The political effects of the depression may have equaled its economic consequences. It took time, however, for political crosscurrents to settle into a pattern that benefited Republicans. The initial tendency to blame banks for the panic seemed to give Democrats an opportunity to capitalize on their traditional anti-bank posture. They did reap some political profits in the Old Northwest. But elsewhere the issue had lost much of its old partisan salience because Democrats had become almost as pro-bank as the opposition. Republicans of Whig origin pointed the finger of blame at the absence of a national bank to ride herd over
48. Quoted in James L. Huston, "A Political Response to Industrialism: The Republican Embrace of Protectionist Labor Doctrine," JAH, 70 (1983), 49.
49. Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (New York, 1957), ch. 4.
irresponsible practices of state banks. Several Republicans called for revival of something like the Second Bank of the United States from the grave in which Andrew Jackson had buried it two decades earlier. Democratic tariff policies also came under indictment from Whiggish Republicans.
Although no modern historian has attributed the depression of 1857–58 to low tariffs, Horace Greeley and his fellow protectionists did so. The Walker Tariff enacted by Democrats in 1846 had remained in effect until 1857. It had been mildly protectionist with average duties of about 20 percent, the lowest since 1824. Another Democratic tariff passed in March 1857 lowered duties still further and enlarged the free list. The depression began a few months later. Greeley not surprisingly saw a causal connection. "No truth of mathematics," intoned the New York Tribune, "is more clearly demonstrable than that the ruin about us is fundamentally attributable to the destruction of the Protective Tariff."50
Republicans made tariff revision one of their priorities, especially in Pennsylvania, where recovery of the iron industry lagged behind other sectors. The argument that the lower 1857 duties had enabled British industry to undersell American railroad iron carried great weight among workers as well as ironmasters. Indeed, Republicans pitched their strongest tariff appeals to labor, which had more votes than management. "We demand that American laborers shall be protected against the pauper labor of Europe," they declared. A higher tariff would "give employment to thousands of mechanics, artisans, laborers, who have languished for months in unwilling idleness." Such arguments seemed to work, for in the 1858 elections Republicans scored large gains in Pennsylvania industrial districts.51
The tariff issue provides an illustration of how political fallout from the depression exacerbated sectional tensions. In each of three congressional sessions between the Panic and the election of 1860, a coalition of Republicans and protectionist Democrats tried to adjust the 1857 duties slightly upward. Every time an almost solid South combined with half or more of the northern Democrats to defeat them. With an economy
50. New York Tribune, Oct. 22, 1857, quoted in Philip S. Foner, Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict (Chapel Hill, 1941), 142n.
51. Lebanon (Pa.) Courier, quoted in Huston, "A Political Response to Industrialism," loc. cit., 53; New York Tribune, quoted in Van Vleck, Panic of 1857, 104; Tribune Almanac, 1859, pp. 52–53.
based on the export of raw materials and the import of manufactured goods, southerners had little interest in raising the prices of what they bought in order to subsidize profits and wages in the North. Thus Congress remained, in the view of one bitter Republican, "shamelessly prostituted, in a base subserviency to the Slave Power." A Pennsylvanian discerned a logical connection between the South's support for the Lecompton constitution and its opposition to tariff adjustment: "popular rights disregarded in Kansas; free industry destroyed in the States."52
Sectional alignments were even more clear on three land-grant measures of the 1850s: a homestead act, a Pacific railroad act, and grants to states for the establishment of agricultural and mechanical colleges. The idea of using the federal government's vast patrimony of land for these purposes had been around for a decade or more. All three measures took on added impetus from the depression of 1857–58. Free land would help farmers ruined by the Panic get a new start. According to the theories of labor reformer George Henry Evans, homesteads would also give unemployed workingmen an opportunity to begin new lives as independent landowners and raise the wages of laborers who remained behind. Construction of a transcontinental railroad would tap the wealth of the West, bind the country together, provide employment, and increase the prosperity of all regions. Agricultural and mechanical colleges would make higher education available to farmers and skilled working-men. All three measures reflected the Whig ideology of a harmony of interests between capital and labor, which would benefit mutually from economic growth and improved education. Along with a tariff to protect American workers and entrepreneurs, these land-grant measures became the new Republican free-labor version of Henry Clay's venerable American System. Republicans could count on more northern Democratic support for the land bills than for the tariff, especially from Douglas Democrats in the Old Northwest.
