Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (5 page)

The great danger posed by these arguments over power, liberalism, and republics was the possibility that they might find an outlet in the ramshackle structure of the federal Union. During the War of 1812, New Englanders were hard hit by the naval blockade that British warships imposed on them, and the more they suffered from this blockade, the more the suffering seemed to be the fault of people from other parts of the country, such as President Madison (a Virginian), whose section presumably had something to gain from the war that New England did not. In December 1814 delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island met at Hartford, Connecticut, to express their opposition to the war and make ugly suggestions about seceding from the Union and making a separate peace with Great Britain. The delegations’ threats all blew over because the war ended a month later, but the event was a dangerous indication that states or sections of the country who suspected that their liberties were being leeched by someone else’s thirst for power might take advantage of the autonomy provided them by the federal Union, and leave the Union for good.

A more dramatic example of the intersection of ideology and self-interest occurred in 1832 over the federal tariff. For more than a decade, South Carolina and the other Southern states had been vigorously protesting the use of tariffs to protect American industry. Tariffs such as the one imposed in 1816 boosted the price of imported manufactured goods by 25 percent over their original valuation, and forced consumers to buy American-made goods, which were considerably more costly than the imports had originally been. South Carolina’s John Caldwell Calhoun observed that this was fine for New England, which was home to many of America’s infant industries, but it was very hard on South Carolina, which specialized in cotton
growing and needed to buy manufactured goods from elsewhere. Congress was not inclined to give the South Carolinians relief, and in 1828, Congress passed a tariffso stiff (it imposed import duties up to 50 percent on the value of some imports) that South Carolina dubbed it “the Tariff of Abominations.”

Calhoun saw the tariff not just as an economic issue but also as a challenge by the federal government to South Carolina’s liberty as a state. For two years, while he was serving as Andrew Jackson’s vice president, Calhoun fought the tariff through his political lieutenants in Congress, insisting that South Carolina had the authority to nullify any federal law it deemed unsatisfactory (including tariffs) unless three-quarters of the other states had the opportunity to review the law and approve it. Early in 1830, Robert Hayne of South Carolina, acting as Calhoun’s mouthpiece, delivered a long and powerful polemic on the floor of the Senate, defending the state sovereignty of South Carolina against a “consolidated” Union. Hayne was argued down by Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster, who proclaimed (in words that subsequent generations of American schoolchildren were required to memorize) that the federal government was “the people’s constitution; the people’s government” and the power of the Union should not be splintered by one state under the specious plea of liberty. “Liberty
and
Union,” Webster concluded, must be “now and forever, one and inseparable.”
³⁰

Undeterred by Webster’s eloquence, Calhoun hoped to play on the anti-tariff sympathies of President Jackson, calculating that Jackson would not use force to impose a tariff he did not welcome, and certainly not in the state in which he had been born. Jackson was invited by Calhoun and his friends to a Jefferson’s birthday dinner on April 13, 1830, in the hope that Calhoun might prod an anti-tariff statement out of Jackson. After dinner, the toasts went round the table, beginning with Calhoun and building one by one to a carefully orchestrated anthem of praise for state sovereignty. But when Jackson rose to present his toast, he stared point-blank at Calhoun and proposed, “Our Federal Union: it must be preserved!” then held his glass aloft as a sign that the toast was to be drunk standing. Calhoun and the others struggled weakly to their feet, Calhoun spilling a trickle of wine as he trembled in shock. “The Union,” Calhoun gasped in response, “next to our liberty the most dear.”
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Calhoun had greatly misjudged Jackson’s loyalty to the Union. Realizing that he had lost all hope of influencing Jackson, he resigned his vice presidency and returned to South Carolina. On November 24, 1832, the Calhounites led a specially called convention in South Carolina to nullify the collection of the tariff within South Carolina, threatening secession from the Union if the federal government interfered. Jackson replied on December 10, 1832, with a proclamation announcing
that nullification was “incompatible with the existence of the Union. … The Constitution forms a government, not a league.” On that note, nullification was dealt a staggering blow, and Jackson went on to take a further swipe at secession by adding, “To say that any state may at pleasure secede from the Union is to say that the United States is not a nation.”

