Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (33 page)

The American ideals of individual freedom and the democratic spirit found an extreme expression in the literature of the New England writers known as the Transcendentalists. Chief among them was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), who urged Americans to stop imitating Europe and “go beyond the world of the senses.” Emphasizing individuality and an intuitive spirituality, he balked at the emerging industrial society around him.

A student and friend of Emerson’s, Henry David Thoreau took Emerson’s ideas a step further, removing himself from society to the cabin on Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, which provided the experience for his masterpiece
Walden
(1854). Thoreau’s writings deeply influenced Mahatma Gandhi, who adopted Thoreau’s notion of “civil disobedience” as the means to overthrow British rule in India; and Gandhi, in turn, influenced Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance.

Also part of this “flowering of New England,” as it was called by the critic Van Wyck Brooks, was Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64). But the author of the American classics
The Scarlet Letter
(1850) and
The House of the Seven Gables
(1851) rejected the Transcendentalists and Emerson, whom he called “a seeker for he knows not what.” The Transcendentalist utopian community Brook Farm was the model for Hawthorne’s
Blithedale Romance
. Depicting the New England obsession with sin and guilt, Hawthorne expressed a rejection of the grim Puritanism that dominated the era.

How did Frederick Douglass become the most influential black man of his time?

Among the most outspoken critics of the Mexican War was a man who called the war “disgraceful, cruel and iniquitous.” Writing from Rochester, New York, in his newspaper, the
North Star
, Frederick Douglass criticized other opponents of the war for their weak response. “The determination of our slaveholding President to prosecute the war, and the probability of his success in wringing from the people men and money to carry it on, is made evident, rather than doubtful, by the puny opposition arrayed against him. . . . None seem willing to take their stand for peace at all risks.”

For anyone to write so defiantly against a generally popular war was remarkable. That the author was an escaped slave writing in his own newspaper was extraordinary.

Frederick Douglass (1817–95) was born to a slave mother and most likely sired by his first owner. He was taught to read by the wife of one of his masters—although she had been told that it was illegal and unsafe to teach a slave to read—and taught himself to write in the shipyards of Baltimore. In 1838, he escaped, disguising himself as a sailor to reach New York and then Massachusetts, finding work as a laborer in bustling New Bedford, the shipbuilding and whaling center. After making an extemporaneous speech to an antislavery convention in Nantucket, Douglass began a life devoted to the cause of freedom, for women as well as blacks. In the process, he became one of the most famous men in America, black or white. A speaker of extraordinary power, Douglass was first employed by William Lloyd Garrison’s Anti-Slavery Society. His lectures were grand performances that would leave his audiences in turns laughing and tearful. He braved hecklers, taunts, eggs, and death threats, and with each lecture his fame and influence grew. In 1845 the Society printed his autobiography,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

It remains one of the most chilling accounts of life as a Maryland slave, containing the power to provoke utter revulsion at the “peculiar institution.” The book’s appearance and Douglass’s growing celebrity as a speaker forced him to move to England out of fear that he would be seized as a fugitive. He returned to America in 1847 and began publication of the
North Star
in Rochester, putting him in the front lines of the abolitionist forces. Douglass and Garrison later fell out over tactics, but his stature continued to grow. In one of his most famous speeches, given in 1857, Douglass said, “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.”

During the Civil War, he became an adviser to Lincoln, recruiting black soldiers for the Union cause and lobbying for their equal pay, which was reluctantly granted. After the war he accepted a number of government appointments, and was later made ambassador to Haiti. (It is worth noting, however, that many of his friends and supporters of both races were unhappy when late in life Douglass married a white woman after the death of his first wife, Anna. In 1884, he married Helen Pitts, a college-educated suffragist twenty years younger than Douglass. She was disowned by her family, and the white press accused her of marrying for fame and money. It was also reported that the marriage proved that the black man’s highest aspiration was to have a white wife. The couple remained active in social causes until his sudden death of a heart attack in 1895.)

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

F
REDERICK
D
OUGLASS,
from a letter to his former master, published in the
North Star
(September 8, 1848), ten years after his escape:

The grim horrors of slavery rise in all their ghastly terror before me; the wails of millions pierce my heart and chill my blood. I remember the chain, the gag, the bloody whip; the death-like gloom overshadowing the broken spirit of the fettered bondman; the appalling liability of his being torn away from wife and children, and sold like a beast in the market. . . .

Your mind must have become darkened, your heart hardened, your conscience seared and petrified, or you would have long since thrown off the accursed load, and sought relief at the hands of a sin-forgiving God. How, let me ask you, would you look upon me, were I, some dark night, in company with a band of hardened villains, to enter the precincts of your elegant dwelling, and seize the person of your own lovely daughter, Amanda, and carry her off from your family, friends, and all the loved ones of her youth—make her my slave—compel her to work, and I take her wages—place her name on my ledger as property—disregard her personal rights—fetter the powers of her immortal soul by denying her the right and privilege of learning to read and write—feed her coarsely—clothe her scantily, and whip her on the naked back occasionally; more, and still more horrible, leave her unprotected—a degraded victim to the brutal lust of fiendish overseers, who would pollute, blight, and blast her fair soul. . . . I ask, how would you regard me, if such were my conduct?

