Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Read online

  They were, of course, fooling themselves, and Russell knew it. No people who wanted to be ruled by aristocrats ever defended states’ rights with the doggedness that Southerners demonstrated: “Nothing like it has been heard before, and no such Confederation of sovereign states has ever existed in any country in the world.” The Prussian-born Francis Lieber, who taught at South Carolina College in the 1840s and 1850s and who knew an aristocrat when he saw one, thought that the great planters “are arrogant indeed but not aristocrats.” They were, in truth, something even more peculiar.45

  It was not only the South’s mysterious preoccupation with cotton agriculture that seemed to foreign observers to have shaped a culture of Romantic conservatism. It was the particular form of labor that the South used in cotton agriculture—slaves—that seemed to set the region off, not only from the North but also from the rest of the nineteenth century. Western Europeans had kept slaves ever since the end of the Roman Empire, and even in the heyday of classical Greece and Rome, slavery had been an everyday feature of urban and rural life. The reason for this was simple: in ages that knew only the most basic forms of labor-saving machinery, slaves provided a docile workforce that did not require an equal share of one’s wealth or success. Yet slavery was not always successful and slaves were not always docile, and over the course of the Middle Ages the institution of slavery was gradually narrowed to serfdom, which slowly yielded to simple renter, or tenant, status.46

  Still, slavery did not disappear entirely. Western Christianity, although it gave little reason to encourage slavery, did not forbid it, either. The rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman literature in the Renaissance further reminded western Europeans that slavery had once been an important part of great societies that European humanists admired. Above all, the decimation of European society that resulted from the waves of lethal epidemics and national warfare in the fourteenth century created a revived need for cheap labor, and slave labor was the easiest way to fill that bill. By the end of the 1400s, one-tenth of the population in the Portuguese seafaring capital, Lisbon, was in some form of slavery. Over the next 400 years, as Europeans began pushing outward to the Indies and the New World, the demand for enslaved labor kept pace. More than 10 million Africans were snatched from the West African coastal regions, from Senegal to Angola, and shipped as slave labor to the New World; close to half a million of these victims were shipped to North America, with more than half of those sucked directly to the Southern ports of Charleston and Savannah.47

  Slavery in the American South appeared, at first glance, to be simply a continuation of the slavery people knew from the Bible or from Caesar, Livy, or Suetonius. But in many respects, Southern slavery, like the other forms of New World slavery from Columbus onward, was a very different affair from what Europeans had known in ancient times. Like ancient slavery, Southern slavery had been called into being by economic circumstances—in colonial Virginia, by the need for a cheap labor force to harvest tobacco, a crop that became profitable only when harvested in greater volume than one tobacco farmer could undertake. In the New World case, however, there was a significant difference from all the other forms of slavery that Western civilization had known. This time, slavery was based on race.

  Although colonial Southerners searched for cheap sources of labor in white indentured servants, redemptioners, Indians, and prisoners of war, almost all of these forms of forced labor had time limits and legal obligations attached to them, and fugitives could easily blend into the white or Indian population without much fear of being identified and tracked down. While those limitations eventually forced these practices out of existence, before the end of the 1600s Southern white colonists had found a permanent solution to their labor problems by opening their ports and plantations to the thriving transatlantic African slave trade. African slave labor turned out to be easily transferable to Chesapeake tobacco growing. Using captured Africans as slaves paid additional dividends to colonial slaveholders: their complexion marked them off as a different race of beings to European eyes, so fugitives could be more easily identified and recaptured. Because their owners saw all people of African descent as a coherent group—black—their labor could be bounded with an entirely different set of assumptions than would prevail for white labor. This lent the twist of race to Southern slavery, making what had ordinarily been a matter of economic exploitation into a system of racial exploitation as well. 48