But most southerners opposed these measures. The homestead act would fill up the West with Yankee settlers hostile to slavery. "Better for us," thundered a Mississippian, "that these territories should remain a waste, a howling wilderness, trod only by red hunters than be so settled."53 Southerners also had little interest in using the public lands to
52. Foner, Business and Slavery, 141; Huston, "A Political Response to Industrialism," loc. cit., 53.
53. Columbus (Miss.) Democrat, quoted in Avery O. Craven, An Historian and the Civil War (Chicago, 1964), 38.
establish schools most of whose students would be Yankees. Nor did they have much stake in the construction of a Pacific railroad with an expected eastern terminus at St. Louis or Chicago. Southern senators provided most of the votes in 1858 to postpone consideration of all three bills. At the next session of Congress a series of amendments to the railroad bill whittled it down to a meaningless provision for preliminary bids. In February 1859 Republicans and two-thirds of the northern Democrats in the House passed a homestead act. Vice-President Breck-inridge of Kentucky broke a tie vote in the Senate to defeat it. But enough northern Democrats joined Republicans in both Senate and House to pass the land-grant college act. Buchanan paid his debts to southern Democrats by vetoing it.
A somewhat different path led to a similar outcome in the first session of the 36th Congress (1859–60), elected in 1858 and containing more Republicans than its predecessor. Disagreement over a northern vs. a southern route once again killed the Pacific railroad bill. The South also continued to block passage of a land-grant college act over Buchanan's veto. But a homestead act reached the president's desk. The House had passed it by a vote in which 114 of the 115 Ayes came from northern members and 64 of the 65 Nays from southern members. After much parliamentary maneuvering the Senate passed a modified version of the bill. A conference committee worked out a compromise, but Buchanan vetoed it as expected. Southern opposition in the Senate blocked an attempt to pass it over his veto.54
The southern checkmate of tariff, homestead, Pacific railroad, and land-grant college acts provided the Republicans with vote-winning issues for 1860. During the effort to pass the homestead bill in 1859, Republicans tangled with Democrats over another measure that would also become an issue in 1860—the annexation of Cuba. Manifest Destiny was a cause that united most Democrats across sectional lines. Whatever they thought of slavery in Kansas, they agreed on the desirability of annexing Cuba with its 400,000 slaves. Both Douglas and Buchanan spoke in glowing terms of Cuba; the signs seemed to point to a rapprochement of warring Democratic factions, with Cuba as the glue to piece them together. In his December 1858 message to Congress,
54. This account of the fate of these three measures in the 35th and the 36th Congress has been drawn mainly from Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York, 1948), 192, 231–33; and fr
om Nevins, Emergence, I, 444–55, II, 188–95.
Buchanan called for new negotiations with Spain to purchase Cuba. Senator John Slidell of Louisiana introduced a bill to appropriate $30 million for a down payment. The foreign relations committee approved it in February 1859. For the next two weeks the $30 million bill was the main topic of Senate debate. Republicans rang all the changes of the slave power conspiracy, prompting southerners to reply in kind while northern Democrats kept a low profile. Republican strategy was to delay the bill until adjournment on March 4, 1859. At the same time they hoped to bring the homestead bill, already passed by the House, to a vote. Democrats refused to allow this unless Republicans permitted a vote on Cuba. The question, said the irreverent Ben Wade of Ohio, was "shall we give niggers to the niggerless, or land to the landless?"55 In the end the Senate did neither, so each party prepared to take the issues to the voters in 1860.
Meanwhile a clash between Douglas and southern Democrats over the issue of a federal slave code for territories had reopened the party's Lecompton wounds. The Senate Democratic caucus fired the first round by removing Douglas from his chairmanship of the committee on territories. Then on February 23, 1859, southern senators lashed out at Douglas in language usually reserved for Black Republicans. The Little Giant's sin was an assertion that he would never vote for a slave code to enforce bondage in a territory against the will of a majority living there. Popular sovereignty, said Jefferson Davis, who led the attack on Douglas, was "full of heresy." A refusal to override it would make Congress "faithless to the trust they hold at the hands of the people of the States." "We are not . . . to be cheated," the Mississippian declared, by men who "seek to build up a political reputation by catering to the prejudice of a majority to exclude the property of a minority." For such men, said Davis as he looked Douglas in the eye, the South had nothing but "scorn and indignation."56
This debate registered the rise in rhetorical temperature during the late 1850s. Southern aggressiveness was bolstered by self-confidence growing out of the Panic of 1857. The depression fell lightly on the South. Cotton and tobacco prices dipped only briefly before returning to their high pre-Panic levels. The South's export economy seemed insulated from domestic downturns. This produced a good deal of boasting below the Potomac, along with expressions of mock solicitude for
