A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (55 page)

Ironically, many of the antislavery societies got their start in the South, where the first three periodicals to challenge slavery appeared, although all three soon moved to free states or Maryland.
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Not surprisingly, after the Nat Turner rebellion in August 1831, which left fifty-seven whites brutally murdered, many Southern churches abandoned their view that slavery was a necessary evil and accepted the desirability of slavery as a means of social control. Turner’s was not the first active resistance to slavery. Colonial precedents included the Charleston Plot, and in 1807 two shiploads of slaves starved themselves to death rather than submit to the auction block. In 1822 a South Carolina court condemned Denmark Vesey to the gallows for, it claimed, leading an uprising. Vesey, a slave who had won a lottery and purchased his freedom with the winnings, established an African Methodist Church in Charleston, which had three thousand members. Although it was taken as gospel for more than a century that Vesey actually led a rebellion, historian Michael Johnson, obtaining the original court records, has recently cast doubt on whether any slave revolt occurred at all. Johnson argues that the court, using testimony from a few slaves obtained through torture or coercion, framed Vesey and many others. Ultimately, he and thirty-five “conspirators” were hanged, but the “rebellion” may well have been a creation of the court’s.
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In addition to the Vesey and Nat Turner uprisings, slave runaways were becoming more common, as demonstrated by the thousands who escaped and thousands more who were hunted down and maimed or killed. Nat Turner, however, threw a different scare into Southerners because he claimed as the inspiration for his actions the prompting of the Holy Spirit.
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A “sign appearing in the heavens,” he told Thomas Gray, would indicate the proper time to “fight against the Serpent.”
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The episode brought Virginia to a turning point—emancipation or complete repression—and it chose the latter. All meetings of free blacks or mulattoes were prohibited, even “under the pretense or pretext of attending a religious meeting.”
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Anne Arundel County, Maryland, enacted a resolution requiring vigilante committees to visit the houses of every free black “regularly” for “prompt correction of misconduct,” or in other words, to intimidate them into staying indoors.
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The message of the Vesey/Turner rebellions was also clear to whites: blacks had to be kept from Christianity, and Christianity from blacks, unless a new variant of Christianity could be concocted that explained black slavery in terms of the “curse of Ham” or some other misreading of scripture.

If religion constituted one pillar of proslavery enforcement, the law constituted another. Historian David Grimsted, examining riots in the antebellum period, found that by 1835 the civic disturbances had taken on a distinctly racial flavor. Nearly half of the riots in 1835 were slave or racially related, but those in the South uniquely had overtones of mob violence supported, or at the very least, tolerated, by the legal authorities.
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Censorship of mails and newspapers from the North, forced conscription of free Southern whites into slave patrols, and infringements on free speech all gradually laid the groundwork for the South to become a police state; meanwhile, controversies over free speech and the right of assembly gave the abolitionists the issue with which they ultimately went mainstream: the problem of white rights affected by the culture and practice of slave mastery.
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By addressing white rights to free speech, instead of black rights, abolitionists sanitized their views, which in many cases lay so outside the accepted norms that to fully publicize them would risk ridicule and dismissal. This had the effect of putting them on the right side of history. The free-love and communitarian movements’ association with antislavery was unfortunate and served to discredit many of the genuine Christian reformers who had stood in the vanguard of the abolition movement.
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No person provided a better target for Southern polemicists than William Lloyd Garrison. A meddler in the truest sense of the word, Garrison badgered his colleagues who smoked, drank, or indulged in any other habit of which he did not approve. Abandoned by his father at age three, Garrison had spent his early life in extreme poverty. Forced to sell molasses on the street and deliver wood, Garrison was steeped in insecurity. He received little education until he apprenticed with a printer, before striking out on his own. That venture failed. Undeterred, Garrison edited the
National Philanthropist
, a “paper devoted to the suppression of intemperance and its Kindred vices.”
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Provided a soapbox, Garrison proceeded to attack gambling, lotteries, sabbath violations, and war. Garrison suddenly saw himself as a celebrity, telling others his name would be “known to the world.”

