What Hath God Wrought (10 page)

The apologetic attitude toward slavery, common around 1815, soon began to be challenged by a new justification for slavery: planter paternalism. In colonial times, masters had candidly and unflinchingly admitted that they owned slaves for profit and that the institution rested upon force. The notion of paternalism provided a framework for discussing slavery different from both naked self-interest and the violation of natural rights. Slaveowners, in response to moral criticism, sought to explain their relationship to “their people” as one of caring for those who could not look after themselves. Negroes as a race, they insisted, were childlike. Demeaning and offensive as this “domestic” attitude toward slavery was, it at least acknowledged that the slaves were human beings and not beasts of burden. Viewed objectively, paternalism seems less an overall characterization of American slavery than a rationalization on the part of the masters. If there is a kernel of truth in the paternalist legend it may be this: While the average slaveowner was forty-three, the average age of slaves was under eighteen.
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Paternalism never extended to include overseers hired by the master. They always had a reputation for cruelty, partly because masters blamed them for whatever went wrong, mostly because of the conflicting expectations placed upon them: to bring in as large a crop as possible, but with as little harm as possible to their employer’s valuable slave property. The reasonably good health of the enslaved population by standards of the day, evinced in their height and natural increase, can be attributed to a diet almost as nutritious as the one free farmers ate. Strong, healthy slaves reflected the conjunction of self-interest with paternalist responsibility on the master’s part. No one explained this better than the distinguished Virginia planter who admonished his overseer not to overwork “a breeding woman” (his term) but to remember that her healthy baby was worth more money than her extra labor would represent—adding that “in this, as in all other cases, providence has made our interests & our duties coincide perfectly.”
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Almost half of all slaves lived on plantations with at least thirty others in their situation. In some ways, these slaves were relatively lucky. They had more privacy than an isolated enslaved individual or family could expect as the property of a white small farmer. They enjoyed more opportunities for social life and the nourishment of their own distinctive culture, music, and folktales. They had a better chance to find a marriage partner on their own plantation and thus avoid the inconveniences of having a spouse miles away whom they could only see on weekends. Masters of large plantations often allowed each slave nuclear family a garden of their own behind their living quarters; these could consist of several acres. Such slaves managed to engage in small-scale composite farming, supplementing their allotted rations, trading produce with their neighbors, even earning cash to spend on little luxuries. All such privileges were held, of course, on sufferance of their owners. But in their aspirations for a modicum of personal security, dignity, and tangible reward for hard work, enslaved American families resembled other American families.
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Not that slaves felt satisfied with the rewards available to them in their bondage. Some labored diligently for years to buy their own freedom, even though their master could legally take their money and break his promise. Slaves resisted their bondage in countless small ways; they malingered, damaged property, ran away, and in general matched wits with whoever supervised them. The master class labored under no illusions of black contentment. Masters insisted on “pass laws” for slaves found wandering and on “slave patrols” to enforce the laws. (White men were obligated to take a turn on these patrols even if they did not themselves own slaves.) The fear of insurrection haunted the white South; sometimes it is hard for historians to tell real slave conspiracies from ones the whites imagined. This fear profoundly affected all debates over slavery. Although they owned slaves in order to profit, American masters would not even consider a general emancipation in return for financial compensation, such as slaveowners received in the British West Indies in 1833. Most southern whites, whether they owned slaves or not, feared emancipation would invite black rebellion.
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Although united in their support for white supremacy, white southerners varied a great deal in other ways. Yeoman farmers lived much like yeoman farmers in the North, even if the prosperous ones had a slave family sleeping on the floor of the kitchen building. Landless whites lived worse, driven to the margins of the southern economy, taking jobs too temporary to justify an investment in slave labor. Because they moved so frequently, they found it hard to get the credit on which most forms of economic improvement depended and might resort to hunting, fishing, or squatting on public land. Recognizing the plight of wage labor in the South, few free immigrants chose to settle there. The middle class of the scattered towns (the South contained few cities) prayed in similar churches, voted for the same national politicians, and belonged to most of the same voluntary associations as their northern counterparts.
