Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (6 page)

As a result, some Southerners came to resent the burden that the cotton system placed upon them. As early as 1818, John Taylor of Caroline warned that in the upper South, cotton was accelerating soil exhaustion: “The fertility of our country has been long declining, and… our agriculture is in a miserable state,” and only a vigorous and intelligent program of manuring, drainage, and crop rotation could save it. Thirty years later, the Virginia planter and amateur agricultural scientist Edmund Ruffin pleaded for more intelligent use of fertilizers and crop rotation, and called for state aid to agricultural societies. Governor James Henry Hammond of South Carolina plowed up strips of ground beside public roads and advertised the use of new fertilizers on them so that passersby could have an example to follow with their own lands. In 1849, Hammond harangued the South Carolina State Agricultural Society on how “a combined system of Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce, are essential in promoting the prosperity and happiness of a community.” And in 1852, Southerners reorganized the Southern Commercial Convention so that the convention could become an agency for promoting railroads, steamship lines, port facilities, banks, factories, and other market enterprises. Unfortunately, few of these proposals seemed to produce results. J. B. D. DeBow, the publisher of the Southern commercial magazine
DeBow’s Review
, was chagrined to discover that Northern purchasers of his
Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western
States
(1853) outnumbered Southern ones six to one; he was even more chagrined by the fact that two-thirds of his meager 825
Review
subscribers were in arrears for their subscriptions.
³⁹

In their effort to understand why Southerners would set aside the opportunity to diversify their economy, journalists and travelers could only guess that Southerners were in some peculiar way willing to exchange solid modern profits for the social values that came attached to traditional agriculture. They were helped to this conclusion by the unceasing Southern voices that proclaimed their preference for a way of living that (whether it was profitable or not) provided more graciousness of style, more leisure, and more sense of the past than the frantic, money-grubbing lives of modern Northern manufacturers and their armies of faceless wage-paid factory hands. Edward Pollard, the editor of the
Richmond Examiner
, liked to think of the Southern cotton planters as the last survival of a noble and knightly virtue where “the affections were not entirely the product of money,” a sort of American aristocracy holding its own against the onslaught of Yankee capitalism.
⁴⁰

They derived encouragement for this sort of thinking from new winds blowing out of Europe. The American republic had been the eldest child of the Enlightenment; when a revolution overthrew the king of France in 1789, it seemed that family of reason, liberalism, and republics was on the increase. But then the French Revolution collapsed into the Reign of Terror, which in turn was replaced by the tyranny of Bonaparte, and by 1815 the rule of reason and the viability of republics had become seriously tarnished. A backlash against the Enlightenment emerged out of the shambles of post-Napoleonic Europe, which snarled at the failures of reason and glorified the romance of authority, especially when it was rooted in knightly myth, chivalrous orders, and medieval faith. Its cultural paladins were Edmund Burke and Sir Walter Scott, Hector Berlioz and Georg Friedrich Hegel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Victor Hugo, and its name was Romanticism.
⁴¹

The political theorists of the Enlightenment—not just Locke but Montesquieu, Beccaria, Mandeville, Harrington, and Hume—based their politics on the possession by all humanity of “certain inalienable rights,” which could be encoded in
written (and reasonable) constitutions. Looking out over the wreckage of Napoleon’s empire, observers found that this seemed like drivel. Not rights but the ineffable experience of nationhood was what governed politics. “Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins,” Fichte proclaimed in 1806; “they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole.”
⁴²
And Hoffman von Fallersleben sang of Germany:

Union, right and freedom ever

For the German fatherland!

So with brotherly endeavour

Let us strive with heart and hand!