Jackson had no more love than Calhoun for banks, tariffs, and federally funded “improvements” projects, but he was also the president of the United States, and he was not used to challenges from what he called a “coward, hypocrite, conspirator, traitor and fool” such as Calhoun. Jackson obtained from Congress a Force Bill, which authorized him to use the army and navy to suppress South Carolina resistance. Before force became necessary, however, the more conciliatory Henry Clay had produced a compromise measure that provided for the graduated reduction of the tariff. On March 15, 1833, Calhoun and the South Carolinians rescinded their nullification ordinance.
³²

They did not, however, renounce the principle of secession. That meant that whatever else Americans might hold in common, their political structure—a Union of sometimes grudging and suspicious states—remained vulnerable in any crisis in which any state with a grievance might try to end its cooperation with the others and stalk out of the Union. “Altho I am for the
Union
& no
Nullifier
,” wrote one uneasy Virginian in January 1833, “yet my southern feelings & prejudice are so strong, that I know I should hate to see a Southern man vanquished by a northern one. …”
³³
Jackson might have prevented disunion over the tariff, and Clay might have demonstrated how compromise was the best method for disarming confrontation, but as far as Calhoun was concerned, that did not mean that the remedy of secession would not be available for future use if a more demanding set of circumstances called for it. And, as many Americans could already see, such a set of circumstances was very likely to appear in the form of the issue of slavery, as it was practiced in the Southern states. No one less than Andrew Jackson had already glumly predicted, after the nullification crisis had passed, that “the nullifiers in the South intend to blow up a storm on the slave question. …” Nullification might be defeated, he told his aide John Coffee, but “they will try to arouse the Southern people on this false tale. This ought to be met, for be assured these men will do any act to destroy the union, & form a southern Confederacy, bounded north, by the Potomac river.”
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But even with all the forces that appeared to be pulling Americans apart—from the fissiparous nature of the federal Union to the clashing economic visions of Whig and Democrat—none of them had the weight to outbalance the forces making the
American Union stronger with every decade, nor did they have the power by themselves to fracture the Union. That sort of disruption would require the introduction of a catalyst, which would act on all the divisions of Americans to worsen them.

That catalyst would be slavery.

Jefferson Davis did not like Yankees.

Born in Kentucky and raised in Mississippi, Davis found it something of a novelty to meet Northerners when he arrived at the United States Military Academy at West Point as a cadet in 1824. But it was not a novelty he enjoyed. He found Yankees tight-fisted, chilly, and unsociable. “The Yankee part of the corps [of cadets]… are not… such associates as I would at present select.” Northerners were dedicated to making money, pinching pennies, and building factories; they were all “vulgar parvenus… vulgar landlords, capitalists, and employers.” Henry Rootes Jackson, a Georgian who, like Davis, had gone north for his collegiate education, experienced the same revulsion. “Yankees, and Yankee gold” brought in their penny-pinching wake everything “impure, inhuman, uncharitable, unchristian and uncivilized.” A Virginian on tour in New England in 1834 was reminded that “
Yankee tricks
, and
Yankee knavery
, are ideas inseparable from the word
Yankee
.” Southerners were another quantity altogether. Southerners preferred the relaxed pace of agricultural life close to the rhythms of nature; they were aristocratic, noble-minded, generous, traditional. In fact, Southerners even
looked
different from Northerners. “Foreigners have all remarked on the care-worn, thoughtful, unhappy countenances of our people,” George Fitzhugh, a Virginian, wrote in 1854, but that description “only applies to the North, for travellers see little of us at the South, who live far from highways and cities, in contentment on our farms.” By 1861, claimed Albert Pike, it had become manifest that “the people of the South and those of the North are essentially two races of men, with habits of thought and action very unalike.”
³⁵

