Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (7 page)

I hurried toward them asking what was the matter, supposing at the time the man had been seized with the cholera. Only think said a woman, he just came home and found his house empty—wife, children—all gone. … Her master sold them all, and he did not know a word of it. My God, my God! And this is suffered? And slavery yet defended! Oh, God, what a black thing is man!
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And yet slaveholders could not have everything their own way, no matter what the law or race had to say. A black slave
was
a human being, and any master who aspired to civilized refinement had to recognize that fact just to get any work out of a slave at all. What was more, no master could easily deny that slaves spoke the same language, worshipped the same God, and obstinately behaved like people. It also went without saying that a beaten or dead slave was one less production unit, and in a system where the labor force represented the owner’s capital investment, it did not do to live too much by the whip alone. Many slave owners felt paralyzed by guilt, not necessarily because of slavery but because of the abuses endemic to Southern slaveholding. Nor did African American slaves wait upon the indulgence of whites to work out their own degrees of independence. They formed their own black Christian congregations, which became (and have remained) the center of African American community life; they sang their own songs; and to a degree that ordinarily would seem unimaginable, they kept their fragile families together. For their part, white masters frequently had little choice but to accept these manifestations of extremely human behavior and quietly tolerate them. All arrangements of
employers and labors are negotiations, and the practical realization that real human beings were providing free goods and services induced among whites a sense of obligation that sometimes cushioned the slaves from the excesses of white behavior that the law otherwise permitted.
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And as whites made the grudging concession that their slaves were human beings after all, this produced a clamorous urge on the part of white Southerners to justify the continuation of slavery on the grounds that slavery was actually a benefit of sorts to African Americans. The captain of the steamboat that carried William Howard Russell down the Alabama River in 1861 insisted on arranging a “dance of Negroes … on the lower deck” to demonstrate “how ‘happy they were.’” “Yes sir,” Russell’s host intoned, “they’re the happiest people on the face of the earth.” At almost the same moment, in Georgia, Susan Cornwall Shewmake was writing, “It is certain there is not so much want among them. They are the happiest laboring people on the globe.” Georgia senator T. R. R. Cobb repeated, “Our slaves are the most happy and contented, best fed and best clothed and best paid laboring population in the world, and I would add, also, the
most faithful
and least feared.” Concurrently in Virginia, Governor Henry Wise was claiming that “the descendants of Africa in bondage” find themselves in “bodily comfort, morality, enlightenment, Christianity. … universally fed and clothed well, and they are happy and contented.”
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This was, said Russell, the “universal hymn of the South.” At the same time, though, the guilt that provoked white people to justify slavery on the grounds of its good works also provoked revealing displays of disgust and helplessness over slaveholding. Senator James Chesnut of South Carolina told his wife, Mary Boykin Chesnut, that his slaves owed him $50,000 for the food and clothing he had given them; when asked if his slaves had ever attempted to run away, he exclaimed, “Never—pretty hard work to keep me from running away from them.” In her diary, Mary Chesnut suggested:

Take this estate. John C. says he could rent it from his grandfather and give him fifty thousand a year—then make twice as much more for himself. What does it do, actually? It all goes back in some shape to what are called slaves here—operatives, tenants, &c elsewhere. … This old man’s [money] goes to support a horde of idle dirty Africans—while he is abused and vilifed as a cruel slave owner. … I hate slavery.
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Richard Taylor, a Louisianan and the son of a president, commented bitterly long after slavery had disappeared that “extinction of slavery was expected by all and regretted by none.” Even in the throes of slavery, enslaved African Americans imposed a strong psychological tension on their masters that robbed the whites of whatever joys there were to be had in owning another human being.
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And so, once again, the question emerged:
why
, if slavery held so much woe, not only for black slaves but for white masters as well, did Southerners cling to slavery as they clung to cotton agriculture? The easiest answer available was a Romantic one: because slavery promoted a peculiar culture, a certain way of living, for which white Southerners were willing to pay the price. “It was a medieval civilization, out of accord with the modern tenor of our time,” Fanny Andrews, a Georgian, recalled, as though she had been living rather than merely reading a Walter Scott novel. “It stood for gentle courtesy, for knightly honor, for generous hospitality; it stood for fair and honest dealing of man with man in the common business of life, for lofty scorn of cunning greed and ill-gotten gain through fraud and deception of our fellowmen. …” James Walker, a Charleston lawyer, went so far as to insist that “ours is in truth not so much slavery as feudality.”
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This was an ingenious rationalization. The problem is that it is too simple.