For a bliss that wavers never

Union, right and freedom stand—

In this glory bloom forever,

Bloom, my German fatherland!
⁴³

“There is no such thing as man in the world,” the revolutionary exile Joseph de Maistre sneered. “During my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on… but I must say, as for man, I have never come across him anywhere. …” It was each nation’s collective and organic experience that made its people what they were, not some inherent human qualities shared equally by everyone. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, who would serve in the Confederate government, agreed that civil society “is not a thing of compacts, bound together by promises and paper… It is a decree of God; the spontaneous and irresistible working of that nature, which, in all climates, through all ages, and under all circumstances, manifests itself in social organizations.”
⁴⁴

Southerners found Romanticism irresistibly convenient for justifying the plantation culture—even in the older South, where plantation agriculture faced bankruptcy—because the plantation embodied the mystery of Southernness. “The South had an element in its society—a landed gentry—which the North envied, and for which its substitute was a coarse ostentatious aristocracy which smelt of the trade,” Pollard explained. He acknowledged that “the South was a vast agricultural country,” and its “waste lands, forest and swamps” featured “no thick and intricate nets of internal improvements to astonish and bewilder the traveller.” All the same, “however it [the South] might decline in the scale of gross prosperity, its people
were trained in the highest civilization.” Southerners began to speak of themselves as though they were American Tories, basking in a regenerated feudalism. “All admit that a good and wise despotism is the wisest of earthly governments,” wrote a Louisiana sugar planter in his diary in 1856. In 1861, numbers of them astounded William Howard Russell by insisting that they were descended “from a race of English gentlemen,” full of “admiration for monarchical institutions on the English model, for privileged classes, and for a landed aristocracy,” and happy to persuade him that “if we could only get one of the royal race of England to rule over us, we should be content.”

They were, of course, fooling themselves, and Russell knew it. No people who wanted to be ruled by aristocrats ever defended states’ rights with the doggedness that Southerners demonstrated: “Nothing like it has been heard before, and no such Confederation of sovereign states has ever existed in any country in the world.” The Prussian-born Francis Lieber, who taught at South Carolina College in the 1840s and 1850s and who knew an aristocrat when he saw one, thought that the great planters “are arrogant indeed but not aristocrats.” They were, in truth, something even more peculiar.
⁴⁵

It was not only the South’s mysterious preoccupation with cotton agriculture that seemed to foreign observers to have shaped a culture of Romantic conservatism. It was the particular form of labor that the South used in cotton agriculture—slaves—that seemed to set the region off, not only from the North but also from the rest of the nineteenth century. Western Europeans had kept slaves ever since the end of the Roman Empire, and even in the heyday of classical Greece and Rome, slavery had been an everyday feature of urban and rural life. The reason for this was simple: in ages that knew only the most basic forms of labor-saving machinery, slaves provided a docile workforce that did not require an equal share of one’s wealth or success. Yet slavery was not always successful and slaves were not always docile, and over the course of the Middle Ages the institution of slavery was gradually narrowed to serfdom, which slowly yielded to simple renter, or tenant, status.
⁴⁶

Still, slavery did not disappear entirely. Western Christianity, although it gave little reason to encourage slavery, did not forbid it, either. The rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman literature in the Renaissance further reminded western Europeans that slavery had once been an important part of great societies that European
humanists admired. Above all, the decimation of European society that resulted from the waves of lethal epidemics and national warfare in the fourteenth century created a revived need for cheap labor, and slave labor was the easiest way to fill that bill. By the end of the 1400s, one-tenth of the population in the Portuguese seafaring capital, Lisbon, was in some form of slavery. Over the next 400 years, as Europeans began pushing outward to the Indies and the New World, the demand for enslaved labor kept pace. More than 10 million Africans were snatched from the West African coastal regions, from Senegal to Angola, and shipped as slave labor to the New World; close to half a million of these victims were shipped to North America, with more than half of those sucked directly to the Southern ports of Charleston and Savannah.
⁴⁷

Slavery in the American South appeared, at first glance, to be simply a continuation of the slavery people knew from the Bible or from Caesar, Livy, or Suetonius. But in many respects, Southern slavery, like the other forms of New World slavery from Columbus onward, was a very different affair from what Europeans had known in ancient times. Like ancient slavery, Southern slavery had been called into being by economic circumstances—in colonial Virginia, by the need for a cheap labor force to harvest tobacco, a crop that became profitable only when harvested in greater volume than one tobacco farmer could undertake. In the New World case, however, there was a significant difference from all the other forms of slavery that Western civilization had known. This time, slavery was based on race.

