A Disease in the Public Mind (24 page)

If several years passed without a serious disturbance, the discipline of the patrols tended to deteriorate. The newspapers carried frequent complaints about the carelessness and inefficiency of some patrols. But these cries of
alarm only underscored the intensity of the South's anxiety about slave insurrections. People who refused an order to serve in a patrol could be fined and even jailed.

Joining a slave patrol was serious business in other ways. The new arrival had to go before a justice of the peace and take a solemn oath:

I [patroller's name] do solemnly swear that I will search for guns, swords and other weapons among the slaves of my district, and as faithfully and as privately as I can, discharge the trust reposed in me as the law directs, to the best of my power. So help me God.

The specificity of the patroller's task leaves little room for doubt about the reason for his promise to serve. The word “privately” also reduced the possibility that a patroller might talk to a newspaper.
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Slave patrols were sometimes good at tracking down runaway slaves before they left their district. In this respect, they often competed with professional slave catchers, who searched for runaways expecting suitable compensation for their time and trouble. Some patrollers became so adept that they made slave-catching a full-time job. One man moved to New York and advertised in southern papers about his ability to seize runaways in that city.

Most of the time patrolling was tedious work, not unlike contemporary policing. Some bored patrollers felt free to drink while on the job. Often, the captain of the patrol was expected to furnish the alcohol as well as food, such as an oyster supper, paying for these pleasures out of his own pocket.

In a crisis, state and county boundaries were ignored. The first militia to arrive after Nat Turner's revolt in Virginia came from North Carolina, only a few miles away. State governors and other officials corresponded frequently about rumors of insurrectionary plots.

When the news of the first large-scale rebellion on Saint-Domingue reached South Carolina, the state organized coastal patrols to make sure blacks from the rebellious island did not reach its shores. Slave patrols were expanded everywhere from militia reserves.

The patrols played a curious and paradoxical role in southern life. Their existence more or less admitted that the slaves were unhappy and often
deeply resentful of their bondage and were a constant threat to white lives. Simultaneously the patrols assuaged these fears and enabled people to go about their daily routines with no more than passing qualms. Any attempt to use the patrols as an argument that slavery should be eliminated was dismissed with scorn. But in the hours of darkness, more than one Southerner, in the words of the best historian of the patrols, still “dreamed vivid racial nightmares.”
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Slave patrols are convincing evidence that Thomas Jefferson's nightmare—the dread of a race war—had become a fixture in the southern public mind.

CHAPTER 15

The Trouble with Texas

Congressman John Quincy Adams and his southern antagonists were soon deep in an argument much larger than the gag rule: the admission of Texas into the Union. The idea had on its side something far more powerful than constitutional contentions about slavery. North, South, and West, the American public mind of the 1840s was in the grip of an idea that united most of the country: Manifest Destiny. Numerous journalists, many of them spokesmen for the Democratic Party, foresaw an America that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific shores, absorbing the parts of the continent that lay beyond the boundaries of Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase.
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No one had been a more enthusiastic proponent of this idea than John Quincy Adams before he became embroiled with the issue of slavery. At a time when there already were three quarters of a million slaves in the nation, he predicted God had destined the United States “to be the most populous and most powerful people ever combined under one social compact.” When he was president, he had tried to buy Texas from a disorganized, unstable Mexico, which had won independence from Spain in 1821.
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President Andrew Jackson had continued the attempt to purchase this huge swath of prairie and plateau, stretching 750 miles from the Sabine River to the border of California, and almost as lengthy from the panhandle to the Rio Grande. Its loamy black soil promised riches for cotton growers and almost as much wealth for grain farmers. Larger than France, Texas was peopled only by a few Indian tribes and a scattering of small Mexican settlements. The mantra of Manifest Destiny lured thousands of Americans, often with the encouragement of the erratic Mexican government. By 1835 these pioneers numbered fifty thousand. The majority were Southerners, who had brought with them some five thousand slaves.
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Mexican authority grew more and more unpredictable as revolutionary governments came and went. When a one-legged dictator named General Antonio López de Santa Anna seized power and abolished all state governments, the Texans revolted and won America's attention with their heroic stand in a fort named the Alamo, facing a Mexican army that outnumbered them 30 to 1. Santa Anna's slaughter of wounded captives galvanized Texan resistance.

Within a year, an army led by an Andrew Jackson disciple, General Sam Houston, smashed the dictator's battalions in the 1836 battle of San Jacinto and captured him. Texas declared her independence, and cheering Americans deluged Washington, DC, with demands for immediate recognition. Most people had little doubt that this was only a necessary first step for Texas to join the Union.
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Instead of celebrating with the rest of the nation, several antislavery spokesmen viewed with horror the prospect of admitting another slave state to the Union. Into this emotionally charged political brew the abolitionists flung a new phrase, “The Slave Power.” They claimed that the whole process—the massive immigration, the importation of slaves, Houston's role as a Jackson emissary—was part of a long-range plot hatched by the South to take complete control of the United States government.
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Soon no American politician was doing more to popularize the use of “The Slave Power” than John Quincy Adams. To a confidential correspondent in Massachusetts, Adams stated his position: “There is no valid or
permanent objection to the acquisition of Texas but the indelible stain of slavery.” Adams ignored the way this claim contradicted his previous political principles. In 1803, Senator Adams had backed President Jefferson's right to buy Louisiana by treaty, to the outrage of not a few people in Massachusetts. In 1819, Secretary of State Adams had bought Florida from Spain by treaty. In both cases, slaves were involved. Now Adams told a skeptical House of Representatives that acquiring Texas and its few thousand slaves by treaty with Mexico was unconstitutional.
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For three weeks in the summer of 1838, Adams used his procedural skills to hold the floor of the House, frustrating Congress's hopes of achieving a quick vote to annex Texas. In the course of this filibuster he went public with his new political creed: “I believe that slavery is a sin before the sight of God, and that is the reason and the only insurmountable reason why we should not annex Texas to this union!”