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The southern planter class, however, constituted a highly distinctive social group. Much of the romantic mythology surrounding them (even then) was fictional. Hardly ever descended from aristocratic European ancestors, the large slaveholders were modern, not medieval, in their sensibilities. Often parvenus, they operated at the very heart of the global market economy and ran their plantations with as much attention to efficient moneymaking as northern merchants showed for their ships and mills.
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As the historian Joyce Appleby has pointed out, the plantation owners were “the great consumers of the American economy,” with their big houses, their lavish hospitality, their horse races, and hordes of domestic servants.
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In their printed periodicals they read about attractive transatlantic concepts of “politeness” and good taste. The large planters, America’s wealthiest class, were in a position to acquire what others could only sample carefully. In a nation of austerity and thrift, they opted for extravagance, honor, and refinement. Like their exemplar Thomas Jefferson, many American plantation owners lived well and died broke. Americans of the twenty-first century may look back upon them as our precursors in some ways, for like them we too spend even more than our relatively high average incomes and slide more and more into debt to outside creditors (in their case, northerners and Europeans).

Their strong sense of common interest enabled the slaveowning planters to become the most politically powerful social group in the United States. They dominated southern state governments. The Constitution’s three-fifths rule (counting five of their slaves as three free persons) enhanced their representation in Congress and the electoral college. In 1815, they had held the presidency for twenty-two of the past twenty-six years, and they would control it for all but eight of the next thirty-four.
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V

Washington, D.C., presented a strange aspect in 1815. The ambitious design of the original city planner, Pierre L’Enfant, had been adopted but not implemented. The Capitol and the White House, monumental in design, looked incongruous in their muddy surroundings, their construction (with slave labor) set back years after the British army burned them in 1814. The community had no economic rationale save the government, but the government’s presence in the city remained slight; as a result Washington grew slowly and haphazardly. For decades to come, every visitor would be struck by the discrepancy between its grand ambitions and their limited realization. As late as 1842, Charles Dickens called it a “City of Magnificent Intentions.” Few government officials even lived the year round in Washington, its summers notoriously humid and unpleasant. During the months when Congress met in session (winter and spring), the members roomed together in boardinghouses, then fled back to their families, who had remained in their constituencies. The District of Columbia, like the United States as a whole, embodied big plans but remained mostly empty. America and its capital city lived for the future.
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In 1815, America was still more potential than realization. The Western world looked upon it as an example of what liberty could achieve for good or ill, but the experiment had not yet unfolded very far. The economy remained preindustrial, though its people’s outlook was innovative and ambitious. By 1848, a great deal of development had occurred, often in ways no one would have predicted. Between 1815 and 1848, the United States achieved gigantic expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific, both in the extension of its sovereignty and in the actual movement of people on the ground. The widespread participation of Americans in a global market economy had long since turned the Atlantic Ocean into a commercial highway; now, the innovations in transportation and communications would enable Americans to traverse and exploit the vast continent to their west as well. Their imperial ambitions brought them into conflict with the people already living athwart their path, Native Americans and Mexicans. Their ambitions also brought white Americans into disagreement with each other. What version of their society would be projected westward: an agricultural one, producing staples for export to the world, often by means of slave labor? Or the mixture of agriculture and commerce typified by the enterprise of Aaron and Fanny Fuller, producing for domestic consumers, some of them urban? Should America expand much as it already was, or should it be a reformed and improved America that rose to continental dominance and moral leadership?

In the years between 1815 and 1848, two rival political programs appeared, reflecting rival sets of hopes. Some Americans felt largely satisfied with their society the way it was, slavery and all, especially with the autonomy it provided to so many individual white men and their local communities. They wanted their familiar America extended across space. Other Americans, however, were beguiled by the prospect of improvement to pursue economic diversification and social reform, even at the risk of compromising some precious personal and local independence. They envisioned qualitative, not just quantitative, progress for America. In the long run, the choice was more than an economic decision; it was a moral one, as the tall, prophetic figure of Sojourner Truth, preaching the coming judgment like a latter-day John the Baptist, reminded her countrymen.

