Colin Woodard (31 page)

The cotton boom produced a simultaneous explosion in the demand for slaves. Since the United States had banned their importation in 1808, planters in the new Gulf states and territories began purchasing them from counterparts in Tidewater and Appalachia. Tidewater alone exported 124,000 slaves between 1810 and 1820. Slave traders marched their “goods” through the countryside, chained to one another; most were young men who would never see their families again, a traumatic event the historian Ira Berlin has called the “Second Middle Passage.” Most found harder working conditions than they'd left behind, as the climate was harsher and the labor more difficult than in the mountains and the Chesapeake region. The least fortunate wound up on the sugar plantations of southern Louisiana and Mississippi, where it was sometimes profitable to work one's slaves to death. Being “sold down the river” originally referred to slaves being sold by Appalachian people in Kentucky and Tennessee to downriver plantation owners in the Deep South.
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Deep Southerners still had an abiding fear of slave uprisings, and not without cause. In 1822 a charismatic freed slave named Denmark Vesey organized thousands of slaves to rise up, slay their masters, seize Charleston, and escape by ship to the free black state of Haiti. The plot was thwarted when Vesey was betrayed by slave informants, and he and thirtyfour colleagues were hanged. In response, Charlestonians established a military school called The Citadel, charged with training their youth to suppress future slave insurrections.

 

As the Deep South spread, it developed a social and political philosophy that went beyond defending slavery to actually celebrating it. What others regarded as an authoritarian society built on an immoral institution that concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a small elite, Deep Southern oligarchs viewed as the pinnacle of human achievement. Theirs was a democracy modeled on the slave states of ancient Greece and Rome, whose elites had been free to pursue the finer things in life after delegating all drudgery to slaves and a disenfranchised underclass. The Southern gentry were superior to northerners because they had a “nobility to cultivate some of the higher and more ennobling traits of humanity,” according to one Deep Southern political boss. Yankees, this boss added, were a “nation of shop keepers” while Deep Southerners were a “race of statesmen, orators, military leaders and gentlemen equal and probably superior to any now existing on this or any other continent.” They were also spared the “ignorance, bigotry, and envy resulting from an oppressed and starving laboring class” by the presence of slaves. Following the philosophy of
libertas
, theorists such as South Carolina chancellor William Harper declared that humans are “born to subjection,” and that it was in “the order of nature and of God that the beings of superior faculties and knowledge, and superior power, should control and dispose of those who are inferior.” On the eve of the Civil War, Alexander Stephens of Georgia gave a speech condemning the Founding Fathers for “the assumption of the equality of races,” an idea that was “fundamentally wrong.” The Confederacy, he asserted, “rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” This statement represented mainstream opinion in the Deep South: Stephens was the Confederacy's vice president.
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Southern Baptist and Methodist preachers broke with their northern counterparts to endorse slavery on the grounds that Africans were descendants of Ham, who was condemned in the Bible to be a “hewer of wood and drawer of water” for his white masters. Slave lords welcomed the proselytizing of such ideas among the black population. They found allies among Appalachian Presbyterians like the influential northern Alabama minister, the Reverend Fred A. Ross. “Man south of the Equator—in Asia, Australia, Oceanica, America, especially Africa—is inferior to his Northern brother,” Ross wrote in his 1857 opus,
Slavery Ordained of God
. “Slavery is of God, and [should] continue for the good of the slave, the good of the master, the good of the whole American family.”
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As tensions over slavery increased, Deep Southerners began asserting their racial superiority over Yankees as well. The region's thinkers reaffirmed the thesis that they belonged to a master Norman race, separate from and superior to the Yankee Anglo-Saxons. “The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots who settled the South naturally hate, contemn [sic] and despise the Puritans who settled the North,” the Deep South's leading journal,
DeBow's Review
, declared. “The former are master races—the latter a slave race, the descendants of Saxon serfs . . . [who] came from the cold and marshy regions of the North, where man is little more than a cold-blooded amphibious biped.” “We are the most aristocratic people in the world,”
DeBow's
continued. “Pride of caste and color and privilege makes every white man an aristocrat in feeling. Aristocracy is the only safe guard of liberty, the only power watchful and strong enough to exclude monarchical despotism.” Another paper proclaimed, “The Norman cavalier cannot brook into the vulgar familiarity of the Saxon Yankee, while the latter is continually devising some plan to bring down his aristocratic neighbor to his own detested level.”
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As this “master race” expanded westward, its members were offended by other cultures with which they came in contact. Ironically, this included a more genuinely Norman society than their own.

