Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (8 page)

If slave owners worried about the misbehavior of their slaves, they experienced just as much anxiety over non-slaveholding whites. Although slaves were held by a remarkably broad section of Southern society—overall, one out of every four white families in the South in 1860 owned slaves, an extraordinary figure when it is remembered that by 1860 the cost of a strong, healthy field hand had reached $1,500—the distribution of that ownership varied considerably. Less than 1 percent of Southern white families (comprising a group of less than 12,000 people across the South) owned more than a hundred slaves, and only 46,000 (3 percent of all Southern families) owned more than twenty. The overall median for cotton plantations was thirty-five slaves.
⁶⁶

The largest group of slave-owning families held between one and four slaves, and those families accounted for almost half the slaveholding in the entire South. This meant, for one thing, that Southern slavery was, in most cases, an affair of small-scale farming, in which white farmers extracted the help of a slave or two to plow up and harvest holdings of less than a hundred acres. It also meant that, beyond the actual slaveholders themselves, there existed a large population of nonslaveholding whites, and without their cooperation, slavery could never have survived. Apart from a tiny population of urban professionals, the nonslaveholding white population of the South was the very model of the yeoman republican farmer that the Jeffersonians had assumed to be the salt of the earth in the early years of the Republic. At the same time, they had been shunted into the least desirable lands by the greater purchasing power of cotton, and there they clung to the old model of self-sufficient corn-and-livestock agriculture. These white yeoman farmers had every reason to resent the economic success of the planters, the loss of yeoman independence, and the way the planters turned their cotton profits into political dominance throughout the South. “In what else besides Negroes were these rich men better off then when they called themselves poor?” asked Frederick Law Olmsted, the noted American journalist and architect, and that was precisely the question surly slaveless farmers wanted to ask.
⁶⁷

At some point, an economically and politically alienated population of white yeomen with a curiosity on such subjects might easily decide that its mutual interests lay in directions other than those of the great planters, and thus become an engine for abolition or (in the most hideous scenario) a refuge for slave runaways and rebellion. Southern planters fantasized about Northern plots “to array one class of our citizens
against the other, limit the defense of slavery to those pecuniarily interested, and thereby eradicate it.” It thus became vital to the peace of the planters’ minds that the frustrations of the “crackers,” “sandhillers,” or “poor white trash” be diminished or placated at all costs. This involved, first and foremost, keeping the bogeyman of race ever before the nonslaveholders’ eyes, for whatever hatreds the poor whites nursed against the planters, they nursed still greater ones against blacks.

Even if slavery was wrong, its wrongs were cancelled out for nonslaveholders by the more monstrous specter of racial equality. Abolish slavery, and white farmers would find that blacks were now their legal equals and economic and social competitors. “You very soon make them all tenants and reduce their wages for daily labor to the smallest pittance that will sustain life,” prophesied Georgia governor Joseph E. Brown, and that would eventually force poor whites and blacks “to go to church as equals; enter the Courts of Justice as equals, sue and be sued as equals, sit on juries together as equals, have the right to give evidence in court as equals, stand side by side in our military corps as equals, enter each others’ houses in social intercourse as equals; and very soon their children must marry together as equals. …” Southern elites such as Brown felt certain that when nonslaveholding whites realized the full racial consequences of abolition, they would become slavery’s strongest supporters. “The strongest pro-slavery men in these States are those who do not own one dollar of slave property,” insisted a Louisville newspaper, “They are sturdy yeomen who cultivate the soil, tend their own crops; but if need be, would stand to their section till the last one of them fell.”
⁶⁸

Ensuring the loyalty of nonslaveholding whites involved a measure of social humiliation on the part of the “intelligent proud, courteous slave barons” who found themselves forced at every election to solicit the votes of “ignorant, slovenly, poor white trash in the country” with “frequent treats that disgrace our elections” and to advocate as a social ideal not aristocracy but white man’s democracy—a kind of equality in which all the members of a superior race are more equal, socially and politically, to each other than to any members of an inferior race. By arguing that slavery was a benefit to slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike, the slave owners could weld the loyalty of the nonslaveholding white to their standard forever. “The existence of a race among us—inferior by nature to ourselves, in a state of servitude—necessarily adds to the tone of manliness and character of the superior race,” argued Alabama governor John A. Winston.
⁶⁹

What was more, assigning menial work to black slaves assured poor whites that they would never have to worry about being reduced to the same level of drudgery. Explained James Henry Hammond in 1858, “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” a class that “constitutes the very mud-sill of society and political government.” White Southerners had found that “mud-sill” in black slaves, who performed the “duties” no white man would stoop to. With that class beneath them, all Southern whites could feel that they were members of a ruling class. “African slavery,” announced another slaveholder, James P. Holcombe, “reconciles the antagonism of classes that has elsewhere reduced the highest statesmanship to the verge of despair, and becomes the great Peace-maker of our society.” Compared to the black slave, every white was an “aristocrat,” and not just the thousand-bale planters. Of course, arguing thusly forced slavery’s apologists to sing a different tune than the one that assured the world that slavery existed to bestow happiness on the slave. Alongside the happiest-people-on-the-face-ofthe-earth argument, planters had to offer a parallel argument for slavery based on the vilest form of racism and calculated to enlist the racist sympathies and fears of nonslaveholders. “The privilege of belonging to the superior race and of being free was a bond that tied all Southern whites together,” wrote the Alabama lawyer Hilary Abner Herbert, “and it was infinitely strengthened by a crusade that seemed from a Southern stand-point, to have for its purpose the levelling of all distinctions between the white man and the slave hard by.”
⁷⁰

