Chapter 8 - Land of Hope (PDF)

CHAPTER EIGHT THE OLD SOUTH AND SLAVERY IT IS HARD TO IDENTIFY THE MOMENT WHEN “THE SOUTH” crystallized as a distinct region within the new nation. Regional tensions over slavery were already evident, as we have seen, at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, but they were not appreciably gre...

CHAPTER EIGHT THE OLD SOUTH AND SLAVERY IT IS HARD TO IDENTIFY THE MOMENT WHEN “THE SOUTH” crystallized as a distinct region within the new nation. Regional tensions over slavery were already evident, as we have seen, at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, but they were not appreciably greater than East–West tensions over other issues, and certainly not strong enough to overwhelm the desire to establish a strong and stable national union. Indeed, the earliest serious movements in the direction of state secession from the Union would come from New England states, as in the Hartford Convention, rather than from southern ones. All but two of the first seven presidents of the nation were southerners, a fact that did not cause undue alarm or distress to the rest of the nation. Regional tensions flared up over tariffs, which tended to favor northern industrial and commercial interests over southern agricultural ones. But it may not have been until Jefferson’s “fire bell in the night,” the 1819–21 crisis over the admission of Missouri to the Union, that the possibility of the two sections, North and South, evolving into dramatically and enduringly different cultures loomed. Yet the South had a certain unifying distinctiveness from the beginning. At the bottom of it all was a certain combination of climate and economics, a combination both felicitous and fatal. Commercial agriculture had been the bulwark of the southern economy from the discovery of tobacco onward and continued to be well into the nineteenth century. The South’s climate was warm, humid, even in places subtropical, and the region enjoyed an almost year-round growing season, along with its being favored with numerous navigable waterways. Fertile bottomland made it ideal territory for the profitable cultivation of cash crops, such as cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, and indigo, which could in turn be exported as a source of income. By the early 1800s, there could be no doubt which of these crops was the most lucrative and most important: by the 1850s, cotton accounted for two-thirds of all U.S. exports and linked the South’s burgeoning agricultural economy with Great Britain’s preeminence in the textile industry. The mass cultivation of such crops in quantities large enough to be commercially profitable required a continuing supply of vast tracts of land, and an equally large supply of inexpensive unskilled labor to do the tedious and exhausting work that large-scale agriculture required. The economic incentives to expand westward were strong and unrelenting, and the plantation system and institution of chattel slavery, which were well suited to the mass production that cash-crop agriculture entailed, became central features of southern life. Much of the distinctiveness of the antebellum South can be traced back to the diverging character of the nation’s regional economies and labor systems. The South also was more self-contained, more drawn in upon itself, more conscious of its own identity, and increasingly aware of its potential minority status within the nation. Unlike the North, it did not experience great waves of immigration from Europe, such as the influx of Irish and German refugees who streamed into northern cities during the 1840s, fleeing from poverty, famine, and political instability in their native lands. As time passed, these trends tended to perpetuate one another; European immigrants avoided the South because there was so little nonagricultural work, and the status of agricultural labor was tainted by the existence of slavery. And so the South became ever more committed to slave labor, in what turned into a self-reinforcing cycle. As a consequence, the region’s population growth would come mainly from internal sources. Thus the South became a strikingly biracial society, underwritten by stark differences of power and status, although strangely, underneath it all was also a certain commonality of culture. This is a paradox not easily unraveled, although it may well derive in part from the specific texture of agricultural life, where there is likely to be a stronger sense of place, and where human relationships are more likely to be casual and organic in character, less guided by strictly instrumental or impersonal concerns. Another important commonality was that, aside from south Louisiana, which retained much of its Catholic character, the population of the South was almost entirely Protestant Christian in its religion, with Anglicanism dominant in the white upper classes and various forms of low-church evangelical Protestantism presiding in the lower classes, both white and black. The amount of exchange and interchange between and among white and black Southerners, in speech patterns, foodways, music, worship, folklore, and literary expression, was enormous. Yet, at the same time, the mounting economic importance of slavery led, little by little, to a stiffening determination among southern whites to defend their “peculiar institution,” as they came to call it, though even at the height of southern slavery, only a minority of southern whites were slave owners, and only a tiny number of those were plantation