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August 16 - September 16, 2019
Grinding poverty and luxurious wealth were by no means absent from the United States, but what impressed most observers was the broad middle.
It was not so much the level of wages as the very concept of wages itself that fueled much of this protest. Wage labor was a form of dependency that seemed to contradict the republican principles on which the country had been founded.
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.
Capitalism was incompatible with republicanism, they insisted. Dependence on wages robbed a man of his independence and therefore of his liberty.
“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, or singular misfortune.”
The Wilmot Proviso wrenched this division by parties into a conflict of sections. The political landscape would never again be the same. “As if by magic,” commented the Boston Whig, “it brought to a head the great question that is about to divide the American people.”15
The House again passed Wilmot’s amendment by a sectional vote. But the South’s greater power in the Senate (15 slave states and 14 free states composed the Union in 1847) enabled it to block the proviso there.
On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress.
This opened the floodgates for a new series of personal liberty laws (nine between 1842 and 1850) that prohibited the use of state facilities in the recapture of fugitives.1
“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?”
“To the Southern republic bounded on the north by the Mason and Dixon line and on the south by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, including Cuba and all other lands on our southern shore.”54 This
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.
“I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it,” declared Jefferson Davis’s fellow senator from Mississippi, Albert Gallatin Brown. But Brown would not stop there. “I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting and spreading of slavery.”
“we have a destiny to perform, ‘a manifest destiny’ over all Mexico, over South America, over the West Indies.”60
“The safety of the South is to be found only in the extension of its peculiar institutions,”
Walker decided “to bind the Southern States to Nicaragua as if she were one of themselves,” as he later put it. 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.”
Lincoln denied “that there CAN be MORAL RIGHT in the enslaving of one man by another.” But he did not want to pass judgment on southern people. 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.
Native-born Americans attributed these increases to immigrants, especially the Irish, whose arrest rate and share of relief funds were several times their percentage of the population.
If Frémont won the presidency by carrying a solid North, warned Democrats, the Union would crumble. As Buchanan himself put it, “the Black Republicans must be . . . boldly assailed as disunionists, and this charge must be re-iterated again and again.”24 Southerners helped along the cause by threatening to secede if the Republicans won. “The election of Frémont,” declared Robert Toombs, “would be the end of the Union, and ought to be.”
Indiana Democrats organized a parade which included young girls in white dresses carrying banners inscribed “Fathers, save us from nigger husbands!"26
Buchanan was a minority president in the popular vote, however, having won 45 percent of that vote nationally—56 percent in the South and 41 percent in the North.37
Governors and legislatures stood by to call conventions to consider secession if Congress refused to admit Kansas under the “duly ratified” Lecompton constitution. “If Kansas is driven out of the Union for being a Slave State,” asked South Carolina’s Senator James Hammond, “can any Slave State remain in it with honor?” The southern people, declared a Georgia congressman, intended “to have equality in this Union or independence out of it.”45 These threats stiffened Buchanan’s backbone. On February 2, 1858, he sent the Lecompton constitution to Congress with a message recommending admission of a
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Free-state Kansans organized a Republican party and elected two-thirds of the delegates to a new constitutional convention in 1859. Kansas finally came in as a free state in January 1861, joining California, Minnesota, and Oregon, whose entry since the Mexican War had given the North a four-state edge over the South.
The New York Tribune declared contemptuously that this decision by “five slaveholders and two doughfaces"15 was a “dictum . . . entitled to just as much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.”
Republican refusal to recognize the ruling as a binding precedent. They proclaimed an intent to “reconstitute” the Court after winning the presidency in 1860 and to overturn the “inhuman dicta” of Dred Scott.
The right of property in slaves “necessarily remains a barren and worthless right,” said Douglas, “unless sustained, protected and enforced by appropriate police regulations and local legislation” which depended on “the will and the wishes of the people of the Territory.”
