Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 1 TranscriptJanuary 15, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: Okay, there's an outline up here. I'm going to try to write a little bigger from now on, and it's been already suggested I use capital letters and maybe practice my printing a little better. I will do that too. I'm not very high-tech. I will occasionally use some visuals, slides here and there, a painting here and there, an image now and then, and certainly maps, especially in dealing with the 1850s and the coming of the Civil War. But every lecture will have an outline in front of you, and the intention in every case is to get to the fifth part of that outline. I almost always do. Almost. But at least you'll have a sense of the structure of the topics or the themes that this lecture is supposed to work its way through.

I do welcome your questions. I'll ask at times if you have any questions. This is obviously a terribly formal situation, me up here on this stage and you out there, looking into your laptops in some cases, doing whatever you're doing on your laptops. Just don't do what one student did a year ago, though. He was right back there in that aisle-way, halfway back. He came in--it was the day I was lecturing on the Dred Scott decision, for some reason I've never forgotten that--and he whipped out the Yale Daily News, and he just was enjoying the Yale Daily News. I didn't know there was that much to read in it for that long, most of the time. But he's just reading the Yale Daily News in front of him. And at one point I stopped, rather loudly, and I said, "The Dred Scott decision is not covered in today's Yale Daily News." And he didn't hear me. So I shouted it again, and by that time the whole class was beginning to laugh, uncomfortably, and he finally realized what was going on. The poor guy crumpled up his newspaper and walked out the back and he never came back. I felt a little badly about it but--Just don't make it so obvious.

All right, does everybody have a syllabus, anyone lacking a syllabus, everyone's got a copy? We may need some more, the balcony people need syllabi. They're hiding up there. David, do you have any extras? [Discussion about availability of syllabi]

Professor David Blight: None left. Okay, we'll have more on Thursday. And I should put it on the Web. Dumb. I will put it up, this afternoon we'll get it up on the Web, through the Registrar's site or however. Today I'm going to take up the topic primarily of why the American Civil War period has had, still has, such a hold on the American, and for that matter international, historical imagination. That's what I want to talk about primarily.

But I want to say a word or two about the structure of the course and what you need to do, as quickly as possible. First of all every lecture, if you look at the syllabus, has a

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topic, a title of a kind. I will not get behind, in spite of what it may feel like. The readings are listed each week. We are using, among other things--there's a combination of readings, in fact, a rich combination of historical monograph, historical kind of syntheses, two works of fiction. Two novels, one by Louisa May Alcott, a famous short, classic little book called Hospital Sketches, which was based on Alcott's personal experience as a nurse in Civil War hospitals, an experience that all but overwhelmed her, emotionally, psychologically, and she in some ways could not stop thinking about it. We also are reading--using two readers; that is, collections of documents. One is a collection of documents by, mostly by and somewhat about, Abraham Lincoln, a reader edited by Michael Johnson. There's Nicole Ivy, entering as we speak, the eighth teaching assistant. Sorry Nicole, we just did intros. Anyway, one of the readers is Lincoln, the great speeches, the great public letters. We won't use every document in the book but the great Lincoln stuff is all there and well introduced.

The other reader, which we'll use virtually every week in the course, and teaching assistants will be free with this to assign whichever documents they so choose, any given week. I'm still taking the plastic off this one. It's edited by Bill Gienapp, a great Civil War historian, recently deceased. It's a collection of documents from essentially the Mexican War right on through Reconstruction, many of them very brief and short documents, allowing us at times to teach with a document. It's possible you'll have an entire discussion section that centers around a single document, as well as the other reading you did as background.

The other novel I neglected to mention is a very new novel. And I'm taking a risk in this course. For years and years, and I won't admit how many, I've always taught Michael Shaara's great Civil War novel, The Killer Angels, which I would venture a quarter of you have probably already read. All right, how many of you have already read Killer Angels? Ah-ha. We're not reading it this time. You can't take that week off. We're reading E.L. Doctorow's new novel called The March, which has only been out about a year, just into paperback. It's Doctorow, the great modern novelist of, well, urban America, of race in America, of so many things. He has actually a brilliant short story in the current New Yorker, if you haven't read it. It may not appeal to all of you. It's really about middle-age men in the suburbs. I got it.

Any rate, Doctorow's March is about Sherman's march to the sea. It's about Sherman but it's also about all the people around him. And I think Doctorow accomplished something extraordinary in that novel, which so few American writers of fiction have ever quite been able to imagine--he's not alone but not many have--and that is fully realize slave characters. Those he invents. A lot of real people in that book, and much

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of it--like so many other of Doctorow's great works, like Ragtime, if you've read Ragtime, or others--much of the language, the dialog, is verbatim out of historical sources. You might even want to read Sherman's memoirs in tandem with it, if you have the time. Whole portions of it come directly out of Sherman's memoirs, and then there are characters invented around it. Anyway, it's that last, horrible, devastating, destructive, evil, but sometimes good, year and a half of the Civil War in Georgia and South Carolina when the Civil War became a truly kind of total modern affair. It's a novel about this beast of war itself but it's very much a novel about what this war was about.

Anyway. I don't want to go into all the readings. I divide this course in three parts which may or may not be obvious the first time you glance at the syllabus. But essentially the first third of the course is the coming of the Civil War, it's the story from roughly the mid-1840s through Fort Sumter. And the second third of the course is essentially the war itself, where we tackle not only how the Civil War was fought, but we tackle what it was about, and we tackle the question of Confederate defeat and Union victory. How do we explain that? And we especially tackle questions of meaning. If a war of such devastation can have meaning in the end, what are those meanings? It's, I think, arguably the most important take-home set of questions and answers you might take out of this course. And of course that means we dwell a good deal on emancipation, the single most revolutionary result of the Civil War, and arguably the single most revolutionary historical moment in American history.

The liberation of 4.2 million slaves to some kind of freedom and some kind of citizenship, at least for awhile. And the third third of the course is, of course, Reconstruction. That "brief shining moment" as Du Bois once called it, of about eleven years from the end of the Civil--from Appomattox to the disputed election of 1876 and '77. Twelve years. One of the most vexing, topsy-turvy, turbulent, embittered periods of American history that historians still fight over, to say the least. It is there where we'll try to understand the consequences of the Civil War. This is a course at the end of the day about the causes and consequences, as well as the course, of this event.

Now--but today is January 15th, it is Martin Luther King's birthday. Now I'll start with a very famous passage. It's not usually the passage you hear from the "I Have A Dream" speech. Almost always when the Dream speech is quoted--and now it's quoted in commercials, right? Numerous times, or on radio spots, background. King's voice, as though it's some kind of American chorus for whatever- when, at any moment we need to feel better about ourselves and about race relations. We often just skip right over the first two or three paragraphs of the speech where the central

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metaphor he sets up in the speech is what he called "the promissory note," in the "bank of justice."

"I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. And so we have come here." Excuse me. "Five score years ago"--and here he is drawing directly off Lincoln--"five score years ago a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation." This was of course August 1963. A hot, a brutally hot August day, King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. "This momentous decree came as a great beacon, light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak," he says, "to end the long night of their captivity." That sentence is almost directly from the Bible. "But one hundred years later the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty, in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come here, we've come to our nation's capital, to cash a check. When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.' But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt, we refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us, upon demand, the riches of freedom and the security of justice." I would be thrilled if you walked out of this course and were able to explain to somebody why King made the promissory note the central metaphor of his "I Have a Dream" speech, and you could somehow explain why it hadn't been cashed by 1963, and could then begin to discuss whether it's fully cashed yet.

Now--that was just my homage to King. Now, I like to do a little ritual at the beginning of every class. If you'll forgive me, it only takes me about ten seconds. But you know we live in a world where all of us in this room take books for granted. We throw books on the floor, we throw books at people, we load them in and out of our backpacks, we drop them here and drop them there, we lose them, we rip them up, we write all over them--I write all over mine. It's only a few generations ago when there

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really weren't any bookstores to go to. Your great-great-grandparents couldn't meander a bookstore, to speak of, unless they lived in a special section of a special city. Books are precious things. A lot of them are assigned in this course. There's short ones, little ones, big ones, syntheses, novels, monographs. Think of a book, just for a moment, and then you can forget this if you want. But think of a book, any book. It's hard to think of a really bad book this way, but think of a good book, one of your favorite books ever, as like a newborn child, a newborn child brought into the world. A book. Probably a lot more planning and thought and design and construction, at least intellectually, goes into that book than goes into most babies. Books have a cover. They have beginnings, middles and ends. They're somebody's dream, they're somebody's creation. They never satisfy--just like people--but they're in some ways the greatest things we have, and sometimes it's nice to remind ourselves of that, in the places where we take them most for granted.

And I want to quote for you, to you, from the oldest history book in Western civilization. Not just because it's a book, but I think this is a point one can make about any history course, it doesn't matter what the subject is. It can be Social History, Political History, Intellectual History, any history. It can be the History of Ancient Rome, it could be Post-1945 United States, it could be any history. But any history course ought to do the two things that Herodotus named in the opening sentence of the oldest history book we have. This is Herodotus, The History. Isn't it great when you're writing the first book, what are you going to call it? The History; no subtitles, nothing fancy, just--"I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my history, that time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds manifested by both the Greeks and the barbarians, fail of their report, and together, with all of this, the reason why they fought one another."

I don't know how closely you listened to that, but what has Herodotus just said? He's basically said history is two things. It's the story, it's the color, it's the great deeds, it's the narrative that takes you somewhere; but it's also the reason why, it's also the explanations. That's what history does. It's supposed to do both of those things. Some of us are more into the analysis, and we're not so fond of story. Some of us just love stories and don't care about the analysis--"oh, stop giving me all that interpretation, just tell me the good story again." This is what goes on, of course, out in public history all the time: "just tell us the old stories and just sing us the old songs, make us feel good again. Stop interpreting, you historians, and worst of all, stop revising." You notice how that word 'revision' has crept into our political culture? When politicians don't like the arguments of people who disagree with them they accuse them of being revisionist historians. It was even a poll-tested word for a while when Condoleezza Rice was using it. "Revisionist, revisionist." As though all history isn't revisionist.

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My favorite story about revisionism is my buddy, Eric Foner, was on a talk show once. About 1992. He was on one of those shouting talk shows with Lynne Cheney, who at that--Dick Cheney's wife--who was then head of the NEH. And this was a time--you won't remember this--we were having this national brouhaha over what were called National History Standards. And Lynne Cheney, if you remember, a real critic of these National History Standards. She didn't particularly like some of the ideas that the historians were coming up with. So on this talk show--it was Firing Line where you get two people on and they just shout at each other for an hour, or a half hour, and the producers love it. And Foner is pretty good at rapid fire coming back, he's pretty good at it. Anyway they had this set-to and she kept accusing him and other historians of being "revisionist." And Eric says the next morning he got a phone call from a reporter at Newsweek and she said, "Professor Foner, when did all this revisionism begin?" And Foner said, "Probably with Herodotus." And the Newsweek reporter said, "Do you have his phone number?" Never underestimate the ignorance--H.L. Mencken said this, I didn't--never underestimate the ignorance of the American people. Or of journalists, or of--.

Now, as to this question of why the Civil War has a hold on us, or a hold on historical imagination in this country. There are many, many ways to think about that. I'm going to take you through seven or eight possible answers to that in just a moment, almost like a list. But again, sometimes if you go back to the oldest explanations you find things that we haven't even thought about. In Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, the first great modern text, in Western Civilization at any rate, about a Civil War, the great Greek Civil War. In Thucydides' great work he has this little sentence where he actually captures a good deal about why civil wars are such vexing, difficult problems in nations' memories once they've had them. So Thucydides said, "The people made their recollections fit in with their sufferings." They began to tell a story that reflected their own suffering. Now the 'they' here might be white southerners. They suffered. They lost. They were truly defeated, conquered. That suffering might be African-Americans. Emancipation wasn't a day of jubilee; it was an agonizing, horrible, terrible, sometimes wonderful, set of experiences into the unknown. And the suffering might be northern Unionists. About 300,000 Yankee soldiers died in the Civil War and about 650 to 700,000 were wounded. People made their memories fit their sufferings.

I also like this little passage, to just put into your craw, about any History course, about any interpretation. And of course I'm going to have a point of view at times in this course; all historians do. Don't even listen to a historian if he or she doesn't have a point of view. None of us are blank slates. None of us can just tell it like it was--"stop interpreting, please." But I always try to remember William James' passage in one of his Pragmatism essays, an essay I think that should be required for U.S. citizenship. If

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I ruled the world you'd have to read this for U.S. citizenship. In it, James says, "The greatest enemy of any one of my truths is the rest of my truths." It's as though James is saying, "damn, every time I think I really know something--that's the truth--along comes some other possible truth and it screws it up." Why can't history just be settled? Enough already. If it was, it wouldn't be any fun; if it was it wouldn't be interesting; if it was it wouldn't be good for business either.

Now, why does the Civil War have a hold? Why are you here? There's 280 of you here for a course on the Civil War. I know it fits--10:30 on Tuesday, Thursday--a hundred other reasons--you want a lecture course. Lots of possible answers to all that kind of question. But why does this event hold people? There are now approximately 65,000 books that have been written on the American Civil War--this doesn't even really include the books on Reconstruction--that have been written since Appomattox.

Now, I realized recently when I was giving a public talk that you can't always say "since Appomattox" and people know what you mean. I'm going to assume Yale students do. But that's actually where the surrender was signed that ended the Civil. I was giving a talk recently and I said, "Before Appomattox and after Appomattox"--and I must have said that four of five times. One of the first questions in Q & A is this woman innocently asked, "Well what is Appomattox?" Oh dear. "Well you see ma'am…" Anyway. Since Appomattox 65--you know what that is? That's more than one per day--have been published in this country on this event. Why?

What does Robert Penn Warren mean when he said, "The Civil War draws us as an oracle, darkly unriddled and portentous of our personal and our national fate"? That's pretty grandiose language, but what did Warren mean? What did Gertrude Stein mean when she said, "There never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War"? Of all people, Gertrude Stein was hopelessly interested in this event. "There never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War," she said. Why are so many people into this? Why do people want to read about it, re-enact it, go play it, go visit it? Is it just heritage tourism? Is it just the attraction of military history? What is it that compels us to remember the most divisive, the most bloody, the most tragic event in our national history? And how do we remember it? Have we sometimes cleaned it up with such pleasing mythology that we've just made it fun?

Why is the Confederate flag a problem? Why doesn't it just go away? It's the second most ubiquitous American symbol across the world, especially since Michael Jordan quit playing. Other than the U.S. flag, the Confederate flag is the most ubiquitous symbol of the United--maybe Coca Cola, okay, but Coca Cola's an international symbol now. You can find the Confederate flag everywhere in this world. I spent a year in Germany and I've traveled a lot in Eastern Europe. I saw it all over the place. I was in Prague, the Czech Republic, in 1993. Jim McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom,

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a book you're assigned largely as background, the largest selling book on the American Civil War published in the last twenty-five years. International bestseller, sixteen weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, was translated into Czech. I mean, nobody reads Czech. Except the Czechs, and even them, even they tend to read fiction in German. Anyway, I was at a bookstore, they had a big display of Jim McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, the whole bookstore window. I couldn't believe it. But how did they display it? With Confederate flags. And they missed the point of the title of the book, but never mind. How do you portray the American symbol less symbolically? Oh it's that Confederate flag that will tell us right away what this is about. Why? Why doesn't the Confederate flag just go away?

Or put another way, why do you love the Civil War? I can't tell you how many thousands of times in public lectures, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera in my--and all Civil War historians face this--people will come up afterward. Usually they want to show you their grandfather's letters, but they'll say, "I just love the Civil War." And you want to just stop them for a moment and say, "You need a shrink." Or, "What is it you love? Is it the aftermath at Antietam? Is it the trenches of Spotsylvania? Is it the latrines at Andersonville? Is it Booth killing Lincoln? What is it you love?"

Is it because we love epics? Is it because a lot of people really are kind of hardwired maybe? We may even be hardwired--biologically--for story. I can't prove that but there's a lot of research on this. Are we hardwired for story, and therefore, to some degree, for epic stories that have heroes and villains and beginnings and ends and great collisions? Maybe.

Is it because Americans love redemption? And people around the world love to think that about us sometimes too. Is it because we like to see or we've converted this terribly divisive experience into a great unifier? Do we go back and look at the Civil War not only to see the beginnings of our own modern time, in a modern American nation, a second American Republic, born out of the death of the first and so on and so forth? But do we actually go back to this most dividing experience to figure out how we became unified? Or as William Dean Howells put it in 1900 in a lovely line, he said, "What the American people always like is a tragedy as long as they can give it a happy ending."

Is it because we see the American Civil War, or have learned to see it, as American's first great racial reckoning? Where the nation's national sin of slavery, as some like to put it, had to finally be remitted in some way, purged, cleansed? In the language used by both sides in this war, of purgings and cleansings. The war that brought a reckoning from 250 years of slavery, destroyed a slave society, brought the end of the First American Republic, and the revolution of emancipation. I think there's a lot to argue that Americans have begun, at least, they've just begun this, to love the Civil

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War because they love emancipation. They want to live in the nation that freed its slaves.

My favorite line in George Bush the first's Inaugural Address in 1989--and I'm probably the only one that ever bothers to remember this line or maybe the only one who cares. But Peggy Noonan wrote him a sentence. It's classic inaugural rhetoric and it comes right after the section in Bush One's inaugural where he's saying we must put the war in Vietnam behind us, it is too divisive and so on. And then there's a line where he says, "We must remember, we are the nation that sent 600,000 of its sons to die rather than have slavery." Now, who wouldn't want to live in that country? That's a great line in an inaugural address. Of course it's ignoring the fact that at least half of those people died to preserve slavery. But never mind, I mean--Do we love the Civil War because sometimes there's a lot of guilty pleasure, or not so guilty pleasure, in just loving the details of military history? And if you're one of those, fine, that's great. I had that stage, too. I will confess, if you make me. But what is all that nostalgia about for those battlefields?

Or is it because this experience in American history is ultimately about loss? Are we attracted to loss? Is loss more interesting sometimes than victory? And by loss I mean defeat but also loss in terms of human life, treasure, proportions of civilizations that died. Take loss for just a moment. If you took the 620,000-odd Americans who died in the Civil War, you moved it ahead to the Vietnam era in roughly the twelve years the United States fought in Vietnam, per capita--okay?--approximately four million Americans would've died in Vietnam. That's the scale of death and loss in the Civil War -- four million. Now Americans will never sustain four million casualties in a war, I would argue. I can't prove that. Unless Osama bin Laden is coming through that window. Who knows, maybe he will one day. Wouldn't that be cool? You wouldn't sleep through that lecture. But I don't think Americans will ever sustain that kind--but four million--if you came, per capita from the Civil War-era population to the era of Vietnam.

Every year at Antietam, in rural Maryland, on the anniversary of the battle, 17 th of September, they put out illuminati, or the illuminaria, excuse me--no, no, whoa, that's a slip--illuminaria, or the little candle lamps, all over the battlefield. They put 23,000 of them out, which was the number of casualties in eight hours at Antietam. And when the sun goes down you can look at the battlefield and get a sense of this kind of powerful, almost artistic sense of the loss. Every one of those little candle lights was a human life.

Related to that, is the American imagination for this event still stimulated in part because sometimes we just like lost causes? We are attracted to defeat sometimes more than we are attracted to victory. Loss in war is sometimes more interesting. Lost

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causes somehow represent the rebel spirit, a rebellious spirit, an insurrectionary spirit, an insurgent spirit. Some people may be attracted in that way.

And maybe last but not least, and this list could go on and on, there is I think an interest in the Civil War, among serious readers in particular because it does somehow satisfy that search we often all have for origins. The origins of the modern nation state, the origins of big government, the origins of centralized power, the origins of what seemed to be the death of state's rights; but it surely didn't die, did it? We have a state's rights Supreme Court now, in case you didn't notice. The birth of a kind of modernity in America, in many forms, comes out of this era. It doesn't just come out of the Battle of Gettysburg but it surely comes out of the era.

There's also this sense in which, somehow, in that experience of the Civil War in the middle of the nineteen century--fought for the existence of an American nation and for the new definition of that nation, and just how free and equal the people in it would be--is where we may somehow see that transformation from a pre-modern to a more modern world. And sometimes I suspect that's what attracts us.

Now, the watch says I only have about two minutes. So let me leave you here. I do think sometimes we're attracted because war is just so beguilingly fascinating. And Drew Faust, a wonderful historian whom you now know is the President of Harvard University, has just published a brand new book, it's literally just out this week. I read it in manuscript, I have a blurb on the back. It's called The Republic of Suffering. And she has much to say in that book, which I highly recommend, about why death is so interesting.

Let me leave you with this. Thursday, I'm going to take up the Old South and begin this comparison of the Old South to the growing capitalist--well, both sides were highly capitalist--northern society. But in 1850 or 1840s America you could find both extremes of, on the one hand, a tremendous seemingly unfathomable optimism about America. It seemed to be limitless and boundless, and nobody captured it, ever, any better than Walt Whitman. But you can also find expressions all over the culture, especially from African-Americans and abolitionists and some slaveholders of a great dread about the direction of the country. In Whitman's first line of his Drum-Taps, his famous collection of Civil War poetry, comes that phrase, which is up here: "First O Songs for a Prelude." And that first poem in Drum-Taps is Whitman trying to capture just how exciting war can be.

But he'd also written a poem like "Democracy." And I'll leave you with this, and I'll start with a response to it on Thursday. In Whitman's "Democracy," as well as several other Whitman poems, you can find this limitless sense of optimism. Just listen to his words: "Sail, sail thy best ship of Democracy. Of value is thy freight, 'tis not the

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Present only, the Past is also stored in thee." This America, this thing called America to him is the whole world's new beginning. "Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone, not the Western continent alone. Earth's résumé entire floats on thy keel! O ship is steadied by thy spars. With thee Time voyages in trust. The antecedent nations sink or swim with thee." America is everything, according to Whitman. "With all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes, epics, wars though bearest the other continents. Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination-port triumphant. Steer then with good strong hand and wary eye. O helmsmen, though carriest great companions. How can I pierce the impenetrable blank of your future? I feel thy ominous greatness, evil as well as good. I watch thee advancing, absorbing the present, transcending the past. I see thy light lighting and thy shadow shadowing as if the entire globe. But I do not undertake to define thee, hardly can I comprehend thee." Well that's Whitman saying, as we all do at times, "America is an idea." This course is the story of what that idea was and what happened to it, and the chance it had coming out of it.

[end of transcript]

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 2 TranscriptJanuary 17, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: Well, go South with me today. We're going to take up this question initially of--it's an old, old, old American question--how peculiar, or distinctive, or different is the American South? That used to be a question you could ask in quite some comfort. The "Dixie difference," as a recent book title called it, or "Dixie rising" as another recent book title called it. The South, of course, is many, many, many things and many, many, many peoples. There are so many South's today that it has rendered this question in some ways almost irrelevant, but, in other ways, of course not. We still keep finding our presidential elections won or lost in the South. Name me a modern American president who won the presidency without at least some success in the states of the old Confederacy. Look at the great realignments in American political history. They've had a great deal to do with the way the South would go, or parts of the South would go. We're on the verge now of the first southern primary in this year's election, in South Carolina, and everybody is wondering, is there a new modern South Carolina or not?

Now, this question is fun to have fun with in some ways because it's fraught with stereotypes, isn't it? The South: hot, slow, long vowels, great storytellers, and so on. Oh, and they love violence and football and stockcar racing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well I grew up in Michigan and I can assure you that Michiganders love all those things too and probably even more. But the idea of Southern stereotypes is very, very old. It isn't a product of the Civil War by any means. The South as an idea, the South and its distinctiveness was very much there even in the Colonial Period. Travelers from England and elsewhere, France, who would come to the American colonies and would travel throughout the colonies, would often comment on this, that somehow Southerners were different culturally, attitudinally, behaviorally.

And none other than Thomas Jefferson himself left this famous description of characterizations of Southerners and Northerners. He wrote this in the mid-1780s. He was writing to a foreign--a French--correspondent. And Thomas Jefferson described the people of the North--this was in the 1780s now, this is before the cotton boom and all that--he described the people of the North this way. Jefferson: "Northerners are cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties, chicaning, superstitious, and hypocritical in their religion." Take that Yankees. But Southerners, he said, "they are fiery, voluptuous, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous of their own liberties"--he changed jealous to zealous there. If we're doing close readings we might go into that for twenty minutes, but we're not. He's not over:

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"zealous of their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid and without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of their own heart." Now we can debate what Jefferson got right or wrong there, or what's held up, but do note how he said both sides were either jealous or zealous of their own liberties. That could be an epigraph on this course, if you like, because in the end when this Civil War will finally come both sides will say over and over and over again that they are only fighting for liberty. Everybody in the Civil War will say they're fighting for liberty.

In one of the greatest books ever written on the South, by a Southerner, in particular Wilbur Cash's great classic in 1940 called The Mind of the South, he did something similar to Jefferson, although he's focusing only on Southerners here. Cash was a great journalist, intellectual historian in his own right, deeply critical of his beloved South. In fact it was Cash who wrote a book called The Mind of the South in which he argued, in part, that the South had no mind. He didn't really mean it. He said Southerners are "proud, brave, honorable by its"--The South is "proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible in its actions. Such was the South at its best," said Cash, "and such at its best it remains today." Then comes a "but." But the South, he says, is also characterized by, quote, "violence, intolerance, aversion, suspicion toward new ideas, an incapability for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice."

Some of the South's greatest critics, of course, have been Southerners. What's distinctive about the South, especially this Old South? There's Shelby Foote to comment on this. None other than Shelby the star of Ken Burns' film series on the Civil War, that lovely, lovely, lovely geriatric in a blue shirt that American women fell in love with in a documentary film. It's the only time in recorded history that anyone fell in love with anybody in a documentary. Shelby Foote said this--and who is he speaking for? "I'm not aware that there is such a thing as Southern art," said Shelby, "at least not if you're defining it by technique. If there's something distinct about it"--Southern art--"it's subject matter and also inner heritage. All Southerners who try to express themselves in art are very much aware that they are party to a defeat." Now, that's Shelby Foote speaking for white Southerners. And when Shelby Foote uses the term 'Southerner' he means white Southerners. But party to a defeat. Or as Walker Percy, the great Southern writer, was once asked--he was asked, in effect, "why do Southerners have such long memories? They don't seem to forget anything." And he gave a simple, straight, declarative answer. He said, "Because we lost the war." We lost. Loss always, I think, almost always, especially in modern history, has led to longer, deeper, troubled memories.

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But Shelby wasn't speaking for all Southerners there. Toni Morrison was speaking for black Southerners in that, I think, fantastic line in her novel Beloved--which I know many of you've read because it's taught all the time--but there's that marvelous little exchange at one point between Paul D and Sethe. And Paul D and Sethe are trying to imagine a new life out of the horror of their past, and at one point Paul D simply says to Sethe--Sethe, of course, is a former slave woman who birthed this child which becomes this extraordinary ghost called Beloved, and Paul D was a former slave who survived the worst brutalities of slavery and worse than chain gangs and so on and so forth. But at one point he just says to her, "Me and you Sethe, we got too much yesterday, we need more tomorrow." Too much yesterday, we need more tomorrow.

Why does the South have such a long memory? Why is history and memory sometimes a deep family matter, to Southerners? Whereas it isn't necessarily to Northerners, or so it seems. Faulkner captured this, Faulkner captured this all over the place. But I have a favorite line in his novel called The Hamlet, where Faulkner has one of his characters say, and I quote: "Only thank God men have done learned how to forget quick what they ain't brave enough to cure." Can't cure it, can't solve it, can't get rid of it? Forget it. Or try to forget it, or work on forgetting it, or create a structure of forgetting; which is, of course, always a structure of remembering at the same time.

And then lastly there's Allan Gurganus, that wonderful Modern Southern writer who wrote that book called The Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All, you know that bizarre--it's a wonderful read. We've always been looking for the oldest Confederate widow, in case you haven't noticed. They keep finding one. The latest was just found another five years or so. She was, I don't know, ninety and she married some sixty-year-old Confederate veteran at some point in time. We're always finding some woman alive who claims she was married to a Confederate soldier. I don't know precisely why. That's one for an anthropologist to figure out. But Allan Gurganus, he actually said this in The New York Times in a commentary he wrote on the Confederate flag, where as a Southern writer back during--oh about five to six years ago--during the worst of the controversies over the Confederate flag flying on the South Carolina capitol and so on, Gurganus wrote this wonderfully witty, wry, brilliant op-ed piece, long op-ed in The New York Times where he talked about the depth of Southern memory and why Southerners have such deep memories, and then he begged his fellow Southerners to fold that battle flag and put it in museums. But the line I wrote down out of that piece was this. What's distinctive about the South: "The South has a tradition," said Gurganus, "of attempting the impossible at great cost, proudly celebrating the failure, and in gaining admiration for the performance." Trying something, failing gloriously at it, and then getting everybody's admiration. If that's not a novelist's description of what a lost cause is I've never read one.

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One could go on and on here. In some ways the most distinctive literature America has is a kind of Southern literature, white and black. Every major African-American writer of the twentieth century, at least until your lifetime, when black writers in this country are now born and raised in cities, in California or Minneapolis or New York or--and in modern Atlanta and they come from all the same places other Americas do. Sometimes they come from the Caribbean and become Americans. But that's recent. Every major African-American poet and writer and artist from frankly the mid-nineteenth century on has always been reflecting on this nexus of North and South. South to a Very Old Place as in Albert Murray's famous book. Trouble the Water; a novel about growing up in the South by Melvin Dixon, a great novel that gets little attention, and his lifelong struggle to understand just how Southern he was in New York. Ralph Ellison's famous musings on being a Southerner come to Harlem; and on and on and on.

But let's go back to the Old South, this Old South that got the United States in so much trouble. Although it wasn't all their fault. First of all, it's worth remembering there are a lot of clear, undeniable similarities of all kinds, things you can measure, between South and North in the 40 years before the Civil War. The North and the South had roughly, as the Northern and Southern states, the Free states and Slave states, had roughly the same geographic size. They spoke the same language, English, although in very different regional dialects, of course. They had common heroes and common customs and a certain common heritage of the American Revolution; make no mistake.

John C. Calhoun, one of the great intellectual architects of Southern distinctiveness or Southern sectionalism, and certainly of Southern States' Rights doctrine, was very much an American nationalist, at least in the early parts of his career. Northerners and Southerners shared basically the same Protestant Christianity, although they used it in different ways. They had very similar political ideologies, borne of the republicanism, they all kind of breathed in- that was breathed into them, and they inherited from the age of the American Revolution. A fierce belief in individual liberty. When you hear a slaveholder preach about his individual liberty and his rights, you sometimes wonder, "come on, where do you get off?" But as many of you know, and certainly you will find out here, they had pretty clear ideas of who ought to have those individual liberties and who would not, who indeed were born equal and who were not.

Both shared, both sides, the leadership of both sides, shared a rich kind of nationalism about this American experiment. You can find a whole- you can sort of find a deep and abiding kind of American nationalism still in a lot of these budding Southern patriots, even by the 1850s, especially when they get scared about what secession might actually mean. You could argue that both Southerners and Northerners shared a

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certain degree of old-fashioned American localism, attachment to place. New Englanders know something about attachment to place, and so did people from the low country, South Carolina. States' Rights was nothing that the South owned either, of course. Some of the most open exercises of states' rights, of course, before the 1850s, were conducted by Northerners, like in the Hartford Convention of 1814, like in personal liberty laws that we'll come to a bit later. In resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act the state of Wisconsin enacted a Personal Liberty Law that said they were not going to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and turn in fugitive slaves, and the justification was that it was their state's right to do so. So it isn't just States' Rights that's distinctively Southern. Southerners shared with Northerners a faith in progress, if you breathed the air in American in the 1840s and '50s. The idea that America stood for some kind of progress, that America meant a prosperous future was just common coin. And both Southerners and Northerners shared both the reality and the spirit of that westward movement. Both had participated in what David Donald used to call the great American practice or custom, tradition actually he called it, of compromise.

And both sides, both North and South, in their political leadership, in their economic leadership, were led by hard-boiled, believing, practicing, capitalists. Southern slave-holders were not pre-capitalists. There's historical scholarship that used to argue that a couple of generations ago, but not anymore. And throw this statistic up. You could argue that both sides had essentially the same kind of oligarchies. Less than one percent, less than one percent of the real and personal property, in both South and North by the 1850s, was held by approximately fifty percent of free adult males. The richest one percent in both sections, put another way, held twenty-seven percent of all the wealth. The North had budding oligarchies, just like the South did. Now those oligarchies were based on different things, and that's where the rub came.

A little more on this distinct South. I said earlier that this is an old idea, I mean it goes back into the eighteenth--you can find all kinds of examples of these stereotypical conceptions of the South in French, British visitors. One of the most famous, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, who in his famous fictional letters, Letters from an American Farmer, he invented a character, if you've ever read that great text, called Farmer James. His typical American farmer, Farmer James, was of course a Pennsylvanian--sturdy, probably had some German blood in him. Crèvecoeur made the North the site of the true essence of what he saw as this new American man being born in America, not in the South. He traveled in the South. He likened Charleston, South Carolina though--this was in the 1780s--he likened Charleston, South Carolina to what he called, quote, "the barbarous institutions and traits, especially slavery, the self-indulgence of the planters"--and then he concludes--"just like Lima, Peru." That's the only known comparison of Charleston to Lima, Peru that I'm aware of. Oh and on and on and on.

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There were travelers from Europe who came and would write these stereotypic stories. There's one by an English traveler, he entitled it, "A Georgia Planter's Method of Spending Time." And it's this litany of how a Georgia planter gets up early, has his first draught of whiskey, talks to his overseer, has another draught of whiskey, eight o'clock has breakfast, another draught of whiskey, and the day goes on--talks to his overseer again, gets things started on the plantation that day, and then he goes into the village, to the tavern, to start drinking. Lots of these.

Most importantly, seriously, the idea of the South as exotic, different, and dangerous is an old idea. A new layer of danger sort of was put on top of images of the South--not just in Northerners' minds, for that matter--after the great Haitian Revolution, after the slave rebels of San Domingue made Haiti the first black republic in modern history, and some of those Haitian rebels ended up in the American south. In the imagination of white Southerners there were a lot more Haitian rebels coming into the South than actually ever got here.