owners with large numbers of slaves under their command. This defensiveness of southern slaveholders would find its way even into their religion, with a strict interpretation of the Bible as the single most important method of defense. As the historian U.B.Phillips argued, “the central theme” of southern history became the “common resolve indomitably maintained” that the white population should maintain its dominance. This determination had the effect of muting the sort of class conflict among whites that was becoming all too common in industrializing northern centers like Boston, where the native born and the immigrant Irish constantly clashed. Such unity would, however, exact an awful price from enslaved black southerners with little or no access to freedom. There were other distinctives about southern culture, although it is difficult in discussing the South to separate myth and legend from fact, and perhaps it is not even desirable to try too hard. For a myth that is widely believed may be itself a very powerful cultural reality – not in the sense that it describes reality accurately but in the more limited sense that it reflects a widely shared aspiration or formative belief that is as much a part of the historical landscape as any fact. Nothing was more distinctive about the South than the fact that southerners believed their region to be distinctive. So too did other Americans – and such a belief, when widely shared, becomes a fact in itself, a fact of culture.  To live enveloped in myth is, to say the least, a mixed blessing. Jonathan Daniels, a prominent North Carolina journalist, wrote in his 1938 book A Southerner Discovers the South, “We Southerners are a mythological people, created half out of dream and half out of slander, who live in a still legendary land.” What he meant by that statement was exemplified the following year, when the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind was released and enjoyed an enthusiastic national reception, thus immortalizing a dreamy view of the Civil War–era South as a stable and dignified aristocratic society that looked out for its happy-go-lucky and compliant, childlike slaves as a benevolent father would watch over his lovable but immature brood. “Moonlight and magnolias,” a tagline used in the movie by the hard- boiled character Rhett Butler, came to stand for this wistful sentimental vision of the Old South. And yet equally vivid was the reverse portrait of the Old South as a sinkhole of the utmost depravity and cruelty of which humanity is capable, an image sketched unforgettably in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s portrait of the vicious and violent slave owner Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This, too, is an overdrawn and exaggerated picture if it is made to stand for all the Old South, which had many elements of beauty and graciousness, learning and high culture, piety and devotion, all mixed in with elements of ugliness and brutal dehumanization. If one tries to view the Old South whole, it makes for a deeply baffling picture. The most distinguished students of the subject, the historians Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, asked poignantly in their 2005 book The Mind of the Master Class, how civilized people who were admirable in so many ways could also have embraced a cruel social system that inflicted horrors upon those subordinated to it. This is a haunting question that lingers in the mind and is not easily answered or set aside. It is a question that history often poses to us when we encounter times and peoples whom we esteem in many ways but whose values and circumstances are in other respects so different from our own. In any event, with mythic extremes making up so much of our image of southern life, it has been hard to find our way to something more closely approximating the reality in all its complexity.  Certain generalizations about the Old South are indisputable, however. It was an overwhelmingly agricultural society in which the production and sale of cotton constituted the central form of economic activity and in which cities were few and far between and economic diversification outside of agriculture was almost nonexistent. It was also a very wealthy region, but with wealth concentrated in a very few hands, individuals who were perched atop a very precarious social and economic structure, ultimately dependent on the price of cotton and the use of forced labor for their lofty standing. Cotton enjoyed phenomenal success in establishing itself as a commodity avidly sought around the world, and especially in Great Britain, where southern cotton became the force powering the British textile industry. That success made the planter class overconfident about their standing and their prospects. As world demand for cotton continued to rise inexorably, the South’s future prosperity seemed assured, so long as it was firmly wedded to cotton. With cotton as its chief weapon, the southern economy appeared to be unbeatable and could call the tune for the rest of the world, for long into the foreseeable future. As the South Carolina planter James Henry Hammond boasted, if the South were to choose to deprive England of a steady supply of southern cotton, “England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her…. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.” Such words smacked of hubris, the excessive pride that goes before a fall. And so they would turn out to be, expressing a mistaken vision that would lead to cruel and tragic consequences for the South. Lulled into a false sense of economic security by the illusion that cotton was invincible and its prices would never fall, the South would become fatally committed to a brutal social and economic system that was designed for the lucrative production of cotton on a massive scale but that achieved such productivity at an incalculable cost in human and moral terms. It placed the region on a collision course with changing moral sensibilities in the world, and with fundamental American ideals. The system was not a machine, however. It evolved into a complex and many-faceted society whose contours would be as unique and varied as the South itself. As has already been pointed out, the elite planter class was small in number, constituting only about 4 percent of the adult white males in the South, and only a relative handful of those planters (around twenty-three hundred of them) owned at least one hundred slaves. The majority of slaveholders were ordinary farmers who owned fewer than twenty slaves and worked in the fields with their slaves. The majority of whites, three-fourths of them by 1860, were not slaveholders at all and were unable to afford the rich low-lying farmland favored by the planters, who lived instead in the upcountry, and got their living largely as subsistence farmers. The growing concentration of slaves in fewer and fewer southern hands and the decline of slavery in border states indicated to many Southerners that an end to slavery within the Union was coming. Yet the large planters continued to set the tone for the whole, exercising a disproportionate influence on their societies and the legislatures of their states. Far from resenting them or begrudging them their wealth, most poor whites tended to be loyal to the planters and hoped someday to be able to emulate them. Dominated as it was by an aristocratic planter class, the Old South in some ways resembled a feudal society, with all the strict social hierarchy that implies. Over time, the resemblance became increasingly self-conscious and was actively embraced by those at the top of the social pyramid. Many planters adopted a code of conduct that they associated with the chivalric codes of medieval times, with a strong (and often prickly) sense of masculine honor, a respect for culture and learning, a taste for grand estates and lavish hospitality, a strong loyalty to family and locality, fierce veneration of womanhood and feminine purity, and strict deference to elders, a pattern of dutiful respect toward one’s “betters” that would also be reflected (if less consistently) in patriarchal and paternalistic attitudes toward social subordinates, including slaves. Even if the economic basis of southern life revolved around a harsh form of commercial agriculture, the society that grew up around that economic basis increasingly conceived of itself in very different terms, as a variation on a very old theme: the belief that there is a great chain of being that links and orders all things, from the highest to the lowest, and that harmony and well-being derive from the preservation of the elements of degree and rank in that given order. As in feudal Europe, so in the American South: there was much that could be considered graceful and orderly and humane in that ideal. The trouble was that it was not at all obvious how such a vision could be rendered compatible with the idea that all men are created equal or with the energetic individualism and entrepreneurship that Tocqueville had observed. “In the great Anglo-American family,” wrote Tocqueville, “one can distinguish two principal offshoots … one in the South, the other in the North.” How had the South become so different in such a short period of time? In later years, the writer Mark Twain claimed that books like Sir Walter Scott’s 1820 historical romance Ivanhoe, which glorified the world of medieval England, had been the cause of the American Civil War, by filling the southern mind with “dreams and phantoms” of a “long-vanished society.” The claim was wild and farfetched, as Twain tended to be, and just as fanciful as anything in Scott’s romantic prose. But there was an important element of truth in it. The steady divergence of the antebellum South from the northern states was not just a matter of differences over nitty-gritty issues of economics and politics. Such differences were extended and hardened by the emergence of divergent social ideals. By the time the sectional conflict came to a head in the 1850s and 1860s, the depth and width of these cultural differences would make political compromise even more difficult to achieve. Twain’s observation conveyed another truth: “the South” was not merely the South of the planter class. To see it otherwise was to buy in to the very fantasy of a revived feudalism that Twain believed had led the South into catastrophe. Nor was it merely the South of white people. