More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 22 - February 19, 2021
The core of republicanism was liberty, a precious but precarious birthright constantly threatened by corrupt manipulations of power. The philosopher of republicanism, Thomas Jefferson, had defined the essence of liberty as independence, which required the ownership of productive property. A man dependent on others for a living could never be truly free, nor could a dependent class constitute the basis of a republican government.
Jefferson envisaged an ideal America of farmers and artisan producers who owned their means of production and depended on no man for a living.
Instead of working for themselves, they worked for someone else. Instead of earning a just price for their skill, they earned wages whose amount was determined not by the intrinsic value of their labor but by what an increasingly distant “market” would bear.
Capitalism was incompatible with republicanism, they insisted. Dependence on wages robbed a man of his independence and therefore of his liberty. Wage labor was no better than slave labor—hence “wage slavery.” The boss was like a slaveowner. He determined the hours of toil, the pace of work, the division of labor, the level of wages; he could hire and fire at will. The pre-industrial artisan had been accustomed to laboring as much or as little as he pleased.
Lincoln told an audience at New Haven in 1860. But in the free states a man knows that “he can better his condition . . . there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer.” “Wage slave” was a contradiction in terms, said Lincoln. “The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.” If a man “continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly,
...more
“We have calculated the value of the Union,” warned Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi. “We ask you to give us our rights” in California; “if you refuse, I am for taking them by armed occupation.” The South’s liberty was at stake as much now as in 1776, for “it is clear,” according to an Alabama congressman, “that the power to dictate what sort of property the State may allow a citizen to own and work—whether oxen, horses, or negroes . . . is alike despotic and tyrannical.”45 Several fistfights broke out between southerners and northerners in the House. The Senate caught the same fever.
...more
Taylor never receded from this position. When Toombs and Stephens appealed to him as a southerner, warning him that the South would not “submit” to these insults, Taylor lost his temper. In unpresidential language he told them that he would personally lead an army to enforce the laws and hang any traitors he caught—including Toombs and Stephens—with as little compunction as he had hanged spies and deserters in Mexico.
The North had grown faster than the South in population, wealth, and power. This had happened because of discriminatory legislation favoring the North: the Northwest Ordinance and the Compromise of 1820 which excluded southern property from a vast domain; tariffs and federal aid to internal improvements (Calhoun neglected to mention that he had once supported these measures) to foster northern enterprises at southern expense. Yankees had wantonly attacked southern institutions until one by one the bonds of Union had snapped:
“Sir—did you hear it? That three harmless non-resisting Quakers and eight-and-thirty wretched, miserable, penniless negroes, armed with corn cutters, clubs, and a few muskets, and headed by a miller, in a felt hat, without arms and mounted on a sorrel nag, levied war against the United States.”
A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a subsequent volume by Stowe containing documentation on which she had based the novel. When Lincoln met the author later that year, he reportedly greeted her with the words: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”22
The vehemence of southern denunciations of Mrs. Stowe’s “falsehoods” and “distortions” was perhaps the best gauge of how close they hit home.
Within two years proslavery writers had answered Uncle Tom’s Cabin with at least fifteen novels whose thesis that slaves were better off than free workers in the North was capsulized by the title of one of them: Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia and Tom Without One in Boston.
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.
Indeed, Tom was a Christ figure. Like Jesus he suffered agony inflicted by evil secular power. Like Jesus he died for the sins of humankind in order to save the oppressors as well as his own people. Stowe’s readers lived in an age that understood this message better than ours.
Following the lead of Adam Smith, classical economists considered free labor more efficient than slave labor because the free worker is stimulated by the fear of want and the desire for betterment. A slave, wrote Smith, “can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible.” Yankee opponents of slavery agreed. “Enslave a man,” declared Horace Greeley, “and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one’s condition is the mainspring of effort.”
The new party in Michigan officially designated itself Republican in July. Conventions in numerous congressional districts, especially in the Old Northwest, chose this name that resonated with the struggle of 1776. “In view of the necessity of battling for the first principles of republican government,” resolved the Michigan convention, “and against the schemes of aristocracy the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed, or man debased, we will co-operate and be known as Republicans.”