In his paper
Genius of Universal Emancipation
, Garrison criticized a merchant involved in the slave trade who had Garrison thrown into prison for libel. That fed his martyr complex even more. Once released, Garrison joined another abolitionist paper,
The Liberator
, where he expressed his hatred of slavery, and of the society that permitted it—even under the Constitution—in a cascade of violent language, calling Southern congressmen “thieves” and “robbers.”
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Abolitionism brought Garrison into contact with other reformers, including Susan B. Anthony, the Grimké sisters, Frederick Douglass, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Each had an agenda, to be sure, but all agreed on abolition as a starting point. Garrison and Douglass eventually split over whether the Constitution should be used as a tool to eliminate slavery: Douglass answered in the affirmative, Garrison, having burned a copy of the Constitution, obviously answered in the negative.

The Political Pendulum

From 1848 to 1860, the South rode a roller-coaster of euphoria followed by depression. Several times solid guarantees for the continued protection of slavery appeared to be within the grasp of Southerners, only to be suddenly snatched away by new and even more foreboding signs of Northern abolitionist sentiment. This pendulum began with the election of Zachary Taylor, continued with the California statehood question, accelerated its swing with the admission of Kansas, and finally spun out of control with the
Dred Scott
decision and its repercussions.

The first swing of the pendulum came with the election of 1848. Van Buren’s assumptions that only a “northern man of southern principles” could hold the nation together as president continued to direct the Democratic Party, which nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan. Cass originated a concept later made famous by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, popular sovereignty. As Cass and Douglas understood it, only the people of a territory, during the process by which they developed their state constitution, could prohibit slavery. Congress, whether in its function as administrator of the territories or in its national legislative function, had no role in legislating slavery. It was a convenient out, in that Cass and Douglas could claim they were personally opposed to slavery without ever having to undertake action against it, thus protecting them from Southern criticism over any new free-soil states that emerged from the process. In reality, popular sovereignty ensured exactly what transpired in Kansas: that both pro-and antislavery forces would seek to rig the state constitutional convention through infusions of (often temporary) immigrants. Once the deed was done, and a proslavery constitution in place, the recent arrivals could leave if they chose, but slavery would remain.

Whigs, too, realized that the proslavery vote was strong, and the free-soil vote not strong enough, to run strictly on slavery or related economic issues. They needed a candidate who would not antagonize the South, and many prominent Whigs fell in behind Zachary “Old Rough-and-Ready” Taylor, the Mexican War general. Taylor, however, was a Louisiana slaveholder who offended free-soil Whigs, who distrusted him. Taylor’s ownership of slaves cost him within the party: except for “his negroes and cotton bales,” one congressman wrote, he would have won the nomination without opposition.
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Opposing Taylor was Henry Clay, ready for yet a fifth run at the presidency. But when Clay delivered an important address in Lexington, Kentucky, disavowing any acquisition of new (slave) territories in the Mexican War, he lost Southern support. His April 1844 Raleigh letter, in which he opposed annexation of Texas, did him irreparable damage.

Privately, Taylor was less Whiggish than he let on. He told intimates that the idea of a national bank “is dead & will not be revived in my time” and promised to raise tariffs only for revenue.
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But Taylor benefited from a reviving economy, which made the election almost entirely about personality, where he had the reputation and the edge. A third party, the new Free Soil Party, siphoned off both Democrats and Whigs who opposed slavery. The Free-Soilers nominated Martin Van Buren, demonstrating the futility of Van Buren’s earlier efforts to exclude slavery from the national politcal debate. Van Buren’s forces drew in abolitionists, Liberty Party refugees, and “conscience Whigs” who opposed slavery under the slogan, “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men.”

Free-Soilers made a strong showing at the polls, raking in more than 10 percent of the vote, but did not change the outcome. Taylor won by an electoral vote margin of 163 to 137 and by a 5 percent margin in the popular vote. Virtually all of the Free-Soil ballots would have gone to the Whigs, who, despite Taylor’s slave ownership, were viewed as the antislavery party. It is probable that Ohio would have gone to Taylor if not for the Free-Soilers.