In southern Louisiana, which was ceded to the United States in 1803, they confronted an enclave of New France consisting of the descendants of Acadian refugees living in the bayous, as well as merchants and sugar planters from the French West Indies. The former people—still hunters and trappers with a reputation for enjoying life—were dismissed as peasants. One might think Deep Southerners would be predisposed to getting along with the planters of New Orleans and the river parishes, given their shared Caribbean economic models and alleged Norman racial affinities. On the contrary, Deep Southerners were disgusted with New Orleans, where a more lenient French and Spanish form of slavery and race relations had produced a far less rigid slave society. Since the Spanish had given all slaves the right to buy their freedom, 45 percent of the city's black population was free. Whites and blacks were not allowed to marry one another, but liaisons, affairs, and unsanctioned marriages were carried out in the open, in violation of Deep Southern mores. Many free blacks ranked higher up on the social scale than most of the Irish and other white immigrants who were crowded into the city's poorer quarters. Free blacks even had their own militia regiments and had the confidence to protest when they were excluded from voting in the first U.S. congressional election there in 1812.
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Tension between the white Franco-Spanish residents of New Orleans—the “Creoles”—and the “new population” continued throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Americans arrived from all sections of the continent, but most came from the Deep South, which had a similar geography and climate. Regardless of their origin, the new settlers looked on the Creoles with suspicion given their Roman Catholicism and their unusual ways. Creole women wore rouge, which was unheard of in the other nations. Creole leaders organized bizarre Mardi Gras celebrations and parades and kept to themselves socially. Even in the 1860s intermarriage between the old and new populations was rare. Politics remained split between the “French” and “American” factions, with Francophones fighting to retain French legal and parish-based administrative norms. Sixty years after being absorbed into the United States, and surrounded by the Deep South and Appalachia, New Orleans and the sugar-planting parishes of the lower Mississippi still retained their own identity; they voted Republican and opposed Southern succession. A New French enclave in the heart of the Deep South, southern Louisiana resisted assimilation, remaining a land apart right into the twenty-first century.
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By midcentury, the Deep South's rapid expansion had come to a halt. In a little over forty years, it had absorbed the subtropical lowlands surrounding the Gulf of Mexico and pushed plantation agriculture as far north as southern Missouri and south to the edge of the arid ranges of Texas. In 1850, however, there was nowhere else in the United States for it to go. Limited by climate, ecology, and its northerly rivals, the Deep South was hemmed in. Its leaders could see that their culture could not hope to take hold in the Far West, where slave crops could not flourish. They could envision a future unfolding in which Yankees, Midlanders, and Borderlanders would continue to expand across the continent, gaining relative strength in population, economics, and congressional representation. If the Yankees gained control of the federal government, slavery—the basis of Deep Southern society—might be criminalized. The Deep South and Tidewater aristocracies would be laid low, their countries turned into “nations of shopkeepers,” their underlings meddling in politics to undermine their genteel, deferential society. They feared that if the Deep South stopped growing, there would be no future for it within the federation.
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But what if they could expand outside the United States?