The founding fathers, said Lincoln, had opposed slavery. They adopted a Declaration of Independence that pronounced all men created equal. They enacted the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banning slavery from the vast Northwest Territory. To be sure, many of the founders owned slaves. But they asserted their hostility to slavery in principle while tolerating it temporarily (as they hoped) in practice. That was why they did not mention the words “slave” or “slavery” in the Constitution, but referred only to “persons held to service.” “Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution,” said Lincoln,
...more
Lincoln denied “that there CAN be MORAL RIGHT in the enslaving of one man by another.”
When they “tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we, I acknowledge the fact. . . . They are just what we would be in their situation.
“I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia.” But a moment’s reflection convinced him of the impossibility of that. “What then, free them and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? . . . What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals?” Even if Lincoln’s own feelings would accept this, “we well know that those
...more
Popular sovereignty was false in principle and pernicious in practice, said Lincoln. Its assumption that the question of slavery in a territory concerned only the people who lived there was wrong.
But such action, Douglas had protested, would be contrary to the settlers’ “sacred right of self-government.” Nonsense, replied Lincoln. Slavery was contrary to that right. “When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man . . . that is despotism. . . . The negro is a man. . . . There can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another,” “Let no one be deceived,” concluded Lincoln:
The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms. . . . Little by little . . . we have been giving up the old for the new faith. Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a “sacred right of self-government.” These principles cannot stand together. . . . Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. . . . Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy,
...more
think little better than I do of the slavery extensionists. . . . Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ’all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of
...more
So felt Congressman Preston Brooks, a cousin of Andrew Butler. Two days after the speech Brooks walked into the nearly empty Senate chamber after adjournment and approached the desk where Sumner was writing letters. Your speech, he told the senator, “is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.” As Sumner started to rise, the frenzied Brooks beat him over the head thirty times or more with a gold-headed cane as Sumner, his legs trapped under the bolted-down desk, finally wrenched it loose from the floor and collapsed with his head covered by blood.11
The South, declared one newspaper, “cannot tolerate free speech anywhere, and would stifle it in Washington with the bludgeon and the bowie-knife, as they are now trying to stifle it in Kansas by massacre, rapine, and murder.”
“Has it come to this,” asked William Cullen Bryant of the New York Evening Post, “that we must speak with bated breath in the presence of our Southern masters?
Are we to be chastised as they chastise their slaves? Are we too, slaves, slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
When the House voted 121 to 95 to expel him, southern opposition prevented the necessary two-thirds majority. Brooks resigned anyway and returned home to seek vindication by reelection. South Carolinians feted him and sent him back to Washington with triumphant unanimity. From all over the South, Brooks received dozens of new canes, some inscribed with such mottoes as “Hit Him Again” and “Use Knock-Down Arguments.”
When further word reached Brown’s party of the caning of Sumner in Washington, Brown “went crazy—crazy,” according to witnesses. “Something must be done to show these barbarians that we, too, have rights,”
These Yankee fanatics were a sectional party, charged Democrats. That was quite true. In only four slave states (all in the upper South) did Frémont tickets appear, and the Republicans won considerably less than one percent of the vote in these states. If Frémont won the presidency by carrying a solid North, warned Democrats, the Union would crumble.
But lo and behold, the initial returns seemed to indicate an astonishing proslavery victory. Closer investigation uncovered the curious phenomenon of two remote districts with 130 legal voters having reported almost 2,900 ballots. In one case some 1,600 names had been copied onto the voting rolls from an old Cincinnati city directory.
Democrats gonna democrat
Free soilers refused to participate in this referendum, which thereby approved the constitution “with slavery” by a vote of 6,226 to 569. (As usual, an investigation found 2,720 of the majority votes to have been fraudulent.)
On one occasion during an all-night session Republican Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania walked over to the Democratic side to confer with a few northern Democrats. Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina shouted at him: “Go back to your side of the House, you Black Republican puppy!” Replying with a sneering remark about slave drivers, Grow grappled with Keitt and knocked him down. Congressmen from both sides rushed into the melee. “There were some fifty middle-aged and elderly gentlemen pitching into each other like so many Tipperary savages,” wrote a reporter describing this 2:00 a.m. free-for-all,
...more
This was false, as Curtis and McLean pointed out in their dissents. Free blacks in 1788 and later had many legal rights (to hold and bequeath property, make contracts, seek redress in courts, among others). In five of the thirteen states that ratified the Constitution black men were legal voters and participated in the ratification process.