The slave-based cotton agriculture of the Southern states was an intricate and complicated system in which appearances were not always uniform and not always the safest guide. Alongside the Romantic image of magnolias at midnight lay a relentless economic rationality; alongside the facade of racial reciprocity lay resistance and revolt; and alongside the casual tolerance of slave labor in producing their most lucrative commodity, Southerners displayed a fierce personal independence and a resentment at condescension and control. Southerners veered between assertions that theirs was a thoroughgoing slave society, in which “every fibre… is so interwoven with it, that it cannot be abolished without the destruction of the other,” and realizations that Southerners were as much participants in a liberal democratic order as any other Americans, though one inexplicably incorporating the quirk of slave labor. This uncertain swinging between two poles would come back to cripple them in the 1860s when Southerners had to decide whether the survival of slavery or the survival of Confederate nationalism was more important to them.
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The South was divided in other ways as well. Geographically and socially, there were actually
three
slaveholding Souths, embracing masters, slaves, and nonslaveholding
whites, and spread across an uneven and uncooperative geography. The first South anyone who crossed the Ohio River or the Mason-Dixon Line found was the Border South (Kentucky, Maryland, northern Virginia); below this lay the Middle South (Arkansas, northern Louisiana, Tennessee, southern Virginia, and the upcountry of Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina); and bordering the Gulf and south Atlantic coastlines was the Deep South (New Orleans to Charleston).

In the Border South, cotton had long since ceased to be the dominant crop and slavery the primary labor system. There, soil exhaustion drove fortune-hunting planters southward, slaves in tow; or, for those who did not plan on moving themselves, the proximity of the border states to the free states of the North, making slave flight as easy as it would be anywhere in the South, would persuade planters who stayed to sell off their slaves to the Deep South at a tidy profit. Either way, slavery was an institution in motion, mostly southward. One North Carolinian who lived “on one of the great thoroughfares of travel… on the Yadkin River” recalled seeing “as many as 2,000 slaves in a single day going South” during the prewar years, “mostly in the hands of speculators.” By 1860, Virginia and Maryland had only 18 percent of all Southern slaves within their borders, and only a quarter of the South’s cotton output; less than a third of the populations of Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee, and Virginia were slaves (compared to 57 percent in South Carolina, 45 percent in Alabama, 55 percent in Mississippi, and 47 percent in Louisiana). In eastern Tennessee, only 10 percent of the population were slaves, and most of Tennessee grew not cotton but wheat.
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In this environment, it was easier to find the remaining slave owners imbued with the Romantic conviction that they were upholding, to their own financial loss, an economic system that preserved the ancient atmosphere of the castle, moat, and manor.

