Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  12. The fullest account is Jonathan Katz, Resistance at Christiana: The Fugitive Slave Rebellion, Christiana, Pennsylvania, September 11, 1851 (New York, 1974); quotation from 96.

  13. Foner, History of Black Americans, 54, 57; Rhodes, History of the United States, I, 223; Campbell, Slave Catchers, 152; Katz, Resistance at Christiana, 138.

  14. Katz, Resistance at Christiana, 156–243; quotations from Foner, History of Black Americans, 62, and from J. Miller McKim to William Lloyd Garrison, Dec. 31, 1851, Garrison Papers, Boston Public Library.

  While this was going on, another dramatic rescue took place in Syracuse, New York. In that upstate city lived a black cooper named William McHenry, popularly known as Jerry, who had escaped from slavery in Missouri. His owner's agent made the mistake of having Jerry arrested when an antislavery convention was meeting in Syracuse and the town was also crowded with visitors to the county fair. Two of the North's most prominent abolitionists, Gerrit Smith and Samuel J. May, organized a plan to rescue Jerry from the police station. May, a Unitarian clergyman, told his congregation that God's law took precedence over the fugitive slave law, which "we must trample . . . under foot, be the consequences what they may." A large group of blacks and whites broke into the police station on October 1, grabbed Jerry, sped him away in a carriage, and smuggled him across Lake Ontario to Canada. A grand jury indicted twelve whites and twelve blacks (this time for riot, not treason), but nine of the blacks had already escaped to Canada. Of those who stood trial only one was convicted—a black man who died before he could appeal the verdict.15

  Northern resistance to the fugitive slave law fed the resentment of fire-eaters still seething over the admission of California. "We cannot stay in the Union any longer," said one, "with such dishonor attached to the terms of our remaining." South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi held conventions in 1851 to calculate the value of the Union. The fire-eater William L. Yancey toured Alabama stirring up demands for similar action. The governor of South Carolina assumed that "there is now not the slightest doubt but that . . . the state will secede."16

  But already a reaction was setting in. The highest cotton prices in a decade and the largest cotton crop ever caused many a planter to think twice about secession. Whig unionism reasserted itself under the leadership of Toombs and Stephens. Old party lines temporarily dissolved as a minority of Democrats in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi joined Whigs to form Constitutional Union parties to confront Southern Rights Democrats. Unionists won a majority of delegates to the state conventions, where they advocated "cooperation" with other states rather than secession by individual states. As the Nashville convention had demonstrated,

  15. Campbell, Slave Catchers, 154–57; Foner, History of Black Americans, 42–46.

  16. Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism 1848–1861 (Baton Rouge,1953), 103; Potter, Impending Crisis, 128.

  cooperation was another word for inaction. Unionists won the governorships of Georgia and Mississippi (where Jefferson Davis ran as the Southern Rights candidate), the legislatures of Georgia and Alabama, and elected fourteen of the nineteen congressmen from these three states. Even in South Carolina the separatists suffered a setback. This denouement of two years of disunion rhetoric confirmed the belief of many northerners that secession threats had been mere "gasconade" to frighten the government into making concessions.17

  But a closer analysis would have qualified this conclusion. Unionists proclaimed themselves no less ardent for "the safety . . . rights and honor of the slave holding states" than Southern Rights Democrats. In several states unionists adopted the "Georgia Platform" which declared that while the South did "not wholly approve" of the Compromise of 1850 she would "abide by it as a permanent adjustment of this sectional controversy"—so long as the North similarly abided. BUT—any action by Congress against slavery in the District of Columbia, any refusal to admit a new slave state or to recognize slavery in the new territories would cause Georgia (and other states) to resist, with secession "as a last resort." Above all, "upon a faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law . . . depends the preservation of our much beloved Union."18

  Southern unionism, in other words, was a perishable commodity. It would last only so long as the North remained on good behavior. This truth did much to neutralize the apparent triumph of southern Whig-gery in these 1851 elections. For while Whigs provided the bulk of unionist votes, the Democratic tail of this coalition wagged the Whig dog. The Georgia platform held northern Whigs hostage to support of the fugitive slave law and slavery in the territories. With Fillmore in the White House, the situation seemed stabilized for the time being. But northern Whigs were restless. Most of them were having a hard time swallowing the fugitive slave law. The party was sending a growing number of radical antislavery men to Congress: Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and George W. Julian entered the House in 1849; Benjamin Wade of Ohio came to the Senate in 1851. If such men as these gained control

  17. Potter, Impending Crisis, 122–30; William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery 1828–1856 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 304–10; Craven, Growth of Southern Nationalism, 103–15; Nevins, Ordeal, I, 354–79; J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 188–200; John Barnwell, Love of Order: South Carolina's First Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1982), 123–90.

  18. Potter, Impending Crisis, 128.

  of the party it would splinter along North-South lines. Southern Whigs had barely survived Taylor's apostasy; another such shock would shatter them.