“Southern opinion upon the subject of Southern slavery . . . is now the supreme law of the land.” The decision “crushes the life out of that miserable . . . Black Republican organization.”13 But the Republican party declined to die. Its press condemned this “Jesuitical decision” based on “gross historical falsehoods” and a “willful perversion” of the Constitution. If this ruling “shall stand for law,” wrote William Cullen Bryant, slavery was no longer the “peculiar institution” of fifteen states but “a Federal institution, the common patrimony and shame of all the States. . . . Hereafter,
...more
Lincoln spelled out his position with clarity: “I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, (applause)—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”
By the summer of 1857 the combination of speculative fever in some parts of the economy and ominous cutbacks in others created a climate of nervous apprehension. “What can be the end of all this but another general collapse like that of 1837?” asked the financial writer of the New York Herald. “The same premonitory symptoms that prevailed in 1835—36 prevail in 1857 in a tenfold degree . . . paper bubbles of all descriptions, a general scramble for western lands and town and city sites, millions of dollars, made or borrowed, expended in fine houses and gaudy furniture. . . . That a storm is
...more
Remembering that some of the European revolutions in 1848 (which had been preceded by a financial downturn) had taken a radical turn toward class warfare, Americans wondered if they would experience similar events. Unemployed workers in several cities marched in demonstrations carrying banners demanding work or bread. In New York a large crowd broke into the shops of flour merchants. On November 10 a mob gathered in Wall Street and threatened forced entry into the U.S. customs house and subtreasury whose vaults contained $20 million. Soldiers and marines dispersed them, but unrest persisted
...more
I deny everything but what I have all along admitted: of a design on my part to free slaves. . . . Had I interfered in the manner which I admit . . . in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the socalled great . . . every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches
...more
Instead of a platform, therefore, they adopted a pious resolution pledging “to recognize no political principle other than the Constitution . . . the Union . . . and the Enforcement of the Laws.”
“revolutions are much easier started than controlled, and the men who begin them [often] . . . themselves become the victims.”
Ex-Governor Henry Wise of Virginia, who urged the formation of committees of public safety, gloried in his reputation as the “Danton of the Secession Movement in Virginia.” Carried away by an excess of Robespierrian zeal, a Georgia disunionist warned cooperationists that “we will go for revolution, and if you . . . oppose us . . .we will brand you as traitors, and chop off your heads.”
The jacobin appeal throughout history is disturbing. We have the advatange of nowing how this period of history turned out in france, but young radicals continue to glorify it even today.
What were these rights and liberties for which Confederates contended? The right to own slaves; the liberty to take this property into the territories; freedom from the coercive powers of a centralized government. Black Republican rule in Washington threatened republican freedoms as the South understood them. The ideology for which the fathers had fought in 1776 posited an eternal struggle between liberty and power.
What stake did nonslaveholding whites have in this crusade for the freedom of planters to own slaves? Some secessionists worried a great deal about this question.
For disunionists to compare themselves to the Revolutionary fathers “is a libel upon the whole character and conduct of the men of ‘76,” declared William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post. The founders fought “to establish the rights of man . . . and principles of universal liberty.” The South was rebelling “not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic despotism. . . . Their motto is not liberty, but slavery.”
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
The Union was not “a mere voluntary association of States, to be dissolved at pleasure by any one of the contracting parties,” said Buchanan. “We the People” had adopted the Constitution to form “a more perfect Union” than the one existing under the Articles of Confederation, which had stated that “the Union shall be perpetual.” The framers of the national government “never intended to implant in its bosom the seeds of its own destruction, nor were they guilty of the absurdity of providing for its own dissolution.”
If secession was legitimate, warned the president, the Union became “a rope of sand” and “our thirty-three States may resolve themselves into as many petty, jarring, and hostile republics. . . . By such a dread catastrophe the hopes of the friends of freedom throughout the world would be destroyed. . . . Our example for more than eighty years would not only be lost, but it would be quoted as a conclusive proof that man is unfit for self-government.
"The doctrine of secession is anarchy,” declared a Cincinnati newspaper. “If any minority have the right to break up the Government at pleasure, because they have not had their way, there is an end of all government.”