But then if you look at the writings of New Englanders, by the early nineteenth century. Take Jedidiah Morse, for example, the great geographer. He called the North a, quote, "happy state of mediocrity, a hardy race of free, independent republicans." And isn't that the image that New Englanders always want of themselves? They don't share anything, but they're free and independent. When my wife and I first moved to Amherst, Massachusetts--I took a job there once--we took some baked goods over to our neighbors. And we'd been warned about New Englanders and all that. But we delivered the baked goods and said, "Hi, how are you? We're here now." And the woman said in effect, "Why have you brought this?" Anyway.

Sorry. Jedidiah Morse described Southerners however as, "disconsolent"--"represented," he said, by, quote, "disconsolent wildness and popular ignorance." Noah Webster, of the great dictionary fame, said famously, "Oh New England, how superior are thy habits in morals, literature, civility and industry." So, comparing the North and the South, try and understand how difference eventually does boil into political crisis, which eventually boils into conflict, which eventually boils into disunion, which eventually boils into war, does have some root back in these kinds of perceived differences.

As one of my favorite historians warned me once, "don't leave out the politics." Don't leave out politics. Now, if I could hang your hat on one kind of Southern distinctiveness, perhaps above all--it's fun to play with all these stereotypes and realize that if so many people were writing this way, from personal observation, yes, there must be something to all these differences. But what eventually evolved in the South--and we will return to this a good deal next Tuesday when I'll devote an entire lecture to this kind of slaveholder worldview and the pro-slavery argument--the pro-

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slavery defense--and how that evolved into a political culture. But if there's one thing--and this is a little risky because there are always holes in any claim like this--but if there's one distinct feature of the Old South society and indeed its leadership and most of its people, it would be what we might label anti-modernism.

It was a society that eventually developed a disdain for what they perceived as the corruptions of modern commercialism. Southern slaveholding leadership, in particular, were very suspicious of the spread of literacy. They were very suspicious of the democratic tendencies, or so it seemed, the democratic tendencies of that northern society which was spreading literacy more widely, and eventually the right to vote more widely, at least among white people. It is a society where the leadership for sure, and much of the non-leadership, were suspicious of reform, suspicious of change, suspicious of democracy itself. Democracy, the slaveholding class of the South came to see--small d--as a dangerous thing. It was a threat to hierarchy and the South became quite distinctively a very hierarchical society--more on that in just a second. It became a hierarchical society rooted very deeply in open conceptions of class and obviously open conceptions of race. Some were born to rule. In the overall attitude of the planter class and the leadership class of the American South by the 1840s and 1850s, some were born to rule and some born to be ruled. Deal with it, was their attitude.

They became deeply protective and insistent upon their own peculiar sense--and there's a great scholarship on this--their own peculiar sense of honor. Honor. That old-fashioned concept--it's an old-fashioned word. How many of you even use that word anymore? "Do the honorable thing." Ah. "Oh, I didn't act today with much honor did I?" We're more likely to--we have other words for it now. What would the--? We might say class -- "we did that with class." Or being effective. I don't know, what would a synonym today be for honor? Anyone? A good synonym for honor. "A person of character." Oh, I don't know. Work on that, will you? A synonym for honor.

Well, honor in the Old South. There's a whole vast scholarship on this and two or three of the teaching assistants in this class are real experts on it. So check it out with Steve and Sam and others. But it was essentially a set of values, and it was a deeply rooted set of values in the planters' worldview. It was a form of behavior, demeanor. Yes, it meant a certain kind of gentleman's understanding of behavior. It was the idea that a gentleman must be honest. A gentleman must be trustworthy. A gentleman was a man of entitlement. A gentleman was a man of property. A gentleman had class, rank, and status, and you better recognize it. And the most important thing in the Southern code of honor, I think, safe to say, was reputation. A man of honor must be recognized, must be acknowledged. And indeed there must be virtually a ritual of that recognition.

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Now, honor's alive and well around the world today, make no mistake. It's alive and well in diplomacy, it's alive and well in many, many cultures. I was part of a huge conference last summer in West Africa on the end of the slave-trade in Ghana, and we had representatives--we had people participating in that conference from 15 or 16 different African countries. We had African chieftains involved, we had the Vice-President of Ghana and the President of Togo and on and on and on. We spent an entire day doing nothing but bowing and doing honor. And for Americans, all our democratic experience and do I have to put a tie on for this event or not? This kind of ritual honor all the time--I mean after all we have a president who just likes to speak like a Texan, he doesn't do all that honor stuff. I'm sorry, if I'm going to do Bush I got to work on that, don't I? That's terrible. Who's that guy that does those commercials? He's brilliant at Bush. Forget it, anyway.

James Henry Hammond of South Carolina once said, I quote, "Reputation is everything. Everything with me depends upon the estimation in which I am held." That's honor, personal honor. For many Southerners it was more important than law, more important than conscience. And when they started encountering these Northerners, whether they were from Massachusetts or Ohio, who started talking about a politics of conscience, or a politics of law, they're not always talking on the same page. So anti-modernism and honor are two hooks you can hang your hats on.

There are all those other claims. The South is distinctive because of its climate, hot weather, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's book after book after book on this, like Clarence Cason's famous book, 90 Degrees in the Shade, which is supposed to explain all Southern behavior and ideas. Ruralness is often used to explain the distinctiveness of Southern writing and art and so on. I do love Eudora Welty's description of this. She didn't just say it's all because the South is rural. But Eudora Welty was once asked why Southerners can be such great writers, or such good storytellers--and she was a wonderful storyteller. Her answer was this--and it's got something to do with how a lost cause took hold too--but she said, "Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers and letter savers, history tracers and debaters, and outstaying all the rest they are just great talkers." Now I've met a few New Englanders who were good talkers too.

Then there's this issue of conservatism. Why is the South the seat of American conservatism? Why did a Southern strategy in modern American political history re-invent the Republican Party? Even though some defenders of that particular movement claim it didn't happen, like David Brooks tried to claim in The New York Times. David Brooks is a revisionist. Well, the taproot of conservatism you could say is right there in the Old South. It's exactly what Wilbur Cash once said. He said, "If you want to understand the South," he said, "its taproot is back there in the Old

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South." We so long had this game of sort of always looking for the central theme of Southern history, the central theme of the South. And so often it does come back to this overall claim of a kind of anti-reform, sometimes even anti-intellectual, conservative defense of a hierarchical civilization rooted in white supremacy and originally, indeed, in one of the biggest slave systems the world had ever created.

And there's the old business about violence. You can go way--there's lots of books on this and articles on this; why cockfighting was more popular in the South, why country fighting and eye-gouging was--. Elliott Gorn, a wonderful historian up at Brown, wrote a brilliant, fascinating, half-crazy essay once about eye-gouging and Southern fighting. And I don't know, I used to love to quote from it but then I began to realize I'm only quoting that because it's about a guy's eye being gouged out. So that's--I'm not going to do that anymore.

Now, C. Vann Woodward weighed in on this, a great historian, worked here much of his life. But he said, you know, finally the South--he said, finally the South got liberated from being the place that America always dumped its sins. In his famous book of essays, The Burden of Southern History. among many other things he argued that the South actually had the chance to finally be liberated from being the seat of all of America's sins, by three things. And he didn't live long enough quite to--well he actually lived long enough but he didn't really write about what I would add as a fourth one--but he said the Civil Rights revolution finally began to liberate the South. And concomitantly a second reason is that that Civil Rights revolution also brought, through its process, a huge discovery at the same time of Northern racism, when Martin Luther King brought the movement to Chicago and nearly got killed doing it. And in a thousand other ways Americans realized racism isn't a Southern thing, it's everywhere, belongs to everyone.

And then Woodward argued quite directly that the loss of the Vietnam War began to liberate the South, in a sense that the South, Southerners, white Southerners, were the only Americans other than--we always forget Native Americans--who had ever lost a war. And that a burden was taken off the South by the loss of that Vietnam War. Now, that's a debatable subject, isn't it? Because there's a broad revisionism about Vietnam. Ronald Reagan argued it was our noble cause in Vietnam. We could've won, should've won, were winning, and so on and so forth. There's even a fourth idea you might add to how the South may have been a little bit liberated from this past by what has happened in just the last twenty to twenty-five years of American political history, and economic history, with Sunbelt migration, with Southern industrialization and post-industrialization, with massive immigration now from around the world; large Vietnamese populations in Louisiana, large Hispanic populations in North Carolina, a huge Cuban and other Hispanic populations in Florida. You have a very, very

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changing demographic situation in the American South and its political culture has to respond to that. So we may live, in your lifetime, to a time when this burden of Southern history may get all but lifted altogether from Southerners, unless we don't forget the Civil War. And we don't seem to forget it. As I said the other day if that Confederate flag would just go away, just vanish, just stick it in the basement of museums and no one would ever care about it anymore, maybe, maybe the South's burden would go away.

But there's another kind of burden, and again Woodward and many others have written about this. One of the most distinctive things about Southern--the South, is of course its history, not just its culture, not just its attitudes, not just its behavior; not the kind of stuff that what's his name, John Shelton Reed, the great sociologist, is always doing these surveys of attitudes about Southerners, of Southerners, by Southerners. But let's remember the South had a distinctive history. The antebellum Southern economy became by the 1820s, without any question, a slave economy. And by the 1820s and 1830s the American South became what I think you could safely say was the fifth slave society in human history; maybe the sixth. This is debatable.

Now, for a long time in American scholarship and in American classrooms one of the deep mythologies about this whole story of the era of the American Civil War in the Old South is that the Old South's plantation economy was dying out. Soil was being eroded and wasted along the Eastern seaboard, and they were using up the great soils of the Mississippi Valley and over time that slave system just somehow wasn't going to work out. Now Ulrich Phillips argued this years and years and years ago. Others argued it from real research, but along came Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman and a generation of other scholars from the 1960s on, and there were people even before them who looked at the Southern economy through cleometrics and statistics and a broad swath of new economic historical methods and analyses, and they discovered that--sorry folks--slavery was extremely profitable. The Southern economy, thank you very much, was booming.

The South had its greatest cotton crop ever in 1860. It was affected by the major American depressions of 1837, 1857, but not as much as the North. And, lo and behold, that idea we had of the Southern planter as this--oh, you know, kind of anti-modern--don't give up entirely on the anti-modern label, I think there's still something to that--but that anti-modern kind of backward-looking planter who--he didn't really like world markets, he didn't like railroads and trains and all that stuff, he just wanted to make a decent little living if he could off growing some hemp and some tobacco and some indigo and some rice and some cotton, and he was good to his slaves. They had a bad break coming from Africa but that's the way it goes. Uh-uh.

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We now know, if we know anything about the Old South, the average American planter, the average American slaveholder, small ones and big ones, were raging capitalists. They understood markets, they understood profits. They were men of rational choice, and the way to wealth in the American South--the way to wealth, even before the cotton gin but especially after Eli Whitney's cotton gin; and by the way folks, everybody knows Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and it was originally this little box, smaller than this lectern. If you don't know that--somebody should've taught you that in the 6th Grade or the 4th Grade or the 1st Grade or somewhere. Good old Eli Whitney, it's his fault we had the cotton boom and slavery grew, and you get sort of Eli Whitney to the Civil War. And then we have a great war for weeks and it's all Eli Whitney. He's buried right across the street. Go into Grove Street Cemetery some--go visit his grave and say, "It's not your fault Eli." "It's okay, 'cuz them planters, they were raging capitalists just waitin' for you. All you did is give 'em a machine."

The way to wealth. Faulkner wrote about this too in that immortal character he created in Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! Who was Thomas Sutpen? Thomas Sutpen is that guy who arrives out in Alabama with a group of Haitian slaves with him. He treats them like an absolute tyrant. He carves down the forest, he begins to cultivate the land and he declares what you got to have for success in the South is "a house, some land and some niggers." That's another one of those sentences by Faulkner that sort of captured this spirit of Alabama Fever, as it was called, in the 1820s and '30s, and Mississippi Fever in the 1830s, Louisiana/Texas Fever by the 18--well Louisiana Fever is even earlier--but Texas Fever by the 1840s. The land was so rich and it was really cheap at first.

Now, how powerful was the cotton boom once it took hold? This powerful. Sea Island cotton, the kind of cotton grown down there in the Georgia--where it was first grown in North America--in the Georgia, South Carolina islands, was a kind of long and silky kind of cotton. They weren't very successful in growing it in huge amounts, but that short stapled cotton that eventually was the form of cotton that the cotton gin made into such a massive, marketable world product, is what made the cotton boom boom. By the 1820s, already, within a decade of the War of 1812 and the opening of the frontier, cotton's future seemed limitless. And one of the best analogies you can think of is the oil rich nations of the world in post-World War Two, in the post-World War Two era, whether it's Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran, the Emirates, or Venezuela, name--today Russia. If you're an oil rich country today, as long as that oil lasts, you got the world kind of at your knees. You're in OPEC. And that is exactly what the South began to see itself as, at least Southern leadership began to see itself as, as early as the 1820s and 1830s.

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The cotton crop nearly doubled every decade from 1820 to 1860. Four decades in a row the production of American cotton nearly doubled. Now think of another product in American history that doubled every decade for four decades, and then imagine that that product became the country's, without question, absolute largest export. General Motors at its height, when I was growing up in Flint, Michigan, in boom times, would've wished it could've said that. Already by 1825--that early--the South was the world's largest supplier of cotton and fueling now this Industrial Revolution in textile production in Great Britain and other places. And think of it this way. I need a map for this, excuse me.

I don't know if you can see those colors much at all, sorry about that. But what you've got at the top are the early 1790s and I think 1820 in terms of slave population in the American south. But if you look at 1860, the bottom map, if you can vaguely see those deep, dark, red areas, you can see where cotton moved, where slavery moved in the domestic slave trade, and then where Southern political power moved. And you will find, as we will in the next few weeks, the Southern political power by the 1850s and 1860s is really no longer in Virginia, or even South Carolina, it's out in the Mississippi Valley. There's a very good reason Jefferson Davis becomes president of the confederacy in 1860. It's because he's from Mississippi.

Now, fortunes were made overnight; new wealth, overnight. A number of men, as one historian has written, I think quite effectively, "mounted from log cabin to mansion"--and I quote--"on a stairway of cotton bales accumulating slaves as they went." If you had five slaves and a good piece of land in Alabama in 1820, you might very likely have fifty slaves and a hell of a lot more land a decade later. But it's also worth knowing that that slaveholding population was also fluid, people moved in and out of it. There were approximately 400,000 slaveholders, white slaveholders, in the American South by 1860. About one-third of Southern white families at one time or another had at least a toehold in slave ownership. That means two-thirds did not, of course. Two-thirds of the white South remained in those classes we've come to call the yeoman farmers, the poor whites, or the sand hill farmers, as they were sometimes called. In certain regions of the South, the yeoman farmer--non-slaveholding, but land owning, usually--and the poor white farmer--non-slaveholding, but usually not even land-owning, usually renting or working for wage labor--were forty, fifty, and even sixty percent of the white population in a given region.

Jefferson Davis is, in fact, a classic example of the cotton boom planter. He was born in relatively meager and humble circumstances in Kentucky, not what, about 80 miles from where Abraham Lincoln was born, in even meagerer circumstances. But his older brother, Joseph, went out to Mississippi and struck it rich in cotton. And Jefferson Davis went out to join him, and Jefferson Davis became a millionaire. On

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cotton. Of course Jefferson Davis really preferred to be a military officer and went to West Point and on and on and on, and the rest is history. My watch says I've run out of time. Now let me leave you with this. How successful was the cotton boom, how important was the cotton boom, what is the relationship between the spread of slavery, the spread of cotton, and power? By 1860 there were approximately 4,000,000 slaves in the United States, the second largest slave society--slave population--in the world. The only one larger was Russian serfdom. Brazil was close.

But in 1860 American slaves, as a financial asset, were worth approximately three and a half billion dollars--that's just as property. Three and a half billion dollars was the net worth, roughly, of slaves in 1860. In today's dollars that would be approximately seventy-five billion dollars. In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America's manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together. Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy. The only thing worth more than the slaves in the American economy of the 1850s was the land itself, and no one can really put a dollar value on all of the land of North America. If you're looking to begin to understand why the South will begin to defend this system, and defend this society, and worry about it shrinking, and worry about a political culture from the North that is really beginning to criticize them, think three and a half billion dollars and the largest financial asset in American society, and what you might even try to compare that to today. Now I'll pick up with this next Tuesday; it's a perfect transition into the pro-slavery argument an the southern worldview. Thank you.

[end of transcript]

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 3 TranscriptJanuary 22, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: In a speech before the Virginia Secession Convention, in 1861, in late April, in the wake of the firing on Fort Sumter, the newly elected--sort of appointed--Vice-President of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, gave a speech that became quickly known to history as his "Cornerstone Speech." This is Spring, 1861. Alexander H. Stephens, a Georgian, a slaveholder, an old friend and colleague of Abraham Lincoln's, ironically, said the cornerstone of the Confederacy, the cornerstone of their political movement, was what he called "American Negro slavery." It was the cornerstone on which they had founded their revolution. The quote goes on: "As a race, the African is inferior to the white man. Subordination to the white man is his normal condition. He is not his equal by nature and cannot be made so by human laws or human institutions. Our system, therefore, so far as regards this inferior race, rests upon this great immutable law of nature." You always have to get worried in history when people start talking about how human beings or human behavior is rooted in nature.

But how do we get to 1861 and that secession crisis with Alexander H. Stephens delivering this Cornerstone Speech, declaring that, "Hey folks, it's all about slavery and its preservation?" How did we get there? Today I want to talk about, we're going to dwell on, ultimately, the Southern defense of slavery--the arguments over time that they developed, layer upon layer, drawing upon earlier arguments and building them into new ones--sometimes quite original--toward ultimately a virtually utopian defense of slavery as a perfecting, perfectible, if not perfected system.

Now, I want to say one other quick thing before we get to the substance. A thousand times in a thousand ways anybody who studies the American Civil War period is inevitably asked, "so what caused this war?" It's, of course, the question of the first third of this course. So what caused it? Yesterday, on M.L. King Day, I had the privilege of being on at least four radio programs about this new book I have out called A Slave No More, some of them quite terrific. Minnesota Public Radio does a fabulous hour-long program. But one of them was on a Nashville, Tennessee radio station, on a program at 5:30 p.m. called "Drive Time." And the host was Harry or Pete or whoever he was--I've been on too many of these. The first question was, "So Professor, what was the Civil War about?" Now do that in a sound byte on a national radio station when you got two minutes to answer. "Well Pete, you see, there was this free labor system and this slave labor system," blah-blah blah-blah. I tried to sound byte this and I ended up saying something silly like, "You know Pete, I'm teaching a

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whole course on this." And I finally just ended that particular little exchange before he went on to rant at me about all that's wrong with American education by saying, "Pete, it was slavery." [laughs]

In Alexis de Tocqueville's great Democracy in America, which he published in 1831, or published in 1837, after his famous nine-month tour of the United States [in 1831]--the most famous book, travel book, ever written about America, by a foreigner. InDemocracy in America there's that famous passage, or passages, when Tocqueville crosses the Ohio River, from Ohio into Kentucky, from free soil into slave soil, free state into a slave state. Tocqueville, you may know, didn't spend a great deal of time in the South though he traveled all across the South. He spent at least two-thirds of his--more than, about three-quarters of his time--in the northern states. But when he crossed into Kentucky, he wrote this letter to his father. "For the first time"--this was, of course, the French aristocrat de Tocqueville--"For the first time we have had the chance to examine the effect that slavery produces on a society. On the right bank of the Ohio everything is activity, industry, labor is honored, there are no slaves. Pass to the left bank and the scene changes so suddenly that you think yourself on the other side of the world. The enterprising spirit seems gone. There work is not only painful, it's shameful, and you degrade yourself in submitting yourself to it. To ride, to hunt, to smoke like a Turk in the sunshine, there's the destiny of the white man. To do any other kind of manual labor is to act like a slave."

Now, Tocqueville was of course responding from his own kind of French aristocratic heart, to some extent. He was drawn in a bit to certain kinds of Southern charm. "The whites," he said, "of the South, form a veritable aristocracy which combines many prejudices with high sentiments and instincts." He probably over-judged the scale of that aristocracy. "They say, and I am much inclined to believe," said Tocqueville, "that in the matter of honor these men practice delicacies and refinements unknown in the North. They are frank, hospitable and put many things before money." Well, they'd have loved that. When we start hearing from our pro-slavery advocates and writers--they would've loved that. Because one of the critiques that slavery allowed pro-slavery writers, ultimately, to make, was a critique of a certain kind of capitalism, the greedy, grinding, aggressive, malicious kind of capitalism they believed the North embodied. But charm alone didn't seem to make a great society, according to Tocqueville. "You see few churches and no schools here in the south," he observed. "Society, like the individual, seems to provide nothing." The South would end, he said, by being dominated by the North. "Every day the latter grows more wealthy and densely populated while the South is stationary and growing poor." Not entirely accurate about that either, from what we now know about the profitability of slavery and the profitability of the cotton crop. But he ends that famous section with this passage. It is kind of haunting when you think it's only 1831 when he writes this, and

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that Civil War is still 30 years away: "Slavery brutalizes the black population and debilitates the white. Man is not made for servitude."

Now, in the South what developed--and let's define it at least quickly--what developed was one of the world's handful of true slave societies. What is a slave society? What do we mean when we use that phrase 'slave society'? Essentially, it means any society where slave labor--where the definition of labor, where the definition of the relationship between ownership and labor--is defined by slavery. By a cradle to grave--and some would've even said a cradle to grave and beyond--human bondage. Where slavery affected everything about society. Where whites and blacks, in this case--in America in a racialized slavery system--grew up, were socialized by, married, reared children, worked, invested in, and conceived of the idea of property, and honed their most basic habits and values under the influence of a system that said it was just to own people as property.

The other slave societies in human history--and you can get up a real debate over this, especially among Africanists, Brazilianists, Asianists and others, and it's why slavery is such a hot field in international history--but the other great slave societies in history where the whole social structure of those societies was rooted in slavery, were Ancient Greece and Rome; certainly Brazil by the eighteenth and nineteenth century; the whole of Caribbean--the Great West Indies sugar-producing empires of the French, the British, the Dutch, the Spanish, and a few others--and the American South. Now, there were other localized slave societies, surely; certainly within Africa, to a certain degree even before Europeans arrived and certainly after Europeans arrived, particularly after the regularization of the Atlantic slave trade. There were certain localized slave societies in East Africa, out of Zanzibar by the eighteenth and nineteenth century. There were certain localized slave societies in the vast Arab world, in the Muslim world, well before there was even an Atlantic slave trade to the Americas. But the five great slave societies were those five. All were highly profitable in their primes. All tended to hinder technological innovation in those societies. All tended to have a high slave-to-free ratio of population. All of those slave societies had a population of slaves that was from one-quarter to one-half, and sometimes more, of the total population. In those slave societies, slaves--as an interest, as an interest--were both a political and a great economic institution that defined ways of life.

Now, when exactly did the American South become a slave society? Is it 1820--the Missouri Crisis--in that settlement, and at least the beginnings now of a clarity of its expansion? Or was it more the 1830s when you've got this booming cotton production happening finally in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana? Or was it 1840? Or was it really in the wake of the Mexican War when you get this massive expansion into the great southwest and the Mexican Session--which we'll take up actually next week?

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That's always open to debate, exactly when the South became a slave society. But I think it became, in most ways and in most definitions, a slave society surely by the 1820s or the 1830s.

Now, one aspect of that slave society then--and I'll focus on it just at least briefly--is that as Americans ended the foreign slave trade--and we did in 1808--this is, this month is the bi-centennial of the legal end of America's--the United State'--participation in the foreign slave trade. Now it didn't entirely end, and there were some South Carolinians and Georgians who wanted to re-open it, and a few folks out in Louisiana, who wanted to re-open it at numerous times in the antebellum period, especially in the late 1850s. They were the same people who were always trying to annex Cuba; about four times over they tried to annex Cuba, and it's still a bit of mystery how it never happened. But as the foreign slave trade was closed off, for a whole variety of reasons, only one of which was that there was this passage, sort of a vow, in the original Constitution that the question would be re-visited in 20 years, and 1808 was 20 years. But as the foreign slave trade was cut off the domestic American slave trade absolutely boomed. And one of the reasons that the American South could become such a profitable slave society, one of the reasons that the cotton boom could be the cotton boom is because one of the unique features of North American slavery, U.S. slavery, is or was, that it was the only slave population in the entire New World--Brazil managed it now and then but not in the long run--it's the only slave society in the New World where the slaves naturally reproduced themselves. And it has to do with climate, it has to do with sex ratio--male to female--it has to do with diet, and it has to do with movement. If Frederick Jackson Turner had anything right in "The Frontier Thesis," although he didn't pay hardly any attention to the South, this idea of a safety valve of a West to move to was surely there for slavery.

Between 1810 and 1820 alone--this is the decade of the War of 1812, which caused all kinds of chaos on the Western frontier--137,000 American slaves were forced to move from North Carolina or the Chesapeake states to Alabama, Mississippi, and other western regions. That's in the one decade of the teens. Then from 1820 to 1860, the forty years before the war, an estimated roughly two million American slaves were sold to satisfy the need of slave labor in the great cotton kingdom of the growing Southwest. Now, about roughly two-thirds of those two million slaves moved from the Eastern seaboard or the Upper South to Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, et cetera. About two-thirds of those went by outright sale, by financial speculation, in now a growing huge American business of the domestic slave trade. By the 1830s, 1840s, there were over 100 men in Charleston, South Carolina alone, making their livings full-time as slave traders. Their ads were in the newspapers every day. Many of them owned their own shops and their own--in effect--jails where they

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housed people. Other cities became major ports or places of deportation, for the domestic slave trade.

Richmond, Virginia, for example, became a huge slave-trading center by the 1840s and 1850s. It had two--depending on when you look--to three dozen major full-time slave traders. One of the richest was a man named Hector Davis. Hector Davis owned a two-story slave auction house and jail on 14th and Franklin Streets, just two blocks down the hill from Thomas Jefferson's glorious capitol building of the State of Virginia. Just two blocks down the hill from that great equestrian statue of George Washington, the Founder, you could find a huge slave jail owned by Hector Davis. Hector Davis kept tremendous records, he kept account books, huge account books. And one of those account books ended up in the Chicago Historical Society after the Civil War because it was confiscated by an Illinois regiment that took it home. And I worked with that account book, because one of the two slaves I write about in this new book called A Slave No More--I publish their two narratives--was indeed a young 14-year-old teenager, sold out of North Carolina--from Snow Hill, North Carolina, he was sold in 1860 to Hector Davis in Richmond. Hector Davis purchased him for $900.00. For about six months Wallace Turnage worked in Hector Davis's slave auction house helping organize the auctions every day. And one day, Wallace was told, "Today, boy, you're in the auction." And he was sold for $1000.00 to an Alabama cotton planter who came up to Richmond twice a year to buy slaves. And 72 hours by train he found himself on a huge cotton plantation, near Pickensville, Alabama, on the--in west central Alabama, on the Mississippi border, at 14-years-old. More on Wallace Turnage later in the course. He'll be sold again, by the way, a third time, for $2000.00, in Mobile, Alabama, at the Mobile Slave Jail.

I calculated in Hector Davis's account book that the biggest week he had--and he had some big weeks--but he had a week in 1859 where he made a cool, approximately, $120,000.00 in profit, just from selling slaves. I mean, the equivalent of a healthy teenage male slave, if you could sell him for $1000.00 in 1860--it's about the same price of a good Toyota Camry today. And when I go to the A-1 Toyota for my service or to buy my new Camry, which I've done every four years for the last two decades, I don't always think of a slave market but it does occur to me that--. [laughter] They just sell those Toyotas, they tell you, "Here's the price, we don't bargain."

The South was part of the westward movement. For slave children--one other little point about this, so we can get a sense of this system that is now about to be justified and defended--for slave children, between 1820 and 1860, living in the Upper South or the Eastern Seaboard, they had approximately a thirty percent chance of being sold outright away from their parents before they were ten. Now, just to give you a sense of how cold and calculated this business was, and how in many ways the first defense

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or justification of slavery in America is of course--it certainly is by the late Antebellum Period--it is an unabashed economic defense, as we'll see. Ads in newspapers, like this one in Charleston, would read, "Negroes wanted. I am paying the highest cash prices for young and likely Negroes, those having good front teeth and being otherwise sound." It's all about market forces and the health and the condition of your product. Probably the best book written on this, particularly on the language of the domestic slave trade, is Walter Johnson's book called Soul by Soul, a book--I highly recommend you read it sometime in your reading lives.

But it's amazing to read the letters and the language of slave traders when they write to each other, the complacency, the mixture of just pure racism on the one hand and just business language on the other. "I refused a girl 20-years-old at $700.00 yesterday," one trader wrote to another in 1853. "If you think best to take her at 700, I can still get her. She is very badly whipped but has good teeth." "Bought a cook yesterday," wrote another trader, "Bought a cook yesterday that was to go out of the state. She just made the people mad, that was all." "I have bought a boy named Isaac," wrote another trader, "for $1100.00." He writes this in 1854 to his partner. "Bought a boy named Isaac. I think him very prime. He is a house-servant, first-rate cook, and splendid carriage driver. He is also a fine painter and varnisher, and says he can make a fine panel door. Also, he performs well on the violin. He is a genius. And strange to say, I think he's smarter than I am." Truth always creeps through all of our language--it doesn't always but sometimes--creeps through our language, doesn't it?

Now, how is slavery defended? In many ways, to say the least. But I want to give you at least some sense of the development of the pro-slavery argument, the kinds of arguments that were used, how they changed over time, who made the arguments. Now, the best way to begin to understand pro-slavery ideology, whether we're in the early period of its defense in the 1820s--actually, a quite virulent defense of slavery begins early, it isn't something that just sprung from Southern pens in the 1850s during all this expansion, it comes very early. But a framework in which to understand it is that pro-slavery ideology was, at its heart, a kind of deeply conservative, organic worldview. And by that I mean a Burkean conservatism, a set of beliefs that says the world is ordered as it is, for reasons, and that human beings ought not tinker with that order, very much. It was a set of beliefs in the sustenance of a social order as it is. It was a belief in a hierarchical conception of not only society, but of people. That people were conceived, whether by nature or by God or even by evolution, with a certain order to them; some born to do this and some born to do that and some born to do that. It's an organic conception of the world. It just is the way it is. It's natural. Remember back to Alexander H. Steven's cornerstone quote -- he uses the word "natural" twice in that passage.

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This worldview had, of course, an obsession with stability. It's one of the reasons white Southerners didn't like reformers. It's one of the reasons Abolitionists are dangerous. What are Abolitionists calling for? Upsetting the social order. They're offering a critique of the social order, and they even have the audacity to talk about good and evil. It's a worldview often obsessed, as we said last time, with notions of honor and duty. And it's a worldview deeply rooted in the idea or respect for tradition; tradition and social control. In this worldview, institutions--human institutions--evolve only slowly over time and cannot be altered by abrupt human interventions. It's dangerous to abruptly intervene in the evolution of human institutions.

Now, think what's at stake here in this worldview, especially as we transition next Thursday to a developing--though by no means unanimous or homogenous--northern worldview in which reform impulses get embedded. White Southern defenders of slavery were--to some extent--like other Americans--products of the Enlightenment. Some of them come to really believe in intellect. They really do come to believe in the power of reason, of human beings to figure out the universe. But to figure it out in different ways. You can be a product of the Enlightenment and still be deeply conservative. You can be a product of the Enlightenment, with a faith in reason, and not become a Romantic who begins to believe in the possibilities of man, or even the perfectibility of man. Conservativism--deep organic forms of Conservativism--is not antithetical to the Enlightenment, at least not entirely. Although pro-slavery writers will become deeply contemptuous of Natural Law--of Natural Law doctrine as it can be applied to the possibilities of man.

Many of them will argue, therefore, that ideas like freedom--and that idea of liberty, so much at stake in the age of the American Revolution and falling off everybody's tongue, and eventually falling off their tongues and off their pens as well, what they're fighting for by 1861 were their liberties, they said, over and over and over and over again. But in their worldview, the pro-slavery worldview, ideas like freedom and liberty were simply never absolutes, and many of them will directly reverse Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and simply say, "Nobody is born equal." They will argue over and over and over again--some of them almost in a feudalistic way--that freedom must always be balanced with order, and that order is rooted in certain kinds of prescribed stations in life, for the various statuses of humans. Or freedom, they will argue, must be balanced with tradition. The possibilities of freedom must always, in their view, be balanced with the world as it as--not as it ought to be. They are, therefore, going to have an extremely different point of view--from at least Abolitionists in the North--on this concept of equality. Although a lot of Abolitionists had their struggles with this one too. Southern pro-slavery defenders are much more likely to stress a human's duty, than they're ever to stress a human's rights. They believed the world was made up of a struggle between human autonomy, on the

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one hand, and human dependency on the other, and you should never give up on that dependency.

As early as 1826 an important pro-slavery writer named Edward Brown argued that "Slavery," he said, quote: "had ever been the stepping ladder by which nations have passed from barbarism to civilization." There you have the roots and the kernel of the so-called "positive good thesis" about slavery. That slavery was a way in which you sustained a social order, a way in which you built an economy, a way in which you maximized the possibilities of those who deserved it, by using those who did not deserve the same fruits.

Pro-slavery writers, you have to understand, had also a really often a fundamentally different conception of history itself, or of how history happens, than will many eventually northern anti-slavery writers--even, eventually, the political anti-slavery folks like an Abraham Lincoln, who was never a real abolitionist but did at least grow up with anti-slavery in his heart. Thomas R. Dew, a very important pro-slavery writer, who wrote a whole book in the wake of the state of Virginia's debates in 1831 and '32 over whether to re-write its Constitution. And they squarely faced the question of a gradual abolition plan for the state of Virginia in 1831 and '32. They had been planning to rewrite their Constitution--an extraordinary turning point in Southern history. The problem was, of course, Nat Turner's Insurrection; it had just occurred in October of 1831 and they held these debates in the wake of it. And Dew wrote a forceful defense of slavery in the wake of this, which became kind of a seminal text for all future pro-slavery writers. Among the many things he said, and that was the simple sense of how history happens. "There is a time for all things," wrote Dew, "and nothing in this world should be done before its time." Now, what would you do if your parents told you that? They probably have. What would you do if your professors told you that all the time? "Stop trying to change things. Nothing will change before its time." You'd probably get bored, or angry. Or who knows? Maybe you would just agree. I don't know. Youth are supposed to be impatient.