Fitzhugh and Pike were at least partly right. After the Revolution, European tourists and journalists flocked to America to gawk at the operation of the new republic, and they did agree that the Southern states of the American democracy seemed like a country unto itself, although the watchers did not always mean that observation
to be a compliment. The statistics the travelers amassed, or culled from the United States census reports, put a decidedly different spin on Fitzhugh’s praise of Southern agriculture. In 1850, the South possessed only one-quarter of the railroad mileage of the Republic, and less than one-fifth of the country’s manufacturing capacity. Three times as many Northerners lived in cities, while value of northern farmland was reckoned, acre for acre, at more than twice that in the South. In the North, less than 5 percent of the population was illiterate; in the South, illiteracy ran as high as 40 percent in some areas. For “the first time in the States,” wrote English correspondent William Howard Russell as his train crossed through into North Carolina in 1861, “I noticed barefooted people” and “poor broken-down shanties or loghuts” filled with “paleface… tawdry and ragged” women and “yellow, seedy-looking” men.
³⁶

And yet the impressions of difference that foreign travelers gained from their tours of the South were also likely to miss many of the subtleties of Southern money and manners. The political and social economy of the Southern states was an exceedingly complex affair, compounded by deceptively stable appearances and highly aggressive commercial enterprise. It was a rash traveler indeed who rushed in to announce that the enigma of the South was now solved.

The first appearance that shaped the initial impressions of onlookers was the dominance of cotton agriculture in the South. Single-crop agriculture was actually a habit with a long history in the Southern states, stretching back into colonial times when the South’s prosperity had relied almost entirely on tobacco grown around Chesapeake Bay and rice or indigo in the South Carolina lowlands. The soils of the South faded fast, though. Lands farmed for five years had to be left fallow for five or even ten years to regain their fertility. By the time of the Revolution, tobacco and indigo production had gone into decline, and the South faced an agricultural crisis of alarming proportions. Then, in 1793, a New England–born inventor, Eli Whitney, constructed a simple device known as the cotton gin, which was able to take raw cotton, separate the fiber of the cotton from the seeds, and produce a usable product with no more than the effort needed to turn a handle. At one stroke, cotton production became mechanically simple and economically viable.

At virtually the same moment that Whitney’s gin simplified the production process, Great Britain’s factory-based textile industry began its clamor for new, cheap sources of cotton. Demand met supply, and between the 1790s and 1850, British cotton imports from the South leapt from 12 million pounds a year to 588 million pounds; in the same period, British exports of finished cotton products rocketed from 40 million square yards to 2 billion square yards, while the costs of cotton goods fell by 1850 to 1 percent of what they had been in the 1780s. Cotton brought Britain power and prosperity, employing 1.5 million workers in the textile factories alone. Cotton, in return, brought the South economic and political power in the American republic. By 1860, Southern cotton constituted 57 percent of all American exports;
compared to Northern grain farms, which exported only 5 percent of their total crop, Southern cotton plantations shipped 75 percent of their cotton abroad.
³⁷

But cotton brought the South bane as well as blessing. The rage for cotton profits meant that the South was forever having to import manufactured goods, either from the North or else from abroad over the intolerable hurdle of federal tariffs. To buy these goods, Southern planters were compelled to mortgage their next crop to Northern manufacturers and bankers in order to buy the cotton gins and other tools they needed to plant and harvest the crop in the first place. The money that flowed from English cotton buyers back to the South generally came in the form of bills and drafts that were then forwarded to New York banks to pay Southerners’ bills to Northern merchants. This created cycles of debt for cotton growers, especially in the oldest parts of the South, and most of the debt was owed to northern bankers. “We have been good milk cows,” South Carolinian Mary Boykin Chesnut complained in 1862, “milked by the tariff, or skimmed… Cotton pays everyone who handles it, sells it, manufactures it, &c &c—rarely pays the men who make it.”
³⁸
The faster planters in the old cotton states ran to produce more cotton, the faster they piled up debts for the costs of production. By 1850, some of them were surviving on profit margins as low as 2 or 3 percent.