Mail coming from New Orleans to Washington, traveling across the Natchez Trace route, usually took about three weeks, but the harsh winter of 1814–15 made it slower. While Washington waited “in awful suspense,”
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news of the great victory at New Orleans took a full four weeks by the fastest horsemen, arriving on Saturday, February 4. It provoked delirious rejoicing; all that night the District of Columbia blazed with candles and torches, as if to mimic in celebration the horror of the burning of the White House and Capitol by enemy invaders only five months earlier. Never has good news been more badly needed or more anxiously awaited. By act of Congress and presidential proclamation, January 12 had been a day of national prayer and fasting; though they did not know it, the people’s prayers had already been answered.
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On Monday, February 6, President James Madison issued another proclamation: This time, coming after a weekend of festivities, it was a full pardon for the pirates of Louisiana who had rallied to Jackson’s call. (Alas, the pirates proved incorrigible, and within the year the president needed to order out the navy against them again.)
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To say that Jackson’s victory came as an enormous relief to Madison would be an understatement. The previous six months had been probably the most harrowing that any president has ever been called upon to endure. In August the British had landed an expeditionary force in Chesapeake Bay and advanced upon Washington. Secretary of War John Armstrong had belittled the possibility of such an invasion and impeded preparations to defend against it. The president made it clear that he lacked confidence in the secretary and had curtailed his authority without actually replacing him. With the enemy nearing the capital by both land and water, American military intelligence was so inadequate, and staff work so nonexistent, that when a scouting party formed to ascertain the position of the redcoats, Secretary of State James Monroe saddled up and led it. For political reasons, the defense of the nation’s capital had been entrusted to Brigadier General William H. Winder, an officer of demonstrated incompetence. Winder and Secretary Armstrong were jealous of each other and showed more concern with shifting blame for what was going wrong than with rectifying it.
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Even before the scouts located the enemy, the citizens of Washington began to pack up and flee the city, fearful not only of the British army but also of persistent rumors of slave insurrection. In fact, although the British in the Chesapeake campaign did not call upon the slaves to revolt, they did promise freedom for those who would rally to their cause (as they had also done during the Revolutionary War). About three hundred escaped slaves donned the uniform of Royal Marines and—with very little training—showed “extraordinary steadiness and good conduct” in combat against their former oppressors, the British commander reported. Many other escapees helped the British as spies, guides, and messengers. The fear of slave insurrection forced the Americans to divert large numbers of militiamen away from the battlefront into preserving domestic security.
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At Bladensburg, Maryland, on August 24, 1814, seven thousand Americans faced forty-five hundred British. With the tactical advantages of the defense as well as numbers, the Americans should have been able to repel the invaders. But the hastily assembled local militia were undisciplined and poorly positioned, and their units uncoordinated. When the British artillery opened up with Congreve rockets—a novel weapon more spectacular than lethal—some of the militia panicked. At this juncture, with battle scarcely joined, Winder ordered a general retreat. The panic spread, the retreat became a rout, and the road back to Washington was littered with unfired muskets thrown away by militiamen in a hurry. The verdict of history terms Bladensburg “the greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms,” and the defense—or rather, nondefense—of Washington “the most humiliating episode in American history.”
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Yet, as at New Orleans, the American artillery performed well; its guns covered the flight of the militia. African Americans fought on both sides, and “a large part” of these cannoneers “were tall, strapping negroes, mixed with white sailors and marines.”
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The crowd of fugitives included the president of the United States. On the field of combat the commander in chief had not even been able to control his horse, much less his army. Madison and his cabinet secretaries, after witnessing the first stages of the farcical “battle,” galloped off in different directions and went into hiding, out of touch with each other, leaving the country leaderless. Congress was taking its accustomed summer vacation, its members out of town. In this political vacuum, responsibility for the evacuation of the executive mansion fell to the first lady. Unlike most of those around her, Dolley Madison kept her head and safeguarded some of the national treasures (including Gilbert Stuart’s famous portrait of George Washington) in organizing her departure. But when Mrs. Madison sought refuge the next day at a Virginia farmhouse, the housewife cursed her because her husband had been called up for militia service, and threw the first lady and her entourage out. It was all too typical of the disrespect into which military humiliation had cast the country’s leaders.