Now, there are many ways to look at pro-slavery. Deep, deep in the pro-slavery argument--I'm going to give you categories here to hang your hats on--deep in the pro-slavery argument is a biblical argument. Almost all pro-slavery writers at one point or another will dip into the Old Testament, or dip into the New Testament--they especially would dip to the Old--to show how slavery is an ancient and venerable institution. Its venerability was its own argument, some said. It's always been around. Every civilization has had it. All those biblical societies had it. You can read Jeremiah and Isaiah and some of the great Old Testament prophets in some ways as defenders of slavery. You can therefore assume it was divinely sanctioned. You can also look in the New Testament for examples of it, justifications of it. "Slaves, be honorable, be

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dutiful"--be obedient is usually the word in the King James--"Slaves, be obedient to your masters." Slavery is all over the Bible, in one way or another. The Bible, of course, can breathe anti-slavery into a situation and it can breathe pro-slavery into a situation.

A second kind of set of arguments, I've already referred to, are the historical ones. Here it is not just the venerability of slavery, how old it is, but it's the idea that it has been crucial to the development of all great civilizations. That slavery may have its bad aspects but it has been the engine of good, it has been the engine of empires, the engine of wealth, the engine of greatness. How would you have had Cicero? How would you have had the great Roman philosophers and thinkers? How would you have had the great Greek playwrights, they would argue, without the system, the world the Greeks were able to create with the Helots? That at the base of all societies there has to be a labor system that will support the possibility of Plato.

Pro-slavery ideology is also part of--at the same time it's resistant to--the greatest product arguably of the Enlightenment, and that is the idea of natural rights; natural law, natural rights, rights by birth, rights from God, being born with certain capacities. Now pro-slavery writers were inspired by this to some extent, but many of them will simply convert it. They will convert it--they'll take portions of John Locke that they like, and not the others--and they'll say the real rule of the world is not natural equality, but it is natural inequality. Humans are not all born the same, with the same capacities, abilities.

Now, then there's a whole array of economic arguments, and the cynic, the economic determinist, simply goes to the economic conclusions of pro-slavery and nowhere else. One of the greatest of these writers was James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina planter who had plenty of mixed-race children. He was in some ways the epitome of the kind of cynical pro-slavery. In the end of the day, he wasn't bothered by morality. His argument for slavery was that ultimately it was amoral. But at the end of the day, he also essentially made a property argument or a property defense of slavery. He wrote, among other things, "The means therefore, whatever they may have been, by which the African race, now in this county, have been reduced to slavery, cannot affect us since they are our property, as your land is your property, by inheritance or purchase and prescriptive right. You will say that man cannot hold property in man. The answer is that he can, and actually does, hold property in his fellow, all over the world, in a variety of forms, and has always done so." Thank you very much, said Henry Hammond, don't talk to me about property in man.

Oh, some would get guilty. Indeed they did. Some would get worried and they would discuss slavery as a necessary evil--this system entailed upon them. God, they wished they were without it. And some of them, frankly folks, were deeply sincere in that.

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One of the most famous and one of the most prolific was a man named Charles Colcott Jones who owned a huge rice and partly cotton plantation system in low-country Georgia, just south of Savannah. He and his family wrote literally thousands upon thousands of letters. those family letters have been published in a book called The Children of Pride, and a brilliant book has been written about Colcott Jones and his extended family by Erskine Clarke called Dwelling Place. But one of the fascinating things about Charles Colcott Jones--born in the late eighteenth century, rises to adulthood by the teens, 1820s--is he's a classic example of a highly educated Southern planter. He came North. He was educated in Theology at Yale for awhile. He was really affected by it. And then he went up to Andover Theological Academy and he taught there and he was affected even more, by New England theologians. And he began to write back, first to his fiancée who quickly became his wife, Mary, and he was really worried about all the slaves he owned. And he writes, for example, to Mary: "I am moreover undecided whether I ought to continue to hold slaves." He underlines hold slaves. "As to the principle of slavery it is wrong. It is unjust, contrary to nature and religion, to hold men enslaved. But the question is, in my present circumstances, with evil on my hands, entailed from my father, would the general interest of the slaves and community at large, with reference to the slaves, be promoted best by emancipation? Could I do more for the ultimate good of the slave population by holding or emancipating what I own? I know not very particularly how you feel on this point." And there are many letters like that. He and his wife Mary write back and forth about how evil slavery is. But in the end Colcott Jones becomes a classic example of the guilty pro-slavery slaveholder. He doesn't know how to free them. He doesn't know how to go to emancipation. Instead he develops a highly intricate theory of how he's going to use slavery to save black people. He's going to ameliorate their conditions, he's going to make their slavery on his plantations so effective, so good, such a even joyous form of labor, that he will be doing God's work by improving slavery. It's a genuinely tragic sort of story in his case.

There are plenty of pro-slavery writers who also, to some extent, whether out of guilt or out of awareness, saw slavery as wrong, but they saw it as a problem more for white people than for black people. Their concern was not the conditions of blacks but what slavery did to whites; and usually they ended up in the same situation as Colcott Jones.

There are many pro-slavery writers who developed, like James Henry Hammond, what I would call the cynical or amoral form of pro-slavery argument; and this is a potent form of argument when you think about it. One of them was a writer named William Harper who wrote a book called Memoir [On] Slavery in 1837 or '38. It's an oft quoted work of pro-slavery writing. This is just one little passage. This is this kind of cynical, if you want, defense of slavery. It is what it is, deal with it. He wrote,

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"Man is born to subjection. The condition of our whole existence is but to struggle with evil, to compare them, to choose between them, evils that is, and so far as we can to mitigate them. To say that there is evil in any institution is only to say that it is a human institution." And Harper's writing in the thir--James Henry Hammond starts writing in the forties and into the fifties and he takes it much further, and he writes over and over and over again that, "The only problem with slavery in America," said James Henry Hammond, is that too damn many northerners didn't understand it is the way of the world as it is, and they ought to stop talking about the world as it ought to be.

And Hammond even aggressively, directly, took on Thomas Jefferson. I'm sorry, Harper did, even before him. Here's Harper on Jefferson: "It is not the first time that I have had occasion to observe that men may repeat with the utmost confidence some maxim or sentimental phrase as 'self-evident' or 'admitted truth', which is either palpably false or to which upon examination it will be found that they attach no definite idea. Notwithstanding our respect for the important document which declared our independence, yet if anything be found in it, and especially in what may be regarded rather as its ornament than its substance, false, sophistical and unmeaning, that respect should not screen it from the freest examination. All men are born free and equal?"--he says with a question mark. "Is it not palpably nearer the truth to say that no man was ever born free and that no two men were ever born equal? Man is born in a state of the most helpless dependence on other people."

And then there's the whole vast category of racial defense and justification of slavery. At the end of the day that's where Alexander H. Stephens went, with his Cornerstone Speech in 1861. That's where all of them went at one point or another, some less than others. Probably the most prominent pro-slavery writer to make the racial case--and they all did--but probably the most prominent was George Fitzhugh. In a book called Sociology of the South--he's also the same George Fitzhugh who wrote a book calledCannibals All--but in Sociology of the South, his famous pro-slavery tract in 1854, he wrote this: "The Negro," he said, "is but a grownup child and must be governed as a child. The master occupies toward him the place of parent or guardian. Like a wild horse he must be caught, tamed and domesticated. We find slavery repeatedly instituted by God or by men acting under his immediate care and direction, as in the instance of Moses and Joshua. Nowhere in the Old or New Testament do we find the institution condemned, but frequently recognized and enforced." And probably his most famous line, "Men are not born entitled to equal rights. It would be far nearer the truth to say that some are born with saddles on their backs and others booted and spurred to ride them."

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And lastly, there was a kind of utopian pro-slavery. It was best exemplified by a writer in Mississippi named Henry Hughes. Henry Hughes was one strange duck. He lived in New Orleans, he was eccentric as hell. He wrote an amazing diary. He was a loner. He urged revival of the slave-trade in the late 1850s, and he developed a theory of what he called warranteeism--w-a-r-r-a-n-t-e-e-i-s-m. He said slaves were not slaves they were warranties. What he meant was they were the charges put in the world for slaveholders to care for, and if possible, even to protect and perfect. He believed in a strong central state, which was a real departure for him from the rest of the pro-slavery writers. He wanted a strong central government to regulate everything. He wanted huge taxation. He wanted to build institutions that would be used for the sole purpose of perfecting the slave into the perfect worker. He was a bit of a mad scientist. And he was especially obsessed with racial purity. His writings are just replete with his fears about hygiene, that if white and black people touched or if they came together the whites would be soiled, and that any kind of intermixing of the races was to destroy ultimately the intellect, the ability, the capacity of a master race. He wasn't that widely read, I must admit, but it shows us how far pro-slavery could ultimately go. In Hughes's vision and Hughes's worldview slavery was not only a positive good--it was the possibility of man finding a perfected society, with the perfect landowners fulfilling their obligations, supported by a government that taxed the hell out of them to do it, and perfect workers, would make the South into the agricultural utopian civilization of history.

Now, the clock says I've run out of time. Let me just leave you with this. All of that is a way of simply saying it was a deep and abiding and well-rehearsed--indeed thousands of pages were written in defense of slavery. It wasn't just a profitable financial institution. And if you want to understand why so many white Southerners, especially in the Deep South, went to such great extents to save their slave society, remember the kinds of arguments and language used by its defenders. Thursday we'll take up the North and the critique of this ideology.

[end of transcript]

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 4 TranscriptJanuary 24, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: The other day I laid a--well, in part I laid a list of pro-slavery arguments on you, and a lot of quotations to give you a sense of the depth and breadth of pro-slavery ideology, and I didn't want to leave that entirely without tying up a knot or two. Just consider this as a sense of the scale of pro-slavery writing. [I don't want anybody to think that] when slave-holding politicians--when the planter elite of the American South--begins to organize toward, at least toward, some kind of separation and secession over this slave society they want to protect, they are reading hundreds and hundreds of pages about their system. In 1855 an anthology of pro-slavery writings was published in the South. It was about 450 pages long. In 1860, that anthology was updated, particularly with the works of George Fitzhugh, into a 900-page volume, which was really in most ways only excerpts of pro-slavery writing. And it was a work on the desks of most secessionists.

And I also didn't want to leave you thinking this was all about abstract ideology. One of the best descriptions I've ever read of why slavery persisted, of why people defended it, and why people went to war for it, came before the war, in 1857, in a speech by the African-American woman, novelist, writer, poet, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. In an 1850s anti-slavery speech she said, among other things, this conclusion--in effect, she's answer the question now, "why has slavery boomed and persisted and grows still?" And this is in the wake of the Dred Scott decision. "Ask Maryland," she says, "with her tens of thousands of slaves if she is not prepared for freedom, and hear her answer. I helped supply the coffles, gangs to the South. Ask Virginia with her hundreds of thousands of slaves if she is not weary with her merchandise of blood and anxious to shake the gory traffic from her hands and hear her reply, 'Though fertility has covered my soul,'"--this is Virginia speaking--"'though I hold in my hand a wealth of water power enough to turn the spindles to clothe the world, yet one of my chief staples has been the sons and daughters I send to the human markets.' Ask farther south and all the cotton growing states chime in, 'We have need of fresh supplies to fill the ranks of those whose lives have gone out in unrequited toil on our distant plantations.' A hundred-thousand newborn babies are annually added to the victims of slavery," said Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. "Twenty-thousand lives are annually sacrificed on the plantations of the South. Such a sight should send a thrill of horror through the nerves of civilization and impel the heart of humanity to lofty deeds. So it might, if men had not found out"--and here's her phrase worth remembering--"a fearful alchemy by which this blood can be transformed into gold. Instead of listening to the cry of agony they listen to the ring of

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dollars and stoop down and pick up the coins." A fearful alchemy--that's a useful definition of slavery. Why did an inhumane institution--of course not everybody who defended it thought it was inhumane--but why did that system survive, persist and grow? Because it was so damned profitable.

Last time I began with Alexander H. Stephens's famous Cornerstone Speech in 1861, the famous passage by the Vice-President of the Confederacy declaring slavery the cornerstone of the Confederate Movement. We go north today. We're going to look largely at the nature of Northern society. We're going to look to some extent today and mostly next Tuesday at the roots and origins of an anti-slavery ideology, a growing anti-slavery ideology in its many layered forms. But I want to begin today with another passage, from the war years, and ask now from a Northern point of view, how do we get to Uriah Parmelee? Now there's a nineteenth century name for you. Nobody's named Uriah anymore. You know any Uriah's? Uriah Parmelee was a kid who grew up on a Connecticut farm, and the best I've been able to determine his family was part of this market revolution. They ended up moving to a small town and no longer engaged in subsistence agriculture, if his parents had, or his grandparents. And by means I don't entirely understand, Uriah Parmelee, in the spring of 1861, was an Abolitionist. He was a Junior at Yale College. He'd gotten caught up in Abolitionism and anti-slavery, as young people get caught up in political fervor and movements of their times, sometimes.

As soon as the Civil War broke out and Lincoln called for volunteers in late April 1861, Uriah Parmelee dropped out of his Junior year at Yale and he joined the first regiment he could get into. There wasn't one organizing yet around New Haven or nearby in Connecticut so he went to New York and he joined the Sixth New York Cavalry. To his brother Parmelee confided, "I am more of an abolitionist than ever now, right up to the handle. If I had money enough to raise a few hundred contrabands and arm them I'd get up an insurrection among the slaves; told the captain I'd desert to do it." Nah. A lot of chutzpah in that passage; he hasn't seen any real war yet. He wants to be John Brown, at that point. He's going to get himself a band of insurrectionists and go down there and kill some slaveholders, he says.

Parmelee, in letters back home to his parents, his brothers, his sisters--and he wrote lots of them--he at first denounced Lincoln's government for its failure in 1861 and even into early 1862 to come out against slavery, to make it a war against slavery. He denounces the government he's serving. In a letter in late 1861 from the front, "The present contest," he says, "will indeed settle the question, for some years at least, as to whether union or secession, the Constitution or rebellion, shall triumph. But the great heart wound, slavery, will not be reached." He's angry, he's pissed off, he wants the war to be against slavery, and it's not. He goes on in a letter in spring 1862--the war

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still isn't a war against slavery in any official sense--and he writes home to his brother saying he wishes he had the, quote, "moral courage to desert," because he no longer wants to serve this cause. But he doesn't desert. By March 1863, he had concluded that emancipation would indeed be achieved--this is now in the wake of Congress's Confiscation Acts in '62, Lincoln's preliminary proclamation, the ultimate Emancipation Proclamation as of January 1863--and by March of that spring he's convinced the war has transformed. He refused a furlough to stay and fight. He writes home, "I do not intend to shirk now that there is really something to fight for; I mean freedom. Since the 1st of January it has become more and more evident to my mind that the war is henceforth to be conducted upon a different basis. Those who profess to love the Union are not so anxious to preserve slavery, while those who are opposed to the war acknowledge in all their actions that its continuance will put an end to this accursed system. So then I am willing to remain and endure whatever may fall to my share."

He was honored for bravery by at least three commanding officers in numerous battles, especially the Battle of Chancellorsville in May of 1863; he was promoted to Captain. He eventually switched; his New York [regiment]--this happened in many regiments in the Civil War--it took so many casualties it ceased to exist--and he switched to a Connecticut regiment and he served that Connecticut regiment through the summer of 1864. The great war of attrition in Virginia. He survived the Battle of the Wilderness, the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, the Battle of Cold Harbor, the entire Siege of Petersburg from August of '64 all the way until the end of March of 1865. He was killed on April 1st, 1865, at the Battle of Five Oaks--excuse me, at Five Forks, just west of Richmond, the last major engagement of the Civil War. And when you walk out today and you go through Woolsey Hall, if you haven't done this before, you'll note, if you haven't before, that that's full of the names of Yale College men who have died in war. And Uriah Parmelee's name will be right on your right, as you're walking through. He's this high on my arm or shoulder, and there's his name. Dropped out, Junior Year, to fight, to destroy slavery. And he did, for four years, and died in the last battle.

But how do you get to Uriah Parmelee, a kid from Connecticut, obviously bright enough or connected enough to get into Yale, who gave all that up for something he saw as a lot higher? If you can come to understand a Uriah Parmelee--or better yet, if you can come to understand young, white, northern, Yankee, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants, who often were very contemptuous of Irish immigrants, and even more contemptuous of black Americans, who nevertheless believed the War of 1861 had to be fought, and ultimately came even to support the destruction of slavery--if you can understand why those Northern Yankees get to that point, you really will understand

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the Civil War. Uriah Parmelee had an inheritance; at what level he exactly understood it I can't necessarily know, although his letters are extraordinarily rich.

Now, in that Northern society--and here we're using labels pretty loosely, but so be it--the northern states; and well I'll leave the outline up for the moment. No I won't.

[Professor adjusts his slides]

Professor David Blight: That's a wonderful old painting from 1830 called "The Yankee Peddler." Everybody's heard of Yankee peddlers. They don't come door to door anymore unless they're working for the Jehovah's Witnesses. Oops. [Laughter] Well, or the Environmental Action Committee or the, let's see--never mind. What's the Yankee peddler peddling? Cloth. Readymade, factory-made cloth for a woman, a housewife, who isn't making her own cloth anymore. That's the Market Revolution. There are a thousand ways to see it, understand it and grasp it. If the South was a slave society--and we tried to demonstrate that last time, we tried to define that. Although it's not defined in that newspaper that you're reading back there in row twelve, the Market Revolution is not reported in this morning's newspapers; actually it probably is, the markets are going bad, although they went back up yesterday. But this Market Revolution is not reported in that newspaper, I would venture. Sorry to interrupt you.

But if the South was a slave society the North was a market society. It was a booming market society by the 1820s and 1830s. It was beginning to be a market society even in the late eighteenth century. The northern states by the Antebellum Period--1820s, 1830s, 1840s--was beginning to sort of hurtle toward a different future than what that slave society was--perhaps--no, not really slowly--it too was hurtling toward a certain future. This market--this booming market society with its market, commercial, consumerist mentalities, and its belief--eventually, its faith in, its defense of--free labor for the common man, its kind of fanfare for the common man ideology, would be something a lot of white southerners would actually fear and be frightened by.

What is the Market Revolution? It's the time in which--it's not a single moment in time or course, it's a long process--but it's the time in which long distance commerce began to take hold, because of transportation revolutions: canals, roads, railroads in particular. It's a time of technological innovation, tremendous technological innovation, so much technological change that half the time it frightened people. In fact you can find all over American culture in 1800, 1810, even into the 1820s, a lot of fear of technology. What is this thing, a telegraph? Now today you probably don't fear technology. I still have a little bit of that, I'm still a little nineteenth century in that sense. I hate it when they tell me they want to buy me a new laptop. Enough already. I don't care if it's four years old, I don't want another one. Don't make me learn something new with my machine.

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The Market Revolution was driven, of course, by the growth of cities, which became market centers and manufacturing centers. Maybe more importantly, the Market Revolution is that time in American history--that incredible time, really, when you think about the scale of change--when eighteenth century subsistence farmers who engaged in what was always called, or we've always called, mixed agriculture--that is, they grew all kinds of foodstuffs, almost always for themselves--when that kind of eighteenth century style farming gave way to commercial farming, where farmers now produced cash crops, for a much broader market. A market on the East Coast if they were in upstate New York, or out in Ohio eventually, and a market of the whole world. It's that period when the home or the farm--still a majority of northern people by the 1830s and 1840s were making their livings from agriculture--but it's a time when that home and farm became its own domestic factory, where people began to produce in their homes, for markets, not for themselves. The vast multitudes were still farmers, but they began to now buy goods, manufactured goods, readymade clothing and shoes, cloth, candles, soap, all kinds of foodstuffs. Stuff that the eighteenth century farmer made for him and herself now you bought from a peddler or you bought from a store in town.

This all, of course, leads to a change in what European historians taught us to call mentalities, mentalité. It brought about fundamental alterations, slowly, in ways sometimes people didn't even know it's happening; fundamental alterations in aspirations, in habits, in activities, in conceptions and definitions of work, and leisure. What is work and leisure now in a society where you don't have to produce everything for yourself? It produced, it would produce fundamental alterations in the conception of labor. Who's a worker? What is labor? Is a laborer any more just an individual, or is a laborer part of a collective problem, part of a collective mentality, part of a collective movement against a much greater force now called capital, manufacturing, the company?

It's going to alter the very idea of individual rights. We have a habit in this society to think that individual rights, when they drafted the Bill of Rights, was just laid down for us and it's just traveled through time and here they are. Just go back and look at the founders. It's such nonsense. It's ahistorical. The very idea of individual rights got reshaped by the Market Revolution. What do you have a right to now? New shoes?

It's going to change the very idea of mobility. Where can you go, and how, by what means? It's going to really change--and this is absolutely crucial, indirectly, in helping us understand this war that's going to come down the way--it's going to change for a lot of northern--millions of northern people, some of them now immigrants who have come here with a clear purpose--that is, to make a better life--it's going to change their conception of what they can give their children.

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And we're going to hear a lot more later on, next week, week after, about free labor ideology. The idea that if labor is left free then that common man always has a chance. If the land isn't taken up by large oligarchies--life slaveholding class--then the small guy has a chance. But rooted in free labor ideology is, among other ideas, this notion of mobility. That a free laborer is a mobile laborer, especially in a society like the United States that had this thing called The West, the limitless--apparently to them anyway--boundless West.

Even such concepts, such great American concepts--let's call it that--as self-reliance about which Ralph Waldo Emerson may have written his greatest essay--I go read Emerson's "Self-Reliance" at least once a year. Just, I don't know, to feel better or something. It's the quintessential sort of expression of individualism, but it's more than that. But even an ideal like self-reliance--I can remake my world, I can be anything I want--is changed by the Market Revolution. It doesn't mean people believe any less in self-reliance, it's just they keep seeing evidence, they keep bumping into realities that show them that in the face of the market now, especially the boom and bust cycles of the market, their individualism is not so powerful.

The Market Revolution would, on the level of ideas and thinking and sort of common behavior, would bring about a kind of combination of tremendous optimism, possibly like we've never experienced since; although you can find other moments in American history, like the 1950s, where a kind of broad, broad social optimism took hold of Americans. It's one of the reasons we had a Civil Rights Movement. But at the same time the Market Revolution is going to bring a certain sense of anxiety, even dread, even despair. It will lead to great wealth, of course. Fortunes will begin to be made in the textile industry and in the railroad industry by the '40s and '50s, and in a host of other ways, real fortunes. And some fortunes will begin to be made in simple financial speculation. Wall Street will be born. At the same time, of course, as wealth grows, the inequality in wealth grows too. Specialization will set in. Workplaces that some--that your parents' generation may have grown up understanding as a very personal place. Even if you worked in a small shop, they only had eight workers and you were related to half of them. The workplace would become less personal, bigger, uncontrollable.

Women went to work, most famously in the Lowell factories in Massachusetts and in other places. Among the many images of the famous mill girls is this one, taken in 1850, I believe, in Lowell, Massachusetts. She looks about nine-years-old; she may have been 12 or 13. But for the first time, in significant numbers, young girls and young women left farms, left the realm of domesticity, left that world in which they presumably had been shielded as children, and now entered a world where they were

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child laborers, and in a world now that breeds child labor, and even defends child labor, you have problems.

The Market Revolution would also lead to a lot of natural environmental degradation. People got to be--got worried about rivers, they really did. There's now an environmental history being written of the impact of the Market Revolution.

As I mentioned earlier it would lead, of course, to big cycles of boom and bust. A big depression hit in 1837. Another big depression hit in 1857. Much more on that 1857 panic, as they were called then, a little later in the course, because it's absolutely pertinent to what happened in the great political debates of the late1850s. Even the idea of what a child is--since we've got a child up here--even the idea of--and there's a growing little subfield now of children's history, which is actually very interesting; there's a man named Jim Martin at Marquette University who's pioneered this--even the idea of a child, that a child's place in a family undergoes a kind of revolution in 20 or 30 years. In a working-class family, an immigrant working-class family in particular, by the '30s and '40s, a child meant income, a child meant a worker. Everybody had to work, and usually outside of whatever was home. But what also set in, in the growing middle-class, of course, was a more bourgeois definition of childhood, a more modern definition of childhood, born somewhere there between 1800 and 1860, where the child was to be a protected youth--shielded, and not used, by a family. Parenting, in this new bourgeois conception of family, parenting was to be moral guardianship. Or so it seemed.

What the Market Revolution was, in so many ways, was an engine, a tremendous--Charles Sellers has written a famous book on this--it was a tremendous engine for what became arguably the most prevalent idea of the entire nineteenth century in America, and that's the notion of progress. America was now going to be the nation of progress. It was going to be the place of progress. It seemed to have boundless borders and boundless resources. It looked like it could expand almost forever. It had tremendous riches in ore. It had tremendous natural wealth. It would therefore be the place of progress in the world. And as Walt Whitman wrote in poem after poem, and other poets did as well, and politicians said over and over and over and over--America, and this United States, this nation formed there--would be the beginning of a new man, a new start for humankind. That's a big idea. Of course we still want to be that. It's never vanished in our culture. We still sometimes want to be Winthrop's City on the Hill, beacon of something for everybody.

But think with me just for one second about the idea of progress. If you come to believe, if you say to the world, "We are the hope of humans, we are the hope of earth, we are progress. And by the way, we, the people of progress, are rooted in those principles of the Declaration of Independence"--which are written down essentially as

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creeds--"and, oh and by the way, we have a written Constitution--we actually wrote it down, we have a Bill of Rights where we declare these things on paper, unlike the Brits." What have you done? You've said: "we are really special, and we are really important, and we are really good." You've kind of set yourself up, haven't you? If somebody walks and you're meeting them for the first time, "Hello, I'm a beacon of progress and good and hope in the world, how do you do?" [Laughter] You're probably going to think, "oh shit, this"--instantly your cynicism kicks in and then "who's this jerk?"

The doctrine of progress I'm simply saying has always bred its contradictions. And there were a whole bunch of them laying out there, weren't there? They were laying all over the place. But, you know, you couldn't resist it. How could you resist a sense of change in 1820s New York? 1830s Philadelphia? 1840s and '50s Ohio? 1850s Chicago, which was already by the 1850s the railroad capital of North America? How could you resist that sense of change? Tocqueville couldn't resist it, it was the thing he couldn't stop writing about in Democracy in America, and he was only observing in 1831. He didn't come back and see it in the 1850s. He was just amazed at these Americans, how they just moved all the time, and they were just so full of hope all the time. He said Americans would always build a house but then move before they put a roof on it. They were always mobile, always going somewhere, always changing.

Part of that change, of course, bringing fear with it, was immigration. In the 1830s 600,000 immigrants came to the United States, almost entirely from Western Europe; in the 1840s alone 1.5 million; and in the 1850s, almost 3 million more. By 1852-53, Boston and New York--think about this--Boston--although we're getting close to that again--Boston and New York had 50% foreign-born populations. One of every two people in New York City in 1852 was born outside the United States. Same in Boston. Close to that in Philadelphia. The Northern cities, seats of market culture, commercialism, manufacturing, were immigrant cities.

All this, of course, was fuelled by--I mentioned it already--a transportation revolution symbolized by the Erie Canal, finished in 1825, which remained profitable all the way out into the 1880s. The longest ditch in the world, as it was called, 300-and-some-odd miles out to Buffalo. It was the romantic--and by the way, about 3,300 miles of such canals would be built by the middle of the 1850s, all for the purpose of commerce, and to move people. Steamboats became the romantic symbol of this great transportation revolution and all of this movement. Although they too, they too brought dread with them. One-third of every steamboat built in the United States before 1850 exploded and destroyed--became a wreck. And there's no mistaking in Mark Twain's imagination, if you remember the scene in Huck Finn--I mean, among the hundred eternal take-home images in Huck Finn is that moment when Huck and

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Jim are on their raft, it's a little foggy, they can't quite see--they can hear--and pretty soon that steamboat just smashes into that raft and over they go. Steamboats were wonderful and exciting and romantic. You could go gamble on them, you could go get sexed on them. They also might just blow you up. [Laughter]

And then, of course, railroads, which reshaped North America. No continent, you could argue, had ever been quite made--readymade if you want--for railroads quite like North America. It fit the environment perfectly, once they could make these things actually go twenty-five miles an hour. They never figured out how to build gauges properly. There were some twelve to fifteen different widths of railroads in the Northern states alone by the 1850s, and you could go into one town on a gauge, I don't know, three feet wide but on the other side of town it would come out four feet wide. Why they never quite sat down and standardized all this, I have no idea. But railroads revolutionized an American sense of time, their ability to travel. It revolutionized manufacturing, it revolutionized how quickly you could get to markets, and it made Chicago Chicago. It also made the first multi-millionaires, the first massive fortunes, and it became the first great example of the deep relationship in the nineteenth century--back in our heyday of laisser-faire government, ho-ho--of a relationship between the Federal government and business. The great American railroads were built by and large, for decades, by government subsidies, and a tremendous amount of corruption. The railroad had a lot to do, too, of course, with linking northeast with northwest, which has a lot to do with a certain sense of economic isolation that set in in the South, to some extent.

And I'll just say a word quickly, that don't underestimate the influence here of an ideology beneath this. We usually only talk about Manifest Destiny when we're talking about the westward movement beyond the Mississippi. We only usually bring it up when we're talking about the Mexican War and its aftermath, or something. But Manifest Destiny was a very old American idea. It was probably coined by this journalist named O'Sullivan, although now there's a new theory that it wasn't. I leave it to my expert colleagues in History of the American West to decide exactly who came up with the term Manifest Destiny, who actually first used it. But Manifest Destiny was in some ways the fuel of the American imagination. It combined so many ideas. Under that heading you might call "American Progress" came the sense of American mission: spreading liberty, spreading democracy, spreading Christianity. A Christian civilization was deeply at the root of this cluster of ideas we call Manifest Destiny, as was a virulent kind of nationalism that boomed after the War of 1812 and through the 1820s into the 1830s. And Manifest Destiny was the engine of capitalism, make no mistake. Why did we want all that land in the Mexican Session? Why did we want Oregon? Why did we want California? And deep at the root of Manifest Destiny, of course--and there's book after book written on this--is a deep and abiding American

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white supremacy. It was the destiny of a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, United States to take control and improve this great land it had been given.

Now, before I leave that, let me just suggest--sometimes one of the ways, when you want to understand how progress builds in its own contradictions, and why I think contradiction is what makes American history interesting--we are our contradictions. That's why the world is fascinated with us. Look at the literature. Go back all the way to James Fenimore Cooper. His Leatherstocking Tales are full of a certain anxiety about what might be happening to that frontier, what's coming from east to west.

Read Thoreau's Walden. What's Thoreau up to? I mean Thoreau may have been a snob, he may have been smarmy, and he may have wanted you to think he was cool because he sold pencils. [Laughter] But he wrote one of the most brilliant critiques of change, and what it can mean, any American ever wrote. When Thoreau sits on his little stool outside his cabin at Walden Pond and he hears the train go by over the ridge, and he puts his hands over his ears--he doesn't want to hear it--he's representing something. I'm not saying he was right, and the damn fool should've got down and got real with the railroads, but he didn't.

What is Emerson up to in his essay "Nature"? In almost every poem Walt Whitman wrote he seems to be fashioning himself, if not the whole of this American people, which sometimes he did call an American race, as a new Adam. "I the singer of Adamic songs"--he said it directly--"through the new garden of the West, the great city is calling, as Adam early in the morning, walking forth from the bower, refreshed with sleep; behold me, where I pass, hear my voice." He goes on, I can do anything in this American West, this American possibility.

But as soon as we read Whitman, then you realize there's Nathaniel Hawthorne who in 1844--even before Whitman started writing most of his poems--Hawthorne was a pretty dourful, he was an old Puritan, he was a conservative, dourful kind of--he was a real New Englander. Hawthorne wrote a short story you should read sometime, as a balance to all of this optimism of this period, irresistible as that optimism was. It's called "Earth's Holocaust." Have you ever read that? It's an incredible story. He has this whole group of people out somewhere on the American frontier and they're a kind of a cult. They decide they're going to have a bonfire and they build this giant fire and into it they throw everything from the past. They throw heraldry, they throw every kind of vestige of Old World culture and monarchy and aristocracy and civilization. They throw all kinds of old books, great old books, onto the bonfire. They burn everything from Europe, everything that's old. It's a purification. They're going to make a new world. They don't need anything from the past. And it's Hawthorne's satire, it's his critique of it. It's apocalyptic, angry critique of all these Americans who

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think they're inventing everything anew every day. Hawthorne had a bummer, I mean he--.

Well enough, I guess, of that; although if you want to understand the optimism of that time just dip into Leaves of Grass, read Whitman's Old Pioneers. He can't stop. I once counted the number of times he used the word--the letter--O--in that poem, and I quit counting. It's like America, to Whitman, was "O!". He just couldn't stop. Well, and sometimes that "O America" meant the tinkerer, it meant the inventor, it meant the guy who invented a new kind of sewing machine and took it in for a patent. If you want to understand this Yankee, northern, market economy, society, just look at some histories of technological innovation throughout this era and you realize there were just thousands and thousands of patents given, mostly to northerners, for inventing this or that kind of thing or trinket or firearm or method of producing something or printing press or glass or musical instrument or Connecticut clocks or the first refrigerators or ice-making machines or new locks or new elevators, and on and on and on and on and on it goes. I forget who--it may have been Charles Seller--who said if you want to see the Market Revolution happening go study the Archives of the U.S. Patent Office. I've always found that kind of research rather boring, but I think he had a point.

Now, in any society changing this much, this fast, doubling its own population--doubling--in twenty-five years. If the rate of population growth of the United States between 1820 and 1850 had sustained over time, we'd have today approximately one and a half billion people in the United States. Now it didn't, and we had these World Wars and we had all this history in between. What do we have now, 300 million? If the rate of growth had sustained, that's what the population would've been. Any era of great change, great ferment, usually causes reform, anxiety, people who get worried, want to change things.