Although colonial Southerners searched for cheap sources of labor in white indentured servants, redemptioners, Indians, and prisoners of war, almost all of these forms of forced labor had time limits and legal obligations attached to them, and fugitives could easily blend into the white or Indian population without much fear of being identified and tracked down. While those limitations eventually forced these practices out of existence, before the end of the 1600s Southern white colonists had found a permanent solution to their labor problems by opening their ports and plantations to the thriving transatlantic African slave trade. African slave labor turned out to be easily transferable to Chesapeake tobacco growing. Using captured Africans as slaves paid additional dividends to colonial slaveholders: their complexion marked them off as a different race of beings to European eyes, so fugitives could be more easily identified and recaptured. Because their owners saw all people of African descent as a coherent group—black—their labor could be bounded with an entirely different set of assumptions than would prevail for white labor. This lent the twist of race to Southern slavery, making what had ordinarily been a matter of economic exploitation into a system of racial exploitation as well.
⁴⁸

Colonial slavery was also a far more brutal and ruthless system of labor organization than the slaveries of the dim past. American slavery involved from the start the kidnapping of other human beings from their homes, subjecting them to the horrors of transportation across the Atlantic Ocean in fetid and disease-ridden slave ships, where as many as half died en route, and then selling them like cattle; slaves had no real hope of ever obtaining their freedom again. This kind of brutality toward other human beings, which departed dramatically from anything Protestant Americans could read concerning slavery in their Bibles, could not be justified in an avowedly Christian society—unless, of course, it could be shown that the slaves were not really human beings at all.
⁴⁹

It was here that the Romantics served yet another purpose. Taking de Maistre one step further, Arthur de Gobineau, in his
Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
(published in four volumes from 1853 to 1855), located the unbridgeable differences of human nations in the biology of races. “I was gradually penetrated by the conviction,” wrote Gobineau, “that the racial question overshadows all other problems of history, that it holds the key to them all, and that the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny.” Americans seized on Romantic racism to protect themselves from the charge of kidnapping and murder by declaring that black Africans were members of a race that was irreversibly underdeveloped or perhaps even subhuman. “He is by nature a dependent,” argued a contributor to
DeBow’s Review
in 1861 of blacks, “his normal state is that of subordination to the white man,” and “his nature is eminently parasitical and imitative.” It was impossible, added Mississippi physician William Holcombe, that either “circumstances or culture could ever raise the negro race to any genuine equality with the white.” Even in a northern state such as Illinois, a farmer-politician from DeWitt County, George Lemon, “did not believe they were altogether human beings. … If any gentleman thought they were, he would ask them to… go and examine their nose; (roars of laughter) then look at their lips. Why, their sculls were three inches thicker than white people’s.”
⁵⁰

But slavery contained more deadly poisons than racism. A slave, by simple definition, has no legal or social existence: a slave could have no right to hold property, could enjoy no recognition of marriage or family, and could not give testimony (even in self-defense) before the law. Slaves could be beaten and whipped: Josiah Henson, born a slave in 1789 in Charles County, Maryland, remembered that his
father had “received a hundred lashes on his back” and had “his right ear… cut off close to his head” for stopping a white overseer from beating Josiah’s mother. Slaves could be bullied and brutalized: Frederick Bailey, also born a slave in Maryland in 1818, was turned over by a fearful owner to a professional “slave-breaker,” Edward Covey, who whipped and beat Bailey without mercy for six months to bring him into “submission.” Slaves could be raped: in 1855, Celia, the slave of Robert Newsom, killed Newsom in self-defense when Newsom attempted to rape her. The Missouri court she appealed to in
State of Missouri v. Celia
would not admit her testimony, but it did execute her.
⁵¹
Above all, slaves could be bought and sold, and slave families broken up for auction, without any regard for ties of kinship or marriage. Francis Lieber was appalled to happen upon “a group of well-dressed negros” in Washington, “loudly talking while one them screemed and groaned and beat himself.”