Recent scholarship sustains Lincoln’s apprehension that the Taney Court would have sanctioned “some form of slavery in the North.”24 Even
Lincoln admitted that he believed black people “entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But “I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily have her for a wife. (Cheers and laughter)” So that his horse chestnut should no longer be mistaken for a chestnut horse, 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,
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Reaction in the South to Brown’s raid brought to the surface a paradox that lay near the heart of slavery. On the one hand, many whites lived in fear of slave insurrections. On the other, southern whites insisted that slaves were well treated and cheerful in their bondage.
The distinction between act and motive was lost on southern whites. They saw only that millions of Yankees seemed to approve of a murderer who had tried to set the slaves at their throats.
On the Senate floor Robert Toombs warned that the South would “never permit this Federal government to pass into the traitorous hands of the Black Republican party.”
Some lower-South Democrats even preferred a Republican president to Douglas in order to make the alternatives facing the South starkly clear: submission or secession. And they ensured this result by proceeding to cleave the Democratic party in two.
They accepted the axiom of the Freeport doctrine that a Court decision would not enforce itself. Slave property needed federal protection, said the committee chairman, a North Carolinian, so that when the United States acquired Cuba, Mexico, and Central America any slaveholder could take his property there with perfect security.
The bolters quickly organized their own convention and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky (the current vice president) for president on a slave-code platform. The dispirited loyalists nominated Douglas and returned home with renewed bitterness in their hearts toward the rebels who had all but ensured the election of a Black Republican president.32
Stories of slave uprisings that followed the visits of mysterious Yankee strangers, reports of arson and rapes
the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.”58
Republicans refused to take these warnings to heart. They had heard them before, a dozen times or more. In 1856 Democrats had used such threats to frighten northerners into voting Democratic.
Though Lincoln won only 40 percent of the national popular vote (54 percent in the North), his 180 electoral votes gave him a comfortable cushion over the necessary minimum of 152.
Charles Francis Adams, whose grandfather and father had been defeated for reelection to the presidency by slaveowners, wrote in his diary the day after Lincoln’s victory: “The great revolution has actually taken place. . . . The country has once and for all thrown off the domination of the Slaveholders.”
the Confederate States of America organized itself, drafted a constitution, and set up shop in Montgomery, Alabama, within three months of Lincoln’s election.
As fire-eaters had hoped, this bold step triggered a chain reaction by conventions in other lower-South states.
At the center of the cooperationist spectrum stood a group that might be labeled “ultimatumists.” They urged a convention of southern states to draw up a list of demands for presentation to the incoming Lincoln administration—including enforcement of the fugitive slave law, repeal of personal liberty laws, guarantees against interference with slavery in the District of Columbia or with the interstate slave trade, and protection of slavery in the territories, at least those south of 36° 30′. If Republicans refused this ultimatum, then a united South would go out.
Secession was an unequivocal act which relieved the unbearable tension that had been building for years.
Slavery “is the poor man’s best Government,” said Brown. “Among us the poor white laborer . . . does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense his equal. . . . He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men.” Thus yeoman farmers “will never consent to submit to abolition rule,” for they “know that in the event of the abolition of slavery, they would be greater sufferers than the rich, who would be able to protect themselves.
Alexander Stephens after he had become vice president of the Confederacy. “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.”
a pre-emptive counterrevolution strikes first to protect the status quo before the revolutionary threat can materialize.
“A successful rebellion by a few States now,” ran an editorial typical of hundreds, “will be followed by a new rebellion or secession a few years hence.” This was not mere alarmism. Some Americans were already speculating about a division of the country into three or four “confederacies” with an independent Pacific coast republic thrown in for good measure. Several New York merchants and Democrats with ties to the South were talking of setting up as a free city.
The “central idea” of the Union cause, said Lincoln, “is the necessity of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.”
Although few of the compromise proposals introduced in Congress went so far as Buchanan’s, they all shared the same feature: Republicans would have to make all the concessions. Republicans refused to succumb to what they considered blackmail.
Having long regarded the Union as a “covenant with death,” Garrisonian abolitionists were glad that slaveholders had broken the covenant. Even non-Garrisonians agreed, in Frederick Douglass’s words, that “if the Union can only be maintained by new concessions to the slaveholders [and] a new drain on the negro’s blood, then . . . let the Union perish.”