  Colonial slavery was also a far more brutal and ruthless system of labor organization than the slaveries of the dim past. American slavery involved from the start the kidnapping of other human beings from their homes, subjecting them to the horrors of transportation across the Atlantic Ocean in fetid and disease-ridden slave ships, where as many as half died en route, and then selling them like cattle; slaves had no real hope of ever obtaining their freedom again. This kind of brutality toward other human beings, which departed dramatically from anything Protestant Americans could read concerning slavery in their Bibles, could not be justified in an avowedly Christian society—unless, of course, it could be shown that the slaves were not really human beings at all.49

  It was here that the Romantics served yet another purpose. Taking de Maistre one step further, Arthur de Gobineau, in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (published in four volumes from 1853 to 1855), located the unbridgeable differences of human nations in the biology of races. “I was gradually penetrated by the conviction,” wrote Gobineau, “that the racial question overshadows all other problems of history, that it holds the key to them all, and that the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny.” Americans seized on Romantic racism to protect themselves from the charge of kidnapping and murder by declaring that black Africans were members of a race that was irreversibly underdeveloped or perhaps even subhuman. “He is by nature a dependent,” argued a contributor to DeBow’s Review in 1861 of blacks, “his normal state is that of subordination to the white man,” and “his nature is eminently parasitical and imitative.” It was impossible, added Mississippi physician William Holcombe, that either “circumstances or culture could ever raise the negro race to any genuine equality with the white.” Even in a northern state such as Illinois, a farmer-politician from DeWitt County, George Lemon, “did not believe they were altogether human beings. … If any gentleman thought they were, he would ask them to… go and examine their nose; (roars of laughter) then look at their lips. Why, their sculls were three inches thicker than white people’s.” 50

  But slavery contained more deadly poisons than racism. A slave, by simple definition, has no legal or social existence: a slave could have no right to hold property, could enjoy no recognition of marriage or family, and could not give testimony (even in self-defense) before the law. Slaves could be beaten and whipped: Josiah Henson, born a slave in 1789 in Charles County, Maryland, remembered that his father had “received a hundred lashes on his back” and had “his right ear… cut off close to his head” for stopping a white overseer from beating Josiah’s mother. Slaves could be bullied and brutalized: Frederick Bailey, also born a slave in Maryland in 1818, was turned over by a fearful owner to a professional “slave-breaker,” Edward Covey, who whipped and beat Bailey without mercy for six months to bring him into “submission.” Slaves could be raped: in 1855, Celia, the slave of Robert Newsom, killed Newsom in self-defense when Newsom attempted to rape her. The Missouri court she appealed to in State of Missouri v. Celia would not admit her testimony, but it did execute her. 51 Above all, slaves could be bought and sold, and slave families broken up for auction, without any regard for ties of kinship or marriage. Francis Lieber was appalled to happen upon “a group of well-dressed negros” in Washington, “loudly talking while one them screemed and groaned and beat himself.”

  I hurried toward them asking what was the matter, supposing at the time the man had been seized with the cholera. Only think said a woman, he just came home and found his house em
pty—wife, children—all gone. … Her master sold them all, and he did not know a word of it. My God, my God! And this is suffered? And slavery yet defended! Oh, God, what a black thing is man! 52

  And yet slaveholders could not have everything their own way, no matter what the law or race had to say. A black slave was a human being, and any master who aspired to civilized refinement had to recognize that fact just to get any work out of a slave at all. What was more, no master could easily deny that slaves spoke the same language, worshipped the same God, and obstinately behaved like people. It also went without saying that a beaten or dead slave was one less production unit, and in a system where the labor force represented the owner’s capital investment, it did not do to live too much by the whip alone. Many slave owners felt paralyzed by guilt, not necessarily because of slavery but because of the abuses endemic to Southern slaveholding. Nor did African American slaves wait upon the indulgence of whites to work out their own degrees of independence. They formed their own black Christian congregations, which became (and have remained) the center of African American community life; they sang their own songs; and to a degree that ordinarily would seem unimaginable, they kept their fragile families together. For their part, white masters frequently had little choice but to accept these manifestations of extremely human behavior and quietly tolerate them. All arrangements of employers and labors are negotiations, and the practical realization that real human beings were providing free goods and services induced among whites a sense of obligation that sometimes cushioned the slaves from the excesses of white behavior that the law otherwise permitted.53