We've probably had four major periods in American history of--there's one other picture I wanted to put up. Oh, I'll leave that little girl up. She's much better than the--. I had a picture of the Lowell Mills insignia but you don't need that. We have probably four great reform periods in American history. Now, and by reform I mean a period in which people became professional reformers. Movements, organizations, societies--whole newspapers came into existence, magazines came into existence--to either eradicate something, to change something, or to build something. Fundamental challenges to the social order. The first is this era, of the 1820s, '30s, '40s and '50s, Antebellum America, exemplified most obviously by the anti-slavery movement, which is where we're going to get to as we leave today. Of course, there were many other reform movements at the time. The second great reform era is the Progressive Era, a great response to urbanization, industrialization and immigration, as it had

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never quite happened before. The third is in all likelihood the New Deal, the Great Depression, the incredible emergencies and crises of what governments owe their people and people owe their governments that the Great Depression caused. And the New Deal brought a fundamental new set of approaches, ideas, which we're still debating today; it's all over our political culture whether it's named or not. And the fourth one is the '60s. There it had less to do often with social forms of reform--although that's not entirely true--than it had to do with the Civil Rights revolution and the Vietnam War.

In American history our reform crusades have usually had to do with one of several objects or purposes or problems. The first is the industrializing process. And we've been living the history of how to reform the industrializing process, and now the post-industrializing process, ever since our first market revolution--we're still living it. Why are we having a debate over Social Security? The second is racial equality, and we're still having that reform movement. Well, or are we? The third is gender equality; that's at least as old as abolitionism. The fourth is war, and we got peace movements in American history and anti-war fervor and ferment, of all kinds, for a very long time. And the fifth kind of American reform--and here it takes on sometimes some distinctive, distinctly American forms--is religious and individual morality; movements of piety, movements that try to define deviance in others, and try to reform others to a certain personal conception of faith, or religion, or behavior.

But whenever we've had a reform era there's been a big issue, or two or three or four. That's why all these arguments that we all get into these days about third-party political candidates--what do we really need in our political culture, what would break apart the stagnation of our two-party system, if that's what people want--or put more directly, will Michael Bloomberg run or not? I always throw that back at people and say, damn it, read some history. There's never been a successful third-party political culture take hold in this country without one really big issue to drive it. Name that issue that Michael Bloomberg would use. I'm a billionaire and you can be too? [laughter] That's unfair. I know, he's a nice guy.

Let me just end here with this. To be anti-slavery in America by the 1820s and 1830s was to face a host of barriers--and I'll come back to these barriers next time--a host of barriers. The sanctity of the U.S. Constitution, the depth of that pro-slavery argument, which northern abolitionists over time had to actually come to realize even existed--and they began to realize it existed in the 1820s and '30s. They faced tremendous barriers. There was no good reason in the world that an abolitionist in the 1830s, '40s, and even the '50s, had any right to believe they would see the end of slavery in their lifetime.

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And last point. One of the barriers--think about this--one of the barriers that an anti-slavery--if you were worried about slavery in America, its expansion, its influence in the government, what it did to free labor, how it might retard that market revolution that you wanted your children to benefit from, whatever position you might end up taking between 1830 and 1860 that made you at least suspicious of slavery, whatever you thought of African-Americans--one of the barriers you're up against is the simple fact that the United States was a republic, and that the side that owned those slaves, that vast slave society, half of the United States--it's still half the States in 1850--they were free, their leaders at least, were free to defend their system. They were free to dissent. And they were republicans, small r, too. The greatest tragedy of American history arguably is that this struggle could not be decided by debate. Okay, see you in the gym.

[end of transcript]

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 5 TranscriptJanuary 29, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: In some ways, the greatest witnesses--there are many, many witnesses of the coming of the Civil War--what caused it, what's percolating from beneath the society of the South, we've looked at, and the society of the North--and in so many ways, of course, the greatest witnesses--and their stories have only been with us, in a serious, robust way, for the past couple of decades or so, a few decades--are those of the slaves themselves. If it was somehow all about them--and in varying kind of ironic ways folks on both sides will say that--if it is somehow all about them, what did they think?

This week you're reading the greatest of the slave narratives. Frederick Douglass's first autobiography, published in 1845, is, I still would maintain, the greatest of the slave narratives, certainly in a literary sense. He was an almost mystically brilliant writer, for one so young. He first drafted this when he was 26. He escaped from slavery when he was 20-years-old. You'll find out in the text how he learned his literacy. He learned it first from his white mistress, Miss Sophia, who became like an angelic mother-figure to him until she took language away from him.

The book is full of metaphor, it is full of one kind of tale and story after another that Douglass shapes into telling a free story. Telling a free story, as the great literary critic of this genre, Bill Andrews, has put it. For a fugitive slave to emerge in the Northern states--for that matter a fugitive slave who goes to Britain, like Olaudah Equiano did, African born, or so we still think, and writes his story in Britain--but for a fugitive slave to write his or her story and publish it in English in the western world was to say: "I'm a person of letters, I am somebody, I have a history, I am free, but I am not free until you let me write, and I will make myself free, if I must, by telling you who I am." When a fugitive slave could go to England and hold up his book in front of huge audiences--Douglass spoke in London at one point before 10,000 people, in 1846--and he could hold his little book up in his hand, he could probably at that moment feel freer than he'd ever felt, because he could actually say "this is who I am, I'm not a manufactured identity, I'm not what you necessarily want me to be. I won't talk the way you expect me to talk. I won't scratch my head when I tell my story." But what a story.

When I was a fledgling graduate student, not knowing what I was doing and writing a dissertation on Frederick Douglass, a couple--a few decades ago, a new book had come out called Young Frederick Douglass. It was a wonderful study of Douglass's youth. It had been written by a journalist, so he was hard to find--he wasn't an

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academic. This is pre-email, pre-Google, pre-lots of things. I wrote to his publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, and said can you give me a phone number for Dick Preston--Dickson Preston was his name. They said, "yes, here's his phone number." I was in Washington, D.C., doing research; called him. He lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, that much I knew, which is where Douglass grew up. I didn't know much about Dick except that he had written this extraordinary book on Douglass's youth. In fact, it was Preston who actually discovered Douglass's birth date. Douglass was one year younger than he ever knew--wouldn't that be cool? I'll take a year back any time at this point. Called him, he said, "Yeah, come on out to the Eastern Shore, meet me in the Easton Community College parking lot at 9 a.m."--on whatever Wednesday morning it was in July--"I'll give you a tour of the sites of Douglass's youth." And it was one of the most extraordinary days of my life. I folded myself into his station wagon and we drove back roads all over the Eastern Shore. He took me for a walk through a muddy cornfield, as I believe it, out to the back lot of a field, to a bend in Tuckahoe Creek, and he said, "This is where Douglass was born. Here's where Grandmother Betsy's cabin was." Then he took me down all kinds of back roads, then we ended up at the Freeland Farm. If you've read the Narrative you know the Freeland Farm was--among Douglass's three or four masters he had as a youth, Freeland he admired the most or respected the most. And then he said, "Do you want to see Covey's Farm?" Edward Covey, the so-called slave-breaker Douglass had been hired out to, or sent to, by his master Thomas Auld, when he was a 17-year-old, quite rebellious and rather uncontrollable teenager. I said, "Sure, show me Covey's farm." Then back roads again that I couldn't find today if my life depended on it. We get out of a car and, in my memory, we stepped over a fencepost, we walked out this ridge, and Dick said something like "turn around."

And there they were. He hadn't made it up. In the narrative, if you've read far enough, if you've read to page 83 in my edition, you've encountered the most beautiful metaphor in anti-slavery literature. It's Douglass's metaphor of the white sailing ships on the Chesapeake that he would see from Covey's farm for eight months, and he would try to dream and imagine his way onto their decks, their "gallant decks", as he called them. And I realized that day sometimes metaphor is not just a metaphor. "Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay"--this is Douglass's description--"whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen"--don't you wish you could write like this when you're 26?--"were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean." Douglass was fond of adjectives. "The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would

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compel utterance, and there with no audience but the Almighty I would pour out my soul's complaint"--a phrase right from the Book of Job--"in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitudes of ships." And when you read this, note what he does then, he puts his own teenage voice, or his memory, in quotation marks, and he speaks to the ships. "You are loose from your moorings and are free. I am fast in my chains and am a slave. You move merrily before the gentle gale and I sadly before the bloody whip. You are freedom's swift winged angels that fly around the world. I am confined in bands of iron. Oh that I were free. Oh that I were on one of your gallant decks and under your protecting wing. But alas, betwixt me and you the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. Oh that I could also go." And he still goes on for another paragraph, milking, if you like, the sailing ship metaphor for all it's worth. How many of us--perhaps all of us, I think everybody, has their own Chesapeake. It may be every morning when you have to go to class. We all have our own Chesapeake Bays we've looked out on and wondered "wouldn't I rather be there?" Or "how can I get out of here?" Or "is there a sailing ship that will liberate me?" Telling a free story is what the slave narratives were about. They were acts of telling that in some ways made the former slave almost literally free by an act of language. Language itself to a former slave who could write was a form of liberation. We tend to take it for granted today, these books, language.

Okay, abolitionism, its roots. Reformers, the barriers they faced. I'm going to run through this with some speed, and then the stages in the development of an anti-slavery impulse--let's call it that to begin with. It begins with this idea of colonization, colonizing African-American freed people or former slaves outside the United States; an idea that never lost its kind of beguiling hold on the American imagination, even well after the Civil War, ironically. And then on to a more radicalized form of anti-slavery thinking and action, exemplified especially by William Lloyd Garrison, but by a host of other black and white abolitionists. And then I want to work you at least to the story, in myth and reality, of the Underground Railroad, since it is so much a part of our imagination of this story, and it would at least I hope take us to the point of understanding why that Fugitive Slave Act, that we'll hear about on Thursday and into next week, that Fugitive--that Federal Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850, in the compromise of 1850 that flowed out of the Mexican War--why that Fugitive Slave Act was so pertinent, so divisive, so significant, in the kinds of ways Americans were beginning to divide over the future of free labor and slave labor, whatever. They may have thought about African-Americans as their neighbors.

But permit me to use Emerson again, at least briefly. This idea of reform. I mentioned last time that--and sort of ended there--that in American History we've had at least four major reform eras or waves of reform. And certainly this is the first. In Antebellum America from the 1820s through the 1850s all kinds of reform ferment

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came to the surface. Sometimes that was against flogging in the Navy. Sometimes it was in utopian experiments and communities. Sometimes that was in Women's Rights. Sometimes that was in Temperance, which was by far--that is the anti-alcohol, anti-booze, anti-demon rum movement--Temperance was by far the most widespread American reform movement in pre-Civil War times. It was probably the only major reform movement that got a hold in the South. Personal reform of some sort was something that that Southern society we looked at--a slave society, a very hierarchical society--certain kinds of personal reform that dealt with personal piety and behavior could take hold in the South; broader social reforms that would challenge the social order--not so much.

But listen to Emerson. In his essay called "Man the Reformer"--and think about our own times. "What is man born for?" said Emerson. "What is man born for but to be a reformer?" Now he may be right or wrong about this, you can decide. "A re-maker of what man has made, a renouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature"--note the metaphor here--"which embosoms us all and which sleeps no moment on an old past but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with every pulsation a new life. Let him renounce everything which is not true to him, and put all his practices back on their first thoughts, and do nothing for which he has not the whole world for his reason." Emerson is arguing, right or wrong, that you are a reformer by nature. Nature recreates itself daily and so do humans. Is he right?

Call home tonight to your parents and say--you're a Senior--"I've decided what I'm going to do, Dad, I'm going to be a reformer." If I were your parent I'd say, "Of what? For why? Do they pay you for that? Will it be safe? Who you been talking to? A what?" "I'm gonna be a reformer." This was an age, though, by the 1830s, for a small group--and rest assured abolitionists, in particular, were never a large group. They probably were never--excuse me, I was in Montana on the weekend giving lectures, and the mountains were gorgeous but it was cold. Anyway, abolitionists were never, even at their peak of organizational action, were never more than probably, probably at most, 15% of the population of the Northern states. Now in some communities they might be larger--upstate New York, parts of Massachusetts and Connecticut or New Hampshire--always a small group. But like most vociferous and, eventually, highly organized--operating by the printing press--reform groups, their significance is much greater than their numbers.

Now, what were they up against? Real quickly let me run through these. I may have begun here last time and had to stop. The American abolitionists, or anybody concerned about slavery--let's just take the slavery question--has to deal, by the 1820s now, with the new generations being born who did not experience the Revolution, and

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they are inheriting now this great experience of their parents, the American Revolution. But that revolution had at least a twofold legacy. On the one hand, it was an event that really ushered those great Enlightenment ideas into the world that an anti-slavery impulse in America is going to draw upon, constantly. Black and white abolitionists, they're all going to do it. Those great Enlightenment ideas--hostility to monarchy, the growth of Republicanism, representative government, the faith in human reason, the notion of individual liberty, that you're born with certain natural rights. These are revolutionary ideas. They hadn't worked them out yet either. How about the right of revolution, one of Jefferson's four first principles? The doctrine of consent. Popular sovereignty--not a brand new idea--it's all the way back there in the Epistles of Paul and even before that in certain kinds of writings. But how many times had the world actually invented governments truly based on the doctrine of consent? And that fledgling idea of equality, human equality, had been put in play.

But the other side of the American Revolution is that it had also fostered in the South the necessity of an intensification of slavery's defense. In many ways, the success of the American Revolution and putting slavery on the run in the Northern states, where it was gradually abolished in every Northern--immediately abolished in a few but gradually abolished in most of the Northern States by the 1820s--the South now had to have answers, it had to have justifications. And we went through a lot of those defenses and justifications the other day. This was what Edmund Morgan, the great colonial revolution historian here at Yale for years argued so brilliantly, over and over. It was the American paradox, this great American contradiction; largest slave system in the world being built by one of its first functioning, thriving republics.

Two, anybody trying to work against slavery, even in the most gradual, modest ways, by the 1820s and the 1830s, has got to bump his head right into what we might simply call the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution was revered in American society, it was a sacred thing. And look what it was rooted in. Now, Garrison's going to call it a covenant with death, a deal with the devil, because of its complicities in slavery. But it's also rooted deeply in Federalism and in what southerners and northerners would practice as states rights doctrine--all that localism that the Constitution was designed in Madison's genius to try to control, hold together. Then you take the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause and the postponing for 20 years of any consideration of the banning of the foreign slave trade. And you realize that the U.S. Constitution is morally complicit in slavery, even though it never used the word. Why did abolitionism in America--or any kind of concern--let's just put it that way--about slavery become more radical with time? It is because, ultimately, an anti-slavery movement in the United States, to succeed, had to become extra legal. Or, put another way, it had to break the law. That's why law breaking is such a central theme in Harriet Beecher Stowe's great novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

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And then, of course, anti-slavery activists were up against the increasingly deep defense of slavery, which we've already dealt with. They were up against an increasingly highly organized and widely written racial theory about black inferiority. An anti-slavery impulse in the United States was an impulse, a set of ideas, that eventually would have to call for some form of social revolution, legal revolution, and political revolution in a society that did not want it. And in a society where increasingly a tremendous amount of wealth was of course staked in slavery, a point we've also made. Just a last thought on that. Think today, just think around you, think out of your box for a moment, of an issue in the world of great concern that really affects you, or most of us; for that matter the whole bloody world. How confident are you in succeeding in solving it, in your lifetime? World poverty, global warming, take your pick. Racism, go end it. To be an abolitionist in the 1830s was to take on an issue like this and say, "Well, you know, maybe not in our lifetime but maybe sometime." It doesn't mean they were altruistic, I'm not sure there were any altruistic abolitionists. As you'll see when you read about them in Bruce Levine's book or any other way we look at them, they could be as egotistical and as vane and as conflicted in their tactics and their methods and their personalities as anybody. Certainly William Lloyd Garrison was not an easy guy to get along with.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, anti-slavery in America, though, takes stages, it goes through periods, stages. The first of these is this idea of colonizing black people elsewhere. Now colonization, as an idea, is not brand new by 1816, when the American Colonization Society was formed, but it finally took hold in the political soil of the United States, in the wake of the War of 1812. The American Colonization Society was actually founded in the U.S. capitol. This thing had congressional funding at first. It was actually founded by some of the greatest statesmen in America at the time. Henry Clay was there at the original meeting. James Monroe; John Marshall--Chief Justice of the Supreme Court--and many others, especially border state, Upper South leaders, like Clay, from Kentucky, the great Whig who will become the kind of father-figure of the Whig Party. Many of them slaveholders, like Clay--owned about 60 slaves on his hemp farms in Kentucky.

The idea here is that somehow over time, in that America of the future--that vast, infinite, boundless America of the West--that eventually this problem of slavery might have to be faced, but the way it could be faced eventually is if you start gradually removing black people from the United States. And you do it first with volunteer freed people, free blacks. They would be asked, never coerced, was the theory of the original Colonization Society. That Colonization Society, of course, is the organization--it had a lot of money in its first decade or so. It was such a beguiling idea. It fit in so many ways this generation. And it was actually the revolutionary generation and the immediate post-revolutionary generation who really were infused

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with what you might call a kind of Jeffersonian idealism--or even a Madisonian idealism--that somehow this America, yes, it had problems--or as Jefferson said, we got the wolf by the ears, with slavery; you can't get off because the wolf will devour you; but if you stay on you got to ride that damn wolf forever. But he said that in private--but this kind of Jeffersonian idealism that somehow this grand American continent with its resources physically, and this grand American Constitution, this great experiment, would dissolve this problem, especially if you helped it.

The American Colonization Society founded the colony of Liberia on the West Coast of--the nation of Liberia was founded in 1820, '22, by the ACS, the American Colonization Society. It would ship approximately 1500 free African-Americans to Liberia--1500, that's it--between 1821 and 1831, and they would found its capital at Monrovia, named for James Monroe, the United States President. Liberia today, as you may know, has been through a vicious, horrifying Civil War. It's a disaster. It does have the only African woman president now. It's a fascinating story of what's happening to Liberia. But its roots are back here, in the impulse of white Americans to remove black Americans from their native soil. Now some African-Americans bought onto this. It's the immigration impulse, go elsewhere, make a new start. Some of them were even inspired by this idea of a return to an ancestral homeland that they knew so little about.

But colonization had all kinds of flaws at its roots. Well, we can call these flaws; we can call these realities; we can call them whatever we want. Colonization was essentially rooted in these ideas. It was first these--or assumptions we might call them. The first assumption was that equality, racial equality in America was never going to happen. Just start there, is what the colonizationalists would argue. "Be real--ain't gonna happen." There was a fear of the rising free black population that had really boomed in numbers in the wake of the American Revolution, with all the manumissions that went on in the Upper South, and then the emancipations that had occurred in the north, where the slave population of a state like New York had been six or seven percent. It was the fear now of the specter of slave insurrection. There'd been the Gabriel Prosser plot in 1800 in Richmond. There'd been the Denmark Vesey insurrectionary plot in Charleston in 1822, which brought a lot of converts to colonization. And of course Nat Turner's bloodiest of all insurrections in 1831 made colonization look pretty nice to a lot of Americans. There was this idea too that somehow colonization would be a safety valve. It might only remove five or ten percent of American free blacks and slaves over say a few decades. But even that five or ten percent, the theory was, would ameliorate conditions in the south, it would begin to defuse this powder keg of a rising slave population being fueled by the great cotton boom. And it had a kind of a strange attractiveness, but mostly to white folks. It was roundly loathed by--make no mistake--by a majority of free African-Americans

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in the North or Upper South, and feared--to the extent they even grasped the idea--by slaves in the Deep South.

But it was a gradualism that fueled the idea of colonization and it was gradualism that a lot of America's first early youthful generation of abolitionists thought might still be the best way to go, in the 1820s. Gradual plans had been used, for example, in states like Connecticut. Connecticut passed a law in the late-1790s that said that every slave born in that state, after that date, on his or her 21st birthday would be freed; that's a very gradual plan. Abraham Lincoln is still voicing this very kind of gradual plan of emancipation at the outbreak of the Civil War. He's still going to suggest it to the states of Kentucky and Delaware when he calls them in and asks those states in 1862 to consider emancipation on a gradual plan. And he would even compensate the slaveholders 600 bucks a slave or--I forget exactly what the figure was. And gradualism, many people have argued, is kind of the American way, a long-term plan, cushion the change.

But, several things began to happen, especially in the 1820s and into the 1830s that radicalized anti-slavery thinkers in the United States. And this is indeed the roots, if you like, of a more radical abolitionism, the roots of what came to be known among the Garrisonians as Immediatism. And those roots are these; I'm going to give you four. I wrote an essay, the first essay I ever published in graduate school was on this subject, and you never quite forget your argument of your first essay, even if it wasn't very good.

But what began to radicalize American anti-slavery activists? First, it was Evangelical Christianity. Some of the radicalism they took from their faith. They took from the so-called Second Great Awakening. They took from this idea that somehow, it was their duty, it was their place in the world--many of them were the sons and daughters of ministers--to save souls. And if you'd been inspired by Charles Grandison Finney out in Oberlin, Ohio, or--as Theodore Weld had--or a number of other ministers across the North, that it was your duty to go save souls, it was only one step further--and Finney told them that--to save society as well. And if conversion to Christ or conversion to faith, conversion to salvation, can happen immediately in a person, why not a whole society? If you can revolutionize a single soul, why can't you revolutionize a hundred, 100,000, 1,000,000? A second source--and I can say so much more about the significance of Evangelicalism, this idea of the rebirth of faith and rebirth of the soul, the born-again notion, in this era at least. We're living in a different kind of era of Evangelicalism in the United States--although some Evangelicals are indeed reformers, they tend to be seen today largely as political conservatives, social conservatives. Some of the Evangelicalism of the 1820s in America, in the 1830s, became a much more radical kind of Evangelicalism in terms of the social changes

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that they were advocating. Having said all that, that same Evangelical Christian who becomes an abolitionist may indeed have been a virulent Temperance advocate and saw demon rum as as big a demon as demon slaveholding.

The second cause of this roots of radicalism is what we might call perceptions of southern intransigence or perceptions of southern truculence. In the 1820s a lot of these early young--they're youthful, they're only in their twenties--anti-slavery advocates are--some of them are--even William Lloyd Garrison flirted with colonization at first, when he was about 23, 24-years-old. They were gradualists at first, until they began to realize how deeply committed the South actually was to slavery, and that leaving it to them, leaving it to their own resources, was never going to solve anything. An early, early abolitionist, in 1818, George Bourne said, quote, "When Southerners are challenged on the slavery question they"--quote--"are choked, for they have a Negro stuck fast in their throats." The more and more that early abolitionists began to realize just how deeply committed the South was--morally, biblically, socially, philosophically--to sustaining this slave society, the more they began to realize that if they were serious about this, they had to have much more radical strategies. The young William Lloyd Garrison started by 1829 to use metaphors in his writings of cement and icebergs that would only melt with decades and decades, to characterize what he perceived now as this deep kind of Southern intransigence.

A third root of American radical anti-slavery though was the British influence. Make no mistake--and I won't go into any detail here because time doesn't permit--but these early American abolitionists were deeply influenced by the now decades old--two or three decades old--anti-slavery crusade in England, which at first meant, of course, a crusade against the slave trade, succeeding in that great Act of Parliament in 1807, which was just celebrated last year--it's still being celebrated in Britain as we speak, everywhere. And then, ultimately, the movement in England against slavery itself; and the British Empire, of course, will free its slaves by Act of Parliament in 1833.

And thirdly, I would argue that immediatism or a radicalization of anti-slavery also stems from events. I think--very often historians are asked, "so what was the most pivotal thing" or "what's the principle cause of," or "what do you expect to--?" You're always asked to predict, which is the worst thing you can ask any historian, because the historian will then say, "Oh, historians never predict," and then they'll go on and do it. But you know, I don't know if I'm old enough to have any wisdom or conclusions about any of this yet, but frankly sometimes people simply react to events that you cannot predict. And there were events in the teens and 1820s and by the 1830s that did indeed have a direct impact on this growth of a more radical anti-slave--. Denmark Vesey's insurrection, aborted insurrection, in Charleston in 1822 and

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the twenty-eight or thirty people who were executed in its wake made huge national news. The Negro Seaman's Act, passed in South Carolina in 1822, that said that any ship that came into Charleston Harbor in South Carolina, if it had black sailors, those black sailors would be jailed in Charleston while the ship was in harbor. No white sailors would be jailed. There was a thing called the Ohio Resolutions, passed in 1824. Imagine this: the legislature of the state of Ohio passed a resolution suggesting that a gradual plan of emancipation be put in place over twenty-five years, over two generations, whatever plan they might want to enact, and they sent this suggestion--the so-called Ohio Resolution--to all the southern state legislatures--ha--thinking they were going to open the dialogue. There was no dialogue. In effect, Ohio was told where they could put their resolution. They got letters from a few southern governors that said, in no uncertain terms, "mind your own bloody business; this is our society, this is our system, we'll do with it as we please." That massive growth of the domestic slave trade that I already talked about--nearly 150,000 slaves moving from east to west in the decade of the 1820s alone; and then it's going to double and triple, in the next decade. Northerners become aware of this. And Nat Turner's Insurrection in the fall of 1831, without a question, had a radicalizing effect on people like Garrison.

Now, who was William Lloyd Garrison? I want to touch on him just at least briefly; well, I want to get us to this story of the Underground Railroad. Although, if I save the Underground Railroad for Thursday, it still fits, because it's right there with the Fugitive Slave Act. So don't worry if I don't quite get there. Garrison was by no means the whole Abolition movement, by any means. He did found, and edited and published, the longest lasting anti-slavery newspaper of all. First published it January 1st 1831 in Boston, called The Liberator, and he would publish it for the next 35 years. He would cease publishing it in December 1865; about nine months after the end of the Civil War, he ceased publication of The Liberator in the week after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. His life is complicated, complex--he was one complex character. But he is the real thing, a professional, radical reformer.

He was born in utter poverty, in Newburyport, Massachusetts. His father went to sea and abandoned him as a child. His mother tried to raise he and his equally ne'er-do-well older brother on next to nothing. At one point, she apprenticed him out because she couldn't feed him. And he was apprenticed out at the age of twelve to a printer, and he learned how to make a printing press work, and for the rest of his life he set his own print, every week he could, if he was in town, in Boston, on The Liberator. And he prided himself at being faster at setting print than anybody he ever hired. He did start as a kind of a gradualist. He went down to Baltimore, Maryland--here I go, I'm going to talk too much about Garrison, but that's the way it goes--he went down to Baltimore and he worked with an anti-slavery paper there called The Genius of Universal Liberty, published by a guy named Benjamin Lundy, in Baltimore, a slave

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state. There was a young slave growing up there named Frederick Bailey, but they didn't meet, yet. Garrison got thrown in jail, which for him was his Birmingham Jail--if you remember Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"--he got thrown in jail for slandering a slave ship captain, whom he accused of murder. The guy sued him, he was convicted and he spent about nine months in jail, which for Garrison was pride. It was also the first time he met and talked at great length with other blacks, who were in jail with him. By the time he got out and came back North and finally got the chance, after two other aborted or failed attempts to create a newspaper, he finally got his chance, and a little bit of money, and he founded this paper called The Liberator, a paper he would publish without missing an issue--and write something for every issue--for thirty-five years.

Now, if you want to understand William Lloyd Garrison, you have to understand through his ideas--and I'll just list them for you with the briefest explanation. But it is here where you see now the fruition by the 1830s of an immediatist abolitionism, a radicalizing form of anti-slavery--which, by the way, will develop a following, in various forms, among free blacks in particular in the North, but it will also of course begin to garner widespread enemies, widespread enemies. Garrison and his ilk will come to be seen as very dangerous people, these reformers. But if you can remember these six ideas of William Lloyd Garrison's--or do I have seven? It's seven, sorry--you can have a handle on what immediatism and radical anti-slavery became, in Garrison's hands. Now, as soon as you get a leader who goes out and pushes an idea, pushes an agenda, pushes a set of moral principles by which this movement should be run, of course he's immediately begun to develop an opposition within his own movement. And people will disagree with him.

But number one, his first idea was moral perfectionism. A stern, demanding call for abolitionists to remove themselves personally from any corrupting complicity with the American slave system. "Be ye perfect, even as your Heavenly Father is perfect," said Garrison. He was not a trained minister, but he was a deeply Old Testament biblical Christian. His second principle was passivism, what the nineteenth century called non-resistance. Garrison rejected all acts of violence, in any form--well, until the Civil War broke out. More on that later. His third principle was anti-clericalism or opposition to what he saw as the hypocrisy and corruption of the American churches. The Protestant clergy was one of his greatest targets. And make no mistake, folks, Frederick Douglass began his career as an intellectual, as an orator, and as a writer, as a Garrisonian. It was William Lloyd Garrison who, in part, discovered Frederick Douglass by going down to New Bedford, Massachusetts and watching this brilliant, young, twenty-one-year-old, twenty-two-year-old black guy get up and speak at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New Bedford, and said, "My God, this kid can speak." And for the first five, six years of Douglass's public life Garrison was

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like his mentor, a father-figure, and an intellectual teacher. Look for these Garrisonian tenets when you read the narrative.

His fourth principle was what he called dis-unionism. "No union with the slaveholders" was his motto or his statement on the masthead of The Liberator. He actually advocated a kind of personal secession from the Union. This was one of those ideas. He advocated that Northern states not participate in the same Constitution--more on that later when we get to 1854. And five, he took it one step further. He advocated not voting. To vote in an American election, he believed, was to be morally complicit with slavery. Until the U.S. Constitution was ripped up and rewritten he advocated political non-participation with it. Now, how that was supposed to change the world and save it was always a bit of a problem, for some of Garrison's own admirers. Sixth, he was an early and often supporter of women's rights and women's equality, which was another form of radicalism that would make you lots of enemies in the 1830s, '40s, and '50s. And seventh, he was a tremendous advocate of African-American civil rights--early, in a time when there in effect weren't any.

Now, I'm going to leave you here thinking with me just for a moment--I think I have two minutes--about what's going to happen now with this anti-slavery impulse, because in part what happened is that two kinds of abolitionisms emerged, one white and one black. And there were hundreds and hundreds of white abolitionists, thousands eventually, across the North, who became deeply involved in organizing anti-slavery societies and creating newspapers and running petition campaigns by the 1830s, and eventually even beginning to be involved in the first fledging anti-slavery political parties--although Garrison wouldn't go there. But there are also lots of black abolitionists in the North, free blacks, many of them, though, former fugitive slaves who wore the experience of slavery on their backs and in their souls and in their psyche, and often could not risk the kind of abstractions, the kind of theoretical debates and arguments over tactics and strategy the white abolitionists would spend hours on. A lot of black abolitionists said" all right already, what are we doing for the slaves?" Or "what are we doing for my children that don't have a school?" "What are we doing for that child who doesn't have parents? We need an orphanage." A real division will evolve by the 1840s and into the 1850s between the very real, practical needs of northern free blacks and black abolitionists and white abolitionists.

But beneath all of this, the fugitives kept coming. The fugitive slaves kept coming out of the south. They never came in the numbers that the myth and the legend of the Underground Railroad teaches us today. And I'm going to return to that myth-and-legend problem when we begin on Thursday. And I want to leave you with this. This is just a way of thinking your way to Thursday, and as you read Douglass. As you already know sometimes I think the poets tell us more than the historians. I hate to

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admit it. Robert Hayden, the great African-American poet who wrote mostly in the 1960s, wrote a magnificent poem about runaway slaves, who they were, what they represent, the story they help us tell. He called it "Runagate, Runagate." And he rooted it in the refrain of the great negro spiritual "Many Thousands Gone." Just a couple of verses. We'll return to it on Thursday. It might be something TAs want to pick up. "Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness, and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror, and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing, and the night cold and the night long and the river, to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning beckoning, and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going. Runagate, Runagate, Runagate. Many thousands rise and go, many thousands crossing over. O mythic North, O star-shaped yonder Bible city. Some go weeping and some rejoice and some in coffins. And some in carriages, and some in silks and some in shackles. Rise and go, fair you well." See ya Thursday.

[end of transcript]

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 6 TranscriptJanuary 31, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: If you haven't noticed, at the back of my edition of Douglass's narrative, which is the one I'm hoping you are using--. Come on down, in, quickly. Anyway, if you haven't noticed, at the back of this edition of Douglass's narrative there are not only a variety of ancillary documents, Douglass's greatest speech is also included. A word on that. It's Douglass's 4th of July Speech. If you've never read it, you should read it. It is the rhetorical masterpiece of American abolitionism, one of the greatest works of oratory in American history. It was Frederick Douglass as Beethoven on steroids, but with language. It's like a symphony in three movements; I say that in a little head-note introduction to it. He gave that speech in 1852. I may refer to it at the end of this lecture, depending on the time. It is all about the crisis that has gripped the country in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, in the midst of this expansion of slavery into the West, and the way it has begun to tear apart America's political culture.

And on the 4th of July, amidst his friends in Rochester, New York, he's invited to give the 4th of July oration. He says "thank you very much." The invitation was from the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, New York, many of whom were his friends. He gave the address in the house of his friends, Corinthian Hall in Rochester, 600 people in the audience; double, more than double your numbers. Read that speech because it's as if Douglass, after that first opening, gentle introduction where he sets his audience at ease about the greatness of the Founding Fathers, the genius of the Declaration of Independence--he calls it the ring-bolt of American independence, the ring-bolt of American identity. He just makes them feel good about the founders. And then it's as if he has a staff bolting the doors around the hall, and then he's got a staff riveting people into their seats, puts metaphorical seatbelts on them and says, "you won't move until I rain Hell down on you for the next twenty minutes." Which is what he did. And he says, in effect--he says more than in effect, he says it directly--"why have you invited me to speak to you on your Fourth of July?" And he just rains the pronouns on them: you, you, you, you, your, your, your, your. "The Fourth of July is yours and not mine; you may rejoice, I must mourn," and on and on he goes.

And then there's the moment, one of the most brilliant rhetorical moments in American letters, in my view, certainly in abolitionist writing, where he doesn't even announce his text to his well rooted Biblical audience, and he says, after raining down on them this long passage about--"the Fourth of July is yours, you may rejoice, I must mourn, to drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty and call

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upon him to join you in joyous anthems, is inhuman mockery," he says. And then he just floats, without announcing his text, into the 137th Psalm. And he simply reads: "By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down. Yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof, for there they that carried us away captive required of us a song, and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying 'sing us one of the songs of Zion.' How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning, if I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth." What has Douglass just done to his friendly audience? He's used one of the most famous passages in the Bible. His audience would've known that passage. People wouldn't today, in most circles. "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down." We were the captives from Egypt and he said, you made us sing for you. And in effect he is saying to them, "I'll sing for you but you may not like it." That was Douglass's--and he did it hundreds of times elsewhere--it was Douglass's most brilliant expression of--or critique of--this American hypocrisy about freedom in a land of slavery.

