Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

Magnified by southerners into an enormous Yankee network of lawbreakers who stole thousands of slaves each year, the underground railroad was also mythologized by its northern conductors who related their heroic deeds to grandchildren.

The fugitive slave law of 1850 put the burden of proof on captured blacks but gave them no legal power to prove their freedom. Instead, a claimant could bring an alleged fugitive before a federal commissioner (a new office created by the law) to prove ownership by an affidavit from a slave-state court or by the testimony of white witnesses.

The operation of this law confirmed the impression that it was rigged in favor of claimants. In the first fifteen months after its passage, eighty-four fugitives were returned to slavery and only five released. During the full decade of the 1850s, 332 were returned and only eleven declared free.

President Fillmore denounced the Bostonians, threatened to send in federal troops, and assured the Crafts’ owner that if he wanted to try again the government would help him “with all the means which the Constitution and Congress have placed at his disposal.”

They found the fugitives, along with two dozen armed black men vowing to resist capture. Two Quakers appeared and advised the slave hunters to retreat for their own good. The owner refused, declaring that “I will have my property, or go to hell.” Shooting broke out. When it was over the slaveowner lay dead and his son seriously wounded (two other whites and two blacks were lightly wounded). The blacks disappeared into the countryside; their three leaders sped on the underground railroad to Canada.12 The “Battle of Christiana” became a national event. “Civil War—The First Blow Struck,” proclaimed a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, newspaper.

Northern resistance to the fugitive slave law fed the resentment of fire-eaters still seething over the admission of California. “We cannot stay in the Union any longer,” said one, “with such dishonor attached to the terms of our remaining.”

But already a reaction was setting in. The highest cotton prices in a decade and the largest cotton crop ever caused many a planter to think twice about secession. Whig unionism reasserted itself under the leadership of Toombs and Stephens. Old party lines temporarily dissolved as a minority of Democrats in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi joined Whigs to form Constitutional Union parties to confront Southern Rights Democrats.

But northern Whigs were restless. Most of them were having a hard time swallowing the fugitive slave law. The party was sending a growing number of radical antislavery men to Congress: Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and George W. Julian entered the House in 1849; Benjamin Wade of Ohio came to the Senate in 1851. If such men as these gained control of the party it would splinter along North-South lines. Southern Whigs had barely survived Taylor’s apostasy; another such shock would shatter them.

The novel enjoyed equal popularity in Britain and was translated into several foreign languages. Within a decade it had sold more than two million copies in the United States, making it the best seller of all time in proportion to population.

“That triumphant work,” wrote Henry James, who had been moved by it in his youth, was “much less a book than a state of vision.”

It is not possible to measure precisely the political influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. One can quantify its sales but cannot point to votes that it changed or laws that it inspired. Yet few contemporaries doubted its power. “Never was there such a literary coup-de-main as this,” said Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin struck a raw nerve in the South. Despite efforts to ban it, copies sold so fast in Charleston and elsewhere that booksellers could not keep up with the demand. The vehemence of southern denunciations of Mrs. Stowe’s “falsehoods” and “distortions” was perhaps the best gauge of how close they hit home.

In a later age “Uncle Tom” became an epithet for a black person who behaved with fawning servility toward white oppressors. This was partly a product of the ubiquitous Tom shows that paraded across the stage for generations and transmuted the novel into comic or grotesque melodrama. But an obsequious Tom was not the Uncle Tom of Stowe’s pages.

The South’s defensive-aggressive temper in the 1850s stemmed in part from a sense of economic subordination to the North. In a nation that equated growth with progress, the census of 1850 alarmed many southerners. During the previous decade, population growth had been 20 percent greater in the free states than in the slave states.

Three times as many people born in slave states had migrated to free states as vice versa, while seven-eighths of the immigrants from abroad settled in the North, where jobs were available and competition with slave labor nonexistent. The North appeared to be racing ahead of the South in crucial indices of economic development. In 1850 only 14 percent of the canal mileage ran through slave states. In 1840 the South had possessed 44 percent of the country’s railroad mileage, but by 1850 the more rapid pace of northern construction had dropped the southern share to 26 percent.

With 42 percent of the population, slave states possessed only 18 percent of the country’s manufacturing capacity, a decline from the 20 percent of 1840. More alarming, nearly half of this industrial capital was located in the fou...

But this silver lining belonged to a dark cloud. The states that grew cotton kept less than 5 percent of it at home for manufacture into cloth. They exported 70 percent of it abroad and the remainder to northern mills, where the value added by manufacture equaled the price that raw cotton brought the South, which in turn imported two-thirds of its clothing and other manufactured goods from the North or abroad.

“Our whole commerce except a small fraction is in the hands of Northern men,” complained a prominent Alabamian in 1847. “Take Mobile as an example— of our Bank Stock is owned by Northern men. . . . Our wholesale and retail business—everything in short worth mentioning is in the hands of men who invest their profits at the North. . . . Financially we are more enslaved than our negroes.”