  And as whites made the grudging concession that their slaves were human beings after all, this produced a clamorous urge on the part of white Southerners to justify the continuation of slavery on the grounds that slavery was actually a benefit of sorts to African Americans. The captain of the steamboat that carried William Howard Russell down the Alabama River in 1861 insisted on arranging a “dance of Negroes … on the lower deck” to demonstrate “how ‘happy they were.’” “Yes sir,” Russell’s host intoned, “they’re the happiest people on the face of the earth.” At almost the same moment, in Georgia, Susan Cornwall Shewmake was writing, “It is certain there is not so much want among them. They are the happiest laboring people on the globe.” Georgia senator T. R. R. Cobb repeated, “Our slaves are the most happy and contented, best fed and best clothed and best paid laboring population in the world, and I would add, also, the most faithful and least feared.” Concurrently in Virginia, Governor Henry Wise was claiming that “the descendants of Africa in bondage” find themselves in “bodily comfort, morality, enlightenment, Christianity. … universally fed and clothed well, and they are happy and contented.”54

  This was, said Russell, the “universal hymn of the South.” At the same time, though, the guilt that provoked white people to justify slavery on the grounds of its good works also provoked revealing displays of disgust and helplessness over slaveholding. Senator James Chesnut of South Carolina told his wife, Mary Boykin Chesnut, that his slaves owed him $50,000 for the food and clothing he had given them; when asked if his slaves had ever attempted to run away, he exclaimed, “Never—pretty hard work to keep me from running away from them.” In her diary, Mary Chesnut suggested:

  Take this estate. John C. says he could rent it from his grandfather and give him fifty thousand a year—then make twice as much more for himself. What does it do, actually? It all goes back in some shape to what are called slaves here—operatives, tenants, &c elsewhere. … This old man’s [money] goes to support a horde of idle dirty Africans—while he is abused and vilifed as a cruel slave owner. … I hate slavery.55

  Richard Taylor, a Louisianan and the son of a president, commented bitterly long after slavery had disappeared that “extinction of slavery was expected by all and regretted by none.” Even in the throes of slavery, enslaved African Americans imposed a strong psychological tension on their masters that robbed the whites of whatever joys there were to be had in owning another human being.56

  And so, once again, the question emerged: why, if slavery held so much woe, not only for black slaves but for white masters as well, did Southerners cling to slavery as they clung to cotton agriculture? The easiest answer available was a Romantic one: because slavery promoted a peculiar culture, a certain way of living, for which white Southerners were willing to pay the price. “It was a medieval civilization, out of accord with the modern tenor of our time,” Fanny Andrews, a Georgian, recalled, as though she had been living rather than merely reading a Walter Scott novel. “It stood for gentle courtesy, for knightly honor, for generous hospitality; it stood for fair and honest dealing of man with man in the common business of life, for lofty scorn of cunning greed and ill-gotten gain through fraud and deception of our fellowmen. …” James Walker, a Charleston lawyer, went so far as to insist that “ours is in truth not so much slavery as feudality.” 57 This was an ingenious rationalization. The problem is that it is too simple.

  The slave-based cotton agriculture of the Southern states was an intricate and complicated system in which appearances were not always uniform and not always the safest guide. Alongside the Romantic image of magnolias at midnight lay a relentless economic rationality; alongside the facade of racial reciprocity lay resistance and revolt; and alongside the casual tolerance of slave labor in producing their most lucrative commodity, Southerners displayed a fierce personal independence and a resentment at condescension and control. Southerners veered between assertions that theirs was a thoroughgoing slave society, in which “every fibre… is so interwoven with it, that it cannot be abolished without the destruction of the other,” and realizations that Southerners were as much participants in a liberal democratic order as any other Americans, though one inexplicably incorporating the quirk of slave labor. This uncertain swinging between two poles would come back to cripple them in the 1860s when Southerners had to decide whether the survival of slavery or the survival of Confederate nationalism was more important to them. 58