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the institution of slavery so completely undergirded the Southern way of life that it was impossible to consider southern culture apart from it. And that meant that black southerners, most of whom were enslaved, constituted a massive presence in southern life, from the very beginning, and exerted a constant and reciprocal influence on the culture of the South. To see the South whole means telling their story also. That is not a simple matter. For one thing, the practice of slavery in North America was resistant to easy generalizations. Slavery in North America had begun in 1619 in Virginia as something approaching a casual afterthought, not always clearly distinct from indentured servitude, and as it spread, it changed and adapted to circumstances. For the century and a half of British colonial rule, it existed as a system of forced or coerced labor that had not been thoroughly defined and codified, a feature of “benign neglect” with a wide and informal variety in the way it was practiced – and it was practiced in all the colonies, New England as well as the South. After the Revolution, however, it became more regularized and regulated, and its practice became localized to the South, as the northern states gradually abolished it. Yet even after these changes had taken place, the working and living conditions of slavery could still vary dramatically, depending on the historical moment and geographical location – and the disposition of individual masters. The living conditions of slaves on small farms in states like Kentucky in the Upper South, where they often found themselves living more like hired hands and working beside their masters in the fields, were very different from life on the giant sugar and cotton plantations of Louisiana and Alabama in the Deep South, where hundreds were living and laboring together, confined under strict and often oppressive discipline. The plantations formed complex slave mini-societies, with intricate divisions of labor and gradations of rank and status. At the top of the slave pecking order were the household servants and skilled workers, who worked in more refined circumstances, coming into contact frequently with the planter’s family and generally having better quarters and better treatment. At the bottom were the field hands, who typically worked in tightly supervised gangs from dawn to dusk. They slept in crude wooden shacks with dirt floors, poorly fed, poorly clothed and shod, and dwelling always in fear of the master’s punitive lash.  Wherever there were larger concentrations of slaves, there one would find pronounced surviving elements of African cultural and religious beliefs, often manifesting themselves as hybrids and combinations of the distinct African tribal and regional cultures from which the slaves had originally come. The slaves’ religion took on a distinctive flavor, blending Christianity with enthusiastic music and ecstatic African elements in ways that would come to distinguish much of African American worship in the years to come. Slaves found that many of the stories of the Bible spoke directly to their condition, in ways that their masters could not perceive, and they especially took heart from the story of the Israelites’ exodus from slavery in Egypt – just as John Winthrop and the Puritans had done, two centuries before – seeing it as a figure and metaphor for their own tribulations and sufferings, and for the hope of their eventual liberation and redemption. Similarly, they could see their condition and their hopes mirrored in the humility of Christ, the God who came into the world incognito, in the guise of a lowly suffering servant, who took the side of the poor and oppressed of the world and proved himself more powerful even in his earthly humiliation than anything the existing authorities could do to him. His example gave them heart. Religion was at the center of slaves’ communal life, and it was the crucial resource that made it possible for them to sustain communities and families at all under such harsh conditions. The forces against their doing so were immense, especially in the closed circumstances of the large plantations. Slave marriages had no legal validity and no protections against the invasive force of the slave market, which often dictated that families could be torn apart at any moment by an owner’s decision to sell a husband, a wife, or (more often) a child. (The plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin revolves around a series of such family dismemberments.) Ironically, the end of the legal slave trade in 1808 made such transactions more frequent, since the offspring of existing slaves had become even more valuable, particularly since the demand for slaves only increased as planters moved west, expanding cotton cultivation into the rich lands of the lower Mississippi Valley. In addition, slave women had an added source of humiliation and anguish, being subject to sexual abuse and exploitation by masters and other powerful whites in the plantation system. The immense sadness and longing one hears in the great spiritual songs that came out of the slave experience – songs like “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” – were cries of the heart, products of that crucible of harsh and near-hopeless circumstance. But those were not the only such products. There were also songs of exuberance and joy, such as “Rock My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham.” And there were songs hinting at the possibility of this- worldly deliverance, such as “Steal Away to Jesus” and “Go Down, Moses,” the latter of which was used by the black abolitionist Harriet Tubman as a coded signal to slaves thinking of fleeing to the North. Such songs, and the profound religious assurances that lay behind them, gave slaves the capacity to resist being completely overwhelmed by the circumstances of near-total domination in which they found themselves. The slave religion taught the same lesson that many previous generations of Christians, as well as Stoics like the Roman slave Epictetus, had learned: the soul