A Disease in the Public Mind (26 page)

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In 1846 antiwar voters had given the Whigs a slim majority in the House, bringing to Congress a tall Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Originally
a supporter of the war with Mexico, the elongated (six-foot-four) attorney joined enthusiastically in the Whig campaign, led by Senator Henry Clay, to label President Polk a warmonger who had “invaded” Mexican territory. Their partisan reasoning was lost on most Americans, who refused to forget that it was the Mexicans who had ambushed and killed American soldiers to start the war.

Of far more significance was a bill that Congressman Lincoln submitted for the approval of the House. It called for the emancipation of the slaves in the District of Columbia. But instead of condemning slave owners with imprecations like William Lloyd Garrison and John Quincy Adams, Lincoln proposed that the “treasury of the United States” should pay the owners “the full value for his or her slave.” It demonstrated the (seemingly) uneducated prairie lawyer's independence from the mounting abolitionist frenzy.

Compensated emancipation had psychological and spiritual dimensions as well as an economic side. It brushed aside the abolitionists' hatred of slave owners based on their religious conviction that slavery was a sin. Instead, it recognized that slavery was a system that the South had inherited two centuries ago. The current generation of slave owners was not guilty. They had not invented the system, and not a few of them admitted it was evil. It also recognized that, by the same accident of history, slaves were valuable property, even if the idea grated on some sensibilities.

Alas, Lincoln's bill never reached the floor of the House and sank into oblivion. But the
New York Tribune
praised the congressman as “a strong but judicious enemy of slavery.”
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On Monday, February 21, 1848, John Quincy Adams rode to the capitol in his carriage. A stroke had left him a ghost of his previously fiery self, but his opinion of the Mexican War had not changed. When a motion was made to allow Congress to vote their thanks to Winfield Scott and other generals for their exploits in the war, Adams voted a loud and emphatic NO. The motion won by a huge majority.

His defeat only hardened Adams's determination to vote even more emphatically against a third and final reading of the resolution. Before the roll
call reached him, a rush of blood colored his temples and Adams slumped in his chair, unconscious. A nearby congressman caught him before he crashed to the floor. He was carried to a sofa in the speaker's office and died two days later.

As a patriot whose lineage and experience reached back to the days of 1776, John Quincy Adams was mourned by Democrats and Whigs alike; even a South Carolina congressman spoke of him with respect and sorrow. The citizens of Washington, DC, praised him at a public meeting. He lay in state in a silver embossed coffin while funeral services were conducted by the chaplain of the House of Representatives.

The praise was unquestionably deserved. In his youth Adams had been an outstanding diplomat. As President George Washington left office, he had urged incoming president John Adams not to feel the least uneasiness about promoting his son to even more responsible foreign tasks. John Quincy had been a key player in negotiating the treaty that ended the War of 1812. As secretary of state under James Monroe, he had written the Monroe Doctrine, which did much to end European intrusions in South America. Few men were more qualified to become president in 1824.

If John Quincy Adams had capped this magnificent career by healing the breach between the North and South, it would have been his greatest accomplishment. As a first step, Adams might have rebuked Garrison and his fellow extremists with their impossible demands for immediate abolition. Next, he might have become an advocate for compensated emancipation, a crucial part of a practical solution, as the British had demonstrated in the West Indies. If a virtually self-educated Illinois congressman named Lincoln saw this ingredient as part of the answer, a Harvard graduate of John Quincy's intellectual stature could have—and should have—grasped its value at a glance.

Like Lincoln, Adams could have started small, proposing compensation for the slaves of the District of Columbia. Other men might have applied it to border states such as Delaware and Maryland, where slavery was already dwindling. Adams might have reached out to Thomas Jefferson Randolph and helped him persuade Virginia to accept the solution. There were strong
unionist sentiments among a large percentage of southern voters, but they were inhibited by the fear that emancipation meant a race war. There were ways to reduce this fear that might have been acceptable to both sections. A bond issue might have been floated to raise money to station troops in parts of southern states where the density of the black population made a revolt a possibility. The British had followed this policy in the West Indies. At the very least it would have been meaningful to hear an ex-president from New England say he understood and sympathized with the South's fears and as a fellow American wanted to join them in a search for a solution.

As a former president, John Quincy Adams had once been a spokesman for all the people of America and should have felt a compelling loyalty to the central idea of the American republic, the Union. When he was elected to Congress, he had declared he would be the representative of the entire nation. He had spoken out strongly, even fiercely, against John C. Calhoun's doctrine of nullification. Adams had once admired George Washington so deeply that he had named his firstborn son after him (to the dismay of his parents). Instead, Congressman Adams had closed his career ignoring Washington's plea to regard the Union as a sacred trust above all others. The congressman abandoned the principles that had once made him a national leader and become another snarling Southerner-hating New England voice of disunity.

Of all the victims of this disease of the public mind that distorted the noble cause of antislavery, John Quincy Adams is the saddest, most regrettable story. Far more powerfully than his southern counterpart, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Adams had the potential to alter the debate and remind Americans of the 1830s and 1840s of the heritage they were in danger of forgetting. Among the many might-have-beens on the twisting road to the Civil War, the seeming success—and hidden failure—of Old Man Eloquent was the one in which a change of mind or heart might have made a huge difference.

CHAPTER 16

Slave Power Paranoia

By the time the Mexican War ended, paranoia about The Slave Power was virulent throughout New England and among her Midwest emigrants. The original abolitionist hope that they could change the minds of Southerners through “missionary work” had expired. William Lloyd Garrison now called the idea “a useless waste of time.” No longer would they deluge the South with pamphlets or bury Congress in blizzards of petitions. Instead, they hoped to “abolitionize the North” by portraying The Slave Power as a corrupt and decadent society whose inequity had to be trumpeted to the world.

