Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (10 page)

If necessary, Garrison was willing to have the free states secede from the Union rather than continue in an unholy federation with slave states. “It is said if you agitate this question, you will divide the Union,” Garrison editorialized, “but should disunion follow, the fault will not be yours. … Let the pillars thereof fall—let the superstructure crumble into dust—if it must be upheld by robbery and oppression.” In 1833, Garrison joined with the wealthy evangelical brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan (who were also bankrolling Charles Grandison Finney) and founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia, which demanded the “immediate abandonment” and “entire abolition of slavery in the United States.” Slavery was “an
audacious usurpation of the Divine Prerogative, a daring infringement on the law of nature, a base overthrow of the very foundations of the social compact.”
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These demands were infinitely more than Southerners could take. They were also more than many Northerners could take. Just as the South’s cotton agriculture bound Southern whites to the defense of slavery, it also bound the Northern bankers and merchants who lent the planters money to the toleration of slavery. Immediate abolition meant the disappearance of the immense fortunes that had been invested in the purchase of slaves; this would bankrupt not only the planters but also every Northerner who had invested in Southern cotton.
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Even the ordinary Northern mill owner, who depended on shipments of Southern cotton for the manufacture of finished textile products, stood to lose by Garrison’s frank willingness to break up the Union over slavery. There was, as it turned out, a very significant gap between being anti-slavery and being an abolitionist. A Northerner could oppose, criticize, and even denounce slavery without being at all inclined to take the risks of abolition.

It was for just this reason that Northern factory workers could be thoroughly hostile to slavery and yet also be suspicious of the abolitionists. The Northern labor movement was, like the anti-slavery movement, making its first attempts at large-scale organization in the late 1820s, and Northern workers were hostile to an abolitionism that concerned itself only with the plight of slave laborers and not northern “wage slaves.” Garrison did not help matters when he discounted any comparisons between slavery and the working conditions in many Northern mills: “It is an abuse of language to talk of the slavery of wages. … We cannot see that it is wrong to give or receive wages.” The close identification of evangelical Protestantism with the American Anti-Slavery Society did not improve the workers’ opinion of the abolitionists. Many Northern workers were new immigrants from Roman Catholic Ireland or southern Germany, and they spurned the anti-slavery zealots as part of an overall stratagem of evangelical Protestants to Americanize the immigrant. It could not have been far from the mind of Northern workers that a sudden flood of free black labor onto the country’s labor markets would depress white wages and jeopardize white jobs.
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Farmers in the free states also pulled shy of the abolitionists in the 1830s. Although Illinois was technically a free state (under the original mandate of the Northwest
Ordinance), the ordinance had exempted French-speaking slave owners whose settlement predated the Revolution, and the Illinois legislature adopted highly flexible “transit laws,” which permitted slave laborers to be brought into Illinois for up to a year at a time. Illinoisans opposed legalizing slavery, but that was because they banned not only slaves but any African Americans at all, free or slave, from their state; in 1848, the new state constitution required the legislature to “pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free person of color from immigrating to and settling in this state, and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this state.” So when the militant evangelical abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy set up an anti-slavery newspaper in Alton, Illinois, mobs threw his press into the Mississippi River, and when he persisted in setting up a new one, they attacked his office on November 7, 1837, and murdered him. It had not helped that Lovejoy was a rabid anti-Catholic who described Roman Catholicism as “an unmixed evil,” thereby uniting immigrants and Southern migrants in seeing him as a threat to their community identities. So long as the abolition movement chose men such as Lovejoy as its martyrs and examples, large segments of Northern society would balk at abolition.
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As it was, Garrison could scarcely hold his own followers together. The American Anti-Slavery Society was supposed to draw its support from a network of local and state auxiliary societies, but few of those auxiliaries kept their donations up to the necessary level. Although the anti-slavery societies claimed as many as 250,000 members, the
Liberator
had only 1,400 subscribers, and the Tappan brothers had to continually bail out Garrison’s newspaper. Garrison himself only made matters more difficult. When evangelical ministers questioned Garrison’s “harsh, unchristian vocabulary,” Garrison lashed out at them as “a cage of unclean birds and a synagogue of Satan.” When the Tappan brothers and other evangelical supporters of the American Anti-Slavery Society began to balk at Garrison’s criticism of the ministers, Garrison immediately accused them of plotting “to see me cashiered, or voluntarily leave the ranks.”
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Instead, Garrison cashiered the evangelicals. Garrison had been deeply impressed in the 1830s with the fervency and eloquence of two former South Carolina cotton heiresses, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who had been converted to abolition. Garrison promoted them as lecturers on the circuit of the local anti-slavery societies, and they brought Garrison into close contact with the new women’s rights movement and its leaders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abby Kelley, and Lydia Maria Child. These early feminists argued that a campaign to emancipate slaves could not avert its eyes
from the need to emancipate American women from social conventions and legal restraints that prevented them, like the slave, from owning property and voting, and kept them altogether subservient to the interests of white males. “Woman,” declared Stanton, is “more fully identified with the slave than man can possibly be… for while the man is born to do whatever he can, for the woman and the negro there is no such privilege.” And even if women’s rights did not fall precisely within the goals of an anti-slavery society, at least that society could admit women to its membership and leadership, and allow them to bear their “subjective” testimony against slavery. But when Garrison attempted to place Abby Kelley on the business committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society at its annual meeting in May 1840, the Tappan brothers and fully half of the society’s delegates rose and withdrew.
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Garrison was left with a rump society, and although he now had a free hand to place three feminists—Lucretia Mott, Lydia Child, and Maria Chapman—on the society’s executive committee, the American Anti-Slavery Society was never more than a shadow of what it had been in the 1830s. The Tappans, meanwhile, organized a rival anti-slavery society, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, whose constitution expressly barred women from voting in its deliberations. Many of the other leaders and followers of the abolitionists wandered off to support various schemes of “gradual emancipation” or colonization for freed blacks in Africa or the Caribbean. Colonization turned out to be a particularly popular solution to the slavery problem, since it promised to eliminate both slavery and blacks from white view. The colonizationists did not much worry about the injustice of colonizing African Americans back to a continent from which many of them were six to eight generations removed.