But move into Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and there the plantations not only were newer but also constituted some of the richest cotton- and sugarcane-growing soil on the face of the earth. Between 1790 and 1860, nearly a quarter of the slave population was moved into the new cotton states; the slave population of the Border States, meanwhile, fell by almost half. By the 1850s, large-scale cotton plantations and large-scale slave labor were concentrated mainly along the lower Mississippi River valley (where slaves constituted as much as 70 percent of the
population of the fertile cotton-growing districts) and the Carolina and Georgia coastlines; a lesser concentration of slavery and cotton growing stretched in a broad belt from southern Arkansas through central Mississippi and Alabama and up through the Carolinas to the shores of Chesapeake Bay.
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On good, new Mississippi valley soils, there were immense profits to be made, and Romantic paternalism be damned. Harriet Martineau toured cotton plantations in Alabama in the mid-1830s where the profit margin was 35 percent. “One planter whom I knew had bought fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of land within two years. … He expected to make, that season, fifty or sixty thousand dollars of his growing crop.” Joseph H. Ingraham in 1835 had met raw new cotton planters in southwestern Mississippi with net annual incomes between $20,000 and $40,000. Making the adroit move to the most advantageous location could generate immense and quick wealth in cotton. The cotton crop could gross $74 million per annum in the 1840s; a decade later, it would sell for $169 million, and between 1856 and 1860, it topped $207 million a year. In 1860, half of the ten wealthiest states in the Union were slave states, and six of the top ten in terms of per capita wealth were slave states; calculated solely on the basis of the wealth of white inhabitants, eight of the top ten wealthiest states in the Union were slave states. The single wealthiest county in the United States, in terms of per capita wealth, was Adams County, Mississippi. It was ambitious Alabama and Mississippi planters, and not avaricious Northern factory owners, that Martineau described as being, “from whatever motive, money-getters; and few but money-getting qualifications are to be looked for in them.” Slave owners might preen themselves upon their gentry manners, but they had no objection at all to making handsome profits.
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In this environment, slave owners proved to be quite as grasping as their despised Yankee counterparts. “Us was same as brutes en cows back dere,” remembered a South Carolina slave years later. “Dey would beat de colored people so worser till dey would run away en stay in de swamp to save dey hide.” Because “I was black it was believed I had no soul,” wrote William Henry Singleton; “in the eyes of the law I was but a thing.” The signposts of the slave’s life were “the steel shackles of slavery, the slave block of the market place where husbands and wives, parents and children, were ruthlessly torn apart and scattered asunder, the whipping post, the slave quarters, the inhuman restrictions, such as denial of our own religious privileges, no ministers or churches of our race, no educational advantages to speak
of, no social freedom among ourselves. …” Slavery was nothing but “jest a murdering of de people.”
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So slaves rebelled when they could, as Denmark Vesey and his conspirators tried to do in Charleston in 1822, and as Nat Turner and his band of slaves actually did in Virginia in 1831. When outright rebellion was impossible, slaves found other ways to isolate and terrify their tormentors, including work slowdowns, breakage of tools, and abuse of work animals. Frederick Law Olmsted was told by one slave mistress, “There is hardly one of our servants that can be trusted to do the simplest work without being stood over. If I order a room to be cleaned, or a fire to be made in a distant chamber, I never can be sure I am obeyed unless I go there and see for myself. … They never will do any work if you don’t compel them.” Some slaves fought back: when James Knox Polk’s overseer, John L. Garner, tried to make “Henry, Gilbert, and charls” less “indifferent” about their “duty,” one of them “resisted and fought mee.”
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And they ran away. Sometimes for short periods of time to evade punishments, sometimes to escape from slavery entirely, the slaves ran whenever the threats or the opportunities became too great to resist. When Josiah Henson’s master moved him from Maryland to a new plantation down the Ohio River in 1830 and then began toying with the idea of selling Henson away from his wife and children, Henson “determined to make my escape to Canada, about which I had heard something, as beyond the limits of the United States.” In mid-September 1830 he arranged to collect his wife and children, persuaded a fellow slave to ferry them over the Ohio River by night, and trudged all the way to Canada on foot.
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Frederick Bailey returned to his master, scheming all the while how to buy his freedom with the money he earned on odd jobs performed for other whites. But when his master suspended his outside work privileges, Bailey decided that he had paid his master all he deserved, and in 1838 he boarded a train headed for Philadelphia, dressed as a sailor and carrying false identification papers. He found his way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he changed his name to Frederick Douglass. In 1841, Douglass was recruited as an agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society; four years later he published his
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an
American Slave
. Within a decade he had become the most famous African American on the continent, and one of slavery’s deadliest enemies.
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