. . . I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery. . . . I shall make use of you as a means of exposing the character of the American church and clergy—and as a means of bringing this guilty nation, with yourself, to repentance. . . .

I am your fellow-man but not your slave.

Frederick Douglass

Where did the Underground Railroad run?

Douglass had used his wits and unusual abilities to escape slavery. The
Narrative
was deliberately vague about the assistance he received along the way. Douglass did not want to endanger those who aided him, or make it easier for slave-chasers to figure out his route, thereby making escape difficult for other slaves. But he was helped by some brave individuals along the road.

For thousands of other blacks who refused submission between 1840 and 1861, the mostly anonymous people who led the way to freedom became known as the Underground Railroad. A loose network of individuals who believed that every single freed slave represented a victory against slavery, the Underground Railroad ran from the South northward through Philadelphia and New York, its two key stations, to freedom in Canada or the Northeast. While claims for the numbers of slaves it moved to freedom were vastly inflated in later years, the railroad existed and performed a dangerous and noble service.

From “station” to “station,” as each safe spot along the treacherous route was known, the slaves slipped in the dark of night, led by the “conductors.” While many of these were white abolitionists, often Quakers, the ranks of “conductors” were also joined by escaped slaves who risked far more by returning to help other slaves out. Of these, the most famous was Harriet Tubman (1820?–1913). Born a Maryland slave, like Douglass, Tubman made her way northward to freedom in 1849 and immediately returned to the South to aid other slave escapes. She made at least nineteen trips herself, and was personally responsible for bringing out at least 300 slaves, sometimes “encouraging” them to leave at gunpoint. She even succeeded in freeing her parents in 1857. Her success did not go unnoticed in the South; at one point there was a reward of $40,000 for her capture.

Although illiterate, she was a natural leader and a brilliant planner. Her life was undoubtedly saved when illness kept her from joining abolitionist John Brown’s suicidal raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. But during the Civil War she continued her militant defiance, serving with Union troops as a cook and as a spy behind Confederate lines. On another occasion she reportedly led 750 slaves to freedom, with the help of Union troops.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

SENATOR JOHN C. CALHOUN
of South Carolina, from a March 4, 1850, speech read to the Senate for the ailing Calhoun before his death:

I have, Senators, believed from the first that the agitation on the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion. Entertaining this opinion, I have on all proper occasions, endeavored to call the attention of both the two great parties which divide the country to adopt some measure to prevent so great a disaster, but without success. The agitation has been permitted to proceed with almost no attempt to resist it, until it has reached a point when it can no longer be disguised or denied that the Union is in danger. You have thus had forced upon you the greatest and gravest question that can ever come under your consideration—How can the Union be preserved?

. . . What has endangered the Union?

To this question there can be but one answer,—the immediate cause is the almost universal discontent which pervades all the States composing the Southern section of the Union. [The discontent] commenced with the agitation of the slavery question and has been increasing ever since. . . .

One of the causes is, undoubtedly, to be traced to long-continued agitation of the slave question on the part of the North, and the many aggressions which they have made on the rights of the South during the time.

What was the Compromise of 1850?

The election of 1848 was really about the future of slavery and the Union. But you wouldn’t know it from the chief candidates. The hero of the Mexican War, General Zachary Taylor, got the Whig nod without expressing or even possessing any opinions about the chief question of the day: the future of slavery in the new territories. The Democratic nominee, Lewis Cass, sidestepped the issue with a call for “popular sovereignty,” or leaving the decision up to territorial governments. The only clear stand on slavery was taken by an aging Martin Van Buren, who had given up equivocating and was now running on the Free Soil ticket, a splinter group of antislavery Democrats. Taylor’s image as the conquering hero won the popular imagination, and with Van Buren’s third party draining Democratic votes from Cass, Taylor was elected.

As president, Taylor had no policy or plan to cope with the new territories, including the impact of the gold rush on the American economy. But when California petitioned for admission as a free state in 1849, the issue was placed squarely once more before Congress, with the fate of the Union hanging in the balance. Southerners, who accepted the Oregon Territory as free, didn’t want slaves kept out of another state, especially one of California’s size and wealth.

Only another compromise saved the Union for the moment, this one as distasteful to abolitionists as all the others in history had been. A package of bills, mostly the work of the aging Henry Clay, was introduced and heatedly debated in the Senate, chiefly by the other two congressional giants of the age, Daniel Webster—who was willing to accept limited slavery in preservation of the Union—and South Carolina’s John Calhoun (1782–1850), the preeminent spokesman for the slave-plantation system. Because Calhoun was too ill to speak, his views were presented by Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia. Vowing secession, Calhoun died before the compromise was signed into law. New faces on the congressional stage also joined the fray. William Seward of New York weighed in with an impassioned antislavery speech. The new senator from Illinois, Stephen Douglas, finally ramrodded the compromise through by dividing it into five separate bills and pulling together sufficient support for each of these.

It was only Zachary Taylor’s death in office in 1850 that finally allowed passage of the Compromise of 1850. Taylor’s successor, Millard Fillmore (1800–74), signed the five bills that made up the Compromise of 1850. Under these bills:

• California was admitted as a free state;

• New Mexico and Utah were organized without restrictions on slavery;