A lot of people were worried about this contradiction. It was Douglass as well in the midst of the Mexican War--which is what we're about today--in 1847, in the midst of that expansionist war, where at least modest numbers of northerners, certainly abolitionists, opposed it because they saw it as a war for the expansion of slavery. It was Douglass who said America is a nation of inconsistencies, completely made up of its inconsistencies. But you know, the young Abraham Lincoln had always been worried about this very same question. He comes at it from a different perspective, he comes at it from different experiences, largely. He's never going to be an abolitionist. But his very first public address, The Young Men's Lyceum speech of 1838, the first public address that a young Abraham Lincoln ever gave, in the middle of it is this quite remarkable passage where it's as though he's almost predicting--we don't want to give him too much credit for his predictions--but it's almost as if he's predicting this crisis that we're now about to try to understand for the next several weeks. "At what point," said Lincoln in this speech way back, in 1838, "At what point shall we expect the approach of danger and by what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect"--we here is this American nation--"Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step over the ocean and crush us at a blow?" He answers, "Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge Mountains, in a trial of 1000 years. If destruction is to be our lot we must ourselves be its author and its finisher. As a nation of free men we must live through all time or die by suicide." He doesn't say what that problem in the midst would be, directly, but he's already implied it. What is civil war? A kind of collective suicide.

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Now, briefly, and I'm going to put the Underground Railroad story off until after we do the aftermath and the collapse of the Compromise of 1850. Oh, I just predicted it would collapse, sorry about that. But this anti-slavery impulse that does take hold in the American North went through various stages. That first stage is the 1830s into the 1840s, which is largely a time of great expansion in abolitionist organizations, in societies, in newspapers. It tends to be a decade, decade and a half, driven largely by a kind of Garrisonian--and I outlined the various tenets of Garrisonianism--but it tended to be a kind of Garrisonian moral suasion. This was an era in which most abolitionists were largely devoted to this idea of reforming or changing the heart of the American people. This was driven very much by the kind of evangelical second great awakening impulse of changing the conscience of the American people; indeed, just changing the conscience of the slaveholder himself.

A second stage of American anti-slavery impulse-there's no single moment when it begins--but that second stage is essentially a political stage. It begins largely with the birth of the Liberty Party, as it was called, in 1837, the first attempt at an anti-slavery political party, founded by some pretty serious abolitionists. These people were the real thing. They're going to run James G. Birney for President a couple of times, and they got miniscule numbers of almost countable votes. James G. Birney who had been born in Alabama, a former slaveholder who moves north and becomes an abolitionist. His symbol was quite remarkable. That Liberty Party will morph, in the 1840s, after its record of very little success, into--especially in the midst of this Mexican War--what became known as the Free Soil Party, by 1848. And we'll pick up the Free Soilers here in a few minutes. The Free Soil Party--as it was founded in 1848, directly in response to this expansionist war, with Mexico--was a party largely devoted, by its very title, to keeping the West free of slavery; a political impulse to try to keep America's future free of slave labor systems. But what's really going on here is a shift out of the moral suasionist impulses of early abolitionists to a learning of the art of politics; of engaging a larger political culture with the nation's greatest issues. And it is of course when abolitionism--or an anti-slavery impulse is what I want to it call here, because these are not necessarily rabid abolitionists that become Free Soilers, nor who become the Republicans after 1854. But it is a fear of slavery--a fear of its power, a fear of its denigration of free labor, a fear of the way slavery as a system could control America's future--that becomes, especially in the wake of the Mexican War, front and center the greatest political issue in America.

Now how did we get a Mexican War? Now I don't know if you know much about the war with Mexico. We speed right over it in a lot of American history classes. But after the annexation--time for some maps, yes. [puts map on overhead] I think that's visible, mostly. Well after the annexation of Cuba in-- Texas in 1836--the South was always trying to annex Cuba, four times before the Civil War, I can't get that out of my head.

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But after the annexation of Texas, by the United States, and Texas became a state--so said the United States, after 1836--Texas was to be that great Western territory, seemingly limitless. Its western border had never been determined. For that matter, a southern border with Mexico had never been negotiated. The United States just took Texas and said, "well; we'll figure out its boundaries later. Oh, by the way, Mexico--we'll let them know." Mexico never accepted the Rio Grande as a border between the United States and Mexico--never. They assumed if there was a border with this first independent Republic of Texas, and now State of Texas, it was to be the Nueces River. Can you see the Nueces River? Not very visible but it's up here. Oh, my hand's not too steady. Anyway, the Rio Grande was never accepted as the border by Mexico; but that's never stopped wars of conquest before, and why would it then?

Now, just to give you a bigger sense of this story. We've already talked a lot about how the westward expansion of a slave society and the westward expansion of the South was just booming from the 1820s through the '30s into the '40s. And there was a deep and abiding assumption in America--and we call it Manifest Destiny. At the time not everybody was walking around mouthing the phrase Manifest Destiny. People didn't meet in bars and taverns and say, "What do you think of Manifest Destiny?" But they spoke a language of inevitability, they spoke a kind of racialism about what needs to be done, should be done, has been done about Indians. And the Indian removal policies under Jackson of the 1830s did indeed, of course, remove: Indian removal. I have a whole map of that. I love my maps. This one's cool. But, of course, it's a brutal story. The five great tribes, sometimes called the civilized tribes of the American South--the Creeks, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Seminole from Florida--were, indeed, between the early 1830s and the late-1830s removed, by and large--not all the Seminoles--but removed out west to what became Oklahoma Territory or it was originally called Indian Territory. But that Indian removal was in great--was part and parcel of opening up this southern frontier to expansion and to the possibilities now of the cotton boom and the development of the greatest, as we've said now more than once, source of wealth in the United States.

Now, the presidential election of 1844. James K. Polk, the Democrat, a kind of hard money successor to Andrew Jackson, avid expansionist and a slave-owning cotton planter from Tennessee, got elected President. They called him Young Hickory instead of Old Hickory. He ran against Henry Clay, who ran for President, three, four, five times, depending on how many times you count them, in the antebellum years, as will Daniel Webster. But Henry Clay, essentially the intellectual or ideological founder of the Whig Party, ran as the Whig. Clay, too, ran on an expansionist platform of a kind, but the Whigs tended to argue for expansionism by negotiation. We were going to negotiate treaties of expansion, we were going to negotiate our way into the southwest, we were going to negotiate the British out of the northwest. Polk said:

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"negotiation--bullshit," is what he said. "Elect me and I will give you Mexico, elect me and I will give you Oregon." And he did. It was a close election. Polk won by only about 36,000 votes, out of about 2.8 million cast. He barely won New York state, a Democratic stronghold, in part because of immigration to New York, and he carried, therefore, New York's 36 electoral votes and was elected. The Liberty Party of James G. Birney got 16,000 votes in 1844, most of them in about three counties in upstate New York. They didn't cause a lot of ruckus, but they existed.

Now, just before Tyler, John Tyler, left office as a lame duck he pushed through the annexation of Texas as a state. Not as a negotiated treaty, which would've required, as I hope you know, a two-thirds vote of the U.S. Senate. He just did it, and Texas was annexed. Now, Congress eventually did vote approval of this, in a frankly sectionalized vote, which was a harbinger of things to come. But James K. Polk, this expansionist president, expansionist slaveholding president, now, became the sixth of the first ten American presidents who was a slaveholder. This is significant. If you'll actually look back--there's a great book on this that demonstrates--there's lots of writing on this that demonstrates it--but Don Fehrenbacher's book called Slaveholding Republic shows us that before the American Civil War two-thirds of all American presidents were slaveholders or deeply sympathetic with slaveholding, as in the case of James Buchanan by the late 1850s. Two-thirds of all members of the U.S. Supreme Court were slaveholders. And, so far as we know, James K. Polk was the only president in American history to actually buy and sell slaves from the Oval Office of the White House. He kept on retainer a broker with whom he communicated regularly, buying and selling--speculating in slaves. It was kind of his hobby. You know, some presidents engaged in the Hot Stove League in the winter, and do some baseball on paper. Polk was selling and buying some people.

Polk was aggressive toward Mexico. He ordered American troops to march south to the Rio Grande River, in Texas. There are already occupation troops in Texas. He ordered them to move south to the Rio Grande and just, in effect, see what the Mexicans would do. And he sends Zachary Taylor, the American general, to Matamoras, on the Mexico border, in early 1846. There was a negotiation initially set up between the American and Mexican military commanders which was conducted, by the way, in French because the Americans did not speak Spanish and the Mexicans did not speak English, but they found enough people on either side of it to understand at least some French. Mexico had never acknowledged the Rio Grande. It said their border was the Nueces, north about 150, 200 miles. There was a kind of a three-week standoff between troops along the Rio Grande River, and then on the 24 th of April, 1846, a Mexican cavalry contingent ambushed American troops on the north side of the Rio Grande, killed eleven American troops, captured sixty-three.

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Two days later, Zachary Taylor sent a dispatch over land to Washington, DC. It took two weeks to get there--hot news!--and it simply announced, quote, "Hostilities have been commenced with Mexico," and it briefly told the story of the Mexicans attacking on the north side of the Rio Grande. Polk received the news and he immediately went to Congress and asked for a declaration of war. He announced, quote, "Mexico had passed the boundary of the United States and had invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil," unquote. Blood and soil. On May 13, 1846, the House of Representatives voted a declaration of war, 174 to 14. The U.S. Senate voted 40 to 2, with a lot of abstentions from Northerners, to declare war on Mexico. And off we went. The first major expansionist war in American history.

War fever broke out all over the country. The romance of going abroad, an exotic place like Mexico, full of strange people speaking weird languages, and they're Catholics and you never know what you're going to find there. There are all kinds of strange practices. Herman Melville, the young writer--hadn't yet published Moby Dick but he was working on it--from his upstate New York home, he said in his town, "The people here," he said, "are all in a state of delirium. A military ardor pervades all ranks. Nothing is talked about but the Halls of Montezuma," meaning Mexico City. This was going to be an adventurous war, it was going to be quick. It was going to be a war of destiny. An Illinois newspaper justified the war on the basis that Mexicans were, I quote, "reptiles in the path of progressive democracy." Now, you know in Vietnam we called some people "gooks" and we've had "Horrible Huns" and we've had all kinds of names for our enemies. But they would get more direct than that--reptiles in the--I'm sorry. [laughter] Reptiles in the path of progressive democracy. Yes, well. People rewrote the lyrics to the song Yankee Doodle to fit the Mexican War. It went like this. I promise you only one verse. [sings] "They attacked our men upon our land, and crossed our river, too, sir. Now show them all with sword in hand what Yankee boys can do, sir." I'm sorry, I have a cold. [applause] Actually, you should do that with an Irish brogue, because that's the way it would've been done then, making fun of the Irish while you make fun of the Mexicans, while you recruit the Irish to go fight in Mexico. [laughter]

Many abolitionists had very serious things to say about this war, lots of them. I already mentioned Douglass. There are many, many others. The abolitionist James Russell Lowell considered the war--his words--"a national crime committed in behoof of slavery, our common sin." And most poignantly of all, and a title for this lecture, was Ralph Waldo Emerson. As usual Emerson wrote this into his private journals, from his study in Concord. He wasn't out thumping too many public platforms on this one, at least not yet. Emerson wrote into his journals in early 1847: "The United States will conquer Mexico," he said, "but it will be as though a man swallows arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us." It did.

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By the end of 1846, the U.S. had established dominion over the southern half of California, which Mexico also claimed. In 1847, the United States forces, in the face of pretty ferocious resistance, invading largely through Vera Cruz on the Gulf Coast but also from the North, conquered Mexico City--the Halls of Montezuma--hence the line in the Marine hymn. The United States lost 13,000 Americans in the war with Mexico in about a year and a half of fighting. By far, the vast majority died of disease and not in battle. An estimated 50,000 Americans died at the sword and the cannon of American troops. And by the end, the United States negotiated a treaty with Mexico. We conquered them and we dictated the terms, and the terms had everything to do with American geography.

The Mexican Cession, as it became known--the land the United States gained from Mexico--is, of course, the whole southwest. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, the United States obtained, what is today all of the western part of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Southern Calif--well all of California--Utah, parts of Colorado, Nevada--the great southwest. That same year, 1848, was a terribly important year of turning points, in the world, especially in Europe. There are those arguing now that in some ways, 1848 should be as important a turning point year in American history as it is in Europe, because of the great democratic/republican revolutions in Europe. There are debates now in some history departments whether the U.S. survey courses should be divided in thirds now, since American history is into the 21st century now. It's just getting too long in this country, it's got too much history now. And instead of dividing our survey courses at 1877 or 1865, it should be '48. Who cares? But, as these nationalistic revolutions against monarchy were breaking out all over Europe--in Hungary, Austria, Italy, Germany, France--some will succeed and establish republics, some will not--republican America was seizing territory and launching an empire on its own continent. Oh, by the way, for ceding us all of that territory of the great southwest, Mexico was paid 15 million dollars.

Sitting in the U.S. House of Representatives at that very time, during the Mexican War, in his only two-year term in the U.S. Congress, there was a young congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. He voted against the Mexican War; every chance he got he opposed it. He called it Polk's War. And then he said Polk's justification--these were the days of direct political language--he said Polk's justification for the war was, quote, "a half insane mumbling of a fever dream." Tell 'em Abe. He didn't mince any words. Fever dream.

All right, but what did the Mexican War unleash? What are the legacies of the Mexican War? Why was there such a fuss? In the outline it says "why all the fuss"? Slavery in the western territories. Who cared? Daniel Webster, who'll play a big role in this compromise of 1850 debate--the great Whig of Massachusetts, probably the

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most powerful and important northern, certainly New England politician--kept warning that this really wasn't all that important. He said the problem of slavery in the west is like, is, quote, is a big fuss over, quote, "an imaginary negro in an impossible place." And the idea there was, "oh, that southwest, it's all desert isn't it?" What's the problem? It's not Louisiana in New Mexico, it's not Alabama in Arizona. Cotton won't boom there. He called it a mere abstraction. But if it were a mere abstraction, why did so many people care? Let's examine this just for a moment. Why the fuss?

First, Northerners. And I know I'm generalizing here, there's no thing, there's no such thing as "The North" and "The South." At this point I hope you've grasped that. There are complexities within. But to northerners, one, they cared about this because there was the belief that slavery could indeed take root in the southwest. Why wouldn't it be a perfect environment for mining of silver and gold? And, lo and behold, right after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the end of the Mexican War what happened? Gold was discovered in California and it just capitalized, it just--and they had all bets off now, on just how important this question might be. And why wouldn't slavery work for the building of the railroads, why wouldn't slavery work for building canals? And for that matter, nobody wanted to compete for the slave labor system because it denigrated or degraded the idea of free labor.

Secondly, there were a lot of northerners, particularly in politics, who wanted a non--who favored here a non-extension approach to slavery, whatever they thought of black people and the future of their rights and the idea of any kind of racial equality. They favored non-extension on constitutional grounds. The idea was that those who would not attack slavery where it already existed--because slaves were property and protected by the Fifth Amendment--they nevertheless believed they could use the Constitution, under Congress's sole authority to admit new states to the union, to stop this system from expanding. To stop America's future from becoming defined by slave labor, rather than free labor for the little man. Non-extension of slavery, therefore, became a kind of idea whereby you could cordon off slavery and blunt its future.

Three, for northerners: bills in Congress for the territorial organization, which already existed now, as soon as the Mexican War--before the Mexican War was even over--there were bills before Congress to establish the territories now of Utah and New Mexico. Now, in large swaths of land, mind you, that could become more than two states. And there were northerners who found these bills simply personally obnoxious, and they were being asked, they said, to be complicitous now in the expansion of slavery. There were now enough northern politicians who said, "Look, I can't stop anything that's going on in Alabama and I won't try, but don't ask me to vote to create a new territory that will become a slave state." And already in the language of the Free

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Soil Party, and eventually in that Republican Party that will come out of it, is this idea that what northerners had to work to do, they said, was to make slavery sectional but freedom national. Slave labor--sectional, regional, bound to a place--but free labor national, eternal and the definition of a future.

There was also racism as a motive in this. There were lots of northerners who saw the West as the hope of the northern immigrant, the hope of the young farmer in Ohio who's got three sons, and they want to go West, and they don't want black people around. They want a Kansas or a Nebraska, eventually, that's free for small white farmers. And that's rooted, of course, in what we're going to come back to again and again in the next three, four lectures, is this idea of a kind of free labor ideology, a cluster of ideas. No single idea but a cluster of impulses, assumptions, ideas--one of which was defensive representative government, another of which was a devotion to individual liberty for small people, small farmers, lone mechanics, coupled with now a fear of concentrated power. And what could be a more concentrated form of power than an oligarchy of slaveholders who can lo and behold control the presidency, the Supreme Court and enough of Congress, especially the Senate, if they can keep getting more states into the Union, than the South, as a concentrated power? Free labor ideology was also rooted in this kind of now old-fashioned American fear of conspiracy against individual liberty. Free labor ideology was really a fanfare for the common man, a defense of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant small farmer. And, of course, finally there were some real abolitionists around, who opposed the expansion of slavery on moral grounds. And sometimes that person who believes in free labor ideology and may not want to many black folks around, also takes a kind of moral position against slavery, all at the same time. And his name was Abraham Lincoln.

Now in the South, why did the South care about slavery in the West? In part, because an assumption had set in among southern leadership, now, for a long time, that it was not only the destiny of the American people to expand west, it was not only the destiny of the slave society to expand west--and remember they're manufacturing decade by decade a more intensive justification of the system--but it was the necessity, they're going to argue, that it expand or it would die. To check the expansion of slavery would be to strangle the southern economy and way of life, is what so many southern politicians are now arguing. Slaves in existing states, also they came to realize, were becoming a burden, possibly a danger. As the slave population in a Georgia or an Alabama or a Mississippi continues to grow and grow and grow and grow, but nowhere to expand to, that slave population may become indeed a powder keg.

One of the things that southern statesmen feared the most--and I cannot stress enough, because it's going to be right there at the heart of their secession debates in 1860--is

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they feared what they kept calling now this--it's more than a theory to them--this theory of a shrinking south. If they couldn't expand this system beyond its limits and beyond its borders--get into Arkansas, get out into Oklahoma, Texas, West Texas, further west, Caribbean--that the south would begin to shrink as an economic entity, as a political culture, as a force in the national government. And if you cordoned off slavery, what's going to happen to the price of slaves around its borders? Well, they might begin to go down. What happens if the price of slaves starts going down in Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, around the edges? Well, people start selling them off. Where are they going to sell them? Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi. And you would have the beginnings now of an economy turning in on itself. Southerners, many southerners, came to believe slavery had to expand or it could die.

They also wanted political parity in the United States Congress. Every new state meant two new senators. And the number of states--free states to slave states, folks--in 1850, was 15 to 15. They wanted to sustain that parity. And California out there--it's going to have a sudden statehood in 1850 because of gold being discovered--is going to be the problem and the test case. Then there was this question of constitutional power. The question of checks and balances--the states' rights question if you want. Did anybody have the right to prohibit anybody from taking their property anywhere? To John C. Calhoun, at the end of the day, all these other arguments here were important, but the only argument at the end of the day that mattered--I mean he could drive it home with a brilliance unlike anybody else's--"You have no right--you northerners have no right to stop me from taking my wagon and my horse and my slave anywhere I wish." And he would just recite the Fifth Amendment.

Let me put it yet one more way. There is a certain element of honor at stake here, in the South, about slavery. Their moral stance comes from this belief, this position--and think about this in your own time. The idea set in among northerners that the legal status of slavery in the western territories stood as a measure of its moral standing everywhere. Let me repeat that, the legal standing of slavery in the western territories stood as a measure of its moral standing everywhere. If you tell me slavery is wrong enough that you will not have it in America's future, then you're telling me it's wrong where I have it; and I don't accept that, and I won't live in the same political culture with you, if I have to--if I don't have to--on that basis. So why all the fuss? Think today, think today about some of our greatest, salient, polarizing issues--at the risk of bringing them up. If I were a gay American, and I believed in my right to be married, I would believe that the legal status of gay marriage in a Kansas where they have a referendum, is a measure of its moral status everywhere. And extrapolate from there, to other issues. If you outlaw who I am, what I do, what I stand for in one state, what are you saying about it in another? Oh, we shouldn't talk about the present in history courses, I'm sorry.

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The fuss is because this is really a debate about America's future. What kind of future would it have? Well, there were four plans put in place and these four plans are going to come together around this debate over the Compromise of 1850. The first plan--these are all on your outline if you could see it earlier--you want that back up? The first we call the Wilmot Proviso, for good reason--it's named for David Wilmot, a young Democratic Party Representative in the House of Representatives, who in 1846 got up in the midst of the Mexican War--this is a Democrat now and not a Whig or a Free Soiler. He's from Pennsylvania, and he didn't particularly care about black folks but he got up in the debates over the Mexican War about provisions for the troops and all those debates and he said "okay, we're going to war with Mexico, but in any new territory we gain from Mexico slavery shall never exist." It's as simple as that, that's the Wilmot Proviso. It's a great trivia question. If you ever have to play trivia in a bar ask what's the Wilmot Proviso? Nobody knows. But it was the rallying cry of the Free Soil Movement. Okay, we're going to war, we're going to get millions of acres of territory but slavery will never exist. This was the Free Soil formula. The language was borrowed from the Northwest Ordinance. All but one northern state legislature endorsed it. All southern legislatures condemned it. Gee, a little harbinger of things to come there, perhaps. It first passed the House of Representatives on the first try 83 to 64, reflecting that the House had far more northern representatives because the north has more population. But it did not pass the Senate where the Slave states still have parity. There was a good deal of racist support for this. Wilmot himself said--well I'll quote him. And here again this free labor ideology, it's a mixture of ideas. This is Wilmot in the debates. "I have no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery nor no morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause and rights of white freemen. I would preserve to free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil of my own race and color can live without the disgrace which association with Negro slavery brings upon free labor." It doesn't get more direct than that. Keep the west free of slavery--and black people--was really David Wilmot's position.

The second possible plan is what was known formally, legally, as state sovereignty. This is the states' rights position. This is the South's position, at least on this question--the individual's constitutional right of ownership in slaves as property and transport of slaves as property. State sovereignty, states' rights was indeed deeply at the root of the South's growing position here that, ultimately, no Federal Legislature, President--no Federal authorit--existed to stop slavery's expansion.

The third position, a very American position, a natural outcome of the first two. The first two mix like oil and water, you need a compromise position--and that's popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty was not a new idea in the midst of the Mexican War and its aftermath. It'd been around for awhile. It was the simple idea that there would be no Act of Congress on this. Take Congress out of the story and simply let the

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people in the Western Territory have a vote. Let them have a referendum. Let there be popular democracy. If the people who settle Utah want to vote to have slave labor then they vote for it; if they don't, they don't. Democracy, what could be better? This had the wonderful kind of charm of ambiguity, as David Potter once beautifully put it--a charm of ambiguity. There's kind of a place there for everybody, as long as you trust the democratic process. But if you're going to have that referendum the problem of course always was, when do you hold the vote? Do you hold the vote early in the territorial process or do you hold the vote late in the territorial process? Do you establish a rule, there's got to be a certain amount of population before you hold that vote. Southerners wanted that vote held late in the process because it would give their system longer to get there. It would take awhile. If you're going to take fifty slaves out to Kansas and Nebraska, or further west, it'd take awhile; for that lone farmer in his Conestoga wagon, he can get there quicker.

And fourth, they went back to the old Missouri Compromise--it's the principle of geographical division--here--it's the old principle of geographical division. The Missouri Compromise of 1820--you all learned this somewhere in school--established the 36º30' parallel from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, and it said in 1820--a very important Act of Congress in 1820 in this story, now to be so twisted and abused and debated in the 1850s as a sacred act. It said slavery would never exist north of that line. The problem was that half of California was already north of that line. Now a lot of people said, "all right, the way we're going to head this problem off now is just to keep drawing careful geographic lines across the continent, free soil above, slave labor below; we'll just keep drawing that line."

All right, I'm going to have to leave you hanging here about the compromise itself. That's fine because we can do the compromise--its collapse--aand lead right into the Kansas Nebraska--hold on, I got a minute, I think. The Election of 1848 was crucial. Democrats ran Lewis Cass of Michigan--a thoroughly forgettable politician, I'm sure you've never heard of him--but he was a great proponent of popular sovereignty. They ran on a popular sovereignty platform. The problem with slavery in the West now, this whole Mexican War problem, we'll solve it--popular democracy. The Whigs ran Zachary Taylor, the war hero of the Mexican War, old rough and ready; the problem was he was a Louisiana slaveholder.

And out of this furor over the expansion of slavery in the West came two new political offshoots. One was called the Conscience Whigs. They were created first in Massachusetts and they gave us Charles Sumner, among others; a group of abolitionist Whigs who broke with the Whig party now and would never go back, a harbinger of the ultimate death, within the next four years, of the Whig Party. And the other was the Free Soil party. Born in the Convention in Buffalo, New York in 1848,

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it ran Martin Van Buren--an odd choice--for President in 1848; a former President. They stood for one thing: stopping, at all costs, the expansion of slavery into America's west. The Free Soilers took ten percent of the electoral vote in the 1848 election when Zachary Taylor, war hero, was elected.

And then gold was discovered in California and overnight, it seemed like--it was overnight--California was going to be ready for statehood and, oh God, what to do with it? Because if it comes in as a Free state or a Slave state it's going to upset the balance in the Senate; and it's that huge territory out there. And suddenly there was a need, a desperate need--threats coming from the South. John C. Calhoun is calling a Southern Convention. Threats from some northerners who are saying "no, under all costs we will stop the expansion of slavery." There's a need to find yet new middle ground. And on a night in January, 1850 Henry Clay got together and sloshed down a hell of a lot of brandy with Daniel Webster and they cut a deal. It became the Compromise of 1850. I'll leave you hanging there. Clay and Webster are drunk but they're fashioning the Great Compromise, or they hope, that would save the Union. Clay, at the end of that month, would go before the U.S. Senate and announce the five provisions of his compromise, and in so doing he stood up and he held a piece of the coffin of George Washington--now I don't know if it really was or not--but it was a piece of the True Cross, a little piece of wood. "This is from George Washington's coffin," he said. We must circle the wagons, we must save the Union, we must swallow this and do that." And there were groans and there were cheers. People wept, shouted. And people were really worried that the Union was going to unravel and fall apart--and it almost did. See you.

[end of transcript]

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 7 TranscriptFebruary 5, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: There was trouble in the air. I left you the other day with Henry Clay sloshing down some brandy on a late night in mid-January 1850, to try to come up with ways of solving the great political challenges they faced between the sections and over the expansion of slavery. They were doing this, in great part, because gold had been discovered in California. This is an original photograph of panners, gold-miners--white, Asian and who knows, probably somebody mixed black. If California wasn't ready for statehood in 1850, it's possible there wouldn't have needed to be a Compromise of 1850; but it was. And already in its inception, people realized how big California was. And they already realized, North and South, that part of it was north of the Missouri Compromise Line and part it was south. Would that vast territory of California become a free state or a slave state?

The South's greatest spokesman, its intellectual leader of its states' sovereignty and states' rights position, delivered what became known quickly that year as "The Southern Address." And in it, Calhoun said many things, warning the country what the South might do, or at least the Deep South might do. But he captured it in this ending of the speech: "If you," and he's pointing to Northerners, "who represent the stronger portion cannot agree to settle on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace. If you are unwilling we should part in peace, tell us so; and we shall not--and we shall know what to do when you reduce the question to submission or resistance. If you remain silent you will compel us to infer by your acts what you intend. In that case, California will become the test question. If you admit her, under all the difficulties that oppose her admission, you compel us to infer that you intend to exclude us from the whole of the acquired territories of the West, with the intention of destroying irretrievably the equilibrium between the two sections."

And one of the oldest ideas in our political culture is that great conflict comes when there's an issue around which two sides--let's assume there are two, sometimes there are more than two--but if there are two sides on a great issue of conflict, when one side or the other cannot accept the result; when a vital interest is somehow at stake that they will not, or cannot, or choose not, to accept a political outcome. That's the question in the 1850s: can compromise, some kind of coalition and consensus around this question of slavery's future--future in the West, future in the American political culture, future within the Constitution--can some kind of center hold?

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Now, Clay invited Daniel Webster to deal with this because Webster's obviously the most--at that point in time Daniel Webster was the most famous Northern Whig politician. He was from abolitionist Massachusetts. He was anti-slavery, though never a card-carrying abolitionist to say the least. He was a great lawyer, many said the greatest orator in the United States--those were usually the ones that hadn't heard Frederick Douglass yet. He'd been in Congress since 1823, almost as long as Clay. He'd been in the Senate since 1844. He was seen in some ways as the lion and the spokesman of New England. He had been the great voice in the Nullification Crisis debates of 1830. He had been a voice of union but also law enforcement then--that famous phrase that he had become known for, "Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable." Webster always seemed to be the union man, at the same time he was an anti-slavery man.

Henry Clay from Kentucky; founder of the Whig Party; candidate for President three and four times over. The organizational genius in some ways behind the Whig Party and its so-called national system, the idea of using government for economic and social change in the lives of immigrants and everybody else. Clay of Kentucky, slave-holder--he owned about 60 people--hemp plantation farmer, original founder of the American Colonization Society, a border state political titan, with great influence in the Congress, pulls in Webster and says, "Daniel, we got to save the union, because look what Calhoun and company in the Deep South are threatening. What will we do? How will we solve this?" I mentioned the other day that when Clay introduced his five measures, which were known first as the Clay Measures and then as the Compromise Measures, he stood up in the Senate, with great theater, and held a piece of what he said was George Washington's coffin.

What were the issues in 1850? I hope you've seen enough of the outline; if not--it's gone for the moment. The issues are on the map. [Technical adjustments] The issues are that California in the west is ready for statehood, overnight, because of that vast migration of miners, by sea, by land, and by imagination. There'd always been a brewing issue in the U.S. Congress and in the District of Columbia about the fact that the District of Columbia, the capital of the United States, was a slave trading center. Northern congressmen, of all stripes, had always been bothered by the fact that about 2½ blocks down the street from the United States Capitol was a huge slave jail. People said that when the wind was right you could smell it, on the steps of the Capitol. Abraham Lincoln in his one term in the House called it a human livery stable. Foreign visitors would come and they would say--they would stand in awe at that majestic Capitol as it was being built and the dome was being completed, and then they would ask, "Where's the slave jail, can we see a slave jail?" So there were a lot of Northerners now who were saying, "Okay, there's going to be some big compromise

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now about California, about slavery in the West. What are we going to do about this? Let's deal with this question too."

Thirdly, there was the question of--and this is what Southerners were exercised about--of fugitive slaves escaping into the North in that so-called Underground Railroad. And the term Underground Railroad appears for the first time openly, over and over, in public debate on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Southerners standing up and saying we need a much stronger Federal Fugitive Slave Act requiring the return of fugitive slaves because they are escaping too much in that Underground Railroad. They didn't have a clue what it really was; didn't matter. But Southerners wanted fugitive slaves retrieved to them by law under Federal enforcement, no questions asked.

And then there was the problem of Texas now. It doesn't quite show it on this map properly, but the other day you remember the map of Texas--the boundaries of Texas had never been determined--to the Mexicans, much less to the Americans. And the idea here now was to--how would you kind of divide up Texas? There was no New Mexico or Arizona yet, it's just this vast territory called the New Mexico Territory. The idea was if you moved back the border of Texas about three or 400 miles, and you placed it where it actually is today, you would open up new territory, lots of it, to the establishment of at least one new, if not two new states, and those states in the Southern imagination would, in all likelihood, be slave states--they were southern. What to do with the Texas boundary?

Now, Daniel Webster's support of this came at some price. It came at a huge price for his own career. The five measures that came out of their discussions--they weren't alone but they really did conceive this. The five parts of the Compromise of 1850 will be on your citizenship test. You shouldn't have U.S. citizenship if you can't name the five parts of the Compromise of 1850--I've always believed that--and the three parts of the Kansas-Nebraska Act; that should be a test of citizenship. No Lithuanian should ever get U.S. citizenship without being able to name the five parts of the Compromise of 1850. Never mind. [laughter] California would be admitted as a free state. Clay said there's no way around this, if they hold a referendum in California it's going to be a free state; the people who've gone there are all, they're all little people. There are all these miners and these panners, they're immigrants, they're people from Germany who've come across the sea, all in one year, to go find gold in California, and they're not going to be slave-holders. All right, California will be admitted as a free state.

But now, remember what Calhoun had said--so what are you going to give the South? In return the South is going to get a whole new, much stronger, Federal Fugitive Slave Act, the most notorious and controversial aspect of the Compromise of 1850. Secondly, Clay said to Webster, "Let's abolish the slave trade in the District of

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Columbia. We have Federal jurisdiction over that; the Congress has jurisdiction over the District, let's abolish the slave trade, let's get the slave jails out of Washington. Northerners will like that." Webster said "Yeah. Let's move the boundary back three, 400 miles"--it was really about 350 miles--"let's open up a whole new part of the Mexican Session, with a possible establishment of new slave states; let's let Southerners dream of two and three more states, and four to six more U.S. senators in the next three to five years. Let's let them feel secure that California may come in as a free state and get two new senators and the number will now be 16 to 15, free to slave states"--people were counting. The idea was "yes, but maybe the South gets two or three out of the Mexican Session." And then lastly how would slavery be determined in that southwest; the big issue, how do you do it, by what principle? Clay said popular sovereignty, let the people have a referendum and vote--liberal democracy. So that statehood for any territory in the Mexican Session, except for California here--this is the stuff of compromise, don't look for hard principles here--except for California, everything else in the Mexican Session will be determined on popular sovereignty. The people who settled the territory at some stage of the territorial process--it could be early, it could be late--will vote whether slavery shall exist.