can remain free even when the body is bound. While it would be wrong to minimize the psychological ravages of slavery, it would be equally wrong to exaggerate them and thereby deny the heroism and resiliency that slaves showed, guarding their hearts and keeping hope alive under hopeless conditions. Slaves resisted their enslavement both passively and actively. Some of their most effective methods were “day-to-day” acts of passive or indirect resistance: work slowdowns, malingering, feigned illness, deliberate sabotage, breaking of farming implements, setting fire to buildings, and a range of other acts of obstruction. But given the tight grip in which slaveholders held their charges, and laws favoring the capture and return of fugitives, slaves’ opportunities for escape were few and risky, and large-scale insurrections were all but suicidal. But some were willing to try, and others were willing to help. The ingenuity and courage of Harriet Tubman, Levi and Catherine Coffin, and other committed abolitionists created the Underground Railroad, an informal network of secret routes and safe houses sheltering and aiding escaped slaves seeking freedom in the north. Estimates range as high as one hundred thousand for the number of escapes made possible by the Railroad. Those valiant efforts made only a small dent in the slave population of the South – and organized slave rebellions in the South were rare, and never successful. The example of the successful slave uprising in the 1790s in the French Caribbean colony of Saint- Domingue (Haiti), which led to the murder or forced exile of thousands of former masters, had made a permanent impression upon the minds of southern slaveholders, and they were not about to permit something similar to happen on their soil, on their watch. The “moonlight and magnolias” view of antebellum southern slavery did not reckon with the underground river of suspicion and fear that coursed beneath the surface of everyday life. The Nat Turner Rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831, was the most consequential uprising. Turner was a black field hand who was also a religious zealot, driven by prophetic visions to imagine that he was divinely ordained to lead a slave uprising. On August 22, 1831, Turner set out to do just that, with the intention of slaughtering as many as possible of the white neighbors who enslaved them. They began with Turner’s master and wife and children, hacking them to death with axes, and then went on to successive farmhouses, repeating the process until, by the end of the next day, they had killed around sixty whites, mostly women and children. Bodies were thrown into bonfires or left for the wolves. The rebels were readily subdued the following day by units of white militiamen, although Turner himself eluded capture for more than two months. In the end, the state executed about fifty blacks, it banished others, and many more were killed by the militia without trial. The ferocity of the Nat Turner Rebellion and its subsequent suppression dramatically altered the mental and moral climate of the South. It sent a chill of terror down the spines of white southerners, as rumors traveled far and wide about other such rebellions under way or in the making. There also were reports of violent white retaliation against blacks all over the South. Bloody violence was in the air, the civil order itself seemed threatened, and there was a tangible sense that a great divide was being crossed – or perhaps had already been crossed. The rebellion occurred just as the abolition movement in the North was gathering steam – Garrison’s The Liberator published its first issue in 1831 – making its appeal on the basis of Christian moral values that southerners generally shared. And yet, it occurred at a moment when the South’s investment in slavery as an economic institution seemed to have become too great to abandon. White southerners were still holding the wolf by the ear. They responded to the Nat Turner Rebellion by cracking down and tightening their control over the slave system, ensuring that no serious slave uprising would occur after this one. Shortly afterward, in the 1831–32 session of the Virginia General Assembly, the state’s legislators engaged in a far-reaching debate, occasioned by a flurry of some forty petitions, urging them to engage the problems associated with slavery. This was arguably the South’s only full and free general debate over the status of the peculiar institution, and its tenor was surprisingly critical. Some called for outright emancipation, others for colonization, but none called for the protection of “perpetual slavery.” Interestingly, although the delegates were divided about means, they did not differ about ends; many even saw Virginia’s future as lying with the free-soil states to the north but differed only in the speed with which that end should be sought. None defended slavery in abstract terms; in fact, their compromise resolution did not hesitate to call slavery an evil and agreed that slavery would eventually end in Virginia. After vigorous debate, the members narrowly rejected, by a vote of 73 to 58, a plan for gradual emancipation and African colonization, proposed by a descendant of Thomas Jefferson. Instead, members declined to pass any such laws, deciding instead that they “should await a more definite development of public opinion.” That decision doomed to failure any hope that slavery would be abandoned in an orderly and peaceable way, for the window of opportunity for any such