Penguin History of the United States of America (54 page)

He died – the jury wondered why?

The verdict was, the blue-tail fly.

So it was emotionally very difficult to contemplate emancipating the blacks; and as the number of slaves increased, so did the difficulty.

Not that the economic argument was neglected. Slavery meant power and prosperity for the planter class; a huge amount of capital had been invested in it; and no white believed that the crops of the South could be grown and harvested except by slave labour. Free blacks, it was assumed, would abandon the cotton-fields, or insist on working only for themselves, as happened in the British sugar islands after emancipation in 1833. And then what would happen to the planter and his family?

In these circumstances there was no chance that the majority of voters in any Southern state would support abolition. Even enlightened Virginia, after long and anguished debate, rejected the idea in 1832. Private acts of manumission (never very numerous) came to be frowned on as irresponsible. What right had a man to undermine his neighbour’s safety and prosperity merely to gratify his private conscience? Besides, a free Negro population was not only anomalous in the slave South, it was unsettling to discipline. Consequently, in state after state, manumission was outlawed, and the status of the free black was reduced. In this way the South bound itself anew to slavery and to the proposition that slavery was to be eternal. Thereby, Southerners excluded the possibility that black servitude could be ended peaceably, an exclusion that they were well able to enforce. They also denied that it would be ended violently. This they were not so well placed to command.

As we have seen, the slaves themselves were in no position to rebel successfully, and on the whole declined to do so unsuccessfully (though whether such restraint would have continued for ever may be doubted). It is also true that the United States Constitution permitted slavery and that
there was never majority support in the North for armed emancipation until halfway through the Civil War at earliest. The South was a citadel, walled with law, force and opinion. To many it seemed impregnable. Yet its fall was rapid, and the process which destroyed it was a fairly simple, almost a predictable one. The castle’s foundations were rotten. Its defenders proved incompetent, and their incompetence was as much a result of slavery as was any other aspect of Southern life.

This was proved by the fact that the enemies who first touched the fatal weakness had no idea of what they were doing. They did not understand the South at all. The abolitionists were as much the children of the North as the planters were children of the South, and in their way just as purblind. But they were much luckier.

Perhaps they deserved to be. Obsessed with their own experience, the slave-holders constantly misjudged other Americans. For instance, one of the worst mistakes made by such apologists for slavery as Calhoun and Hammond – a mistake prompted, no doubt, by the ever-increasing amount of cotton which New England mills were buying from the South – was to assume that the Industrial Revolution already dominated Northern society. They drew parallels between the chattel slavery of the South and the wage slavery of the North, and appealed for an alliance with the financiers and manufacturers who were beginning to form a new, moneyed aristocracy. But they were misguided, for rapidly though industrialism was rising,
⁷
there were far too few factories in the North as yet to determine the distribution of political power. The North, like the South, was predominantly agrarian. Its towns were growing more rapidly than at any other period of their history, but they were as yet chiefly commercial, rather than manufacturing: they provided goods and services for the surrounding farms and forwarded agricultural produce to the world market. Never, perhaps, has the city dominated American society less than in this period.