So look at the five measures. California will be a free state; slave trade--trade, not slavery itself--will be abolished in the District of Columbia. Two issues the North will like. The Texas boundary moved back, opened a new territory, new possible southern states, and that Fugitive Slave Act. Two measures Southerners would really like. And by the way, when Clay suggested the Fugitive Slave Act to Webster, Webster says "No, no, no, I can't take that home to Massachusetts, it won't fly, you can't do that." Clay said, "You have to do that." Webster said, "I can't do that." Clay said, "You have to do that; have some more brandy." Webster said, "Okay." [Laughter] I don't know how much brandy they drank. And popular sovereignty of course, it's American democracy, let them vote; it's an appeal to both sides, two for each side and one for everybody.

It is a great compromise, in a sense, but how is it actually passed is crucial; and of course its substance is crucial. The way it was finally passed is that once--and by the way, there was no certainly whatsoever that this would work. After Clay initiated the debate with an emotional appeal for union, Daniel Webster spoke in what became known in his career and in American history as the "7th of March Speech." He held forth for three hours in one of his classic philippics. It began with the famous lines, "I wish to speak today not as a Massachusetts man nor as a northern man, but as an American. I speak today for the preservation of the Union." And he appealed to his fellow Northerners to vote for the Fugitive Slave--to vote to make northern states legally complicit in the return of fugitive slaves in their neighborhoods. He got groans and he got jeers and he got cheers. Everybody said one of the greatest speeches ever

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made in the U.S. Senate; and it ruined Webster's career. Poets started writing about, as Wittier did, "the Devil and Daniel Webster."

Calhoun was unable to deliver his speech--it was the 4th of March--he was too sick; he will be dead by the fall. It was delivered by James Mason, his colleague. Calhoun was carried into the U.S. Senate in a chair; he couldn't walk, they literally carried him in, sat him down. He stared at his shoes, while Mason delivered his speech in which Calhoun said that the South had to stand now as one, for a slave society and for states' rights and for the protection of what he constantly argued were minority rights. Calhoun's speech--arguably, I think from an interpretative mode now--frightened, frightened--especially some Northerners, into voting for a compromise they hated. It may have even frightened some border state Democrats and Whigs, to vote for this thing, some of which they hated.

Like any great compromise--if any of you have ever been on major--political committees, dorm committees and so on, you got to pass something, but you got two or three things on the Bill. And there are these people who hate item number one, and these people who hate item number two, and these people who hate item number three. What happens if you vote on all three at the same time? Everybody's got something to vote against. So the way the Compromise of 1850 was passed--and it was passed largely by the young Stephen A. Douglas, who took over the management. He was about 38-years-old at this point, Senator from Illinois, a young titan--small as he was, five foot six--a young titan of the Democratic Party from Illinois. He was really the parliamentary manager in the midst of the debates from March into the summer of 1850. There were threats of disunion from Southerners every other day--brave threats in Southern newspapers. So what Douglas did is a classic parliamentary maneuver. He voted on each bill separately and ultimately called it the Omnibus Bill, and in each case managed just enough of a narrow majority--getting enough Northerners, especially Northern Democrats, to vote for that Fugitive Slave Act, which they tended to hate, and then just enough Southern--what's left of the Whigs--to vote for the end of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. And it passed in early August 1850.

Henry Clay, ill, terminally sick, had gone home to Kentucky. He'll be out of the picture and out of American history before the end of the year. Calhoun was dying at that very moment--was dead, I believe, by September. Webster was now to be denounced politically forever in his own political party and in his own Massachusetts. But the Compromise passed and in some ways the nation celebrated, or so it seemed. The Compromise of 1850 did, in some ways, save the Union, at least at that point in time. But as David Potter, the best historian of this we've ever had, said, it was far more--and it's the best way to remember it I think--it was far more an armistice than it

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really was a compromise. It began to collapse almost as fast as it passed. There were huge rallies and marches in northern cities celebrating the saving of the Union. People were frightened; I mean, business interests in the north--not just in New York City where the banks all were, but now in this colossus of Chicago, this burgeoning railroad center in the West, in Cincinnati, Detroit--worried, what if there is disunion, what happens to the economy, what happens to trade? So there were great rallies. At the same time, the State of Georgia met its legislature by December 1850 and passed what they called the Georgia Platform and sent it all around the rest of the Deep South. And it said they--it said the State of Georgia gave only its conditional acceptance to the compromise measures, waiting to see whether the North acted in good faith. In other words, "we don't trust you." Some Northern State legislatures said, "oh really?" And they passed resolutions saying "we don't think we trust you either."

There were vehement protests against the Fugitive Slave Act. The Fugitive Slave Act, above all else, in this crisis, caused much further conflict. It led directly to an estimated 20,000 African-American free blacks--well, free blacks and fugitive slaves, so many of them--living in the northern states--and in some cases, whole church congregations from cities like Philadelphia and Boston--moved north of the border into Canada, between 1850 and roughly 1857, '58, when there was another small wave, after the Dred Scott decision. This will lead now to the--established in that Fugitive Slave Act of special Federal magistrates whose job, whose sole job it was now--this is a whole new level of Federal adjudication of fugitive slaves. Magistrates were now appointed to go all over the north to retrieve fugitive slaves--well, to set up a police apparatus to retrieve fugitive slaves, and then to conduct courts to determine their identity. And in the Fugitive Slave Act itself it determined, or it said, that those magistrates would be paid twice as much money--they actually would be paid $10.00 for every fugitive slave they convicted of being that person and sent them back to slavery, and $5.00 for every acquittal. Now I know $5.00 doesn't seem like much, but on the face of that you look at that and think, "Now wait a second, this is blind justice--you're going to give me twice as much money to convict you as acquit you? Hey, I need a meal too."

It led now to famous fugitive slave rescues, like the rescue of Jerry McHenry in Syracuse, New York in 1851, in a violent rescue by abolitionists who spirited--who killed one of his captors and carted him off to Canada. It led to the famous rescue of Shadrach Minkins in early 1852 in Boston, a fugitive slave from Virginia who was working in an abolitionist coffeehouse in Boston, retrieved by slave catchers, taken to a jail, broken out of that jail. One of the jailers murdered on the spot by a mob of abolitionists led by Lewis Hayden, himself a fugitive slave from Kentucky, who lived in Beacon Hill in Boston and dared Federal magistrates to come to his house and try

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to retrieve Shadrack Minkins by putting an entire posse on the street, and a keg of gun powder in front of his door, which he threatened he would blow up if any magistrate got near it. And that night they spirited Shadrach off to Concord, Massachusetts where the descendents of abolitionists to this day like to argue which house he stayed in, and then off across Route 2, across northern Massachusetts and on up into Canada where Shadrach remained the rest of his life as a grocer in Montreal.

And there were many, many other fugitive slave rescues now. There was a fugitive slave rescue at Christiana, Pennsylvania in 1851. It was really at a farm. A slaveholder named Gorsuch and a posse of only five or six men cornered a group of his former slaves, four of them, in a barn. A group of abolitionists, black and white, defended them in a gun battle. One of Gorsuch's sons was killed. The fugitive slaves escaped. They ended up going across upstate New York. Two of them ended up in Frederick Douglass's house in Rochester, New York. Douglass drove them personally in a carriage to the wharf on Lake Erie. And when he bid them goodbye, one of them gave him the revolver that he had used at Christiana, a memento that Douglass kept the rest of his life. Resistance to slavery was now direct, sometimes violent. The Underground Railroad had become an over ground railroad. It was no longer caught up in the romance of a whole lot of people spiriting people to secret hideaways. It was sometimes now a matter of gun violence.

And one could argue that the most important thing to happen in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act, and therefore the Compromise of 1850, was the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe, that brilliant, very short, little woman, who had lived for quite awhile with her husband Calvin Stowe, who was a theologian teaching in Cincinnati, had lived in a house on a hill in Cincinnati for several years, where she first met slave women--where she first met fugitive slaves coming through Cincinnati, and may have hid a few. Heard their voices, tried to learn their dialect, and wrote the greatest novel of the nineteenth century, and still on any list, any short list, of the best selling works of literature in the history of the world. That sugar-coated, anti-slavery story of several characters--Eliza, young Eliza, light-skinned with her baby, escaping across the Ohio, jumping from iceberg to iceberg to iceberg. The Ohio doesn't have icebergs anymore; didn't have many then either. Or Uncle Tom himself, the most important Christ-like figure in all of American literature. Harriet Stowe wrote a brilliant book, whatever anyone wants to say about it. She made everybody complicitous in the slave story.

The most despicable character in the book is Miss Ophelia who was born in Vermont, who's racist to the core, who can't stand black people and goes down South preaching at Southerners what's wrong with slavery, at the same time she can't get near black people. And in some ways the most admirable character in that book was a Southern

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slave holder. And actually the most evil character--the most heinous character is Miss Ophelia--but the most evil character, of course, is Simon Legree; and Simon Legree was himself from New England. The whole world was suddenly reading a work of fiction about slavery. It sold 300,000 copies in the first year, by far broke every sales record of any book ever published, ever, anywhere. Reprinted into at least 20 languages in its first five years of existence. Made into stage plays within two years. It brought an awareness to the slavery problem as never before. And in the election, the Congressional off-year elections of 1852, for every four votes, for every four votes cast for Franklin Pierce--the Democrat, who will win--one copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin sold somewhere in the United States. I mean, name a book today that we could even imagine doing that. Would that there was a novel [laughs] that our electorate was electrified by in some way.

Now, in the wake of the Compromise of 1850 the country, now though, had to face this question, not just what you're going to do with the Mexican Session territories--that's going to take a little while. Northerners, a lot of Northerners are pissed off about the nature of the Utah Territory Bill and the New Mexico Territory Bill, because there are--Southerners immediately propose slave territories for Utah and New Mexico. But the real question, by 1853 and early 1854, was all of the territory that was left of the Louisiana Purchase--the Kansas and Nebraska Territories, which is simply what they were at that point in time.

Now, it is worth stopping for a moment to realize that not every American woke up in 1851, '52, '53, and worried every moment of every day about the expansion of slavery. They are worried about it, and it proves to us, without question, that there was a political crisis abrewing that the electorate cared about. But it's worth remembering that a lot of Americans were preoccupied with the same things they always were: price of wheat, a sick cow, wages at a textile mill, a son who wants to marry and needs land, a daughter who wants to marry an Irishman, or, most of all, all those Catholics arriving in New York City and Philadelphia. Huge numbers of Irish Catholics--they're going to Catholicize America, they're going to turn every small outhouse into a confessional. We laugh today, it's easy to laugh at this, but nativism caught hold in the early 1850s--more on this a bit later with the breakup of the American party system as we take it through the 1850s. But a lot of Americans were really worried about those Catholics.

But the Kansas-Nebraska Act--or the establishment now of the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and what to do with them--was front and center on the agenda of the United States Congress by late 1853. In the wake now of numerous of these celebrated, violent rescues of fugitive slaves, the attempts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in some parts of the north where it was very successfully prosecuted, and

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dozens and dozens and dozens of fugitive slaves were returned to the south. But in some celebrated cases they weren't. Quickly. The most celebrated case of all came in the spring of 1854 at the very time Congress is debating this thing called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and people are politically waiting with baited breath to find out what are they actually going to do here? We had the rescue in Boston of a fugitive slave named Anthony Burns, who was a young guy in his early twenties. He had escaped out of Virginia, up to Boston by sea. He too was working in--actually a store at one point, in a coffee shop at another point. He was even distributing copies of William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. He hadn't been there even a year and slave catchers found him, captured him.

Now, after Shadrach Minkins got out of Boston in 1852, the Anthony Burns rendition case captured the imagination of the nation, because Franklin Pierce, President of the United States, moved Federal troops, about 3000 of them, into the streets of Boston to guard the courthouse and to guard the jail and make sure nobody broke Anthony Burns out. It became a test case for the Democratic Party of Massachusetts. And on the day Anthony Burns was marched--he was convicted--marched from the jail down to the wharf and put on a ship back to slavery in Virginia, the abolitionist community, black and white, of Boston and all of Massachusetts, gathered in Boston. They held an all-night vigil with candlelight outside of the jail and they draped the streets of Boston, or some of the streets, in black crepe, in mourning. Burns was sent back to Virginia.

His story is amazing though. His owner then sold him--he was too famous--sold him to North Carolina. And one day a white woman in North Carolina wrote a letter to her sister in Amherst, Massachusetts and said, "Helen, that slave named Burns that they captured up in Boston, he's living on the farm next door. Isn't that interesting?" And her sister wrote from the First Baptist Church of Amherst, Massachusetts, back to her sister and said, "Really? What if we could raise some money to purchase him? Would you talk to your neighbors?" She talked to her neighbors. One thing led to another. Abolitionists, beginning in Amherst, Massachusetts and then around the State of Massachusetts, raised the money, made the offer, and Anthony Burns' freedom was sold. And he came North, by 1856. He first arrived in Amherst, Massachusetts where he was celebrated. They took him out on the road--Exhibit A. Then he went to Canada, and he died in 1860 prematurely of disease--lonely, lost, almost unknown.

But it was in that environment now, that Congress has to decide what to do with Kansas and Nebraska. Now here was the situation. It was in part a big deal because what was firing the American imagination now was not just the west, but it was the railroad west. Who would build these railroads, where would they be built, and where would its eastern terminus be? Would the eastern terminus of the transcontinental

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railroad be in the North, Chicago--or maybe St. Louis, in a slave state--or maybe further south in New Orleans, or maybe Memphis? Or maybe there'd be two of them--maybe you could have a compromised transcontinental railroad built--two of them. Well then people said, "no, wait, it's going to be hard enough to build one of them over those mountains." The Chairman of the Senate Territories Committee, a very powerful position in these years, was Stephen Douglas. He's now about 40-years-old in 1854, a political genius with a few terrible flaws. Douglas wanted the terminus of the transcontinental railroad to be in Illinois, in Chicago, and to go across the north to the northwest into northern California.

Douglas's approach to slavery though is terribly important here. It is in some ways, all of the story. Stephen Douglas believes that climate would solve the problems of slavery. He's famous for all these speeches he would make where he would say, "you know, if the soil is good and the temperatures are right, then slavery will probably exist. Where the soil is not proper and the temperatures aren't right, or if you've got mountains, slavery won't exist. Climate will solve the problem." Now wouldn't that be great? We'll just lift--all of our great political troubles are just lifted off our shoulders by the weather; just watch the weather channel, to hell with MSNBC and CNN and all those blabbering pundits, just watch the weather channel. [Laughter] He really believed that though, and there was some reason to believe it.

Now, the problem was, Southerners wanted one thing out of this and a lot of Northerners wanted another thing. But here was the question, which principal will you apply about slavery in the Kansas and Nebraska Territory? Think now of the recent past; think of the distant past--in American terms--to the Compromise of 1850. One, had the Compromise of 1850 already superseded the Missouri Compromise? Think about that. You had that sacred bargain, they said, of the 36º30' parallel line dividing free territory from slave territory forever, passed back in 1820. That was that vow that Northerners concerned about the expansion of slavery could always assume the great northwest would be free of slavery. But half of California is below it and half of it's above it. Had the Compromise of 1850--and half the Mexican Session is above it, and now you've said popular sovereignty will determine the Utah Territory and not the Missouri Compromise.

So which rule is in play? Which principle do you apply? Do you apply the oldest principle of the Northwest Ordinance from 1787? The Northwest Ordinance, folks, had said slavery shall never exist in the Northwest Territory; which became those five states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin--will never exist. Explicit territorial exclusion--that's one principle. The second principle, geographical division, Missouri Compromise, draw a line across the continent. Do you go back to that one? Or do you use the third one now? The third one that's in play--popular sovereignty--

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just let the people choose. Forget geography, forget old laws, and have a referendum. In other words--and this is the great question of the 1850s and the terrible tragedy, that, in the end, nothing worked. Would the American pragmatic tradition now--yes, we've got this-- we've got principle A, B and C here. We all want principled politicians don't we? We want principled professors and principled politicians and principled stockbrokers. But, at the end of the day, sometimes there are three principles in play. Would American pragmatism continue to solve this one? Well maybe that principle is best now, but that principle is better then.

Douglas wrote the bill, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, as it was called, or Act. Now, in this case, folks, numbers matter. We're going to look at a vote. But first of all, he wrote three different versions of the Kansas-Nebraska Act--this is important--he went from vaguest to most specific, because Southerners put his feet to the fire and made him do it. He first introduced a bill in December 1853--this is for the establishment of Kansas and Nebraska Territory. Everybody said, "that's nice for establishing these millions of acres and square miles, but is slavery going to exist?" The first version that he put before Congress on January 4, 1854, said that a state shall be admitted from those territories, quote, "with or without slavery as their Constitution may prescribe at the time of admission." Note the vagueness. And you all know that in politics sometimes the vaguer you are, the more you get done. "With or without slavery as their Constitution may prescribe at the time of their admission." How that's to be done was not mentioned. Douglas said leave it to time, climate, and good sense. It was silent about the old Missouri Compromise Line.

Southerners quickly reacted and said, "Stephen"--his own fellow Democrats in the south who were now dominant in the South said, "nope, not enough." And there were a lot of powerful Southerners in the Senate. So he drafted six days later, January 10 of '54, a second version of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and he gave a direct statement of popular sovereignty. Quote: "The decision on slavery shall be left to the people residing therein." Now he's moved one step further and said there's going to be a vote out there, and however they vote that'll determine. Again, his fellow Southerners said, "No, not enough." And there's a famous episode where as a kind of spokesman for the Southern point-of-view, a Kentucky Whig from the other party named Archibald Dixon took Stephen Douglas for a ride in a carriage one day, in March of 1854 after these--excuse me, in late January--they were going to vote on it later in March--but in late January, took him for a carriage ride. And Dixon in no uncertain terms told Douglas, "no, no, what you have to do is you have to draft an explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise Line, a specific repeal of any geographic division between slavery and freedom in the West. In other words Stephen, you have to open up the entire West to the possible expansion of slavery." Douglas didn't want to do that--he knew this was going to cause a bad time in the north--and he is alleged to have said

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back to Dixon, quote, "By God, sir, you are right. I will incorporate it in my bill though I know it will raise a hell of a storm." And he was right.

It may seem a bit odd to us today that Americans could care this much about what was to be done to Nebraska, [laughter] or for that matter with Kansas. We didn't even know about Dorothy yet, and the Yellow Brick Road. But Northerners really did care, because think back again to this idea of free labor ideology--and we'll bring this up again and again in the next three lectures. The American Dream to the average Northerner, immigrant or not, was land--free land if possible, cheap land if not--a place to move to, mobility where you would never have to compete with any kind of oligarchy that could control that land.

The bill that he finally brought forth and that actually passed had two measures. And I'm going to leave you here. The two measures were the explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise Line and the principle of popular sovereignty, the formula for the settlement of Kansas and Nebraska. The Kansas-Nebraska Act is, arguably, the pivotal event politically of the 1850s, that will now sectionalize American politics, break apart forever the Whig Party--what was left of it--and give birth to the first successful third party coalition movement in American History--the Republican Party, immediately--which comes into existence immediately--in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

And if you want to understand how sectional that vote was, write down that vote count in the House. Note, Northern Democrats split right in half--that's Douglas's party--but nearly half of his own party in the House voted against this bill. Southern Democrats, 57 to 2--I can't explain those two, I don't know what happened to them. Northern Whigs, 45 to 0 against this. This is a polarization, folks. We've heard a lot about that recently. Southern Whigs, 12 to 7. The Whig Party is diminishing, it's all but--it will be dead in the wake of Kansas-Nebraska. And the four Free Soilers, elected in 1852, on a platform that opposed the Fugitive Slave Act, voted, of course, against Kansas-Nebraska. That vote, 113 to 10 [Professor Blight meant to say "110], got the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed but in the long run with terrible results. It will break apart the American political party system. It will bring about for the first time a genuine anti-slavery political coalition that will elect a president within six years. See you on Thursday.

[end of transcript]

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 8 TranscriptFebruary 7, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: On the 4th of July, 1854, in an outdoor park in Framingham, Massachusetts, which is fifteen, twenty miles west of Boston, William Lloyd Garrison and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society built a stage. They had a huge turnout. And Garrison and his group performed an act of abolitionist theater. Anthony Burns had just been returned to slavery in Virginia. The Kansas-Nebraska Act had just been passed in the month of May. Behind him, on the stage--a huge array--was first the insignia of the State of Virginia, then an insignia of the State of Massachusetts, a banner on one side that read "Redeem Massachusetts." Hanging from that sign was something labeled "the crepe of servitude"--nothing very subtle about this. And two flags were on other side of the rostrum, one labeled Kansas and the other labeled Nebraska, and behind Garrison was a very large United States flag, upside down.

Now, this was political theater, directed by a man who, as you will remember, denounced political parties, said that participation in political parties was complicity with slavery. Garrison first read from scripture--Old Testament, Deuteronomy. Then he proceeded to, in three segments, to burn documents. He first held up in his hand what he said was a copy of The Fugitive Slave Act, which he burned in his hand with a lighted match, threw the ashes on the floor, stomped on the ashes, and the crowd shouted "Amen." Then he held in his hands the documents for the rendition--he said it was a copy of the document for the rendition of Anthony Burns, returning Burns as a fugitive slave to Virginia. He burned that, threw the ashes on the floor, stomped on them, and the crowd shouted "Amen." Then he pulled out a copy of the United States Constitution, which he announced--as he had announced many times over in his newspaper, The Liberator--he called it a, quote, "covenant with death, an agreement with Hell, so perish all compromisers with tyranny." He burned it famously, or infamously, stomped on the ashes all over the stage, and the crowd shouted "Amen."

The Kansas-Nebraska Act had fuelled a political fervor that now could never be bottled up again, it could never be put back on its shelf. Why? Why was that Kansas-Nebraska Act so troublesome? Let me pick that up where I left you off the other day. Now remember, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had two simple resolutions, although it came about through a heightening process. The first was that it explicitly repealed the 36º30' parallel, or Missouri Compromise line, what Northerners--anti-slavery abolitionist or even, in some cases, hardly-aware-of-slavery Northerners--had always referred as the, quote, "sacred pledge." That sacred pledge was now thirty-four years old. Everybody in the United States Congress had grown up with it. It was a template,

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it was an assumption; not unlike you could name certain great resolutions or assumptions that became almost standard parts of American political culture, perhaps in your lifetime, certainly in my lifetime. Certain aspects of the New Deal, we thought, were basic American political assumptions--like Social Security, but recently that one got challenged. You could think of others. The right to collective bargaining out of the Wagner Act in the 1930s. You can think of others. Some would say Roe v Wade, some would say affirmative action, some would say other aspects of our political culture born of the 1960s. Some would say the '64 Civil Rights Act, et cetera.

The Missouri Compromise Line, as people imagined this slavery question in the West, had been seen by Northerners as, quote, "a sacred pledge." That was now repealed explicitly in this very sectionalized, divided vote in the Kansas-Nebraska Act to set up the Kansas-Nebraska Territories. The second part, was, of course, a declaration that any state produced, created from Kansas and Nebraska would be created on a principle of popular sovereignty. There would be a popular referendum at some stage in the territorial process, to be worked out later. It passed the U.S. Senate thirty-seven to fourteen. That's in great part because the Kansas-Nebraska Act became an absolute test of Democratic Party loyalty, which Stephen Douglas demanded. He didn't get all Democrats to support it but he got most of them. And the Whig Party, by 1864, in what was still a fledgling two-party system, now greatly challenged by a third party called the American Party, or known more euphemistically as the Know-Nothing party, or known more directly as the Nativist Party--more on that in a moment--is really challenging that two-party system.

But it was that vote in the House that I showed you on a graphic the other day that tells you the story. It passed the House of Representatives 113 to 110, in a highly sectionalized vote. Ninety percent of all Southerners, on Kansas-Nebraska, voted for it; sixty four percent of all Northerners, people from Free states, voted against it. The second American party system, born out of the struggle over Jacksonian--so-called Jacksonian democracy--from the 1820s into the '30s, into the '40s, into the early '50s, was now disintegrating, faster than most people even really realized. The effects of this were quickly this: the Kansas-Nebraska Act now threw open the vast expanse of what was left of the Louisiana Purchase to the possible expansion of slavery. Secondly, it will destroy the Whig Party forever, and open a huge vacuum in American political culture for some kind of new coalition, some kind of new persuasion that would fill it, about this great question of its time--the expansion of slavery. And then more directly, third, it brought overnight the birth of the Republican Party--the original Republican Party, I hasten to add--a party formed literally overnight in reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

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It was often first called the Anti-Kansas Party. There are three or four towns all over the Midwest in the United States--Ripon, Wisconsin; Jackson, Michigan, and others--that all claim to be the site of the birth of the Republican Party. And they all have their little monuments or their plaques in town squares and parks to say they were the place where the first Republican Party meeting was held. But the Republican Party was really born amidst hundreds of meetings across the North, to discuss the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to react to it, to figure out some way to politically resist it. That "hell of a storm: that Stephen Douglas had predicted, is exactly what happened, but he didn't have any clue the direction or the ferocity of the political storm that this would cause. To so many Northerners now, who believed--for whom the American dream was mobility in the West, availability of cheap if not free land in the West, the possibility of the small farmer, the small mechanic, moving west and getting land in a society without slaves--now seemed to be completely thrown up in the air, if not denied. I don't know what to really compare it to today, that might shock people. Something you assumed was just going to be there and tomorrow it's not--it's just gone--and you basically defined the future of your children on it.

Lots of people now wondered what happened to the Compromise of 1850. Well that was essentially a dead letter. And what was born in that Republican Party, what was born in those meetings that formed the Republican Party in the summer of 1854 was a theory, an idea they called "the slave power conspiracy." It actually wasn't born there, that's an old idea, the idea of a slave power. [Technical adjustments] But the idea of a slave power, this notion of some kind of conspiracy, a cadre, an oligarchy, a small number of great planters in the Deep South that nevertheless had tremendously disproportionate power over their own states, over their own region, and then in the Congress and in the Supreme Count and in the Presidency, was an old idea. I've found it as early as the 1820s in an old, old article I once wrote where people were actually already using the term, "the slave power." But it really crystallized in the 1850s.

This is a poster, one of hundreds, thousands of posters from 1854 calling for a meeting. It doesn't even use the term Republican Party anywhere, just calling people together--it's in Chester, Pennsylvania I think--just calling people together to discuss the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to discuss what's really happened here, and to discuss the slave power. Classic nineteenth century broadside with eight things going on at once in front of your eyes, but the boldest print is reserved for the slave power: fear, conspiracy, come together, watch out, get ready.

The fear now, you see--think closely about this--to Northerners was, "now wait a second, if what the Kansas-Nebraska Act is saying is that the Louisiana--all the rest of the Louisiana Purchase is now open to the possible expansion of slavery--it's got to be rooted in a constitutional theory that probably is supporting that Fifth Amendment

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which is the right to life, liberty, and property, and the transport of that property anywhere you want. So what's to stop someday, somehow, slave holders from coming into Illinois, Ohio, New York, Boston?" It might seem a bit far-fetched, but editorials started appearing all over the North, like this one from The New York Post that predicted, quote, "Gangs of men and women, chained together may yet be seen now marching up or down Broadway, or trembling in Battery Park."

What was born in that summer, and especially that fall, was the most rapid third-party political coalition movement in all of American history; and if you want a prototype for any possibility of that kind, any other time in our political history, this is it. The Republican Party, brand new--not six months old--will elect 100 people to the House of Representatives in the fall elections of 1854, and they will begin to draw together a remarkable coalition. They're going to draw first a whole lot of old Whigs, Northern Whigs in particular, who don't have any home anymore. This is the old Whig Party of Henry Clay, but it's also the old Whig Party that had a reformist element to it. This was the old John Quincy Adams wing of the Whig Party. And there were some Whigs who had become genuine abolitionists, in many states, and they now were looking for a real political home in which to plant their flag--of not just free soil, but a moral case against slavery. You got the old Free Soilers. The Free Soil Party had existed in 1848 and in the 1852 elections--remember, I told you they elected, what was it, four people to the House of Representatives. But more importantly, that Republican Party now had tremendous--we're calling it now "crossover," aren't we--tremendous crossover appeal to Northern Democrats, lifelong Northern Democrats who will now break with Stephen Douglas, break with popular sovereignty, break with their own political lives, and join a new free-soil anti-slavery party. David Wilmot, the author of the Wilmot Proviso, you'll remember from a week ago, that Pennsylvania Democrat who launched this idea during the debates on the Mexican War that said in any state formed from a territory gained from the Mexican War slavery shall never exist, the basic free soil position. In 1854, David Wilmot became a Republican.

This new political coalition, fledging as it was--a lot of strange bedfellows here, guys who had just fought like hell with each other for years in the Congress were now kind of forming the same party. They're forming it around a few key ideas. One is this notion, this idea of a slave power that has to be resisted now. As a political force it has to be resisted, as an expansionist migration force it has to be resisted, as a labor system it has to be resisted. And secondly, they are rooting their political future and ideology in what they're calling, quite explicitly now--and they've rehearsed this, many of them for some years--an anti-slavery interpretation of the Constitution. They're going to now really rehearse publicly the idea that "yes, slavery may be protected constitutionally where it already exists, because slaves are legally property. Okay, we've heard that for decades," they're going to say. But the Federal Government

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has jurisdiction over territories, it has jurisdiction over the District of Columbia, and the slogan that flows from this idea of an anti-slavery interpretation of the Constitution is "make freedom national, slavery sectional." That slavery shall forever be, they say, a regional, sectional, local institution, not a national institution, which was an implicit way of saying the West shall be kept free for free labor at all cost.

And then thirdly, the Republican party is rooted--and this is why it could become a coalition--it's rooted in this cluster of ideas we've come to call here--and Bruce Levine's book is terrific on this--a free labor ideology. A fear of concentrated power, the defense of the individual, the small man. It was a fanfare for the common man, the small farmer or the small clerk, the small--small in the sense of--he has nothing, he may own nothing, but he wants to own something. It's the immigrant with nothing who wants to own a farm, and he must have, at least in this America of its boundless West, he must have physical mobility, geographical mobility. And historians have come to define all of this, of course, under this cluster of notions we call Republicanism, the belief that the United States was, if not a democracy, at least a Republic, where the people rule, where consent of a majority really counts. And if that majority is increasingly becoming small farmers and clerks and mechanics, and a lot of them immigrants, then oligarchies ought to be put on the run, whether those oligarchies are bankers or those oligarchies are made up of slaveholders. This was in its birth, and for the next six years, one of the most potent political coalition ideologies this country has ever seen.

Now, what happens next? What happens to this new coalition? And why are they going to be so threatening to the South? This in some ways is going to become the planter elite, Southern slaveholding class's greatest fear, a genuine Yankee, anti-slavery Northern political party. After all, the North now has close to, pushing, a two to one advantage in population; that is if we simply define that by Free states, Slave states. Now, [technical adjustments] maybe you've seen this picture before. It's a lithograph of the famous beating of Charles Sumner in the spring of 1856, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, by Preston Brooks. Now, how do we get to a scene in the U.S. Senate of a Southern Congressman beating the hell out of a Massachusetts Senator, beating him literally unconscious, bloodying him on the floor of the Senate, while his fellow senators look down, and some of them in glee?

There were ninety-one Northern Democrats in the House of Representatives when they voted on the Kansas-Nebraska Act. After the fall elections of 1854 there were only twenty-five left. This is a political sea change happening and no one quite knows where it's going yet. And in that same year of 1854, this Nativist Party--they called themselves the American Party--a party that stood essentially for trying to stop Catholic--mainly Catholic--immigration into the United States. This was the moment

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of course--I mean look around today, we've got a huge debate going on about immigration and I won't go into that--but you can see how it's clustering in parts of our political culture--heighten that six times over to the early 1850s. The huge Irish migrations to the United States had just happened between the mid-1840s, especially the late-1840s, and about 1852 to '54. This is the moment, the historical moment, of the terrible, infamous potato famine in Ireland.

The Nativist Party was anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant. They believed that Catholicism would undermine American Protestant values and the Protestant work ethic. They believed that a United States of America ought to be a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation, as it was in its founding. They believed in a conspiracy of Popery; crazy as that may seem to some of us today. They believed that Catholics owed and demonstrated a higher loyalty to the Pope in Rome than they ever would in the United States, to the United States Government, and therefore Catholics could not be true Republicans. I know, give me a break, but it is what this party was rooted in. And man did they succeed. They won huge electoral victories in the fall of 1854, particularly because there's this new vacuum now, the Whig Party's dead. By 1856, in the Presidential election of '56, the Nativist American Party candidate will win over 800,000 votes for the presidency--more on that in a second. The American Party won forty seats in the U.S. Congress in 1854. They dominated a few northern state legislatures. They won the governorship of Massachusetts and a majority of its legislature. It shocked people. It shocked some Northern Democrats who weren't comfortable with this nativism, the virulence of this nativism, to become Republicans instead.

Now out west, of course, what's going to happen to Kansas and Nebraska? Kansas now became the object of tremendous migration. It was nothing but a series of frontier settlements in 1855, but large numbers of people began to go there. These were the so-called squatters, squatter farmers. But immediately, it became a contest between how many Yankees and Northerners would actually get there and try to make the place free soil, and how many Southerners would actually get there, with slaves, and try to produce a pro-slavery constitution. Kansas became the great testing ground of popular sovereignty. Immigrant aid societies emerged, especially in New England. One famous one that had a lot of financial backing behind it, called the New England Emigrant Aid Society, they recruited settlers, they raised money, they paid people's way out to Kansas, in some cases. Kansas now became a kind of symbol and reality. Out on its border, of course--its eastern border was the state of Missouri, which was a Slave state, and Missourians began to flock across the border into Kansas, taking land.

By March of 1855, only one year, less than a year, 11 months after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, they held their first election for a territorial legislature in the

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Territory of Kansas. An estimated 5,000 so-called border ruffians--or that meant Missourians--flocked over into Kansas for a day or two to vote. The census--they took a rapid census in the early spring of 1855 in Kansas--recorded 2,905 eligible voters in all of Kansas. In that territorial legislation election, 6,307 people voted; way more than half of the people registered to vote voted. Something was wrong. They elected a pro-slavery legislature, adopted a pro-slavery constitution overnight. And Free Soilers cried foul, formed their own attempt at a government that summer. And by January of 1856, the beginning of the next year, in a sense, in essence, there were two fledgling territorial governments in Kansas, one free soil, one pro-slavery. And it was then--that spring of 1856--that what we call Bleeding Kansas, this border frontier, civil war, this village against village, river ravine against river ravine, broke out. Before it played out over about a year and a half about 250 people would be killed--many of them in nighttime raids and vigilante violence--and millions in treasure.