  After the rescue of the fugitive Jerry in Syracuse, furor over the fugitive slave law declined. Perhaps this happened because the legions of law and order finally prevailed. Or perhaps nearly all the eligible fugitives had decamped to Canada. In any event, fewer than one-third as many blacks were returned from the North to slavery in 1852 as in the first year of the law's operation.19 Democrats, conservative Whigs, mercantile associations, and other forces of moderation organized public meetings throughout the North to affirm support of the Compromise including the fugitive slave law.

  These same forces, aided by the Negrophobia that characterized much of the northern population, went further than this. In 1851 Indiana and Iowa and in 1853 Illinois enacted legislation barring the immigration of any black persons, free or slave. Three-fifths of the nation's border between free and slave states ran along the southern boundaries of these states. Intended in part to reassure the South by denying sanctuary to fugitive slaves, the exclusion laws also reflected the racist sentiments of many whites, especially Butternuts. Although Ohio had repealed its Negro exclusion law in 1849, many residents of the southern tier of Ohio counties wanted no part of black people and were more likely to aid the slave catcher than the fugitive.20

  Nevertheless, resentment of the fugitive slave law continued to simmer among many Yankees. Even the heart of an occasional law-and-order man could be melted by the vision of a runaway manacled for return to bondage. Among evangelical Protestants who had been swept into the antislavery movement by the Second Great Awakening, such a vision generated outrage and activism. This was what gave Uncle Tom's Cabin such astounding success. As the daughter, sister, and wife of Congregational clergymen, Harriet Beecher Stowe had breathed the doctrinal air of sin, guilt, atonement, and salvation since childhood. She could clothe these themes in prose that throbbed with pathos as well as bathos. After running serially in an antislavery newspaper for nine months, Uncle Tom's Cabin came out as a book in the spring of 1852. Within a year it sold 300,000 copies in the United States alone—

  19. Campbell, Slave Catchers, 207.

  20. Ibid., 49–62; Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States 1790–1860 (Chicago, 1961), 64–74.

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

  Although Stowe said that God inspired the book, the fugitive slave law served as His mundane instrument. "Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is," said her sister-in-law after Congress passed the law. "I will if I live," vowed Harriet. And she did, writing by candlelight in the kitchen after putting her six children to bed and finishing the household chores. Unforgettable characters came alive in these pages despite a contrived plot and episodic structure that threatened to run away with the author. "That triumphant work," wrote Henry James, who had been moved by it in his youth, was "much less a book than a state of vision."21 Drawing on her observance of bondage in Kentucky and her experiences with runaway slaves during a residence of eighteen years in Cincinnati, this New England woman made the image of Eliza running across the Ohio River on ice floes or Tom enduring the beatings of Simon Legree in Louisiana more real than life for millions of readers. Nor was the book simply an indictment of the South. Some of its more winsome characters were southerners, and its most loathsome villain, Simon Legree, was a transplanted Yankee. Mrs. Stowe (or perhaps God) rebuked the whole nation for the sin of slavery. She aimed the novel at the evangelical conscience of the North. And she hit her mark.

  It is not possible to measure precisely the political influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin. One can quantify its sales but cannot point to votes that it changed or laws that it inspired. Yet few contemporaries doubted its power. "Never was there such a literary coup-de-main as this," said Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In England, Lord Palmerston, who as prime minister a decade later would face a decision whether to intervene on behalf of the South in the Civil War, read Uncle Tom's Cabin three times and admired it not so much for the story as "for the statesmanship of it." As Abraham Lincoln was grappling with the problem of slavery in the summer of 1862, he borrowed from the Library of Congress A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a subsequent volume by Stowe containing documentation on which she had based the novel. When Lincoln met

  21. Charles H. Foster, The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism (Durham, N.C., 1954), 12, 28–29.

  the author later that year, he reportedly greeted her with the words: "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war."22

  Uncle Tom's Cabin struck a raw nerve in the South. Despite efforts to ban it, copies sold so fast in Charleston and elsewhere that booksellers could not keep up with the demand. The vehemence of southern denunciations of Mrs. Stowe's "falsehoods" and "distortions" was perhaps the best gauge of how close they hit home. "There never before was anything so detestable or so monstrous among women as this," declared the New Orleans Crescent. The editor of the Southern Literary Messenger instructed his book reviewer: "I would have the review as hot as hellfire, blasting and searing the reputation of the vile wretch in petticoats who could write such a volume." Within two years proslavery writers had answered Uncle Tom's Cabin with at least fifteen novels whose thesis that slaves were better off than free workers in the North was capsulized by the title of one of them: Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia and Tom Without One in Boston.23 A decade later during the Civil War a South Carolina diarist with doubts of her own about slavery reflected the obsession of southerners with Uncle Tom's Cabin by using it as a constant benchmark to measure the realities of life in the South.24

  In a later age "Uncle Tom" became an epithet for a black person who behaved with fawning servility toward white oppressors. This was partly a product of the ubiquitous Tom shows that paraded across the stage for generations and transmuted the novel into comic or grotesque melodrama. But an obsequious Tom was not the Uncle Tom of Stowe's pages. That Tom was one of the few true Christians in a novel intended to stir the emotions of a Christian public. Indeed, Tom was a Christ

  22. Longfellow quoted in Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Literature (Dallas, 1985), 166; Palmerston quoted in Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York, 1962), 8; Earl Schenck Miers, ed., Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809–1865, 3 vols. (Washington, 1960), III, 121; Herbert Mitgang, ed., Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait (Chicago, 1971), 373. Dramatized versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin quickly reached the stage. At first these plays expressed the novel's themes and augmented its antislavery message. As time went on, however, "Tom Shows" lost much of their antislavery content and became minstrel-show parodies.