enlightened action was closing, and public opinion in the state was already running in the opposite direction. In fact, proslavery and antiabolitionist opinion rapidly overtook the alternatives in the years that followed, buttressed by arguments that had been previewed in the debate. The General Assembly passed legislation making it unlawful to teach slaves, free blacks, or mulattoes to read or write and restricting all blacks from holding religious meetings without the presence of a licensed white minister. Other slaveholding states across the South enacted similar laws restricting activities of slaves and free blacks. The institution of slavery was henceforth going to be even more closed, more devoted to total control, more bottled up, and more toxic than before. There was to be no loosening of the white South’s uncomfortable grip on the wolf’s ear. Changes in ideas followed these changes in circumstances. The Turner revolt had forcefully given the lie to wistful myths about the harmonious benevolence of slavery. But it did so at a moment when the South’s dependency on its peculiar institution was too great and too thoroughly entrenched to be abandoned – and at the very moment when the voices of northern abolitionists, although few in number and limited in influence, had suddenly become loud and threatening to southern slaveholders’ ears. A defense had to be mounted. But how could one make a robust defense of an institution that one also regarded as an evil on the way to gradual extinction? Would it not be more effective if southerners were to steel their minds and hearts for the struggle ahead with the firm belief that this indispensable institution was actually a positive good and not merely a necessary evil? Instead of abandoning the paternalistic justification of slavery, masters chose to blame slave unrest on outsiders. Hence the emergence of an unapologetically “proslavery” argument, and the source of no small part of its persuasiveness. But it was not merely an invention ginned up for the occasion to justify a dehumanizing economic institution that the prospering South could not, or would not, do without. It had deeper roots in the earliest sources of southern distinctiveness and clear elements of continuity with the neofeudal paternalist philosophy that had already been firmly in place in parts of the plantation South. But the proslavery argument had embraced this premodern, hierarchical vision and intensified a few notches, now couching it as a radical critique of modern capitalism that was startlingly similar in many respects to the critique then being offered by radical leftists like Karl Marx. In the view of the Virginian George Fitzhugh, one of the more influential of the proslavery apologists in the 1850s, the paternalism of slavery was far preferable to the “wage slavery” of northern industrial society, in which greedy, profit-oriented capitalists took no responsibility for the comprehensive well-being of their workers but instead exploited them freely and then cast them aside like used tissues when their labor was no longer useful. Fitzhugh argued not only against capitalism but against the entire liberal tradition, including the ideas of such foundational thinkers as Locke and Jefferson, countering that free labor and free markets and other individual liberties only served to enrich the strong while crushing the weak. “Slavery,” he wrote, “is a form, and the very best form, of socialism,” the best counter to the rampant competitiveness and atomization of “free” societies. With Fitzhugh, we have come a very long way from the ideals of the American Founders. It is hard to know how widespread acceptance of such a radical and unvarnished version of the proslavery argument was. What is clearer, though, is that its appearance on the scene, and its displacement of the more complex “necessary evil” argument in the minds of many elite leaders, including such powerful men as the influential South Carolina politician John C. Calhoun, were developments full of ominous portent for the future cohesiveness of the American nation. They were yet another sign of hardening cultural divisions, a sign that the South was charting its own course based on its own understanding of the nature of the American Founding. Even in the realm of religion, the southern Protestant churches developed a distinct theological orientation, adducing biblical precedents, such as the slaveholding of the Hebrew patriarchs or St. Paul’s commands to slaves, to support the moral acceptability, and even desirability, of slavery. The Methodist and Baptist churches would divide into northern and southern denominations because of sectional disagreements over just such issues. For southern slaveholders, the model slaveholder became the biblical Abraham. In myriad other ways, ranging from the seizure of the mails to prevent the transmission of abolitionist literature to the imposition in 1836 of a “gag rule” in the U.S. House of Representatives to suppress any discussion of petitions relating to slavery and abolition, the southern states seemed intent upon taking off the table, once and for all, any and all reconsideration of slavery, especially of the moral and political acceptability of slavery. The kind of open and frank discussion that took place in the Virginia General Assembly in 1831–32 had become, almost overnight, virtually impossible. How rapidly things had changed. And this change, this defensive hardening of southern opinion, was a harbinger of things to come, none of them good.