The new president was nevertheless something of an odd duck. He had never voted in an American election. He relished his no-party affiliation. Most Americans learned what they knew of him through newspaper accounts of his remarkable military victories. Indeed, in a sense Taylor was the first outsider ever to run for the presidency. Jackson, although different from the elites who had dominated the White House, nevertheless willingly employed party machinery for his victory. Taylor, however, stressed his antiparty, almost renegade image much the way the Populist candidates of the 1880s and independents like H. Ross Perot did in the 1990s. The outsider appeal proved powerful because it gave people a sense that they could “vote for the man,” largely on reputation or personality, without hashing out all the tough decisions demanded by a party platform. A Taylor supporter in Massachusetts claimed that enthusiasm for Taylor “springs from spontaneous combustion and will sweep all before it.”
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To assuage the concerns of Northern Whigs, Taylor accepted Millard Fillmore of Buffalo as his vice president.

In policy, Taylor surprised both parties. Although he sympathized with the South’s need to protect slavery, he wanted to keep it out of California and New Mexico. He announced that in due course California, Utah, and New Mexico would apply for statehood directly, without going through the territorial stage. Under the circumstances, the states themselves, not Congress, would determine whether they allowed slaves. Taylor hoped to finesse the Southerners, reasoning that since they had already stated that they expected these territories to be free soil, there would be no need for the Wilmot Proviso. Nevertheless, he included a strong warning against the kind of disunion talk that had circulated in the South. When an October 1849 convention laid plans for a meeting of delegates from all the slaveholding states in Nashville the following year, attendees issued statements favoring disunion by leaders such as Congressman Robert Toombs of Georgia. Increasingly, such sentiments were invoked, and astute politicians of both sections took notice.

California presented an opportunity for Henry Clay to regain the initiative he had lost in the nominating process. He started machinery in motion to bring California into the Union—a plan that constituted nothing less than a final masterful stroke at compromise by the aging Kentuckian. Clay introduced legislation to combine the eight major points of contention over slavery in the new territories into four legislative headings. Then, his oratorical skills undiminished, Clay took the national stage one last time.

His first resolution called for California’s admission as a free state; second, the status of the Utah and New Mexico territories was to be determined by popular sovereignty. Third, he proposed to fix the boundary of Texas where it then stood, leaving New Mexico intact. This provision also committed the federal government to assuming the debts of Texas, which was guaranteed to garner some support in the Lone Star State. Fourth, he sought to eliminate the slave trade in the District of Columbia and, finally, he offered a fugitive slave law that promised to deliver escaped slaves from one state to another.

Debate over Clay’s compromise bill brought John Calhoun from his sickbed (although Senator James Mason of Virginia read Calhoun’s speech), followed by stirring oratory from Daniel Webster. Both agreed that disunion was unthinkable. To the surprise of many, neither attacked the resolutions. Quite the contrary, Webster promised not to include Wilmot as a “taunt or a reproach,” thereby extending the olive branch to the South. The debates culminated with Taylor supporter William H. Seward’s famous “higher law” remark, that “there is a higher law than the Constitution,” meaning that if the Constitution permitted slavery, Seward felt morally justified in ignoring it in favor of a higher moral principle.
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Meanwhile, Clay thought that, tactically, he had guaranteed passage of the bill by tying the disparate parts together in a single package.

While Clay and his allies worked to defuse the sectional crisis, Taylor became ill and died on the Fourth of July. Millard Fillmore assumed the presidency amidst a rapidly unraveling controversy over the Texas-New Mexico border. At the end of July, Clay’s compromise measures were carved away from the omnibus bill and were defeated individually. Only Utah’s territorial status passed. California statehood, the Texas boundary, the fugitive slave law, all went down to stunning defeat. The strain proved so great on the seventy-three-year-old Clay that he left for Kentucky to recuperate. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and Seward, archenemies of the compromise from opposite ends of the spectrum, celebrated openly. Their victory dance, however, did not last long.