It need hardly be added that “sin” is not an idea that can be found in the U.S. Constitution. Religion had invaded American politics in a totally unexpected way. It was not, as William Lloyd Garrison had hoped, by a mass conversion, but as the justification for flinging hatred at fellow Americans.

Old Man Eloquent was still holding the floor when Congress adjourned, and that meant he would have the floor when it reconvened for its next session in December. By that time, President Martin Van Buren had become so discouraged by the deluge of petitions and angry sermons against annexing Texas emanating from New England and the Yankee Midwest that he abandoned the idea as politically ruinous to his hopes for a second term.
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Abolitionists hailed this retreat as a victory over The Slave Power. But Texas was too big and its potential too huge to go away. Angry southern Democrats and southern Whigs became determined to make it part of the Union, no matter what the abolitionists—or the Mexicans—thought. Their determination increased exponentially when they learned that the British were negotiating with the Texas government, offering them recognition if they agreed to abolish slavery. London even proposed the sort of compensation for the Texans' freed slaves that had persuaded the West Indian planters to accept emancipation.

The British claimed the offer was part of their policy to eliminate slavery around the world. Not a few people saw it as a continuation of their previous attempts to restrict America's growth toward world power status. Not even John Quincy Adams favored it. He told two antislavery men who were going to a World Anti-Slavery Convention in London that he distrusted “the sincerity of the present British administration in the anti-slavery cause.”
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An unprecedented clash between a new president and Congress finally brought Texas into the Union as a slave state. In 1841, John Tyler became the first vice president to succeed a president who had died in office. His predecessor, William Henry Harrison, had been a Whig who expired after only a month in the White House. Tyler was a Virginia Democrat with a distinguished lineage. His father, also named John, had been Thomas Jefferson's roommate at the college of William and Mary and a three-term governor of Virginia. No one was surprised when the younger Tyler became Virginia's governor in his mid-thirties and a senator at thirty-seven. He had voted with the Whigs to protest Andrew Jackson's tendency to ignore Congress and rely on his presidential powers to run the government. The Whigs had added Tyler to their presidential ticket to attract wavering members of the larger Democratic Party.

When the Whigs, led by Senator Henry Clay, attempted to launch a program of expensive public works projects, they collided with Tyler's Democratic roots. Convinced that federal power should be kept to a strict minimum, he relentlessly vetoed their bills. The Whigs lacked the two-thirds Congressional majority needed to override him. Whig rage at Tyler reached epic proportions. He was regularly burned in effigy in the North and South. At one point his entire Whig cabinet, except Secretary of State Daniel Webster, resigned in a body.

Eager to be elected president in his own right, Tyler looked for an issue that would attract both Whigs and Democrats. There sat Texas, all but begging for his embrace. The idea coalesced with one of Tyler's deepest political convictions: expansion was the key to America's continuing political
peace and economic prosperity. He also saw expansion as the eventual answer to the problem of slavery. He had inherited this belief in diffusion from James Madison.

President Tyler first tried to annex Texas by treaty with Mexico. That prompted Secretary of State Daniel Webster to resign. Tyler made Senator Calhoun Webster's successor and chief negotiator. The president also persuaded Andrew Jackson to write an open letter urging annexation, lest Texas “be thrown into the arms of England.” The treaty failed to get a two-thirds vote in the Senate. In the political conventions for the election of 1844, both the Whigs and the Democrats refused to nominate the “accidental president,” as Tyler was often called.
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This rejection only made Tyler more determined to bring Texas into the Union. Soon after the voters chose a pro-admission Democrat, James K. Polk, as the new president, Tyler announced that Texas could be annexed by a joint resolution of both houses of Congress. He argued this move would only ratify the expressed will of the American people in their choice of Polk, a disciple of Andrew Jackson. The proposal outraged John Quincy Adams and his small band of antislavery supporters in Congress. They had already issued an address to the people of the United States warning that the annexation of Texas was a “slaveholders' plot”—fresh evidence of how Slave Power paranoia was gaining a grip on their minds.

Adams had also tried to persuade the House Foreign Affairs Committee, of which he was chairman, to approve a resolution declaring that any attempt to annex Texas by Congress would be null and void. He argued that it violated the Constitution, and the people of the free states should refuse to accept it. Adams followed this up with a tour of northern New York and the Midwest. Everywhere he called for “the extinction of slavery from the face of the earth.” But he offered no proposals on how this goal could be achieved. Instead, his speeches were drenched with hate-filled rants about The Slave Power.
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In Washington, DC, Senator Calhoun issued a reply to Adams's campaign. He said American slavery was drastically different from the brutal version that the British had abolished in the West Indies. He even praised the British for this “wise and humane” decision. In America, slavery was a
reasonable, rational political institution, whose “employees” were far better off than the factory workers of England and New England. Slavery was vital to the “peace, safety and prosperity” of the southern states. There was therefore no reason why it should not thrive in the state on their present border, Texas.

The statement added vigor to this new disease of the public mind, which would soon became epidemic in the South. It had just enough truth in it to seem persuasive to men and women of the 1840s. American plantation owners were more humane than the British and French planters in the West Indies, who resorted to horrendous cruelties to intimidate slaves and worked them to death as a matter of policy. But Calhoun's refusal to consider slaves as human beings with a natural longing for freedom nullified his argument.
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