But the South increasingly failed to see this evidence of fragmentation, poverty, and outright resistance to abolition in the North, and ignored how easily Northerners might oppose slavery on a variety of grounds without necessarily wishing for its abolition in the South. Instead, South Carolina governor James Hamilton thrust copies of the
Liberator
under the noses of state legislators, claiming that Nat Turner’s revolt had been “excited by incendiary newspapers and other publications, put forth in the non-slaveholding states,” and in 1836 the legislatures of South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama formally sent to the legislatures of ten northern states requests that the publication and distribution of “newspapers, tracts, and pictorial representations, calculated and having an obvious tendency to excite the slaves of the slave states to insurrection and revolt,” be made a criminal offense, and John C. Calhoun tried to persuade Congress to prosecute any postmaster who would “knowingly receive or put into mail any pamphlet, newspaper, handbill, or any printed, written, or pictorial
representation touching the subject of slavery.”
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Never mind that no connection between Turner and Garrison was ever demonstrated—Southern pressure forced Postmaster General Amos Kendall to turn a blind eye when Southern postmasters began censoring suspicious mail and newspapers from the North.
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Because Northern state and local governments did not likewise act at once to silence the abolitionists, Southerners concluded that Northerners were actually in quiet collusion with the abolitionists to produce more Nat Turners. Throughout the 1840s and early 1850s, Southerners turned away from the Whig Party to the Democrats, convinced that the Whig programs for federal intervention in the economy were only laying the groundwork for federal tampering with slavery. The tide of Southern suspicion and Southern temper rose higher and higher, and Southerners forgot that they had ever discussed emancipating their slaves. The happiest-people-on-the-face-of-the-earth argument silenced Jefferson’s warning that the South had by the ears a wolf that it could neither master nor release. Southerners who coveted independence and liberty also found themselves extolling white men’s democracy and passing solemn resolutions that warned that “freedom of speech and press do not imply a moral right to freely discuss the subject of slavery. …”
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Eventually, by the mid-1850s, they came to the point of claiming that the political liberties enjoyed by Northern workers were useless frauds compared to the cradle-to-grave care given by the slaveholder to the slave. “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world,” George Fitzhugh intoned yet again in 1857. “We do not know whether free laborers ever sleep,” Fitzhugh snickered; “the free laborer must work or starve,” while the slaves “enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care not labor.” The Northern worker is actually “more of a slave than the negro, because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave, and has no holiday, because the cares of life with him begin when its labors end. He has no liberty, and not a single right.” At that moment, the slaveholders ceased to be an accident within a liberal democracy and became its enemies.
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But it was not enough for Southerners merely to justify the “positive good” of slavery in books, learned treatises, and sermons. Nat Turner had been no respecter of arguments, and so the pro-slavery defenses began to sprout demands that the federal government and the Northern states issue assurances that the abolitionists would never be allowed to tamper with what John Calhoun delicately described as
the South’s “peculiar domestic institution.” Slavery became the lens through which Southerners looked at every question, the red dye that tainted every American conflict. Opposition to Henry Clay’s “American System” was not merely a matter of agrarian economic theory; it sprang from the fear that a national government capable of interfering that deeply in the structure of the economy might prove capable of interfering with slavery, too. North Carolina senator Nathaniel Macon suspected, as early as 1818, that “the passage of a bill granting money for internal improvements” would also make “possible a bill for the emancipation of the negroes,” and he “desired to put North Carolinians on their guard, and not simply North Carolinians, but all Southerners.” And one no less than John Calhoun admitted that nullification of the tariff was really only a mechanism for ensuring that the federal government would never be able to tamper with slavery.
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I consider the tariff but as the occasion, rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things. The truth can no longer be disguised, that the peculiar dome-stick institution of the Southern states, and the consequent direction, which that and her soil and climate have given to her industry, has placed them in regard to taxation and appropriation in opposite relation to the majority of the Union; against the danger of which… they must in the end be forced to rebel or submit to have their permanent interests sacrificed, their domestick institutions subverted… and themselves and children reduced to wretchedness.
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Still, Southern slaveholders need not have worried overmuch, since the Constitution had sanctioned the existence of slavery by allowing the slave states to count three-fifths of their slave populations toward the creation of federal congressional districts. (This arrangement, to the disgruntlement of the free states, effectively granted the South something like two dozen extra members of Congress, though their constituents could not vote.) “Slavery existed in the South when the constitution was framed,” declared Calhoun on the floor of the Senate in 1848, and “it is the only property recognized by it; the only one that entered into its formation as a political element, both in the adjustment of the relative weight of the States in the Government, and the apportionment of direct taxes; and the only one that is put under the express guaranty of the constitution.” William Lloyd Garrison found himself powerless to disagree: “It is absurd, it is false, it is an insult to the common sense of mankind, to pretend that the Constitution… or that the parties to it were actuated by a sense of justice and the spirit of impartial liberty. …”
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And when it
came to choosing between abolition and the Union, Northerners were content to choose the Union.