I will come back to John Brown later, next week in fact. Our friend John Brown from upstate New York--or somebody's friend, he wasn't easy to be friends with--had already sent out some of his sons--more on that later--and John Brown arrived himself in the winter of 1856. John Brown, a genuine, radical, deeply religious Old Testament abolitionist who went to Kansas, make no mistake, to make Kansas free and to kill slaveholders if necessary, in what he believed was a justifiable war. That spring, John Brown with his band of men was traveling along the road when he got news of the beating of Charles Sumner in the Senate.

What happened in the Senate is that Charles Sumner, the radical abolitionist Senator from Massachusetts, one of only a tiny handful--actually one of only two or three, three or four--real card carrying abolitionists, if we want to call them that, who had seats in the U.S. Senate. Sumner, deeply well-educated, classically educated, Harvard man, began his political life as a so-called Conscience Whig in Massachusetts. He got elected to the U.S. Senate in the fervor over the Mexican War and in the fervor over the expansion of slavery. In his first few years in the Senate, from 1849, '50, '51, '52, they had a virtual gag on him. Any time Sumner tried to get the floor--this went on for about four years--there were all kinds of parliamentary maneuvers that the opposition could use to prevent him from speaking. They didn't want abolitionist rhetoric in the halls of the U.S. Senate.

But with time he got a position, that is, a place where he could speak, in the Senate's calendar. And he did, he delivered a speech early that spring called "The Crime Against Kansas." He delivered it in March 1856. It took him about six hours. It was later published in a pamphlet form. It's about 35, 40 pages. It was the classic free soil argument of what was now the Republican Party, and Sumner was by now, of course, a Republican. He made all the arguments about a slave power conspiracy and an anti-

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slavery interpretation of the Constitution. He argued deeply into the cluster of ideas we call free labor ideology. But then he laced the speech, over and over, with personal attacks on Southerners, personal attacks on Southern slave holders. He singled out especially Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, and he used Butler's alleged fathering of children by a slave woman as representative of what Sumner said was a common practice across the south. You could not imagine laying a bigger taboo on your fellow Southern senators than this one. He described Butler as, "a Don Quixote who had taken the harlot slavery as his mistress." And then he went on and on with that. He was jeered. Southerners started shouting at him and Sumner just enjoyed it and went on; many of them walked out. But he had already had copies of the speech printed. He had copies of the speech on the street within a few days.

In the audience that day, sitting up in the balcony, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives named Preston Brooks who was the nephew of Senator Butler. About a week after this event, it may have been two weeks, Butler decided that he was going to have honor, he was going to exercise an act of honor and revenge deeply rooted in what he believed was the Old South sense of honor. He had thought about challenging Sumner to a duel, but duels by this point in time were highly illegal, even though people did get challenged--read my colleague Joanne Freeman on this. They're still challenging each other to duels all the time in the 1850s; well, a lot of times. But he decided against challenging Sumner to a duel. Instead, he thought he would take a sort of Plan B--he would meet Sumner at his desk with a cane and try to kill him. And he did.

Brooks took a cane to Sumner--Sumner was sitting at his desk, literally signing copies of "The Crime Against Kansas" speech to be sent out. And he got trapped in the desk, we're told; he couldn't get out of it and Brooks just kept banging on his head, over and over, just bloodied him into unconsciousness, and Sumner fell on the floor. And there are all kinds of stories--and in fact this lithograph tries to capture it, although I'm not sure you can see it very well--there are all kinds of stories about Senators, especially Southerners, gathering around and saying, "Hold me back, hold me back," as they smiled and watched Sumner bleed on the floor. And finally somebody grabbed Brook's cane and said, "You know, that's probably enough." [Laughter] I mean, by any definition this was an assault with a deadly weapon, this was an assault and battery, it was attempted murder.

Preston Brooks went back to the House of Representatives, tendered his resignation and said he would go back home to South Carolina and submit himself to the people of his district. And he did. And they overwhelmingly re-elected him. He also received more than one hundred commemorative canes in the mail, some of which you can see today at the Caroliniana Library in Columbia, South Carolina. This became, of course,

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a cause célèbre, a brutal example now of the way in which compromise was being ruined, middle realm for moderation, was perhaps being destroyed. Violence had broken out all over Kansas; violence had now broken out in the U.S. Senate. It led many people to a fearful set of expressions; there are literally hundreds of these in the press. This is one from William Cullen Bryant who wrote in The New York Evening Post, after the news broke of the beating of Sumner; I quote him: "A violence reigns in the streets of Washington. Violence has now found its way into the Senate Chamber. Violence lies in wait all over the navigable rivers and all the railways of Missouri to obstruct those who pass from the Free states into Kansas. Violence overhangs the frontiers of that territory like a storm cloud charged with hail and lightening. Violence has carried election after election in that territory. In short, violence is the order of the day. The North is to be pushed to the wall by it, and this plot will succeed if the people of the Free states are as apathetic as the slaveholders are insolent."

It was news of the beating of Sumner on the floor of the Senate that apparently made John Brown snap and within 48 hours he led what's called the Pottawattamie Creek Massacre where he murdered five pro-slavery advocates, in cold blood, with broad swords, in the dark of the night. We will return to John Brown's exploits next week.

Now, that year was though a presidential election year, and the problem is still just laying there out on the landscape. What is to happen with Kansas-Nebraska? What's to be done with Bleeding Kansas? What's to be done with--? Now in that election of 1856--this is terribly important just to note for a moment--the Republican Party will mount its first effort at the presidency. And it all but won. This had never happened in American history till then, it's never happened since, a new third party had come so close to winning. The platform of the Republican Party in 1856 was, if anything, slightly more radical than it had been two years earlier in those congressional elections of 1854. They took a staunch stand about slavery expansion. They took a staunch stand on keeping Kansas free. They announced, directly, that they would, quote, "destroy slavery wherever Federal jurisdiction reigned." For President they ran John C. Fremont, a young, dashing, romantic, heroic type. He had been one of the great surveyors and explorers of the West. He was already known by the nickname "the Pathfinder," and he was the first Senator from the state of California. He's also the son-in-law of Thomas Hart Benton, a very powerful--now Republican--from Missouri. He was well married, well connected and good-looking. They centered their campaign--they borrowed Sumner's own language--and they centered their campaign on what the Republican Party itself now called "the crime against Kansas." They were also for tariffs, for the transcontinental railroad across the West and so on.

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The American Party, known as the Know-Nothings, by the way, because in their origins--if you didn't know this about the Know-Nothings-- in their origins the American Nativist Party tried to maintain a secrecy--they were kind of a secret society at first-- and when asked who they were and how they met and what they were for, the original members would always say they knew nothing. So anytime you hear that term, Know-nNthingism, in American politics, if somebody throws--if Chris Matthews throws that term off at you, showing of his political history knowledge--it usually means nativism, or it means some kind of third party phenomenon. The Know-Nothings nominated that year Millard Fillmore, former president; he'd been the President during the Compromise of 1850. It was a very strange choice. And the Know-Nothings were now in some trouble because of this powerful new Republican coalition which is managing now to draw some of the Nativists into them, because it turns out some Nativists were actually more afraid of the slaveholding oligarchy than they were of this Catholic conspiracy. If they had to choose conspiracies they were a little more frightened of slaveholders than Popes. The Democrats went safe, they chose a largely incompetent James Buchanan to run for President. He was from Pennsylvania--kind of lower north. He was known to have very strong ties to the South and to be what Republicans are already calling a doughface, which meant a Northerner with Southern sympathies. And he had been the United States Ambassador to Britain during the Kansas-Nebraska crisis, so he had never voted on it; he had no position to defend.

It was a highly sectionalized election. Buchanan carried every Slave state except Maryland, and then he carried New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois and California. The Democratic Party was still a national party. Fremont, the Republican, carried the rest of the Free states and New England decisively. Fremont and Fillmore together--and Fillmore, the Nativist candidate, got 850,000 votes; Buchanan about 1.8 million; Fremont about 1.5, 1.6 million--no, 1.3 million. If the Nativist Party had not been in this election and if most of the Nativists had gone to Fremont, the Republican, or even two-thirds of them, Fremont would've won the presidency. This anti-slavery northern coalition of free soil advocates came very close. They would even call it, in its wake, a victory within defeat, for such a brand new political party.

Now, out in Kansas they're still trying to hold elections; one corrupt, fraudulent election after another. Buchanan took office in the spring of '57. He appointed a new governor for the Territory of Kansas named Robert J. Walker whose job it was going to--he was a solid Pennsylvania Democrat but nevertheless said, "I will go out and there and enforce popular sovereignty. We're going to have a true, free ballot in Kansas. Popular sovereignty is still going to work." The trouble was, popular sovereignty was now dead in the water. It was tainted, at best. In the election of delegates to yet another attempt at a state constitutional writing convention in Kansas

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in the fall of 1857, the Free Soilers boycotted the election. So at Lecompton, Kansas--and hence the term the Lecompton Constitution--a pro-slavery constitutional convention met, with the Free Soilers all boycotting, and they drafted--no mistake--a pro-slavery constitution. It protected slavery and the right to slave ownership eternally, forever, in the state of Kansas. It excluded from residence in the state of Kansas any free negroes, and it said that it could not be amended, in any way, for seven years.

This process had taken drastic liberties with the idea of popular sovereignty, which as you'll remember was the idea you're supposed to have a popular referendum and just let the vote determine whether slavery shall exist. This Governor Walker lost control of the territory, violence continued--terrible violence. And Walker came back to Washington, urged his own president, who had appointed him, to not support this Lecompton Constitution. He said it's just--it's not right, it's just too fraudulent. It was boycotted by half of the people, probably more than half the people, and Buchanan made a fateful decision. He said, "Nope. They've had their popular sovereignty, they've had their constitutional writing convention. If the Free Soilers chose not to participate that's the way it goes." And Buchanan took the Lecompton Constitution to Congress and asked for its approval, of Kansas as a Slave state. Buchanan took huge political risks here and didn't--for all practical purposes--apparently know what he was doing.

And here we begin to see now the breakup, the tearing apart, now of even the Democratic Party, because none other than Stephen Douglas, father of popular sovereignty, author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the man who had pushed that act through, went to Buchanan and said, "No sir, you cannot support the Lecompton Constitution, it's a fraudulent constitution. The majority of the people in that territory are probably free soil. You can't do this." He broke with his own President, and it would be disastrous for the Democratic Party. The Lecompton Constitution was not accepted by the Congress.

Now, the Dred Scott decision, which came down that same spring of 1857 in the immediate aftermath of Buchanan's election--there's old Dred, not a great picture of him, but it's the only photograph we have of Dred Scott--the Dred Scott decision also came down in the midst of a major American depression. The so-called Panic of 1857 broke out that very spring. The same time as Buchanan is being inaugurated, the Lecompton Constitution is being forged out in Kansas, the Dred Scott decision is going to be announced, the country is falling into a horrible economic panic. There are many causes of it. I wish I had the time. Actually, I'm going to save the Panic of 1857 because it sets up Lincoln and Douglas in '58, '59 for me later. But I want to leave you--I've got three minutes I think, two minutes, two, three--with this fateful Supreme

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Court Case; many people like to say the worst Supreme Court decision in all of American history, but I suspect you can get up a debate over that. I think we've had a couple of others; I won't name them.

Who was Dred Scott? This man, who was an old man by the time the Supreme Court ruled on him and put his name forever into American history as a symbol, was born a slave in 1795 in Virginia. He had moved to Missouri in the 1820s with his master, a man--his original master's name was Peter Blow. He was then later owned by a physician, a doctor named John Emerson. Emerson was an Army surgeon, and Emerson traveled from Missouri all over the upper Midwest and into what then was the Great Plains as an Army surgeon working at Army camps and bases. Dred Scott went with him as his personal servant. They traveled to Illinois and Minnesota. Dred Scott lived with his master from 1834 to 1838, four years, with Dr. Emerson, on various kinds of military bases, especially in Minnesota, a free territory. At one point, Dred Scott tried to buy his own freedom in Minnesota and wasn't allowed to do it. He married a free black woman named Harriet while he was in Minnesota. Four years residence on free soil, an attempt to buy his own freedom, marries a free black woman. Emerson brought him back to Missouri in 1838 and through an intricate series of events for the next five to six years-- not the least of which was Missouri is a very divided place, especially St. Louis--a group of anti-slavery folk gathered around Dred Scott and tried to help him sue for his freedom.

In 1846, they moved his case through local courts, and the first decision--was at a local court--because of his residence and free soil for four years, gave Dred Scott his freedom. That court decided the case in 1850. It was then appealed by the State of Missouri, which was really worried about this case, to the Missouri Supreme Court, and the Missouri Supreme Court, by a decision of two to one, ruled no, no, no. On appeal, Dred Scott's freedom would be denied--that he did not have the right to his freedom because of residence on free soil. Then, again with the help of an anti-slavery group, and even his own owner, believe it or not, they pushed this appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Dr. Emerson was gone, Dred was now owned by a man named John Sanford, and hence the case is called Sanford versus Scott.

Scott's case came before the U.S. Supreme Court as early as 1854 and got on the docket. It would not be decided for 2½ years. Most people didn't even know this was happening. I'll leave you here. Only three days after James Buchanan was inaugurated President, having just only narrowly defeated this new Republican coalition, news broke in Washington of something called the Dred Scott decision, and it would electrify the political culture of the country. It will fuel this Republican Party anti-slavery coalition as much as--in some places--as much as the Kansas Nebraska act ever had, and it will inspire Abraham Lincoln to run for the senate. That's it for now.

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 9 TranscriptFebruary 12, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: On a morning in the second week of March, 1857, Americans grew up living--they didn't all quite understand it yet--but they grew up living in the land of the Dred Scott decision. And if you were African-American, that really meant something. Now 1857 is, of course, the final year of the playing out of Bleeding Kansas and we'll return to that in just a second. And we're going to discuss mostly today the story of one abolitionist; you could say the most famous abolitionist, certainly the most notorious American abolitionist, John Brown. John Brown never made it easy for people to love him. In some ways he wasn't very lovable, until he died on the gallows, and the gallows made him heroic--at least to some people--and it made him all but the devil to others. There are catalytic events in history, that is, events around which ideas, forces, movements, problems coalesce. Unfortunately, they often have a lot to do with violence, and we'll come back to this point at the end today.

But John Brown was far, far, far, far more important dead than he'd ever been alive. Poets, songwriters, lyricists, biographers, those who would come to love him, those who would come to hate him, and those who cannot quite figure out what to do with him, would never stop writing about him. And we still haven't. And we're in the midst right now of a John Brown biography revival. That's in part because next year is the 150th anniversary of the Harpers Ferry raid. Almost all major African-American poets in the twentieth century attempted their John Brown poem. So did Stephen Vincent Benét in a famous and classic lyric, epic poem called John Brown's Body, published in the 1920s. And embedded in that poem is this verse where Benét, I think, captured the dilemma of John Brown. John Brown--it's not easy to decide--was he a heroic revolutionary or a midnight terrorist? This is Benét's verse, embedded in a 250-page epic poem. "The law is our yardstick and it measures well, oh well enough when there are yards to measure. Measure a wave with it, measure fire, cut sorrow up in inches, weigh content. You can weigh John Brown's body well enough, but how and in what balance do you weigh John Brown? He had no gift for life, no gift to bring life, but his body and a cutting edge, and he knew how to die." More on old John Brown coming up.

The year before John Brown's raid the most important, the most exhilarating, and by far the most substantively interesting political debates in American history would occur in Illinois, when Abraham Lincoln runs for the U.S. Senate against Stephen Douglas--Stephen Douglas, the same Stephen Douglas, author of the Kansas-

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Nebraska Act; parliamentarian genius of the Compromise of 1850; the man most associated with the Democratic Party's theory of popular sovereignty for Kansas and Nebraska and the whole of the West. And this guy, Abe Lincoln, with one term in the U.S. House of Representatives and then a failed attempt at re-election, a guy with very little experience when he ran for President. In the opening of his campaign he decided to open it in the Legislative Hall of the old State House in Illinois. It was on the outside steps of that State House where Barack Obama began his campaign almost exactly a year ago. But inside, Lincoln gave his now famous House Divided speech. Now in your reader, your Lincoln Reader, edited by Mike Johnson, you have the House Divided speech, but read past the first page. Don't just read that first lyrical, biblical paragraph, read what Lincoln goes on the argue. The speech is about the Dred Scott decision. The speech is his opposition to the Dred--to the Supreme Court case that had just been passed the year before. The speech is his opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. His speech is a warning. It's the warning of a moderate Republican, but nevertheless a moderate, anti-slavery, free soil Republican who throws down the gauntlet, in the wake of Dred Scott. This is a sentence on the fifth page of the House Divided Speech, page 68 in your reader if you look it up. "We shall lie down soon," said Abraham Lincoln, "pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall awake the next morning to the reality instead that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a Slave State." Get his drift. The Dred Scott decision, in his view, and the view now of most in this new, extraordinary coalition, the Republican Party, believes the Dred Scott decision now threatens everybody--north, south, and west--with the presence of slavery, and slave labor, and all that goes with it.

It's the opening of that speech though, of course, that the world always remembers, and we love to return to this in our political culture, in our political history, whenever we feel great polarization and great division. Are we a house divided again, against ourselves? "If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending…"--this is so Lincoln; he kind of meanders in a bit of a homespun way into a very serious argument--"…we could then better judge what to do and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated"--Kansas-Nebraska--"with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to the slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy that agitation has not only not ceased but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, I do not expect the House to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other." Southerners never forgot that sentence. "Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in a course of ultimate extinction"--and

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those two words, more than anything else Lincoln had uttered before the Civil War, Southern Democrats would never forget--"or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, north as well as south. Have we no tendency to the latter condition? Let anyone who doubts carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination, piece of machinery so to speak"--and here he's arguing the slave-power conspiracy, without naming it--"compounded of the Nebraska doctrine and the Dred Scott decision, let him consider not only what work the machinery is adapted to do and how"--the machinery--"and how well adapted. But also let him study the history of its construction and trace, if he can, or rather fail if he can, to trace the evidences of design and concert of action among its chief bosses, from the beginning." It's all there; the Republican Party coalition of ideas and fears is all there.

Well, what was everybody so angry about over the Dred Scott decision? It's just a Supreme Court decision. Well, I left you the other day hanging in abeyance. Dred Scott was, as I said, an old, old man by the time this thing finally got before the- got on the docket in 1854, finally was argued in late 1856 and early 1957. And when the court brought down its decision, literally two days, forty-eight hours after the inauguration of James Buchanan as President in 1857, his case was now, his name would now become almost a household word across the country. Now a measure of how important this case was as it was developing largely in legal secrecy was the kind of lawyers who argued it. Montgomery Blair and George Ticknor Curtis for Scott. Montgomery Blair was from the famous Blair family from Missouri, moderate anti-slavery leaning Republicans by this point in time, Member of Congress; George Ticknor Curtis, a former attorney-general, a very important, famous trial lawyer. And for the Government, another former U.S. Attorney General, Reverdy Johnson, and a U.S. Senator, Henry Geyer, were the layers. Reverdy Johnson made the startling statements in the arguments before the Supreme Court and called for a--he made startling statements and he called for a broader pronouncement from the court. He urged Justice Taney, the Chief Justice, and the court to render a big decision here and try, once and for all, to put this--as Lincoln called it--slavery agitation, this whole slavery in the Western Territories problem to rest. The Supreme Court after all is supreme. Reverdy Johnson said--I quote him--"This is a case that shall determine whether slavery shall live forever." Forever; whether preservation of slavery was the only way to preserve the Union.

The decision came on the 6th of March 1857, and here was the decision. Taney and the majority in the court did not have to go as far as they did. This is now legendary and famous, Taney developing his majority. And it was ultimately a six to three decision. And lest you think the Supreme Court doesn't really matter in our political history, please remember the Dred Scott decision. Number one part of the--there were three

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parts of the decision. The first was jurisdiction. Did Dred Scott as a black person have the right to sue--this is the first question they were asked to settle--the right to sue for anything in a Federal Court? Could a non-citizen, because he was a Negro--which was the language used then--sue in Federal Court? Two, did Scott's residence on free soil--remember his four years with Dr. Emerson, his former owner, from 1834 to 1838, living in Minnesota Territory--did his residence on free soil entitle him to freedom? Or, if a slave was taken by his owner to Free states or Free territories, was it the law of the State the master came from that always had jurisdiction? In other words, was it the law of Missouri that took precedent here, or the law of Minnesota? And the third question before the court--they didn't have to take this one up but they sure did--was Congress's right to determine slavery in the Western Territories.

The pressures on the court were tremendous, as I said, to move for a broad decision, to try to put this thing to rest. Well the decision, of course, six to three. And at that point there were five southern born justices, five either slaveholders or former slaveholders on the Supreme Court. The sixth judge who voted with them was Greer of Pennsylvania, forming a majority against the three northern born justices who voted against it. The decision was, one, Scott had no right to sue in a Federal Court. Two, his residence on free soil did not give him his freedom, the law of Missouri was in place. And third, and by far most important, the court ruled--trying to put to rest now nearly forty years of this problem that had been compromised this way and compromised that way and argued with that principle and that principle and that principle, as we've seen--it ruled that Congress had no authority to exclude slavery from any U.S. territory because it would be, just as Southerners had been arguing now for two generations, a violation of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, a person's right to life, liberty, and property. If someone ever wants to doubt that American history is about its ironies, just note that language. Therefore, the Missouri Compromise Line, that so-called sacred pledge that had now been violated, said Northerners, in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had never been constitutional to begin with; that any attempt to prevent slavery's expansion anywhere would be unconstitutional. Now, Taney not only went that far, but in his opinion, in his own written opinion, he famously went a step further and he argued--or he said, quote, that blacks, or negroes is the word he used, had--I'm quoting--"had for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order, so far inferior that they had no rights, which the white man was bound to respect." Some of the most infamous words ever in an American Supreme Court decision.

Now, the decision, six to three, was issued. For this new Republican Party coalition in the North, in some ways this was horrible news and in some ways it was good political news, because nothing crystallized this Republican coalition now quite like this case. They will crystallize in resistance to it, as I just tried to demonstrate, from

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quoting from Lincoln's famous House Divided speech. But most importantly here, I'd argue--the hook to hang your hat on here--is that the Dred Scott decision, it's not once and for all. The war is not necessarily now inevitable. Contingencies are always there, they're always laying there to happen. But what the Dred Scott decision did almost once and for all, is that it destroyed compromise. It destroyed almost any conception now of consensus or compromise. Or put another way, it ruined moderation. Moderate politicians, former Democrats like David Wilmot from Pennsylvania, racist to the core, but free soiler who's joined the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, got his own racial problems, but a much more advanced sort of anti-slavery thinker, but still a moderate--he didn't like abolitionists, he'd never been a member of an Abolitionist Society and never would be--believed there were Constitutional restraints on what Congress could actually do about slavery. But it will bring together now some strange bedfellows in this Republican coalition who cannot find anymore any middle ground with their foes. And that's when you see danger--you more than see danger--in American political history. It's when the side that loses a debate cannot accept the result.

Now, there are many ways to try to demonstrate the importance of that Dred Scott case as it sunk in. Now it's sinking in now in the summer of 1857 as a depression hits the country. Wages in America, North, in northern cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia and so on, drop forty and fifty percent in six months. The estimate is that 100,000 workers in New York City were thrown out of work by the end of 1857; about 50,000 in Philadelphia. The prices of wheat go plummeting, practically overnight. The United States had one of its first significant stock market crashes. There's a lot to be feared here. And on both sides of this, North and South, they're going to blame each other. Southerners are going to blame Northerners for over-speculation, for the over-issuing of credit by banks. And, of course, they're right about that. There were no controls on banks in these years. There was no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; you only got that from the New Deal in the twentieth century. And Northerners are going to blame Southerners because of their belief in King Cotton and this kind of dependence on a single export. They're going to throw blame all over the place.

If you were African-American you now lived in the land of the Dred Scott decision, which had said what? It said you will never be a citizen of the United States. You have no rights which the white man has to respect, which means the white man's Constitution, which means the white man's society. It means you live in the land of the Dred Scott decision that said you have no future in the United States. In the wake of the Dred Scott case, about a month after it, Frederick Douglass gave a speech, which was a bit uncustomary for him. In the 1850s Frederick Douglass was learning his politics, he was really was--he was getting his feet as a political thinker and even

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as a politician. He was trying to sidle up to this Republican Party, even though it was kind of a half-baked loaf of bread to him; it wasn't real abolitionism. This case drove him further into their laps.

But he gave a speech, largely to a black audience, in the wake of Dred Scott. And so typical of Douglass's brilliance as an orator, he started to discuss how he saw fear on the horizon, and trouble and dread on the horizon, and he said he saw what he called "the manifold discouragements of my people everywhere I go." I quote him. "They fling their broad and gloomy shadows across the pathway of every thoughtful colored man in this country." And then he ended with this lament. "I see them"--these are discouragements--"I see them clearly and feel them sadly with an earnest, aching heart. I have long looked for the realization of the hope of my people, standing as it were, barefoot, and treading upon the sharp and flinty rocks of the present and looking out upon the boundless sea of the future. I have sought in my humble way to penetrate the intervening mists and clouds and per chance to see in the distance, a time at which the cruel bondage of my people should somehow end, and the long entombed millions rise from their foul grave of slavery and death. But of that time I can now know nothing, and you can know nothing, and all is uncertain at this point. I walk by faith and not by sight." That's Douglass's beautiful and terrible way of expressing that he's now told, as an African-American, you have no future in the United States.

All right, so who was John Brown? That picture--I'm going to show you just a couple of images here. John Brown, of course, has been a fascination for artists, to say the least. I don't want to take too much time with this. But this is a black and white version now--I don't know if you can see the rope up here. This is one of the 22 panels in Jacob Lawrence's magnificent series on John Brown. Jacob Lawrence, a great African-American painter. He painted this in the 1930s. And at least 20 of the 22 images in Lawrence's incredible series on John Brown, you will find some image of a crucifix, of execution, a hanging. When I was teaching at Amherst College, I don't know, eight or nine years ago, we had Jacob Lawrence for an Honorary Degree, and I got to spend like two days with him. It was one of the greatest thrills of my life. And the museum at Amherst managed to get the series on John Brown, they had it in a room. And I was asked to do a gallery talk on it. And so I went into the room the day before I was to give this talk, all by myself, nobody in there, and I just communed with these terrible images. Sometimes the images, just sort of crisscrossed bayonets and sometimes crisscrossed rifles, and sometimes it's literally crosses on the wall in rooms, and sometimes it's this image, of Brown hanging. And I was overwhelmed by it. And the next day I gave this talk and I talked about these images of crucifixes. What they hadn't told me is that they were also inviting a busload of Fifth Graders to come to the lecture, and they also hadn't told me that that morning in the New York Times, in the headline--today this wouldn't even get headlines--there'd been a bus

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bombing in Jerusalem and 38 people were slaughtered on a bus by a terrorist bomb. And I was going to talk about John Brown, whether he was a terrorist, and in walked the Fifth Graders. Toughest--one of the toughest audiences I ever had. How do you smooth over John Brown and all those crucifixes with Fifth Graders on a fieldtrip? Don't even try is the answer. [Laughter]

Another favorite image of mine of John Brown is David Levine's. David Levine is the artist for the New York Review of Books. This actually comes from 1969. A series of books had come out on John Brown. This is an image that kind of fits John Brown to many people--the gun slinging, kind of wild man. He's got a red face, probably, big nose, gun belt, bullets all around him, kind of saying, "Don't mess with me." But then, of course, there's Thomas Hovenden's incredible painting of John Brown, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I don't have the full version of it. This is the painting that depicts the scene of John Brown leaving his jail cell in Charlestown, Virginia, on the day of his execution, according to the artist with the hangman's noose already around his neck, before he even rode to the gallows--details. And a black woman comes up with her baby and raises her baby to John Brown and he kisses the child. It's the "legend of the kiss," as John Greenleaf Whittier put it in a poem. It didn't happen, but in art anything can happen. This is the gentle savior John Brown, this is the liberator John Brown, this is the martyr John Brown. There are many, many, many John Browns. And you're going to start hearing about and seeing a lot more of them next year. [Technical adjustments]

Well, John Brown was born in Connecticut, Torrington to be exact, and just a ways up the road. He was born in 1800. He grew up mostly out in the Western Reserve, as it was called, of Ohio. He witnessed at the age of twelve the beating of a slave boy. There were remnants of slaves still traversing the north in the eighteen-teens. He tried Divinity School for a little while at the age of sixteen, but said he quit because of insufficient funds and because all the reading caused him sore eyes. He experienced a confession of faith in his father's church, a congregational, old-fashioned Calvinist congregational church, when he was about sixteen. He married first in 1820. His first wife would die on him. He had no less than twenty children by two wives over some thirty years. Nine of those children would die in infancy. From 1820 to 1855 he engaged in approximately twenty different business ventures of one kind and another in six different northern states, virtually all of which ended in failure and poverty for his family; several of which ended in law suits and bankruptcies and one litigation after another; one of which led to debtor's prison for awhile. He and his family had lived a poverty stricken, rolling stone existence, across the northern states.

Probably what sustained him--and we know a good deal about this--was his religion, his faith, his theology if you want. He was a kind of orthodox nineteenth century

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Calvinist. He believed in such things as innate depravity, providential design, predestination, on some level, and the total human dependence on a sovereign and arbitrary God, and an arbitrary God that sometimes chose certain individual human beings in history to act for Him. He believed in an Old Testament kind of justice, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. He punished his children and his employees with Mosaic vengeance. He had a puritanical obsession with the wickedness of other people. He could be domineering, vane, obstinate, as one friend once put it, impervious to a joke. Probably not a lot of fun to just have lunch with. He gave orders, remembered Brown's younger brother, quote, "like a king against whom there is no rising up." He was a thorough going non-conformist. He probably never joined any formal anti-slavery organization, although he went to lots of their meetings. He never joined a political party. We're not even sure if he ever voted.

He was a practitioner of what would become known in these years--certainly by the 1850s--of a kind of higher law doctrine about slavery, an allegiance to God's will and God's law above man's law. To John Brown, put simply, slavery represented an unjustifiable state of war, by one portion of the people against another; and in a state of war you do what's necessary to defend yourselves. He believed slavery was an evil so entrenched--and he was dead serious about this--so entrenched in America that it required revolutionary ideology and revolutionary means to eradicate it. It had led him--as it has often in history led most proponents of revolutionary violence--that the means can, therefore, justify the end. As God had willed so often in his Old Testament that the wicked must die, so too had he willed that slaveholders and their defenders at least deserved the same fate. John Brown came to believe that violence in a righteous cause was like a rite of purification.

Now, what did he do? In brief, John Brown's interest in Kansas was intense, after the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He was living then, by then, in upstate New York, up near what is today Lake Placid, in North Elba, which is indeed where he is buried. Five of Brown's sons went west to Kansas, in late 1854 and early 1855. There was an extraordinary exchange of letters between a couple of those sons, especially Owen Brown and his father back in New York, letters that are saying things like, "Father, you must come out here with us. There are slaveholders living over on such and such creek, within two miles of us Father. Violence is beginning to break out, Father." And so the father came. And John Brown developed, in Kansas, by late 1855 and into 1856, his own little guerilla band. They had gone to Kansas to fight in Kansas's Border War.

Now, I mentioned the other day that it was in the spring of 1856, Brown and his men are traveling along a roadway and they get word of the beating of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate. I think it was first told to them that Sumner was all but dead,

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this, to him, great abolitionist senator. And Brown, it appears, went into a frenzy and vowed revenge, and a couple of days later he and four of his sons, or three of his sons, went and did visitations at three houses along Pottawatomie Creek in eastern Kansas, known to be an area settled by slaveholders or pro-slavery people, and they dragged several men from their houses, in front of their wives, and hacked them to death--five men to be exact--hacked them to death with these huge broad swords, and deposited their bodies on the front steps of their cabins. This was the Pottawatomie Creek Massacre. It touched off even greater violence in Bleeding Kansas, throughout that summer, into the fall of 1856. To John Brown, he had kind of tried to even the score because just a few--a couple of weeks before that pro-slavery forces had sacked, attacked and burned the anti-slavery capital of Kansas--Lawrence, Kansas--burned a hotel and killed six people. Brown, by killing five, said he hadn't quite evened it up.

He spent the summer of 1856 in hiding, into the fall. In October 1856, he left Kansas and went back east to launch what became the Harpers Ferry conspiracy; and in legal terms that's exactly what it was. He launched a fundraising campaign to finance a new and more daring attempt to take this war, as he put it, into Africa; by that he meant the South. It was his hope of attacking, ultimately, the largest federal arsenal in the United States--which was in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers, just some thirty, forty miles from Washington, DC--capture that largest federal arsenal with its thousands of rifles and side-arms and barrels of gun powder, and apparently, launch a growing, developing, slave insurrection, down through Virginia. And it was his hope, at least, the best we can understand, to engage in and effect a violent coup d'état and take over the State of Virginia.

Now, to make a long and dramatic story short enough, his fundraising campaign by 1857 fell by the way, in part because of the Panic of 1857. But he visited all over the North. He visited the parlors of many famous abolitionists in New England. He sat in Ralph Waldo Emerson's study. People hosted dinners for him. He was this fascinating, romantic, somewhat bizarre old man with hair that was whitening, and had been out there in Kansas raising hell. They didn't all know the details of the Pottawatomie Creek Massacre, and even when they began to hear them they didn't want to know too much. But Brown was leading a crusade in Kansas to keep Kansas free soil. Brown was doing in Kansas what a lot of these abolitionists back east could not themselves do but they were glad he was doing it; began to raise some money for him. He came down here to Connecticut and he ordered some 1000 spears--he called them pikes--from a forgery, which were ultimately delivered in boxes to a farm near Harpers Ferry, labeled famously Beecher's Bibles; huge, heavy boxes labeled Bibles. And then he went back west. He established a headquarters in Tabor, Iowa, a town known to be settled by abolitionists from the east, a place where he could begin to recruit men and train them.