This appeal to white racial solidarity disguised the fact that Southern yeomen may have had a great deal more to fear from slavery, so far as their economic futures were concerned, than they suspected. Slavery has become so fixed in the historical memory as a form of agricultural labor that it has been easy to miss how steadily, in the 1850s, black slaves were being slipped out of the “mud-sill” and into the South’s small industrial workforce. More than half of the workers in the new iron furnaces along the Cumberland river in Tennessee were slaves, and after 1845 most of the ironworkers in the Richmond iron furnaces in Virginia were slaves as well. The hemp factories of Kentucky, which had actually begun using slave labor as early as the 1820s, defended the decision to use slave operatives on the grounds that they were so much easier to exploit than free white workers: “They are more
docile
, more constant, and cheaper than freemen, who are often refractory and dissipated; who waste much time by frequenting public places, attending musters, elections, etc., which the operative slave is not permitted to frequent.” And, added Tennessee iron producer Samuel Morgan in 1852, they did not strike.
⁷¹

Furthermore, when the great California gold rush of the late 1840s opened up for Americans the prospect of large-scale mining in the West, it was not forgotten by Southerners how successful slave-based gold mining had been in South America. By 1861, nonslaveholding whites in Texas were petitioning the state legislature to protest “being put in Competition With Negro Mechanicks who are rival to us in the obtaining of Contracts for the Construction of Houses Churches and other Buildings. … We say Negroes forever but Negroes in their Places (Viz: in Corn & Cotton Fields).”
⁷²
With the right circumstances and a sufficient amount of time, slave labor could have easily become an industrial serfdom, made permanent by its identification through race, and nudging expensive white laborers out of the trades they had been assured were secure forever.

For slavery was neither a backward nor a dying system in the 1850s. It was aggressive, dynamic, and mobile, and by pandering to the racial prejudices of a white republic starved for labor, it was perfectly capable of expansion. In 1810, the Southern states had a slave population of just over 1 million; by 1860, in defiance of every expectation for what a system of organized violence could do to the survival of a people, the slave population stood at just under 4 million. No matter that to outside observers the South looked like anything but a market society, and no matter that slavery was based on the absurd and irrational prejudice of race; slavery’s greatest attractions were its cheapness, its capacity for violent exploitation, and its mobility. Southerners understood that slavery was precisely the element that would help them transcend the limitations of poor soils and single-crop dependency and emerge into the dazzling light of a modern economy. As it was, considered as a separate nation from the northern states, the South would rank as the fourth most prosperous nation in the world in 1860, surpassing France and Germany, and outdistanced in Europe only by Great Britain.
⁷³

In the North, predicted South Carolina’s Leonidas Spratt, free laborers and employers must inevitably come to a confrontation, for the goal of the employer is always to screw down the wages, and the goal of the laborer is always to increase them. “We look with perfect certainty to see the breaking up of free society into its elements” in the North, announced Spratt, while in the South, compliant and docile slaves would take up the levers of industry and make them a perfect success. Slaves might not have the skill, intelligence, or incentives that free white laborers had, but technology made all of that irrelevant. “Improvements in machinery have superseded the necessity of more than mere manipulation upon the part of operatives,”
and “of manipulation the negro is singularly capable.” Because the available supply of slaves was so much needed in agriculture, no one had realized what a resource slave labor could be in manufacturing; it was “only for reason of the exceeding profit of agriculture at the South that the negro has not been yoked to the harness of other pursuits and that he has not given still more astonishing evidences of efficiency in that institution which evokes his powers than even that afforded by the products of the South.” And when that happened, slavery “will evolve an energy of light and life that will enable it to advance over existing forms of society with a desolating and resistless power, and… stand from age to age impregnable.”
⁷⁴

“African slavery is no retrograde movement,” warned William Holcombe on the pages of the
Southern Literary Messenger
in 1861, “but an integral link in the grand, progressive evolution of human society.” If California had been turned over to Southerners, speculated Virginia governor Henry Wise, “every cornfield in Virginia and North Carolina, in Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky, would have been emptied of black laborers, and I doubt whether many slaves would have been left to work the cotton and sugar estates of the other Southern plantation.”
⁷⁵

But to expand, slavery would need protection and reassurance. Southerners would tolerate the annoyance of tariffs and the like, but they would not permit interference with or restriction upon slavery or its growth. And the federal Union in which the Southern states participated was a sufficiently rickety structure that any serious attack on slavery would be an excuse for Southerners to tear the whole structure of the Union down.

The cultural differences and economic aggressiveness of the slave system and the political weakness of the Union were an unhappy combination within the American republic, but there was nothing in either of them that necessarily threw one into collision with the other. South and North still shared large areas of cultural continuity, and Northern merchants happily made fortunes feeding slavery’s economic drives. There was no clash of civilizations between North and South, except in the imaginations of Virginian George Fitzhugh and the slave system’s most ardent Romantic admirers. In fact, there might never have been a civil war at all in 1861 had it not been for two facts of geography that forced the sections onto a collision course. The first of these facts was that by 1860 there were virtually no slaves in the Northern
states, and the second was that there was an enormous amount of land in the American West that no one quite knew what to do with.

Under British rule, nearly all white American colonists who owned their own farm or merchandise had servants of various sorts, although
servant
was a term that included everything from wage laborers to outright slaves. Slavery was part of this overall use of servant labor, and it persisted in all parts of the American colonies up until the American Revolution and beyond. As late as 1800, two-thirds of New York’s black population was enslaved, and the legislation that eventually freed them was linked to a timetable that kept some black people in bondage until the beginning of the 1850s. There were still 1,488 slaves in New England in 1800, and Rhode Island and Connecticut possessed a smattering of slaves as late as 1810; Pennsylvania had some slaves living within its borders in 1830; in New Jersey, there were still eighteen lifetime black “apprentices” when the Civil War broke out.
⁷⁶