In the 1850s, Deep Southerners became fixated on annexing their tropical neighbors. Spain's New World empire had come apart in the early 1820s, when its various colonies rose up in a series of independence wars. By the 1850s, the empire had splintered into two dozen smaller, weaker, and less stable states. Several of those closest to the United States—including Mexico and Nicaragua—had outlawed slavery, a development disturbing to the slave lords of the American South. The possibility that Spain might grant Cuba and its black majority independence was particularly frightening, as the island was just ninety miles off Florida and would be an easy refuge for runaway slaves. Cuba, one Texan declared, would soon be “writhing and dying in the dust, suffocated by a million negro hands!” Rumors began circulating that Spanish officials were arming blacks and encouraging interracial marriages. Mississippi senator John Quitman urged a U.S. invasion to prevent the emergence of “a negro or mongrel empire” that could only encourage slave rebellions across the Deep South. The Deep Southern majority in the Louisiana assembly passed a resolution in 1854 condemning Spain's “abolition of slavery in [Cuba] and the sacrifice of the white race.”
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The solution was to conquer and absorb Cuba, and Deep Southerners set out to do so with zeal. Private mercenaries tried to invade the island, backed by the sitting governor of Mississippi and one of that state's former senators. Several more expeditions failed before U.S. president Franklin Pierce, a New Hampshire Yankee, made it clear he would prosecute participants in any sequels. Pierce tried to buy Cuba from Spain in 1854–55, but when negotiations failed, he was roundly attacked by Deep Southerners for caving to “antislavery elements.” President James Buchanan, a Scots-Irish Borderlander, also tried to purchase Cuba as a way of rallying Deep Southern support; his 1858 effort was stymied by an unlikely alliance of Yankee and Midland congressmen on one hand (who opposed acquiring a new slave state) and Deep Southern representatives on the other (who tried to amend the necessary funding bill to force the president to invade the island). Newspapers across the Deep South, Tidewater, and Appalachia continued to call for Cuba's annexation up until the outbreak of the Civil War. What Deep Southern opposition there was centered around fears the annexations would prompt a mass export of slaves from their own nations. The
Richmond Enquirer
warned that the drain would change the “political status of Maryland, of Virginia, of the Carolinas, of Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas—even of the Gulf states themselves.” One of Tidewater's few abolitionists, Matthew Maury of Virginia, supported tropical annexations because they would “relieve our blessed Virginia of the curse” and “the horrors of that war of the races [that is] almost upon us.”
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There were also schemes to annex Nicaragua. When an Appalachian mercenary named William Walker seized control of the tiny Central American republic in 1856, his first act as “president” was to reestablish slavery, hoping to win Deep Southern support. His plan worked. Accolades poured in from Deep Southern newspapers. The New Orleans
Daily Delta
proclaimed Nicaragua a “home for Southern men.” The
Selma Sentinel
proclaimed Walker's actions to be more vital to the South than any other “movement on Earth.”
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Walker's movement was crushed a few months later by cholera and an insurgency, but he returned to a hero's welcome in New Orleans and plotted another invasion. “The white man took the Negro from his native wastes and teaching him the arts of life, bestowed on him the ineffable blessings of a true religion,” he announced in a book published in Mobile, from which his second invasion force departed. Slavery was a “positive good,” Walker argued, and should be extended in a slaveholding empire. Walker had intended to extend his slave empire northward from Nicaragua to encompass much of Central America and Mexico. But his second expedition ended in his arrest by a U.S. naval officer. Deep Southern congressmen tried to have the officer punished but were opposed even by their Appalachian colleagues on this matter of military honor.
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In the aftermath of his arrest, Deep Southerners rallied around a secretive group called the Knights of the Golden Circle, which sought to create an even larger slave empire than Walker had. The “Golden Circle” was centered on Cuba, and its curve took in the Deep South, Mexico, Central America, part of South America, and the entire West Indies. The Knights' founder, a Tidewater-born, Kentucky-based magazine editor named George Bickley, estimated Mexico alone would yield twenty-five new slave states with fifty senators and sixty representatives. It would guarantee Deep Southern hegemony over the federal government (if the Union survived) or “every element of national wealth and power” for a “Southern Confederacy” (if it did not). With the core of its support in east Texas and Georgia, the Knights plotted to conquer all of Mexico.
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