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The advancing British columns found their way to the public buildings of central Washington with such ease that contemporaries believed they must have been guided by traitorous informants. At the President’s House (not yet called the White House), they found the main dining room set with food and wine for forty guests—a banquet had been scheduled for that evening. The laughing redcoats feasted themselves and drank a sarcastic toast to “Jemmy’s health” before putting the torch to the building.
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Besides the presidential mansion, the British burned the Capitol and the Departments of State, War, Navy, and Treasury. A rainstorm blew up during the night and quenched most of the flames, but not before millions of dollars’ worth of damage had been done and thousands of volumes in the original Library of Congress destroyed. Damage was exacerbated by looting, committed not by the enemy but by locals, “knavish wretches about the town who profited from the general distress,” a Washington newspaper reported. The burning of the public buildings did not represent the casual vandalism of drunken soldiers; the fires had been set on orders from Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, overall British commander in the Chesapeake, who sent a message notifying President Madison that the action constituted a reprisal for earlier outrages committed by the Americans during their invasion of Canada. The most significant of these incidents had been the burning of the parliament house of Upper Canada when the Americans captured York (now Toronto) in April 1813.
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The municipal authorities of Georgetown and Alexandria rushed off messengers assuring the British they would capitulate without a fight; Alexandria’s surrender was accepted, but the British actually had no intention of occupying Georgetown.
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Instead the invaders moved on Baltimore. Only the successful defense put up at Fort McHenry on September 13, immortalized by Francis Scott Key in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” kept that city from sharing the fate of Washington. The British then evacuated as quickly as they had come, taking with them some twenty-four hundred African American men, women, and children who had seized the opportunity to escape from slavery. In all but a few cases the British kept their promise of freedom to these people, most of whom wound up settling in Nova Scotia. For eleven years after the war the United States pursued Britain to obtain compensation for their former masters, and eventually collected.
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Strategically, the purpose of the British raid on the Chesapeake had been to distract the Americans from efforts to conquer Canada; psychologically, to discredit the Madison administration. Both objectives were attained. No wonder an October visitor to Octagon House in Washington (at the corner of New York Avenue and Eighteenth Street), where the Madisons lived during the repair of the President’s House, found the chief executive looking “miserably shattered and woe-begone.”
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Madison’s troubles were political as well as military, involving his own party, the Jeffersonian Republicans,
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and his cabinet. Even in defeat, Secretary of War Armstrong represented a political faction Madison must treat with care, the prowar Republicans of New York. So the president graciously allowed Armstrong to resign instead of firing him; Armstrong repaid Madison’s consideration with years of recriminations.
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Madison transferred Armstrong’s rival, James Monroe, to the War Department, creating a vacancy at the State Department that went unfilled, so Monroe handled both jobs until he worked himself to exhaustion. The Treasury and Navy Departments also needed new heads, but again it proved difficult to find appropriate candidates willing to perform such thankless tasks. The prestige of the federal government had sunk so low and the prospects for victory in the war become so doubtful that few politicians cared to identify themselves with the administration. State and local governments, frightened by the prospect of further British raids along the coast, were losing interest in overall war strategy and concentrating on their own defenses, even disregarding federal authority. In a way they had justification for doing so, for the successful defense of Baltimore had been mounted by the Maryland authorities, not by the federal ones.
