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

1836 the legislatures of South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama formally sent to the legislatures of ten northern states requests that the publication and distribution of “newspapers, tracts, and pictorial representations, calculated and having an obvious tendency to excite the slaves of the slave states to insurrection and revolt,” be made a criminal offense, and John C. Calhoun tried to persuade Congress to prosecute any postmaster who would “knowingly receive or put into mail any pamphlet, newspaper, handbill, or any printed, written, or pictorial representation touching the subject of slavery.” 97 Never mind that no connection between Turner and Garrison was ever demonstrated—Southern pressure forced Postmaster General Amos Kendall to turn a blind eye when Southern postmasters began censoring suspicious mail and newspapers from the North.98

Because Northern state and local governments did not likewise act at once to silence the abolitionists, Southerners concluded that Northerners were actually in quiet collusion with the abolitionists to produce more Nat Turners. Throughout the 1840s and early 1850s, Southerners turned away from the Whig Party to the Democrats, convinced that the Whig programs for federal intervention in the economy were only laying the groundwork for federal tampering with slavery. The tide of Southern suspicion and Southern temper rose higher and higher, and Southerners forgot that they had ever discussed emancipating their slaves. The happiest-people-on-the-face-of-the-earth argument silenced Jefferson’s warning that the South had by the ears a wolf that it could neither master nor release. Southerners who coveted independence and liberty also found themselves extolling white men’s democracy and passing solemn resolutions that warned that “freedom of speech and press do not imply a moral right to freely discuss the subject of slavery. …” 99

Eventually, by the mid-1850s, they came to the point of claiming that the political liberties enjoyed by Northern workers were useless frauds compared to the cradle-to-grave care given by the slaveholder to the slave. “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world,” George Fitzhugh intoned yet again in 1857. “We do not know whether free laborers ever sleep,” Fitzhugh snickered; “the free laborer must work or starve,” while the slaves “enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care not labor.” The Northern worker is actually “more of a slave than the negro, because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave, and has no holiday, because the cares of life with him begin when its labors end. He has no liberty, and not a single right.” At that moment, the slaveholders ceased to be an accident within a liberal democracy and became its enemies. 100

But it was not enough for Southerners merely to justify the “positive good” of slavery in books, learned treatises, and sermons. Nat Turner had been no respecter of arguments, and so the pro-slavery defenses began to sprout demands that the federal government and the Northern states issue assurances that the abolitionists would never be allowed to tamper with what John Calhoun delicately described as the South’s “peculiar domestic institution.” Slavery became the lens through which Southerners looked at every question, the red dye that tainted every American conflict. Opposition to Henry Clay’s “American System” was not merely a matter of agrarian economic theory; it sprang from the fear that a national government capable of interfering that deeply in the structure of the economy might prove capable of interfering with slavery, too. North Carolina senator Nathaniel Macon suspected, as early as 1818, that “the passage of a bill granting money for internal improvements” would also make “possible a bill for the emancipation of the negroes,” and he “desired to put North Carolinians on their guard, and not simply North Carolinians, but all Southerners.” And one no less than John Calhoun admitted that nullification of the tariff was really only a mechanism for ensuring that the federal government would never be able to tamper with slavery.101

I consider the tariff but as the occasion, rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things. The truth can no longer be disguised, that the peculiar dome-stick institution of the Southern states, and the consequent direction, which that and her soil and climate have given to her industry, has placed them in regard to taxation and appropriation in opposite relation to the majority of the Union; against the danger of which… they must in the end be forced to rebel or submit to have their permanent interests sacrificed, their domestick institutions subverted… and themselves and children reduced to wretchedness.102

Still, Southern slaveholders need not have worried overmuch, since the Constitution had sanctioned the existence of slavery by allowing the slave states to count three-fifths of their slave populations toward the creation of federal congressional districts. (This arrangement, to the disgruntlement of the free states, effectively granted the South something like two dozen extra members of Congress, though their constituents could not vote.) “Slavery existed in the South when the constitution was framed,” declared Calhoun on the floor of the Senate in 1848, and “it is the only property recognized by it; the only one that entered into its formation as a political element, both in the adjustment of the relative weight of the States in the Government, and the apportionment of direct taxes; and the only one that is put under the express guaranty of the constitution.” William Lloyd Garrison found himself powerless to disagree: “It is absurd, it is false, it is an insult to the common sense of mankind, to pretend that the Constitution… or that the parties to it were actuated by a sense of justice and the spirit of impartial liberty. …”103 And when it came to choosing between abolition and the Union, Northerners were content to choose the Union.

Content, that is, until the time came for Americans to deal with the West.

At the end of the Revolution, the outward fringe of the thirteen newly independent United States stopped pretty much at the foothills of the Appalachians. But the British surrendered to