen Border South despots’ not-quite-total control at home. Yankee allies, especially if constructively conservative, might yet lead more Frederick Douglasses to risk liberating flight, and/or more Cassius Clay sympathizers to defy physical and verbal abuse, and/or more border slaveholders to sell slaves southwards. A not-so-open Border South world might then prove too little closed for comfort.
Partly to guard against that shift in the nature of their social control, some strategically placed border masters eventually demanded Fugitive Slave and Kansas-Nebraska laws. These attempts to shutter off slaveholders’ exposed northern boundary arguably involved anti-republican impositions on northern whites. Southern impositions still prevailed in Congress because enough Yankees cared most about preserving federal Union and national parties.
Many northern—and some southern—egalitarian republicans, however, resented Slavepower bullying, minority dictation, and dubiously republican law. If democrats’ resentment of the imperious Slavepower ever exceeded willingness to appease it, slaveholders might have to chance a more open republican world at home—or might have to dissolve the egalitarian republic abroad.