The amount “lost to us annually by our vassalage to the North,” said De Bow in 1852, was “one hundred million dollars. Great God! Does Ireland sustain a more degrading relation to Great Britain? Will we not throw off this humiliating dependence?” De Bow demanded “action!

The South did take significant strides in the 1850s. The slave states more than quadrupled their railroad mileage, outstripping the northern pace which merely tripled mileage in that section. Capital invested in southern manufacturing rose 77 percent, exceeding the rate of population growth so that the amount invested per capita increased 39 percent. The value of southern-produced textiles increased 44 percent. But like Alice in Wonderland, the faster the South ran, the farther behind it seemed to fall. While the slave states’ proportion of national railroad mileage increased to 35 percent in 1860, this was less than the 44 percent of 1840.

While per capita investment in manufacturing increased no faster in the North than in the South during the 1850s, the population of free states grew more than that of slave states (40 percent to 27 percent) so that the southern share of national manufacturing capacity dropped from 18 to 16 percent. The effort to bring the spindles to the cotton failed: in 1860 the value of cotton textiles manufactured in the slave states was only 10 percent of the American total.

The city of Lowell, Massachusetts, operated more spindles in 1860 than all eleven of the soon-to-be Confederate states combined.

These explanations for southern “backwardness” have some merit. Yet they are not entirely convincing.

Other accounts of southern industrialization have focused not on deficiencies of labor or of demand but on a lack of capital. Capital was abundant in the South, to be sure: in 1860, according to the census measure of wealth (real and personal property), the average southern white male was nearly twice as wealthy as the average northern white man.38 The problem was that most of this wealth was invested in land and slaves.

A northerner described the investment cycle of the southern economy: “To sell cotton in order to buy negroes—to make more cotton to buy more negroes, ‘ad infinitum,’ is the aim and direct tendency of all the operations of the thorough going cotton planter.”

Yes, answered a more recent generation of historians, who have analyzed bushels of data and concluded that slave agriculture yielded as great a return on capital as potential alternative investments.41 Maybe, is the answer of still another group of economic historians, who suggest that investments in railroads and mills might have yielded higher returns than agriculture, that cotton was living on the borrowed time of an almost saturated market,

Defenders of slavery contrasted the bondsman’s comfortable lot with the misery of wage slaves so often that they began to believe it. Beware of the “endeavor to imitate . . . Northern civilization” with its “filthy, crowded, licentious factories,” warned a planter in 1854. “Let the North enjoy their hireling labor with all its . . . pauperism, rowdyism, mob-ism and anti-rentism,” said the collector of customs in Charleston. “We do not want it. We are satisfied with our slave labor. . . . We like old things—old wine, old books, old friends, old and fixed relations between employer and employed.”

The 1850s were boom years for cotton and for other southern staples. Low cotton prices in the 1840s had spurred the crusade for economic diversification. But during the next decade the price of cotton jumped more than 50 percent to an average of 11.5 cents a pound. The cotton crop consequently doubled to four million bales annually by the late 1850s. Sugar and tobacco prices and production similarly increased. The apparent insatiable demand for southern staples caused planters to put every available acre into these crops. The per capita output of the principal southern food crops actually declined in the 1850s, and this agricultural society headed toward the status of a food-deficit region.

By 1857 the politicians had pretty well taken over these “commercial” conventions. And the main form of commerce they now advocated was a reopening of the African slave trade.50

Smuggling continued on a small scale after that date; in the 1850s the rising price of slaves produced an increase in this illicit traffic and built up pressure for a repeal of the ban. Political motives also actuated proponents of repeal. Agitation of the question, said one, would give “a sort of spite to the North and defiance of their opinions.”

Or as William L. Yancey put it: “If it is right to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Africa and carry them there?”51

In addition to moral repugnance toward the horrors of the “middle passage” of slaves across the Atlantic, many slaveowners in the upper South had economic reasons to oppose reopening of the African trade. Their own prosperity benefitted from the rising demand for slaves;

Lamar organized a syndicate that sent several ships to Africa for slaves. One of these was the Wanderer, a fast yacht that took on a cargo of five hundred Africans in 1858. The four hundred survivors of the voyage to Georgia earned Lamar a large profit. But federal officials had got wind of the affair and arrested Lamar along with several crew members. Savannah juries acquitted all of them. The grand jurors who had indicted Lamar suffered so much vilification from the local press as dupes of Yankee agitators that they published a bizarre recantation of their action

denounced Yankee hypocrisy: “What is the difference between a Yankee violating the fugitive slave law in the North, and a Southern man violating . . . the law against the African slave trade in the South?” Lamar repurchased the Wanderer at public auction and went on with his slave-trading ventures until the Civil War, in which he was killed at the head of his regiment.

This version of Manifest Destiny was not new in 1856. Eight years earlier, just after the Senate had approved the treaty acquiring California and New Mexico, President Polk had outlined his next goal: “I am decidedly in favour of purchasing Cuba & making it one of the States of [the] Union.”55 This idea appealed particularly to southerners as a way to expand their political power.