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On September 19, 1814, Congress assembled, summoned into a special session by the president. It met in the only public building in Washington to have escaped destruction, the Post Office
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Patent Office. Even though surrounded by the charred evidence of their country’s plight, the elected representatives of the people could not bring themselves to meet the urgent needs the president laid before them. He called for universal military conscription, and they responded by authorizing more short-term volunteers and state militia, specifying that the latter would not have to serve outside their own or an adjacent state without the consent of their own governors. Recent Treasury attempts to borrow having failed, the president asked for a new national bank to enable the government to raise money for the war and to restore the collapsed financial system of the country. After long debate the congressmen substituted a paper-money measure that Madison felt compelled to veto. They even quibbled over Thomas Jefferson’s generous offer to sell his magnificent library to the federal government as a replacement for the lost Library of Congress. The legislators did conduct a congressional investigation into the fall of Washington and made more trouble for Madison by debating a proposal to move the nation’s capital back to Philadelphia on the grounds that it would be more militarily defensible. (The change only narrowly lost in the House, 83 to 74.) In short, Congress put Madison’s exemplary patience to a severe test. “How much distress in every branch of our affairs” resulted from lack of congressional cooperation, he complained to a fellow ex-president.
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Nominally, Madison’s Republican Party enjoyed a large majority in Congress. In fact, little party discipline existed, and the Republicans had been badly factionalized throughout the war. Once news arrived, in the summer of 1812, that the British had repealed their Orders in Council restricting American commerce, congressional Republicans divided over the wisdom of persisting in the war for the sake of resisting impressment alone. Speaker of the House Langdon Cheves of South Carolina was no friend of the administration; House Ways and Means Committee chairman John Wayles Eppes, son-in-law of Thomas Jefferson, proved a thorn in Madison’s side. Several of the legislative leaders to whom the president might have looked for support were absent, in the armed forces or away on crucial diplomatic missions, like Henry Clay, across the ocean trying to negotiate a peace. Congressmen calling themselves “Old” Republicans remained such stubborn adherents of their little-government, low-tax, state-rights philosophy that no national emergency could budge them, though the president belonged to their own party. Even Madison’s friend and mentor Jefferson sided with his son-in-law and against the proposed second national bank; it was one of the few times Jefferson and Madison did not cooperate with each other. The minority party, the Federalists, constituted the natural friends of national authority, but in the present situation they behaved as the most obstructionist of all Madison’s opponents. Bitterly hostile to an administration that had ruined their commerce and destroyed Alexander Hamilton’s financial system, they were not about to grant assistance to wage a war they deplored.
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After the debacle at Washington, Federalist opposition to the war escalated. Federalist Massachusetts and Connecticut withdrew their militia from federal service. A Federalist-sponsored convention of New England states met at Hartford, Connecticut, from December 15 to January 5, deliberating in secret what steps to take in response to the crisis. A week after its adjournment, the convention’s report appeared on January 12—by coincidence also the day of national prayer, fasting, and humiliation. Speculation had been rife as to what the convention might decide: Secession and the negotiation of a separate peace with the British seemed not at all unthinkable. But in fact, moderate Federalists led by Harrison Gray Otis dominated the Hartford Convention, and its outcome, when revealed, proved less threatening than the Republicans had feared. Protesting that the administration had neglected to protect New England while diverting military effort to unsuccessful invasions of Canada, the convention asked that states be allowed to assume responsibility for their own defense, receiving some federal revenues to help pay the cost. Otherwise the delegates simply repeated the standard complaints of Federalist New England and called for amendments to the Constitution to correct them. Their grievances included the constitutional provision allowing the slave states extra representation in Congress for three-fifths of the people they held as property. (Only because of this clause had Jefferson defeated John Adams in the election of 1800, driving the Federalists from power.) Other requested amendments would have required two-thirds congressional majorities to declare war, embargo commerce, or admit new states. Presidents would be limited to one term and could not come from the same state as their predecessor. Federal offices would be restricted to native-born citizens (New England having relatively few immigrants at the time). When he read the recommendations, Madison is said to have laughed aloud
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—a reflex that might have expressed either his relief or his recognition of the political impossibility of such amendments. Although its Federalist sponsors have received much criticism, both in their own time and since, the resolutions of the Hartford Convention proved in the end less of a long-term danger to the federal Union than the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, which had championed state nullification of federal laws. Only one Hartford action posed even a potential threat: if the war continued until next June, the delegates resolved, a call should go out for another New England convention, presumably to seek more drastic remedies.
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