  23. Gossett, Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture, 185–211; Craven, Growth of Southern Nationalism, 153–57.

  24. See the frequent references to Mrs. Stowe and her book in C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut's Civil War (New Haven, 1981).

  figure. Like Jesus he suffered agony inflicted by evil secular power. Like Jesus he died for the sins of humankind in order to save the oppressors as well as his own people. Stowe's readers lived in an age that understood this message better than ours. They were part of a generation that experienced not embarrassment but inspiration when they sang the words penned a decade later by another Yankee woman after she watched soldiers march off to war:

  As he died to make men holy,

  Let us die to make men free.

  II

  The South's defensive-aggressive temper in the 1850s stemmed in part from a sense of economic subordination to the North. In a nation that equated growth with progress, the census of 1850 alarmed many southerners. During the previous decade, population growth had been 20 percent greater in the free states than in the slave states. Lack of economic opportunity seemed to account for this ominous fact. Three times as many people born in slave states had migrated to free states as vice versa, while seven-eighths of the immigrants from abroad settled in the North, where jobs were available and competition with slave labor nonexistent. The North appeared to be racing ahead of the South in crucial indices of economic development. In 1850 only 14 percent of the canal mileage ran through slave states. In 1840 the South had possessed 44 percent of the country's railroad mileage, but by 1850 the more rapid pace of northern construction had dropped the southern share to 26 percent.25 Worse still were data on industrial production. With 42 percent of the population, slave states possessed only 18 percent of the country's manufacturing capacity, a decline from the 20 percent of 1840. More alarming, nearly half of this industrial capital was located in the four border states whose commitment to southern rights was shaky.

  The one bright spot in the southern economy was staple agriculture. By 1850 the price of cotton had climbed back to nearly double its low of 5.5 cents a pound in the mid-1840s. But this silver lining belonged to a dark cloud. The states that grew cotton kept less than 5 percent of it at home for manufacture into cloth. They exported 70 percent of it

  25. It should be noted, however, that the principal cities and staple-producing areas of the South were located on or near navigable rivers, which made canals and railroads less important than in the North.

  abroad and the remainder to northern mills, where the value added by manufacture equaled the price that raw cotton brought the South, which in turn imported two-thirds of its clothing and other manufactured goods from the North or abroad. But even this did not fully measure the drain of dollars from the South's export-import economy. Some 15 or 20 percent of the price of raw cotton went to "factors" who arranged credit, insurance, warehousing, and shipping for planters. Most of these factors represented northern or British firms. Nearly all the ships that carried cotton from southern ports and returned with manufactured goods were built and owned by northern or British companies. On their return voyages from Europe they usually put in at northern ports because of the greater volume of trade there, trans-shipping part of their cargoes for coastwise or overland transport southward, thereby increasing freight charges on imported goods to the South.26

  Southern self-condemnation of this "degrading vassalage" to Yankees became almost a litany during the sectional crisis from 1846 to 18
51. "Our whole commerce except a small fraction is in the hands of Northern men," complained a prominent Alabamian in 1847. "Take Mobile as an example— of our Bank Stock is owned by Northern men. . . . Our wholesale and retail business—everything in short worth mentioning is in the hands of men who invest their profits at the North. . . . Financially we are more enslaved than our negroes."27 Yankees "abuse and denounce slavery and slaveholders," declared a southern newspaper four years later, yet "we purchase all our luxuries and necessaries from the North. . . . Our slaves are clothed with Northern manufactured goods [and] work with Northern hoes, ploughs, and other implements.

  26. The data in these paragraphs have been compiled mainly from various schedules of the U. S. census reports for 1840 and 1850. Some of this material is conveniently summarized in tables in Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. (Washington, 1933), II, 1043; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections 1789–1968, 4 vols. (New York, 1971), II, 1128–52; and in Twelftn Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1900, Manufactures, Part II (Vol. 8), 982–89. Tables on canal and railroad mileage and on American foreign trade can be found in George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York, 1951), 71, 451. Harold Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers (Lexington, Ky., 1968), and Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States 1790–1860 (New York, 1961), document the colonial economic status of the South as an exporter of raw materials and an importer of capital and manufactured goods.

  27. Joseph W. Lesesne to John C. Calhoun, Sept. 12, 1847, in J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Correspondence of John C. Calhoun (Washington, 1900), 1134–35.

  . . . The slaveholder dresses in Northern goods, rides in a Northern saddle . . . reads Northern books. . . . In Northern vessels his products are carried to market . . . and on Northern-made paper, with a Northern pen, with Northern ink, he resolves and re-resolves in regard to his rights." How could the South expect to preserve its power, asked the young southern champion of economic diversification James B. D. De Bow, when "the North grows rich and powerful whilst we at best are stationary?"28