Believing that the Gulf of Mexico was “a basin of water belonging to the United States,” Senator Jefferson Davis declared in 1848 that “Cuba must be ours” in order to “increase the number of slaveholding constituencies.”

In any case it was unlikely that Congress, with its Whig and Wilmot Proviso majority in the House, would have appropriated funds to buy a territory containing nearly half a million slaves. Whig victory in the 1848 presidential election ended official efforts to acquire Cuba—for the time being.

When this news reached New Orleans, mobs rioted out of control. They destroyed the Spanish consulate and sacked shops owned by Spaniards. “Blood for Blood!” blazoned the New Orleans Courier. “Our brethren must be avenged! Cuba must be seized!"63 But the Fillmore administration, embarrassed by its negligent failure to stop the filibusters before they reached Cuba, confined its activities to a successful diplomatic effort to release the remaining American prisoners from Spain.

Within a year of his arrival at Madrid, Soule denounced the monarchy, wounded the French ambassador in a duel, presented a forty-eight hour ultimatum (which Spain ignored) over an incident involving an American ship at Havana, and began intriguing with Spanish revolutionaries.

The volatile Louisianian somehow persuaded the normally cautious Buchanan as well as the naive Mason to sign a memorandum that became known as the Ostend Manifesto. “Cuba is as necessary to the North American republic as any of its present . . . family of states,” proclaimed this document. If the United States decided that its security required possession of the island, and Spain persisted in refusing to sell, then “by every law, human and Divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain.”

The House subpoenaed the diplomatic correspondence and published it. Already reeling from a Kansas-Nebraska backlash that had cost the Democrats sixty-six of their ninety-one northern congressmen in the 1854 elections, the shell-shocked administration forced Souleé’s resignation and abandoned all schemes to obtain Cuba.

By mid-1856, however, that was changing. While much of the northern press condemned Walker as a pirate, southern newspapers praised him as engaged in a “noble cause. . . . It is our cause at bottom.” In 1856 the Democratic national convention adopted a plank written by none other than Pierre Soul6 endorsing U. S. “ascendancy in the Gulf of Mexico.”

On September 22, 1856, he revoked Nicaragua’s 1824 emancipation edict and legalized slavery again.80 This bold gamble succeeded in winning southern support. “No movement on the earth” was as important to the South as Walker’s, proclaimed one newspaper. “In the name of the white race,” said another, he “now offers Nicaragua to you and your slaves, at a time when you have not a friend on the face of the earth.”

This outpouring of southern sympathy swept Walker into a campaign to organize yet another invasion of Nicaragua. A second tour of the lower South evoked an almost pathological frenzy among people who believed themselves locked in mortal combat with Yankee oppressors.

But Walker’s act was growing stale. When he set out again to recruit support for a fourth try, the crowds were smaller. Walker wrote a book about his Nicaraguan experiences, appealing to “the hearts of Southern youth” to “answer the call of honor.”84 A few southern youths answered the call. Ninety-seven filibusters traveled in small groups to a rendezvous in Honduras where they hoped to find backing for a new invasion of Nicaragua. Instead they found hostility and defeat. Walker surrendered to a British navy captain, expecting as usual to be returned to the United States. Instead the captain turned him over to local authorities. On September 12, 1860, the grey-eyed man met his destiny before a Honduran firing squad.

When Senator John }. Crittenden proposed to resolve the secession crisis in 1861 by reinstating the 36° 30’ line between slavery and freedom in all territories “now held, or hereafter acquired,” Abraham Lincoln and his party rejected the proposal on the ground that it “would amount to a perpetual covenant of war against every people, tribe, and State owning a foot of land between here and Tierra del Fuego.”

Millard Fillmore’s efforts to enforce the fugitive slave law won him the support of southern Whigs for re-nomination. But the president had alienated antislavery Whigs, especially the Seward faction in Fillmore’s own state of New York. Seward favored the nomination of Winfield Scott, a Virginian (but not a slaveholder). The Whig convention presented the curious spectacle of most southern delegates favoring a northern candidate, and vice versa, while many anti-war Whigs of four years earlier once again backed a general who had led American troops to victory in the war these Whigs had opposed.

Balloting for a presidential nominee ground through 52 roll calls as Yankee delegates furnished 95 percent of Scott’s vote and southern delegates cast 85 percent of Fillmore’s. On the fifty-third ballot a dozen southern moderates switched to Scott and put him over the top.

As the campaign proceeded, defections of southern Whigs became a stampede. On election day Scott won 35 percent of the popular vote in the lower South (compared with Taylor’s 50 percent four years earlier) and carried only Kentucky and Tennessee among the fifteen slave states. In the eleven future Confederate states the Whigs in 1852–53 elected no governors and merely fourteen of sixty-five congressmen while maintaining control of only the Tennessee legislature.

But the southerners could not nominate their own candidate, the pliable James Buchanan. Through forty-eight ballots the party remained apparently as deadlocked as the Whigs. On the forty-ninth they nominated dark horse Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, a former senator and a Mexican War veteran, who was acceptable to all factions and safe on slavery despite his Yankee background.