Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (9 page)

Had slavery remained a legal and economic force in every northern state and survived in significant numbers, then slavery would still have posed a moral problem to the Republic. It would have been a problem that every state shared, though, and it never would have developed into a strictly sectional issue, fanning animosities between states in which slavery was legal and those in which it was not. It might have been dealt with as an object of social reform, not civil war, and (as Abraham Lincoln once speculated) might have been gradually phased out of American life, with assistance and compensation to owners, by about 1910.
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But slavery did not remain a national institution. Instead, it became a sectional one. Apart from the small pockets of slaves that survived in the North in the early nineteenth century, slavery gradually became a dead letter north of the famous Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River. This disappearance has often been explained as a result of climate and soil: the North’s climate was too cold to grow cotton, and Northerners felt none of the enthusiasm Southerners felt for the explosive growth of cotton agriculture in the nineteenth century—and therefore the North had no need of slaves. “Because the climate of New England was healthful, and the white man could labour beneath its sun, and no pestilence drove him from its marshes,” black slavery disappeared, wrote Jonathan Wainwright, an Episcopal clergyman in New York City. (He did not intend this as a compliment to New England, though: “Had the banks of the Connecticut been rice meadows, its uplands the soil for cotton, and its summer climate fatal to all but the African race, the African race would, in all human probability, still be in bondage among us.”)
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Instead, the North turned to factory-based manufacturing, which could afford to dispense with a large permanent labor force and get along with a smaller, wage-paid labor supply. Beginning in 1813, when Francis Cabot Lowell built the first cotton textile factory (from plans stolen from British textile manufacturers), the old Northeast sprouted textile mills and manufacturing operations, employing 1.3 million workers. As early as 1826, Pennsylvania’s Chester County already had fourteen woolen factories and thirteen cotton mills, and by 1860 there were forty-nine mills and workshops along just one five-mile stretch of the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts. The coming of the mills to the cold and stony Northern states left only the cotton fields of the South as a viable home for slavery. By the time slavery began to be seen as a moral problem in the United States, it had become a Southern problem as well.

Yet the climate-and-soil argument cannot carry all the weight of explaining why the North lost slaves while the South multiplied them. After all, neither the climate nor the soil of much of the Northern states differed all that much from the climate and soil in a good deal of the slaveholding South. Even if cotton could not be easily grown in Connecticut, wheat could, and wheat was being harvested by slave labor in both Kentucky and Tennessee. Wheat, in fact, had been planted and harvested by slave labor in Pennsylvania as early as the 1680s, and 20 percent of all the manual labor in Quaker Philadelphia in the 1750s was being performed by black slaves. As Southerners themselves had begun to realize, there was no reason why slave labor could not run the mills as easily as hired white labor.
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The reasons for slavery’s disappearance in the North also have to be looked for in a number of more or less intangible sources. One of the least intangible of these causes was the American Revolution. In an effort to weaken American resistance, British occupation forces frequently lured “all indented Servants, Negroes, or others … willing to bear arms” to desert their masters and enter British lines, where freedom was promised as a reward. More often than not, that promise was honored in the breach. Slaves who ran away in Pennsylvania to join Sir William Howe’s occupation of Philadelphia or who ran away in Virginia to join Lord Dunmore’s “Ethiopian regiment” found themselves dumped by their erstwhile allies in Nova Scotia or sold back into slavery in the Bahamas. In May 1787, the abolitionist Granville Sharp employed 1,200 of them as the core of a black colonization experiment in Sierra Leone, on the west coast of Africa.

But the effect on the structures of slavery was significant: more than 5,000 Georgia slaves fled to the protection of King George when the British invaded Georgia in 1779, another 20,000 South Carolina slaves found refuge under British guns in Charleston, and 5,000 more (including thirty slaves belonging to Thomas Jefferson)
followed Lord Cornwallis’s ill-fated army to Yorktown. In New York City, which the British had occupied for most of the Revolution, runaway slaves swelled the free black population, while in Philadelphia the slave population had fallen from 1,400 to 400 by the close of the Revolution. Over the course of the war, upward of 80,000 American slaves (a fifth of the entire American slave population) ran away, joined the British, or found some other way of beating a path to freedom.
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The political idealism of the Revolution also encouraged, and sometimes forced, white slave owners to liberate their slaves. There were, as Samuel Johnson remarked, few things more incongruous than listening to yelps for liberty from the mouths of slave drivers. It remained the great and abiding paradox of the American argument over liberty and power that Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats, who wailed so persistently against the encroachments of power, rested their fortunes so routinely on depriving black slaves of liberty; and that Federalists and Whigs, who saw much more need for the exercise of power in government and commerce, were the least enthusiastic about slavery.