  The South was divided in other ways as well. Geographically and socially, there were actually three slaveholding Souths, embracing masters, slaves, and nonslaveholding whites, and spread across an uneven and uncooperative geography. The first South anyone who crossed the Ohio River or the Mason-Dixon Line found was the Border South (Kentucky, Maryland, northern Virginia); below this lay the Middle South (Arkansas, northern Louisiana, Tennessee, southern Virginia, and the upcountry of Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina); and bordering the Gulf and south Atlantic coastlines was the Deep South (New Orleans to Charleston).

  In the Border South, cotton had long since ceased to be the dominant crop and slavery the primary labor system. There, soil exhaustion drove fortune-hunting planters southward, slaves in tow; or, for those who did not plan on moving themselves, the proximity of the border states to the free states of the North, making slave flight as easy as it would be anywhere in the South, would persuade planters who stayed to sell off their slaves to the Deep South at a tidy profit. Either way, slavery was an institution in motion, mostly southward. One North Carolinian who lived “on one of the great thoroughfares of travel… on the Yadkin River” recalled seeing “as many as 2,000 slaves in a single day going South” during the prewar years, “mostly in the hands of speculators.” By 1860, Virginia and Maryland had only 18 percent of all Southern slaves within their borders, and only a quarter of the South’s cotton output; less than a third of the populations of Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee, and Virginia were slaves (compared to 57 percent in South Carolina, 45 percent in Alabama, 55 percent in Mississippi, and 47 percent in Louisiana). In eastern Tennessee, only 10 percent of the population were slaves, and most of Tennessee grew not cotton but wheat. 59 In this environment, it was easier to find the remaining slave owners imbued with the Romantic conviction that they were upholding, to their own financial loss, an economic system that preserved the ancient atmosph
ere of the castle, moat, and manor.

  But move into Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and there the plantations not only were newer but also constituted some of the richest cotton- and sugarcane-growing soil on the face of the earth. Between 1790 and 1860, nearly a quarter of the slave population was moved into the new cotton states; the slave population of the Border States, meanwhile, fell by almost half. By the 1850s, large-scale cotton plantations and large-scale slave labor were concentrated mainly along the lower Mississippi River valley (where slaves constituted as much as 70 percent of the population of the fertile cotton-growing districts) and the Carolina and Georgia coastlines; a lesser concentration of slavery and cotton growing stretched in a broad belt from southern Arkansas through central Mississippi and Alabama and up through the Carolinas to the shores of Chesapeake Bay. 60

  On good, new Mississippi valley soils, there were immense profits to be made, and Romantic paternalism be damned. Harriet Martineau toured cotton plantations in Alabama in the mid-1830s where the profit margin was 35 percent. “One planter whom I knew had bought fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of land within two years. … He expected to make, that season, fifty or sixty thousand dollars of his growing crop.” Joseph H. Ingraham in 1835 had met raw new cotton planters in southwestern Mississippi with net annual incomes between $20,000 and $40,000. Making the adroit move to the most advantageous location could generate immense and quick wealth in cotton. The cotton crop could gross $74 million per annum in the 1840s; a decade later, it would sell for $169 million, and between 1856 and 1860, it topped $207 million a year. In 1860, half of the ten wealthiest states in the Union were slave states, and six of the top ten in terms of per capita wealth were slave states; calculated solely on the basis of the wealth of white inhabitants, eight of the top ten wealthiest states in the Union were slave states. The single wealthiest county in the United States, in terms of per capita wealth, was Adams County, Mississippi. It was ambitious Alabama and Mississippi planters, and not avaricious Northern factory owners, that Martineau described as being, “from whatever motive, money-getters; and few but money-getting qualifications are to be looked for in them.” Slave owners might preen themselves upon their gentry manners, but they had no objection at all to making handsome profits.61