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Then in early 1858 he spent one full month living in the attic apartment of Frederick Douglass's home in Rochester, New York. We have only one little letter they exchanged during that time. It says, "John, come down to dinner." Thanks a lot guys. But what we do know, that in that attic of Frederick Douglass's house, John Brown wrote his so-called Provisional Constitution for the State of Virginia. When he took over Virginia he was going to announce a new Constitution. He, in fact, was going to be the governor, lest you had any doubt. And then he called a convention in May 1858, in Canada, Chatham, Ontario, to which he invited abolitionists now, black and white, and it was to be a recruiting convention to recruit the men who would become part of his abolitionist army. Now the problem here with John Brown, for everybody who met him--including Douglass, who may have known more about the Harpers Ferry plans than anybody alive--the problem was he was so secretive. He would never tell people the details of what he was doing, who he was actually hiring. Forty-six so-called delegates went to this Chatham Convention; thirteen of them white, the rest of them black. Most of the people attending it were fugitive slaves living in Canada, who had escaped slavery in the United States, many of whom still had family back in the South. Here was a man, in the midst of this political crisis going on in the country--this is in 1858 now--who is saying, "I'm going to lead you back into the South and we're going to get your families out."

He lacked money. He had hired an unreliable drillmaster, a guy named Hugh Forbes, an English soldier of fortune who'd been off in Italy in the late-40s and early 1850s, kind of soldiering as a soldier of fortune with Garibaldi in the Italian Revolution, but it turns out wasn't very reliable. He [Brown] got involved with the so-called Secret Six, New England abolitionists--time doesn't really allow me to tell you everything about them but they were Franklin Sanborn, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe, George Luther Stearns, Gerrit Smith and others; prominent, powerful, and in one case rich, white, New England and Northern abolitionists who supported him.

Then Brown went back out to Kansas that winter, of '58, and in December of '58, with a band of about thirteen men, he went across the Kansas border into Missouri, dead of winter. He attacked three farms, or I suppose you could call them small plantations, in Missouri, where he seized eleven slaves, killed one of the owners, and then went back across the border into Kansas and hid out for awhile in the dead of January 1859, along Pottawattamie Creek. And then he engaged in an eighty-two day wintertime trek of over 1000 miles with these eleven freed slaves, from Kansas north into Nebraska, then into Iowa, into Grinnell, Iowa, by the way also settled by New England abolitionists. In Grinnell, Iowa he was given the key to the city by a Mayor. And in Grinnell, where the railroad had reached as far as Grinnell, Iowa, they put them all in a boxcar, a special boxcar, and they rode by train, all the way to Chicago,

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and then all the way to Detroit. And on the 12th of March, 1859, there was a remarkable scene on the Detroit River as John Brown ushered these eleven freed slaves from Missouri across the river into Canada. But at this point there was a twelfth. A baby had been born in the boxcar and its mother had named him John Brown Daniels. So, lest we think this guy was only a lunatic--this was the real thing, he'd freed some slaves, and he had carted them all across the northern states, in the dead of winter, to their freedom. To the extent he had a messianic image, and a sense of himself as a Moses--actually, his greatest hero was Oliver Cromwell. If you know anything about the English Civil War and the Puritan armies, it makes sense; it was based on something.

Now, I only have a few minutes. The raid on Harpers Ferry would've actually happened a bit earlier, it would've happened in the summer of 1859, had he been able to pull everything together and get everybody to gather. And in the end, it is one of those sad and tragic stories that then takes on a much, much larger meaning than anyone could've ever predicted. His so-called Provisional Army--that's what he called it--for his Provisional Constitution for his provisional new Virginia, would ultimately be about twenty-two men. He rented a farm five miles north of Harpers Ferry, in Maryland, where they were all to gather that summer. He wanted Frederick Douglass to join him. He actually had met Harriet Tubman in Canada. He tried to convince Harriet Tubman to join him. He'd heard of her legend. But she was a little too smart for this. She'd done this stuff. She had more experience in freeing slaves and getting them out than anybody, and she apparently said, in effect--"no thanks." He desperately wanted Douglass to join him, and had he joined them Douglass would've been dead in 1859. But Douglass did have a final meeting with John Brown at an old stone quarry outside of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in late August of 1859. He went down from New York with a fugitive slave Douglass had helped to his freedom named Shields Green. Here's Shields--where is he--there he is. Douglass took him along. They met at this old stone quarry and in Douglass's testimony they had a long conversation. Brown tried one last time to talk Douglass into coming with him, and Douglass, in his recollection, famously said, "I can't do it. You're going to be trapped in a"--how does he put it--"you're going to be surrounded in a trap of steel. You will never get out. But if you must go, go." And then he said to Shields Green, "Your call, your choice." Well it turns out Shields Green was a fugitive slave from Virginia. His wife was still in Virginia. He said--according to Douglass--"I think I'll go with the old man." And Shields did, and he'll die at Harpers Ferry.

There were five black men, finally, who joined John Brown's raid--Osborn Perry Anderson, Dangerfield Newby, Shields Green, John Copeland, Lewis Leary. Two of them were Oberlin College graduates; three of them were former fugitive slaves. Dangerfield Newby had a letter in his pocket from his wife, in Virginia, when he died

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at Harpers Ferry. The plan, simply put--so far as we know--was to attack Harpers Ferry, take the federal arsenal, and begin, if he could, to escape into the mountains, the Blue Ridge Mountains on either side of Harpers Ferry, to establish mountain hideaways, to try from those hideaways to get slaves to escape into his lines, to arm them, and then to begin, as a guerilla warrior, to selectively attack sites in northern Virginia, moving on Richmond.

Now, I say to the extent we understand it, because he didn't leave us much to go on in terms of what his actual plan was. What we do know is the raid only lasted forty-eight hours. They never got out of Harpers Ferry. He did free about a dozen slaves in the surrounding countryside, brought them into the old Fire Engine House of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, hid out. And the news sprung across the country like news had never spread in the United States, partly because John Brown's first major strategic mistake, or tactical mistake, was that the Manakosie Railroad came through Harpers Ferry right as he was entering the town. They stopped the train. The first casualty was a free black watchman on that train who was shot by one of Brown's men. Then Brown, within two hours, let the train go--dumb. The conductor of the train at the next town wired Washington and said, "One man and 200 men are attacking Harpers Ferry." By the time it reached Buchanan's desk in the White House it was 500 men attacking Harpers Ferry. And within twenty-four hours Buchanan ordered a contingent of U.S. Marines under the command of Robert E. Lee and a lieutenant named J.E.B. Stuart to get to Harpers Ferry as fast as possible and crush this slave insurrection, which they did.

Now, I'm going to leave you there, in this situation. Brown was captured. All but two or three of his men were killed or captured, and all those captured will be hung. One of his sons, Owen Brown, did manage to escape. What ensued at Harpers Ferry for 24 hours was an absolute pitched battle between the townspeople, local militias, and Brown's men, and many townspeople were killed. Owen Brown would escape and eventually move as far, far away as he possibly could, and live on a little desert farm up above Pasadena, California, halfway up the San Gabriel Mountains, most of the rest of his life, trying to escape the infamy of his father's legacy. Brown was captured in the Engine House. They tried to run him through with a sword. They beat him over the head, they bloodied him up but, as the story goes, he was saved by a huge brass belt buckle he had, and they kept stabbing at him and they kept hitting the brass belt buckle. He was captured, put in jail in Charles Town, Virginia, just four miles up the road. And in November 1859 he would get the most famous, sensational trial that the United States had ever seen. I'm going to leave you there because it's the John Brown hanging and execution and the aftermath that is the most important template of that election year of 1860 soon to come.

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 10 TranscriptFebruary 14, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: Faster than might seem appropriate, and faster than I wish, we've come to the secession crisis. I wish we had another week, two, three weeks, but we don't. Martyrdom; what is a martyr? It's a term we hear all over the place now. There are martyrs of this cause and martyrs of that cause. John Brown was a martyr. The most important thing about John Brown, as I tried to say the other day--and I want to conclude with several comments about that now--is in how he died and in the aftermath of his death. The United States was a Christian country. Europe was essentially a Christian civilization. John Brown would be filtered through a Christian imagination. Either way, whether people came to admire and sort of agonizingly love him, or agonizingly hate him. "John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was all his own," said Frederick Douglass. "His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was a taper light, his was the burning sun. Mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the silent shores of eternity. I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave. I could live for the slave. John Brown could die for the slave." There's a clarity in that, among the many eulogistic statements about John Brown and the many that Frederick Douglass himself made. Douglass, you'll remember, had great ambivalence about this man and chose not to join him on the raid at Harpers Ferry.

Now, Brown was captured in the raid. The raid only lasted 48 hours. It was in some ways a military strategic blunder. He was taken to a jail four miles from Harpers Ferry, Charlestown, Virginia, now West Virginia, and he would reside there for about the next six weeks. In that period he would be put on trial, the most celebrated trial, to that point, in American history. There were three charges, all of which were punishable by death, at least in Virginia. Treason against the United States--it was considered treason to attack a federal arsenal--I suppose it still would be although we don't try too many people for treason anymore. Two, inciting a slave insurrection; a pretty serious crime in Virginia. And third, for murder.

The trial began on the 27th of October. It lasted three and a half days. The State of Virginia famously tried to provide a lawyer for John Brown and Brown refused that State's supplied lawyer. He laid on a cot, because of his injuries and his wounds, in the courtroom. This would be drawn and put in lithographs and pictures all over the country. He was eventually defended in court by three Northerners, lawyers, who

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came down to help. The closing arguments were the 31st of October. The jury deliberated for forty-five minutes, returned a verdict of guilty on all three counts, and it was announced he would be hung about a month later, on December 2nd, 1859. From November 2nd to December 2nd, that one month--November 2nd was the last day in court where they sentenced him--he had one month in jail. He apparently won over his jailer who found John Brown one of the most fascinating characters he had ever seen. People came from the North and were allowed to visit him, including his wife. From jail he wrote approximately 100 letters, all over the country, to newspapers, to editors, to magazines, to members of his family, particularly to his wife. He was writing his own epitaph, he was creating his own romantic legend, he was arguing his own case. He, of course, had pled innocent. There are many of those letters. I had the great privilege to read a whole batch of the originals once, housed at, of all places, the Pennsylvania Historical Society. He wrote this one to his wife, which may be indicative of Brown's vision of his own acts and a vision that was now going to stick, in some ways, in poetry and in song. "I have been whipped," he wrote to his wife, "as the saying goes, but am sure I can recover all the lost capital occasioned by that disaster by only hanging a few minutes by the neck, and I feel quite determined to make the utmost possible out of my defeat." I love you dear, but I can't wait to hang.

John Brown was a troubled man, he was a morbid man, he was an Old Testament man, but he probably was not crazy, as so many people said at the time, and people have said ever since. His altruism on behalf of black people was not utterly selfless, but he was an extraordinary example of an American, a white American, who put his money where his mouth was--he didn't have any money--put his life where his mouth was, and took it into the South. Now, he was executed, hung out in a field, outside of Charlestown, Virginia, guarded by some 3,000 American troops. There were all kinds of fears of attempts to break him out and seize him by Northern Yankee bands. There were all kinds of threats. There were escape plans in the newspapers.

And by the way, one of the most startling things about the John Brown story, once it broke--there had never been a sensation quite like this in American newspapers. Here was the South's oldest, greatest, worst fear. An abolitionist from the North with a band of men and a bunch of weapons invading the South and trying to incite slave insurrection--they've been kind of predicting this all along and lo and behold it happened. In a trunk of stuff back at the farm in Maryland that he had rented for several months, where his men had gathered, after his capture was found a whole stash of letters and maps. The old man had kept all kinds of maps of the South. He had maps of sections of Alabama, Georgia. He even had x'd certain towns on those maps. I don't know, the old guy just liked maps. Maybe he just stayed up at night kind of playing with his maps, like some of us do with our Rand McNally maps when we want to wish ourselves out of where we are. But when these maps were found, and the

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press got hold of these, all over the South, these stories spread and local newspapers would print stories about the maps of their county or their section of a state. There was hysteria. Northern teachers, working in the South, were tarred and feathered. An itinerant piano tuner in Tennessee was lynched because he was from Massachusetts. Fear set in across the South that there were going to be other abolition emissaries--that was always the term used. And there were predictions and threats of all kinds, especially in South Carolina. John Brown when he--and he did read some of these newspapers--must have smiled.

Now he was hung, his body was delivered to his wife. It traveled all the way by train, all the way up to upstate New York to North Elba, New York where he was buried; a site in a very remote place, I must say, in upstate New York. They have a gathering there every year of something called The John Brown Society. It's run by a bunch of people from New York City, and they have an annual speaker and an annual pilgrimage to Old John Brown's grave. And I had the privilege one year of giving that lecture in the courthouse where his body had laid in state. It was interesting to meet the erstwhile folks of the John Brown Society, who are a strange and interesting lot, I can assure you. But it's an isolated place. But pilgrimages already started happening, especially among African-Americans in the north, to that remote site, right in the wake of his burial.

The most important thing about John Brown's raid and John Brown was the aftermath; it's what people made of him. In the North, certain members of that Secret Six, so called, of white abolitionists who had served him and helped him and raised money for him and wrote letters with him, fled the country, some to Canada. Frederick Douglass himself--and there were letters discovered between Douglass and John Brown--himself will flee the country, out of Rochester, New York, across Lake Erie into Canada and out the St. Lawrence River to England, because of fear of his arrest. And there was a warrant put out for Frederick Douglass's arrest and a Federal Marshall arrived in Rochester, New York only about a day after Douglass left town. Intellectuals and poets and writers in the press, Thoreau and Whittier and Emerson, all over the North, and in England, and in France, began to try their hand at the meaning of John Brown as Christian hero, as martyr of a cause, as a man who would do that which the rest of them would not have done.

And I want to suggest--I'm going to give you really four arguments, just try them on--of why John Brown matters, why he mattered then, and why he still matters in any discussion we have in American society about what constitutes terrorism now, what constitutes revolutionary violence. When is a cause so just that the means justify the end? When is violence in a moral cause justified? Is it ever justified? Go answer those questions in an ethics course, go answer those questions in a politics course, go

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answer those questions in a history course, and you have one of the hardest questions of all. Was John Brown a midnight terrorist or a revolutionary hero? John Brown's a very troubling legacy. Nobody should prettify him and nobody should utterly dismiss him. I'd say he leaves us with four essential questions; and you can add to this if you want. First, he really makes us face this question of the meaning of martyrdom. What is a martyr? How do we define a martyr? What constitutes the values or elements of martyrdom? Two, how do we deal with revolutionary violence, in history or today? When can a cause be just--as I just said earlier--so just that violence in its name is somehow justified?

Three--and here I'm going to give you a list within the list--I think John Brown is our template in American history--there are others you could point to, the leaders of the Haymarket Riot. There are many other cases in our history of people who acted in a cause and used violence. But John Brown forces us to face the almost natural ambivalences about his acts. He is disturbing and inspiring. Note all these opposites. He in some ways worked for the highest ideals--human freedom and the idea of equality--but he also used the most ruthless deeds. There's a certain majesty about his character, at least in the aftermath, but there's also a lot of folly. He was a monster, to some. To others he's a saint, he's a warrior saint. He killed for justice. When does that work for you? He was a great example of what had been brewing all over the culture, by the 1850s. We've talked about this over and over, of this struggle between human law, law fashioned in Congress, law fashioned by people, and the so-called higher law. When do you abide by a higher law than the laws of your society? When is it just to break human law in the name of higher law? Who decides? And lastly, I think he's one of those avengers of history who do the work other people won't, can't, or shouldn't. "Men consented to his death," said Frederick Douglass in one of those eulogy speeches much later, in 1880, "Men consented to his death and then went home and taught their children to honor his memory."

And then fourth, that last question that's always laying out there. John Brown was a white man who killed white people to free black people. And that's actually one of his deepest legacies. In my first years of teaching in a big urban high school in Flint, Michigan, I taught lots of young black people who thought John Brown was black. They had been taught that he was black, sometimes in churches. There's a church in Springfield, Massachusetts, that John Brown went to, attended--they say he was a member--it's called the John Brown Church and there's some people there you still have to convince that he was white. Does it matter? Why does it matter? Why has John Brown been such a romantic hero in black culture, in poetry, in painting, in song? Michael Harper, the great modern African-American poet, has a little line in one of his poems. The poem is called "History and Captain Brown." And the line is, "Come to the crusade, not as negroes but as brothers, like Brother Brown."

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Well, you can try all those questions on and if you come up with some perfect answers do let me know. But before we leave John Brown I want to leave you with my favorite passage ever written about the meaning and memory of John Brown, and you can see if it fits or not. It's in a speech by W.E.B. DuBois, the greatest black scholar, writer of the twentieth century. DuBois gave a speech about John Brown at Harpers Ferry in 1932. They were dedicating a plaque memorial--this had been done before--but they were dedicating yet another sort of John Brown marker at Harpers Ferry. And the ending of that speech, I think it's the most poignant thing anybody ever said about John Brown, and it's why he's so troubling. This is DuBois's ending. "Some people have the idea that crucifixion consists in the punishment of an innocent man. The essence of crucifixion is that men are killing a criminal, that men have got to kill him, and yet that the act of crucifying him is the salvation of the world. John Brown broke the law, he killed human beings. Those people who defended slavery had to execute John Brown, although they knew that in killing him they were committing the greater crime. It is out of that human paradox that there comes any crucifixion."

Okay, good morning. Sermon is over. I've named my text. Now let's do some history. The raid on Harpers Ferry and the execution of John Brown, of course, came--[technical adjustment]--on the eve of an extremely pivotal American election, to say the least. You all know the Republican Party had a good showing in 1856 and nearly won, its first time out. Now what will this Republican Party be by 1860? How will it threaten the South? Will it threaten the South? John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and his execution were a template, all into that next spring as the American political culture held its conventions and nominated candidates and prepared for an election that now people said might decide whether the Union would hold together or not.

The Democrats held their convention in late-April/early-May in the worst possible place they could hold it. They had scheduled it well ahead of time in Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston was a hotbed of Southern rights and Southern nationalism, if you want to call it that, and Southern secessionism--already it was. Now, the front running candidate of the Democratic Party by 1860--and this man had been working for this for a decade and a half--was, of course, Stephen Douglas of Illinois; the same Stephen Douglas of Popular Sovereignty fame. But Stephen Douglas had made one slip-up. Well he'd made more than one but he'd made one, two really big slip-ups in terms of his fellow Southern Democrats--and he's by far the most prestigious person in their party. But in one of his debates with Abraham Lincoln, one of those incredible debates with Lincoln, the one in Freeport, Illinois-- and much ado was made about this, it was almost a throwaway line, although it wasn't thrown away--Lincoln pushed Douglas and he said, "Do you mean, then, Judge Douglas," as he always called him, he would never call him Senator, "Judge Douglas do you mean then that if the people who settle the Western Territory, your popular sovereignty business, that really means

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the folks can vote it out, right, in spite of what the Dred Scott decision says? The Dred Scott decision just said that because of the Fifth Amendment you cannot stop a person from taking his slaves anywhere he wants." And Lincoln says, "But Judge, what's that done to your popular sovereignty?" And Douglas said, "Well the people can still vote, and if the people vote slavery out then they vote it out." And his fellow Southern Democrats immediately started writing to him and wiring him and saying, "Wait a minute Stephen, do we live in the land of the Dred Scott decision or not?" It became known to Southern Democrats as the so-called Freeport Doctrine. And Douglas kept trying to dance around it, avoid it.

In opposition to the so-called Freeport Doctrine and in opposition to Douglas at this Southern--at the Democratic Party convention--and by the way that Democratic party is--by anyone with his eyes open--the only truly national political party left in America. The hope of saving the Union, just in a political sense, by 1860 was with the Democrats. This Republican Party, as we're soon to see, was a Northern party, almost exclusively. Countering Douglas, Southern Democrats--led by none other than Jefferson Davis, a Senator from Mississippi at that point, a long distinguished member of Congress, Secretary of War, commandant at West Point and so on--they came up with what they now called a Slave Code for the Territories--that's what they called it. And that Slave Code for the Territories was now to be a protection in the Constitution, an explicit protection in the Constitution of slave ownership anywhere in the Western Territories of the United States. They wanted, in essence, not just the Dred Scott decision, Supreme Court case, they wanted a federal--they wanted not just the repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act geographical division, not just the Dred Scott case which said a person has a right to take slaves anywhere they wish, they wanted a explicit federal guarantee of the right to slave ownership, and they wanted it to be a Constitutional Amendment if necessary.

Now, this is why the Democratic Party tore itself apart at Charleston. They had a two-thirds rule. So even though Stephen Douglas did muster a small majority of support in the first balloting, he could not win the nomination. And when Douglas's supporters managed to pass a platform without the so-called Slave Code for the Territories, southern delegates of eight states--they'd all prepared for this--stalked out of the convention. The convention ended, they nominated nobody, and they split into two parties, the Southern Democrats and the Northern Democrats. And everybody knows that when a party does this, it almost guarantees it will lose, and they did. The Southern Democrats agreed to reconvene in Baltimore on June 18th and--I'm sorry, the Northern Democrats reconvened, the so-called official Democratic Party reconvened at Baltimore on June 18. They nominated Stephen Douglas, no surprise. They called themselves the National Democrats. The Southern Democrats, of those eight southern states--it's the Deep South--met in Richmond, Virginia shortly after that and

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nominated John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky--a slaveholder but a moderate, known to be kind of an old Henry Clay moderate, although he'd never been a Whig--to be their candidate for President. And by the end of June, 1860, the Democratic Party had two candidates: Breckenridge, the Southern Democrat; Douglas, the Northern Democrat.

Now, the Republican Party had its convention in Chicago. It was an extraordinary convention. There'd never been one quite like it in American history. It was raucous. There were just parades and waves of people, sometimes hired, sometimes induced in by lots of drink to come into the so-called wigwam, which was this big convention hall of a kind they had constructed in Chicago. It was sometimes called the Shouters Convention because these people were sort of hired to shout for one candidate or the other. What fun and nonsense it must have been. The leading candidate of the Republicans, of course, was William H. Seward. Seward of New York, long term time senator from New York, had strong anti-slavery credentials as a good, solid, free soiler, and, indeed, even had fairly strong abolitionist ties. And he'd been there at the creation of the Republican Party, and he had a kind of a machine, of a sort. But there was this strange insurgency out of Illinois behind a favorite son named Abraham Lincoln, who wasn't all that well known, even though he had become fairly well known in his run against Stephen Douglas in 1858; but of course he'd lost that election, narrowly, to Douglas in '58. He'd had one term in the U.S. House back in the late 1840s during the Mexican War and then he lost on his attempt at re-election. Two years in the House of Representatives, a rather inexperienced, but--it turns out--brilliant politician.

The platform of that Republican Party, which was very important--in these years people were reading platforms, believe it or not. Today, platforms, schmatforms--right? Southerners were really reading the Republican Party platform. The platform of 1860 was a little broader and had somewhat more moderate appeals in it than their 1856 deeply free soil platform had had. They made big appeals in 1860 to create higher federal tariffs, to create free homestead law in the West--these were all appeals to the common man--and to the rights of immigrants, because the Republicans were now successful by the late 1850s at all but dissolving that Nativist Party, the Know-Nothings, or the American Party, and were drawing most nativists--not quite all--but most nativists into the Republican Party, and they'd managed this strange marriage or a kind of a pro-immigrant platform at the same time they're attracting nativists who are as worried about slavery as they were about Catholics. They appealed to a certain anti-Southern feeling, there's no question about that.

Now, Lincoln got the nomination largely because, well, one, the convention was held in his home state; two, William H. Seward had made a fair number of enemies around

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the Republican coalition. He was in the limelight too long, in a sense, you could argue politically, and a lot of Republicans were looking for a candidate who seemed more moderate than that abolitionist Seward. They wanted to run in this election in a way that the Upper South, maybe the border states would actually support them. And this Lincoln, after all he was born in Kentucky, he's kind of a border state guy himself; Seward's just a Yankee. So there's a certain irony in that Lincoln got some support because he wasn't seen as abolitionist. Now, that isn't necessarily as true. Lincoln was on record all over the place as saying such things as he had in 1859. I quote him. "Republicans believe that slavery is wrong and they insist and will continue to insist upon a national policy which recognizes it and deals with it as a wrong. There can be no letting down on this." It's reasonably clear language. [technical adjustments] This is Matthew Brady's famous photographs that he took on the day of Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union Speech in New York, the speech that introduced Lincoln to the East and according to Harold Holzer in a recent book made Lincoln president. Now that's a bit overstated but it's pre-beard, he didn't grow the beard till the next year.

But the crisis was so serious now, with this Northern anti-slavery, free soil, Republican Party, two Democratic Parties, one Southern and one Northern, splitting themselves, that a group of American politicos got together practically overnight, late that summer, 1860, and decided to run yet a fourth candidate. His name was John Bell of Tennessee, and they called themselves the Constitutional Union Party. They drew together some old Whigs. The Whig Party doesn't exist anymore, there's still some old Whigs looking for a political home. They drew some Nativists and Know-Nothings, and they drew border state people who were just frightened of how this mess was possibly going to destroy the Union. Their platform was extremely simple. They pledged themselves simply to, quote, "defense of the Union and enforcement of the law." Now, who could be against that? They were for the Union and law, both nice things. And, almost unbelievably, this party had quite a few followers, overnight.

Now, when the election came--and I'll go back to the map if you'll forgive me. It's worth looking at some quick numbers, more than worth it. This is one of the great four-way races for the presidency in American history. We've only had really one or two other four-ways--1912 was a four-way. And, of course, that guarantees almost you're going to have a minority president; that is, the one who wins is not going to win a majority. And that's exactly what happened in this case. Now Abraham Lincoln, the Republican, was not even on the ballot in ten Slave states. The Republicans weren't even put on the ballot in all of the Deep South. Lincoln carried all of the Northern states, and all of their electoral votes except three in New Jersey. Breckenridge, the Southern Democrat, carried all the Slave states except parts of the Upper South--Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri. I don't know how well you can see that on that map. John Bell, the Constitutional Union candidate--this

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overnight party that just said "please, save the Union, whatever it takes; we need a new national compromise"--Bell won Virginia, Kentucky,and Tennessee, Upper South. Stephen Douglas, who'd been kind of running for president in his heart for fifteen years, won only one state, Missouri. Lincoln received only 26,000 votes in the South, in all the Slave states. He received only about forty of the total raw vote. Sixty percent of Americans who voted in 1860--and they voted in huge percentages, seventy-five, eight percent turnout--sixty percent of all those who voted, did not vote for Abraham Lincoln. But he was elected, and now, of course, the question was what would the South do, with all this rhetoric about Southern unity and the possibility of secession. [technical adjustments]

Well, the Secession Crisis is an unprecedented moment in American history and happily we haven't quite had it since. There are always rumors of Texas wanting to secede and the upper peninsula of Michigan wanting to secede, but nobody quite does secession anymore. We got a lot of States Rights going on but we don't necessarily do secession. Would the South really do it? Now, Lincoln made one thing clear within his party. He made almost no public appearances after the Election of 1860, into that winter. Inaugurations were not held in the nineteenth century until March, as you may know. The interregnum was a long time, four or five months. This was the secession winter of 1860/61. But he made one thing very clear within his party circles, and there's quote after quote about this in private correspondence. He said whatever the South does, that he wanted the Republican Party to stand absolutely firm on one thing, and that was opposition at all costs to the expansion of slavery into the West. He said that was the reason to be, that was why they came into existence, that is what they had been arguing for six years, and they would not give up that line, as he put it.

On December 20th, 1860, South Carolina held a Secession Convention--December 20th--and voted unanimously to secede from the Union. They said in that act that they were, quote, "not in rebellion against the United States." They said they were only exercising, quote, their "sovereign power as a state to withdraw." They rooted their secession, as they always had rooted state sovereignty and State's Rights positions in the old notion of a compact theory of government, that which a state chooses to join, and a central government it shall have the right and power to withdraw from. But the question now was, would anybody join them? And, by the way, they declared themselves the Palmetto Republic. But would anybody join South Carolina? And this is where your book, by Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion, comes right into play here--that wonderfully short and I think quite brilliant treatment of the secession commissioners--as South Carolina was the first state to send out secession commissioners to other states in the Deep South and basically say, "Please join us, we're hanging out on this limb, it's scary out here, and here are the reasons you should join us."

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The next state to go though wasn't until the Ninth of January of '61. It was Mississippi. Mississippi held a Secession Convention. And then several Deep South states fell like dominoes. The next day, January 10, Florida seceded; Alabama on January 11; Georgia--I'm going to come back to Georgia in just a second because it's a very interesting case--Georgia on January 19 in a very divided vote; Louisiana on January 26 and Texas on February 1. By February 1, 1861, the seven states of the Deep South--South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas--had seceded from the Union. They declared themselves the Confederate States of America. They met at their first declared capital of Montgomery, Alabama and they, in effect, appointed--there was no general election at first--they appointed--the representatives of the states--appointed Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as their President. By the time Lincoln would take office in the first week of March and deliver his first inaugural, seven states of the Deep South had formed a new government.

Now, why did they do it? I'm going to have to leave you--we have about seven, eight minutes, which is great--and I want to focus briefly on Georgia to show you that secession was no simple process in many of these states, and there was great division, which we will see later, kind of, come out of its shell in the midst of the war, and to some extent, afterwards in Reconstruction. And then I want to at least leave you today with some explanations of why secession happened, interpretations we've developed over the years of why the South seceded. And I may have to leave you hanging as to just what happened to the rest of the South and so on. But the Upper South doesn't budge, and there are many reasons for that--Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas and so on, Maryland--there are many reasons for that. There was a somewhat less strong attachment to slavery in many of these regions, especially in the mountain regions. There were much more closer economic ties to the North that now caused a whole variety of fears of what's going to happen if there's conflict, or two countries, or war. Fear that the war would actually happen, if there was war, on their soil--you didn't have to be too bright to figure that out. And many people in the Upper South, some of whom have actually voted for Bell in the Constitutional Union Party, still had faith that somehow America would reach a compromise. That the party system would somehow work this through. This was a very difficult patch, but they'd work it through. And there was a spirit, especially in the Upper South, at first, and some of this in Georgia, too, to wait for '64. Wait four years, let this Lincoln Republican Party have its way for awhile, we'll see. We, they would say, still have a majority on the Supreme Court.

Now explanations. Now Georgia, we can't leave Georgia, because Georgia's secession vote was fascinating, and that's what this map in some ways shows you. I don't know if you can see this very well but the darker greenish color up there--is that green to

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you or blue? And the rest is kind of a puke yellow. Those bluish, greenish regions are the regions that tended to be against secession. They're the regions that had the least slavery. They're the mountainous regions. They're the upland regions. And we've now had detailed studies of secession done, and state by state--especially in Georgia, in North Carolina, Alabama, other places--that show us that by far the highest support for secession was in those counties or those regions with the largest numbers of slaves.

And this is where Charles Dew fits right in. Read him closely. What are those secession commissioners arguing when they go from Alabama up to Tennessee to try to convince the Tennessee Legislature? Or the South Carolina Secession Commissioner going to Virginia and sitting down in the Virginia State House, the Virginia Legislature and arguing with these people, "Come join us, come joins us." What do they argue? And he's got document after document. They're arguing for the preservation of white security, of white supremacy. They're arguing for the preservation of a slave economy. They're arguing for the preservation of white political supremacy. They're arguing for resistance against any semblance that those Republicans in the North may somehow represent about racial equality. They're arguing for the preservation of a slave labor system. Put simply, they're arguing for the preservation of a slave society. Was secession about slavery? Read Charles Dew.

All right, in the three minutes I have, let me leave you with some arguments. Why did the South secede? One, is what we might simply call, what I've just argued, the preservation of a slave society, the preservation of a slave system, the preservation of a certain kind of racial control over a society that they now greatly feared would be threatened. And this is, in part, what happened in Georgia in their divided vote, because in Georgia the upper counties of Georgia, those more hilly, mountainous regions of north Georgia, voted against secession. The vote on secession in Georgia on January 19, 1861 was 166 to 130. 130 of those people who were elected to go to the Georgia Secession Convention as delegates voted against it. And here was the theory that was at stake. It was really an argument between waiting till '64, or the argument used by Southern slaveholders now--people from south Georgia, and all over the Deep South--it was the theory of a shrinking south. And I really do believe this is one of the most compelling arguments they had about secession and it's why they were able to muster enough folks to go with them in their revolution. The theory of a shrinking south was the idea that if the Republicans gained control of the federal government--through patronage, through nominations to the Supreme Court, through the much high numbers they had in the House of Representatives, and even now with California and so on, maybe even in the U.S. Senate--that eventually--and if they close off the expansion of slavery in the West, what does that do? It cordons off and it contains and it begins to smother Southern society and the slave system. And the

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theory was that on the rim of the South, in Kentucky, in Missouri, in Maryland, the price of slaves would begin to dwindle. And then what do people do when the price of something goes down? They sell it off. Where are they going to sell those slaves? Can't sell them west, can't sell them to the Caribbean--international slave trade's illegal. They're going to sell them into the Deep South. What happens? The Deep South becomes more and more and more, rather quickly, a pressure cooker of increasingly large numbers of slaves and no place to expand to. Prices of slaves would continue to go down. The value of their most precious asset was at stake, as was their security, their safety.

The second reason--and I'm going to run out of time any minute, I know. Let me just lay these out. I'm going to name them, and then I'm going to leave you dangling here. The second is what I will call the fear thesis. The third is what I will call Southern nationalism. The fourth is what I will call agrarianism. And the fifth is what I will call the honor thesis. I will resume that argument when we resume next time.

But let me leave you with this. Lincoln does get inaugurated, of course, in the midst of this. He inherits a nation divided. And at the end of his first inaugural speech comes those famous words--Lincoln was, of course, capable of leaving passages for us to quote in almost everything he delivered and almost everything that he wrote--but he went to a little Shakespeare at the end of his first inaugural. By the way, that first inaugural was an olive branch--we will never touch slavery where it already exists, we only intend to stop its expansion. You are our brothers, you are our countrymen. Come back, do not leave us. Members of a country, he said, cannot divorce. He used a divorce metaphor. And then he ended with, "I am loathe to close. We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature." That was beautiful poetry and wishful thinking, because in the wake of his inauguration and eventually in the wake of Fort Sumter, four more Southern states are going to join the deep South and I'll pick up that explanation why next time.

[end of transcript]

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