Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

the right conditions for emancipation never quite seemed to come. As president, he deliberately turned a deaf ear to cooperation with a new black revolutionary republic in Haiti, which was at that moment struggling to throw back an invasion by the soldiers of a man Jefferson had declared to be a tyrant, Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1824, Georgia senator John Berrien, appearing before the Supreme Court as counsel for the owners of an illegal cargo of slaves seized on the high seas, actually asserted that slavery “lay at the foundation” of the Constitution, and that slaves “constitute the very bond of your union,” irrespective of any “speculative notions” of morality. 86 The Virginians in the state constitutional convention who called for an end to slavery also wanted an end to African Americans in Virginia, and wished them to be bundled out of the sight of white people entirely. Farther South, as cotton grew more and more profitable, republican enthusiasm for abolition waned past the vanishing point.

The death blow to any form of Southern abolition movement came in August 1831 when a religious visionary named Nat Turner led seventy of his fellow-slaves in a short-lived but bloody insurrection in southeastern Virginia. The revolt was quickly and brutally put down, with Turner and his followers captured or butchered, but not before fifty-seven whites had also died. At Turner’s trial, it became apparent that he had cheerfully ordered the execution of every white man, woman, and child he had encountered, whether they were slave owners or not, and had hoped to spread his revolt throughout Virginia. Turner’s confessions served notice on Southern whites that it mattered nothing what their personal opinions on slavery were; Nat Turner would have massacred them all if given the chance. 87

This realization served to drive nonslaveholding yeomen straight into the arms of planters, simply in the interest of self-protection. When the Virginia House of Delegates resumed debate over the future of slavery in 1832, the question was put purely in terms of white survival: either expel the blacks completely from Virginia or institute measures that were even more repressive and ban all discussion of abolition as dangerous incitement. By a margin of 73 to 58, the decision came down, in effect, on the side of repression. After 1832, Virginians’ calls for abolition and transportation faded, and elsewhere in the South, any further attempts by whites to advocate freeing the slaves were denounced as treason and punished accordingly.88

This steady swing back in favor of the continuation of slavery in the 1820s produced, in the North, an equal but opposite reaction. With all the energies of religious and secular idealism flowing, free African Americans raised their voices in a chorus of eloquent protest. “I speak, Americans, for your good,” wrote David Walker, a free black shop owner in Boston in 1829. “We must and shall be free, I say, in spite of you. … God will deliver us from under you. And wo, wo, will be to you if we have to obtain our freedom by fighting.”89 Northern anti-slavery societies denounced the slide backward with new militancy, and on January 1, 1831, William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of the anti-slavery newspaper the Liberator from an office in Boston within sight of the Bunker Hill monument. With one sweep of defiant rhetoric, Garrison demanded an unconditional and immediate end to slavery. “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice,” Garrison promised on the first page of the Liberator. “I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.” Garrison gave up any hope of converting the South to anti-slavery opinions. He was bent upon radicalizing the North, and his weapons were provocation and shock: “Be not afraid to look the monster SLAVERY boldly in the face,” Garrison cried in 1832. “He is your implacable foe—the vampyre who is sucking your life-blood—the ravager of a large portion of your country, and the enemy of God and man.”90

If necessary, Garrison was willing to have the free states secede from the Union rather than continue in an unholy federation with slave states. “It is said if you agitate this question, you will divide the Union,” Garrison editorialized, “but should disunion follow, the fault will not be yours. … Let the pillars thereof fall—let the superstructure crumble into dust—if it must be upheld by robbery and oppression.” In 1833, Garrison joined with the wealthy evangelical brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan (who were also bankrolling Charles Grandison Finney) and founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia, which demanded the “immediate abandonment” and “entire abolition of slavery in the United States.” Slavery was “an audacious usurpation of the Divine Prerogative, a daring infringement on the law of nature, a base overthrow of the very foundations of the social compact.” 91

These demands were infinitely more than Southerners could take. They were also more than many Northerners could take. Just as the South’s cotton agriculture bound Southern whites to the defense of slavery, it also bound the Northern bankers and merchants who lent the planters money to the toleration of slavery. Immediate abolition meant the disappearance of the immense fortunes that had been invested in the purchase of slaves; this would bankrupt not only the planters but also every Northerner who had invested in Southern cotton. 92 Even the ordinary Northern mill owner, who depended on shipments of Southern cotton for the manufacture of finished textile products, stood to lose by Garrison’s frank willingness to break up the Union over slavery. There was, as it turned out, a very significant gap between being anti-slavery and being an abolitionist. A Northerner could oppose, criticize, and even denounce slavery without being at all inclined to take the risks of abolition.

It was for just this reason that Northern factory workers could be thoroughly hostile to slavery and yet also be suspicious of the abolitionists. The Northern labor movement was, like the anti-slavery movement, making its first attempts at large-scale organization