A number of Americans felt the pain of that paradox enough to manumit their slaves (as George Washington did in his will) or pass laws that at least ended the slave trade in their states. As early as 1774, the Massachusetts Provincial Convention suggested “that while we are attempting to free ourselves from our present embarrassments, and preserve ourselves from slavery, that we also take into consideration the state and circumstances of the negro slaves in this province.” By the time the Constitution was written, laws prohibiting the slave trade had been passed in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and slave owners such as Abijah Holbrook, a Connecticut miller, were “influenced by motives of humanity and benevolence” to free their slaves, “believing that all mankind are entitled to equal liberty and freedom.” Joseph Story, the brightest luminary among American lawyers, insisted in 1819 that “our constitutions of government have declared, that all men are born free and equal, and have certain inalienable rights, among which are the right of enjoying their lives, liberties, and property, and of seeking and obtaining their own safety and happiness. May not the miserable African ask, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’”
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Free blacks also took the future of their own people in hand. “Freedom suits” were filed by black Americans in northern courts, and litigious slaves in Massachusetts such as Quok Walker in
Walker v. Jennison
in 1781 (and its companion case,
Jennison v. Caldwell
) and Elizabeth Freeman in
Brom and Bett vs. Ashley
, also in 1781, claimed freedom on the grounds that the new Massachusetts constitution had declared that
all individuals were “born free and equal.” Others organized manumission societies to assist in purchasing the freedom of other blacks still in bondage, or prosecute slave owners guilty of abuse.
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More than secular political ideas, however, religious commitment formed the backbone of much of the North’s hostility to slavery. Protestant evangelicalism was as fully devoted to the importance of individual spiritual freedom as republicanism was devoted to political freedom, and the two ideologies found a common cause in opposing slavery just as evangelicals and Whigs had found common cause in promoting personal self-transformation. The most famous evangelical preacher in the North before the Civil War, Charles Grandison Finney, denounced “the abominable institution of slavery” and openly declared that “no slave holder could come to our communion.” The evangelicals were joined by other streams of religious dissent. The Quakers, awakened by the writing and preaching of Anthony Benezet and John Woolman, moved to admonish and then discipline slaveholders in 1750s, and by the time of the Revolution, slavery had disappeared almost entirely from American Quaker communities.
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Not all of the rising agitation against slavery was limited to the North. Prior to the 1830s, many Southerners expressed a sense of shame over slavery for both political and religious reasons. Thomas Jefferson offers one of the best-known and most ambivalent cases of Southern anti-slavery feeling, for Jefferson fully understood that slavery was a vicious and unjust system that mocked the liberty and equality he had made his political gospel. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” Jefferson declared; if there was no initiative to free the slaves, he could only “tremble for my country,” for he knew “that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only,” a slave uprising “is among possible events.” In that case, “the Almighty has no attribute which can takes side with us in such a contest.”
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And so Jefferson wrote the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which organized the new territories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin so that slavery
would be permanently illegal there. As late as 1827, there were 106 anti-slavery societies in the Southern states as opposed to 24 in the North, and with nearly five times as many members. In 1829, a convention called to rewrite Virginia’s state constitution heatedly debated the wisdom of perpetuating slavery in the Old Dominion. “I wish, indeed, that I had been born in a land where domestic and negro slavery is unknown,” announced one delegate to the convention. “I shall never wish that I had been born out of Virginia—but I wish, that Providence had spared my country this moral and political evil.”
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But anti-slavery opinion in the South remained weak, and palsied by racism. For all of Jefferson’s guilt over slaveholding, the right time and the right conditions for emancipation never quite seemed to come. As president, he deliberately turned a deaf ear to cooperation with a new black revolutionary republic in Haiti, which was at that moment struggling to throw back an invasion by the soldiers of a man Jefferson had declared to be a tyrant, Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1824, Georgia senator John Berrien, appearing before the Supreme Court as counsel for the owners of an illegal cargo of slaves seized on the high seas, actually asserted that slavery “lay at the foundation” of the Constitution, and that slaves “constitute the very bond of your union,” irrespective of any “speculative notions” of morality.
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The Virginians in the state constitutional convention who called for an end to slavery also wanted an end to African Americans in Virginia, and wished them to be bundled out of the sight of white people entirely. Farther South, as cotton grew more and more profitable, republican enthusiasm for abolition waned past the vanishing point.

The death blow to any form of Southern abolition movement came in August 1831 when a religious visionary named Nat Turner led seventy of his fellow-slaves in a short-lived but bloody insurrection in southeastern Virginia. The revolt was quickly and brutally put down, with Turner and his followers captured or butchered, but not before fifty-seven whites had also died. At Turner’s trial, it became apparent that he had cheerfully ordered the execution of every white man, woman, and child he had encountered, whether they were slave owners or not, and had hoped to spread his revolt throughout Virginia. Turner’s confessions served notice on Southern whites that it mattered nothing what their personal opinions on slavery were; Nat Turner would have massacred them all if given the chance.
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This realization served to drive nonslaveholding yeomen straight into the arms of planters, simply in the interest of self-protection. When the Virginia House of
Delegates resumed debate over the future of slavery in 1832, the question was put purely in terms of white survival: either expel the blacks completely from Virginia or institute measures that were even more repressive and ban all discussion of abolition as dangerous incitement. By a margin of 73 to 58, the decision came down, in effect, on the side of repression. After 1832, Virginians’ calls for abolition and transportation faded, and elsewhere in the South, any further attempts by whites to advocate freeing the slaves were denounced as treason and punished accordingly.
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This steady swing back in favor of the continuation of slavery in the 1820s produced, in the North, an equal but opposite reaction. With all the energies of religious and secular idealism flowing, free African Americans raised their voices in a chorus of eloquent protest. “I speak, Americans, for your good,” wrote David Walker, a free black shop owner in Boston in 1829. “We must and shall be free, I say, in spite of you. … God will deliver us from under you. And wo, wo, will be to you if we have to obtain our freedom by fighting.”
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Northern anti-slavery societies denounced the slide backward with new militancy, and on January 1, 1831, William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of the anti-slavery newspaper the
Liberator
from an office in Boston within sight of the Bunker Hill monument. With one sweep of defiant rhetoric, Garrison demanded an unconditional and immediate end to slavery. “I
will be
as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice,” Garrison promised on the first page of the
Liberator
. “I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—
AND I WILL BE HEARD
.” Garrison gave up any hope of converting the South to anti-slavery opinions. He was bent upon radicalizing the North, and his weapons were provocation and shock: “Be not afraid to look the monster
SLAVERY
boldly in the face,” Garrison cried in 1832. “He is your implacable foe—the vampyre who is sucking your life-blood—the ravager of a large portion of your country, and the enemy of God and man.”
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