The abolitionists convinced themselves, based on their evangelical experiences, that smearing the South's reputation in every possible way would create the “anxiety” that would lead to a mass conversion of the North to their crusade. In an analogy that was tortured at best, and blasphemous at worst, the South was portrayed as a province ruled by Satan that would consume the North's soul if her citizens did not vow to expunge the sin of slavery. It was the evangelical camp meeting on a national scale, accusing
the South of four unforgiveable sins: violence, drunkenness, laziness, and sexual depravity.
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Abolitionists declared that the South's “lust for power” was built into the system because from boyhood Southerners learned to tyrannize their male slaves and exploit defenseless female slaves. That was why the South had become “an erotic society” which encouraged whites to “all the vicious gratifications that unrestrained lust can amalgamate.” From Richmond to New Orleans, “the Southern states are one great Sodom.”
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This absorption with pleasure had supposedly produced a society that regarded work as degrading. Southerners saw it as something that only slaves performed. Free white laborers in the South were almost as worthless as slave labor, which everyone knew was inferior because it was unrewarded. Presiding over this swamp of decadence and degradation were the great planters, who looked down with scorn on the “mud-sills” of society, white and black, and devoted their days to loathsome pleasures.

Abolitionist clergymen developed a jeremiad on The Slave Power. They identified it as the anti-Christ, come to terrifying life in America after their Protestant ancestors had defeated this evil being in a centuries-long struggle with the Catholic Church in Europe. The South was “the apocalyptic dragon” of the book of Revelations, rising to strangle freedom in the North as it had already extinguished it in the South.
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No one loved this rhetoric more than William Lloyd Garrison. “The spirit of southern slavery,” he declared, “is a spirit of EXTERMINATION against all those who represent it as a dishonor to our country, rebellion against God and treason to the liberties of mankind.” Senator William Sumner of Massachusetts summed up this rampaging hatred with three questions he roared at a rapt audience in Boston's Faneuil Hall. “Are you for freedom? Or are you for slavery? Are you for God or the Devil?”
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Others saw Slave Power plots in the early history of the republic. First came the concessions southern spokesmen demanded at the Constitutional Convention. Then they acquired the immense territory of Louisiana for slavery's expansion. Next came Jefferson's embargo, which crippled New England's commercial power. In the War of 1812, southern generals had
prevented “the brave soldiers of New England and New York from capturing Canada.” These were, of course, the same New England soldiers who had refused to serve beyond the borders of their states, in defiance of “Mr. Madison's War.”

Paranoid history is indifferent to facts. The Slave Power preachers told their followers that the South had fallen far behind the North in wealth—the exact opposite of the truth. By playing off the two political parties against each other, they claimed the slavocrats had elected presidents and congressmen and senators and chosen judges of the Supreme Court. The Slave Power had caused the financial panic of 1837 by draining the wealth of the North into endless needless expansion exemplified by the Mexican War. For a final touch, there were invented quotations attributed to John C. Calhoun: “The North must be shorn of her natural strength when needful, that slavery may preserve her balance of power.”

Perhaps the most amazing—and dismaying—aspect of this raging final stage of the abolitionist disease in the public mind was the relatively small number of men who perpetrated it. One of slavery's best historians estimates that the paranoid phase of the campaign was launched by little more than twenty-five people.
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Did the campaign of slander about the South's sexual exploitation of its slaves have any basis in fact? The mulatto population of the South, as recorded in the censuses of 1850 and 1860, suggests a rather low rate of miscegenation. In the nation as a whole, the census takers of 1850 counted 406,000 “visibly mulatto” people out of a black population of 3,639,000, which is 11.2 percent of the total. About 350,000 mulattoes lived south of the Mason-Dixon line.
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These figures make it clear that there was a considerable amount of sexual activity between the two races, even if it was a long way from meriting the term “unrestrained lust.” There were many factors that kept the percentage relatively low. A master who recklessly seduced his slaves would demoralize his plantation. A white overseer exhibiting such a tendency would usually
be fired. Slaves were accustomed to making stable marriages. The average age at which a slave woman gave birth to her first child was 22.5. This does not suggest teenage girls having wild sex by the tens of thousands.

A strong religious faith persuaded many Southerners to take their marriage vows seriously. At least as important was the genuine love that existed between most husbands and wives. At the same time, slaves were subject people. A master who wanted to assert his dominance undoubtedly possessed the power, and there are more than a few examples of men who did so.

One of the most deplorable cases is James Henry Hammond of South Carolina. A governor, congressman, and senator, he was semifamous as one of the first who declared, “Cotton is king!” Over three hundred slaves toiled on his ten-thousand-acre Silver Bluff plantation. Hammond regarded stable marriages among his slaves as crucial to the good order of the plantation. A slave who committed adultery was liable to severe punishment.

Nevertheless, for twenty years Hammond maintained a
ménage á trois
with two black women, Sally Johnson and her daughter Louisa, who worked in his mansion as servants. He had children by both of them, and in his will he begged his oldest son to care for the women and their offspring. His wife discovered the truth early in their marriage, but she seemed powerless to do more than berate him and treat the defenseless black women with livid hostility.
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Was Hammond typical of slave owners? Apparently not. Was his example lurid enough to “prove” the wildest fantasies of the abolitionists? Unquestionably, yes.