Family farms spread westward as far as the prairies of Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Times were mostly good, and when they were not the farmer was better placed than the townsman to sit them out. He could feed and clothe himself, and equip himself for the still comparatively simple needs of agricultural production (expensive machinery such as the mechanical reaper was not to become indispensable until after mid-century), and if his debts became heavy he possessed enough political power to stave off his creditors by one means or another. The tradition of the American Revolution gave him immense pride in being a free citizen and a keen sense of his rights. The rapid spread of modern means of communication (canals, newspapers, the post office) kept him in touch with his countrymen and the new ideas of the age. A brisk appetite for dollars (every foreign visitor noticed that Americans had an inordinate respect for riches) fostered his energy, his commercial astuteness and his relish for innovation of all kinds.
There was nothing of the cautious, slow peasant about the successful Northern farmer, any more than there was about the Southern planter. He believed that the future was his, and boasted about the glorious destiny of whatever place he inhabited – every small settlement was going to outdo London and Paris – as if mere assertion (it was called boosting) would make all dreams come true. And his institutions were deeply marked by the heritage of New England. Education was highly valued, so that it would be hard to say which was most typical of the North-West, the proverbial little red schoolhouse where a basic literacy and patriotism was whacked into the souls of young Americans; or the small country college, where slightly higher attainments could be acquired; or the Lyceum, a hall maintained by subscription where adults could spend their evenings listening to travelling lecturers, who covered an amazing miscellany of subjects. The central institution remained the church or the meeting-house. To those New Englanders who moved west, Puritanism remained a living force, setting its stamp as deeply on the nineteenth century and the Mississippi valley as it had on the seventeenth century and Connecticut. It made Mid-Westerners both serious and passionate, though no less given to self-importance, self-deception and the seven deadly sins than other men. The same was true of many Southerners: there was never a more joylessly dutiful Calvinist than John C. Calhoun. But as time went on, Northern culture, not forced into sterile conformity by the need to defend the indefensible, slavery, began to deviate markedly from the ancient norms. In the old centre of the faith, Boston, heterodoxy had long ago reared its successful head. The leading minds of Massachusetts, while remaining deeply Puritan in the best sense – men and women of austere, aspiring lives, of lively consciences and highly trained intellects – were yet abandoning the theology which had once brought Puritanism to birth. They discarded traditional Christianity and became Unitarians; or, with their representative sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), and inspired at a distance by Wordsworth, turned to the cult of Nature. But their influence was restricted. Emerson was barred from Harvard College for thirty years because of his unconventional religious views, though Harvard itself was Unitarian; Unitarianism, in turn, was of little or no attraction to the masses of Northern Protestants. Not that they were necessarily frightened of novelty: this was the period of the birth of Mormonism and of numerous other equally experimental, if less durable creeds. But the bulk of Americans were more susceptible to the call to conversion than to intellectual deliberations. As the eruption of the Great Revival demonstrated, for them the key-experience of life was still that desired by their ancestors under Elizabeth I: the confrontation of the individual soul with the challenge of God. Conversion again became a common episode in the lives of earnest Americans, even such unlikely ones as W. H. Seward, whose career as a distinguished politician does not give much evidence of a religious sense. Most of the conversions either wore off after a time (as was the case with Seward) or led the converts only to greater
introspective concern with the state of their souls and the conduct of their daily lives. But the instinct to make over the world, an instinct clearly owing everything to the sense of boundless opportunities which the opening of the continent entailed, and which was already a deeply established trait of the American character, led a great many of the converts to feel God’s challenge as a spur to undertake social and political reform. With missionary zeal they threw themselves into the task. Some tried to save Americans from the slavery of alcohol (‘the demon Rum’ in their jargon); others undertook, with even less success, to turn American prisons into humane institutions for reclaiming criminals; yet others became campaigners for women’s rights, or for world peace. Others set to work to abolish Negro slavery. They saw it as offensive to God and destructive to American claims to the world’s respect. They brought a terrifying determination and single-mindedness to the task of ending it.

Abolitionism, as distinct from anti-slavery, emerged as a clear movement in 1831, the year in which William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79) founded his journal, the
Liberator
, in Boston. He has not, on the whole, had a good press, North or South (Georgia once offered a reward of $5,000 for his arrest and conviction as a seditious agitator). In some ways his personality recalls that of the arch-enemy, Calhoun. Both men were ruthlessly logical in following out their beliefs, and both, like so many fanatical leaders, spent as much time quarrelling with their associates as in attacking the opposition. As a political tactician Garrison suffered from two fatal weaknesses: he saw, all too clearly, how all the reform causes were intertwined, so that he could not support one without supporting all; and he refused the slightest compromise with what he saw as evil. His business was to cleanse the American soul, to purge it of the sin of slavery: nothing less would be acceptable to God. But Garrison’s function was not really that of a politician. He was a born journalist, and he kept the slavery issue alive by the eloquence and courage of his writings. It was inconvenient to the more conventional, no doubt, that he supported women’s rights and associated with African-Americans (whose subscriptions were the
Liberator
‘s main support); but today we must surely find these eccentricities rather noble, and Garrison’s instinct for the central issue positively magnificent:

… there are, at the present time, the highest obligations resting upon the people of the free States to remove slavery by moral and political action, as prescribed in the Constitution of the United States. They are now living under a pledge of their tremendous physical force, to fasten the galling fetters of tyranny upon the limbs of millions in the Southern States; they are liable to be called at any moment to suppress a general insurrection of the slaves; they authorize the slave owner to vote for three-fifths of his slaves as property, and thus enable him to perpetuate his oppression; they support a standing army at the South for its protection; and they seize the slave, who has escaped into their territories, and send him back to
be tortured… This relation to slavery is criminal and full of danger:
IT MUST BE BROKEN UP
.
⁸

Massachusetts was once more sending out a signal to America.

The next thirty years were marked by ceaseless struggle; constant denunciation of the abolitionists; striking successes for their opponents; and defeats, mostly for the good side. Hope always proved delusive. Theodore Weld (1803–95) made triumphant speaking tours through the Middle West and won hundreds of supporters to the cause, especially in Ohio; but in doing so he wrecked his health, and no one was able to widen the foundations he had laid by bringing in communities where he had not spoken. His wife, Angelina Grimké (1805–79), who with her sister Sarah fled from their house in Charleston out of horror of slavery (having first freed the slaves they had inherited), proved to be an effective abolitionist writer and speaker and a sure platform draw; but she did more for the feminist cause than for abolitionism, since many anti-slavery males could not stomach feminine leadership, and the movement split over the question of women’s participation. Abraham Lincoln told Harriet Beecher Stowe that
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
had caused the Civil War. But for years after its publication there was no sign that it had brought the death of the peculiar institution any closer, though it undoubtedly made it even more hateful to Americans in the free states. In 1837, in southern Illinois,
⁹
a Negro-hating mob murdered Elijah Lovejoy, a white abolitionist who was persisting in publishing an anti-slavery newspaper, although his press had been wrecked four times. In 1835 a mob in Boston set upon Garrison and dragged him through the streets at the end of a rope; an incident which, coupled with the murder of Lovejoy and his own wife’s influence, brought Wendell Phillips (1811–84), the most brilliant speaker of the age, into the movement. Frederick Douglass ran away from Maryland and became abolition’s most notable black orator. But all his speeches, and those of Phillips, seemed to leave slavery intact. The abolitionists could not, they found, preach or pamphleteer the South into repenting its sin; and in the North, when they were not being attacked as ‘nigger-lovers’, they were avoided as bores, and denounced as agitators whose activities threatened the existence of the American Union: for Garrison and Phillips attacked the slavery-sanctioning Constitution as a covenant with Hell, while Calhoun and his followers said that unless the abolitionists were silenced, it might be necessary, in self-defence, for the South to secede. Even when Western and New York abolitionists broke with Garrison (for, being an anarchist, he believed that all government was wrong, all politics corrupting) and ran a candidate in the 1840 Presidential
election (James Bimey, a repentant slave-holder) he only got 5,000 votes. It was not, all in all, an impressive record. Nevertheless the abolitionists changed the course of American history.

For without conscious analysis they had found the weakness in the citadel. The slave-holders rejoiced in the profits of slavery and exhibited the utmost arrogance in personal behaviour; but underneath they were profoundly insecure. They were on the defensive, as had been shown long before the abolitionists appeared on the scene, in 1819–20, during the Missouri Crisis, which turned on the question of slavery extension. Thanks to the North-West Ordinance and the pattern of migration, the new states – Ohio, Indiana, Illinois – carved out of the North-West territory had all been set up as free; the South had been able to balance them with Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. In 1819 it was proposed to admit the territory of Missouri as a slave state. The Northerners in Congress objected to this, even though Maine, an outlying area of Massachusetts, was ready for admission at the same time as a free state, so that the balance between the North and South in the Senate could be maintained. Congressman James Tallmadge of New York proposed that Missouri should be accepted only if it undertook to forbid further slave immigration and to emancipate its slaves gradually, as the Northern states had done in the years after the Revolution. Tallmadge and his associates had two objects in view: to reserve as much of the Louisiana Purchase as possible for free, white labour, and to weaken the political ascendancy in the Union which the South had enjoyed since independence. Naturally the Southern leaders in Congress opposed Tallmadge; more significant was the passion with which they did so. Fear and hatred of the black people whom they were oppressing led them (and, alas for enlightenment, old Thomas Jefferson too) to predict the most appalling consequences for America if the spread of slavery were checked, and to impute the proposal to an unholy alliance between Northern greed and Northern fanaticism. They said that a plot was afoot among the tyrant majority of free states to destroy the South: it must be resisted at all costs. This allegation was wide of the mark: there was no Northern plot, and the North-West Ordinance was ample precedent for Tallmadge’s proposal. Southern hysteria merely annoyed the North. In the end Henry Clay’s skilful leadership pushed a series of bills through Congress which together amounted to the so-called Missouri Compromise: in future slavery would be excluded from all parts of the Louisiana Purchase north of the line of latitude 36° 30’, but it would be allowed in Missouri after all; Maine would be admitted simultaneously. Then Missouri nearly overset the bargain by adopting a constitution which forbade free African-Americans to enter the state, thus denying them the right, undoubtedly enjoyed by all white Americans, of moving freely about their country, although all such rights were guaranteed by the US Constitution;
¹⁰
Missouri was in fact implicitly
denying that blacks were citizens (a denial which would be made explicit in the
Dred Scott
decision in 1857). Congress, again under Clay’s leadership, dealt with this defiance by forcing Missouri to declare that nothing in her constitution should be interpreted as abridging the privileges and immunities of U S citizens, but everyone knew that this question-begging, face-saving measure would never be enforced. From the libertarian point of view it was an abject affair and its settlement was squalid; but it helped to keep the peace in America for the next decade. The outlook for anti-slavery was never bleaker. Abolition societies died out in the South, even in Virginia, whose economy now depended on exporting slaves as once it had depended on exporting tobacco: 300,000 would be sold out of the State between 1830 and i860. Many people of goodwill involved themselves in the mare’s nest of the American Colonisation Society, which hoped to ship the Negroes back to Africa – a futile hope, if only because of the numbers involved. It was against this background that Garrison first lifted his voice (‘
I WILL BE HEARD
’). Unsurprisingly, to anyone who had studied the Missouri affair, the South reacted to his challenge with all the calm and common sense of a scalded cat.