55. CG, 35 Cong., 2 Sess., 1354.
56. Ibid., 1247, 1248, 1255, 1257.
the suffering of unemployed wage slaves in the North. "Who can doubt, that has looked at recent events, that cotton is supreme?" asked James Hammond of South Carolina in his celebrated King Cotton speech to the Senate on March 4, 1858. "When the abuse of credit had destroyed credit and annihilated confidence; when thousands of the strongest commercial houses in the world were coming down . . . when you came to a dead lock, and revolutions were threatened, what brought you up? . . . We have poured in upon you one million six hundred thousand bales of cotton just at the moment to save you from destruction. . . . We have sold it for $65,000,000, and saved you." Slavery demonstrated the superiority of southern civilization, continued Hammond. "In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. . . . It constitutes the very mudsill of society. . . . Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. . . . Your whole hireling class of manual laborers and 'operatives,' as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated . . . yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated."57
This mudsill theme was becoming increasingly visible in southern propaganda. The most extreme expression of it occurred in the writings of George Fitzhugh. A frayed-at-the-elbows scion of a Virginia First Family, Fitzhugh wrote prolifically about "the failure of free society." In 1854 and 1857 he gathered his essays into books entitled Sociology for the South and Cannibals All! The latter was published a few weeks before the Panic of 1857 and seemed almost to predict it. Free labor under capitalism was a war of each against all, wrote Fitzhugh, a sort of social cannibalism. "Slavery is the natural and normal condition of society," he maintained. "The situation of the North is abnormal and anomalous." To bestow "upon men equality of rights, is but giving license to the strong to oppress the weak" because "capital exercises a more perfect compulsion over free laborers than human masters over slaves; for free laborers must at all times work or starve, and slaves are supported whether they work or not." Therefore "we slaveholders say you must recur to domestic slavery, the oldest, the best, the most common form of Socialism" as well as "the natural and normal condition of the laboring men, white or black."58
57. Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond, of SouthCarolina (New York, 1866), 317–19.
58. Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 40, 32, 31; Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, in Eric L. McKitrick, ed., Slavery Defended: The View of the Old South (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963), 38; article by Fitzhugh in Richmond Enquirer, and extract from Sociology for the South, in Harvey Wish, ed., Ante-Bellum: Writings of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper on Slavery (New York, 1960), 9, 85.
Fitzhugh's ideas flowed a bit outside the mainstream of the proslavery argument, which distinguished sharply between free whites and slave blacks and assigned an infinite superiority to the former because they were white. But while Fitzhugh's notions were eccentric they were not unique. Some proslavery proponents drew a distinction between southern yeomen and northern workers or farmers. Southerners were superior because they lived in a slave society. Yankees were perhaps fit only to be slaves. To explain this, southerners invented a genealogy that portrayed Yankees as descendants of the medieval Anglo-Saxons and southerners as descendants of their Norman conquerors. These divergent bloodlines had coursed through the veins of the Puritans who settled New England and the Cavaliers who colonized Virginia. "The Southern people," concluded an article in the Southern Literary Messenger, "come of that race . . . recognized as Cavaliers . . . directly descended from the Norman Barons of William the Conqueror, a race distinguished in its earliest history for its warlike and fearless character, a race in all times since renowned for its gallantry, chivalry, honor, gentleness, and intellect."59 If matters came to a fight, therefore, one Norman southerner could doubtless lick ten of those menial Saxon Yankees.
Whether or not southern superiority resulted from "the difference of race between the Northern people and the Southern people," as the Southern Literary Messenger would have it, the vaunted virtues of a free-labor society were a sham. "The great evil of Northern free society," insisted a South Carolina journal, "is that it is burdened with a servile class of mechanics and laborers, unfit for self-government, yet clothed with the attributes and powers of citizens." A Georgia newspaper was even more emphatic in its distaste. "Free Society! we sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? . . . The prevailing class one meets with [in the North] is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman's body servant."60
59. Southern Literary Messenger, 30 (June 1860), 401–9.
60. South Carolina newspaper quoted in Nevins, Ordeal, II, 498; Muscogee Herald, quoted in New York Tribune, Sept. 10, 1856.
Northern newspapers picked up and reprinted such articles. Yankees did not seem to appreciate southern sociology. Sometimes the response was good-humored, as demonstrated by a banner at one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates: "SMALL-FISTED FARMERS, MUD SILLS OF SOCIETY, GREASY MECHANICS, FOR A. LINCOLN." Other reactions were angrier and sometimes unprintable. No doubt some of the soldiers who marched through Georgia and South Carolina with Sherman a few years later had read these descriptions of themselves as greasy mechanics and servile farmers.
In any event
, northerners gave as good as they got in this warfare of barbs and insults. In a famous campaign speech of 1858, William H. Seward derided the southern doctrine that "labor in every society, by whomsoever performed, is necessarily unintellectual, groveling, and base." The idea had produced the backwardness of the South, said Seward, the illiteracy of its masses, the dependent colonial status of its economy. In contrast "the free-labor system educates all alike, and by opening all the fields of industrial employment to . . . all classes of men . . . brings into the highest possible activity all the physical, moral and social energies of the whole State." A collision between these two systems impended, "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will . . . become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation."61
Southerners claimed that free labor was prone to unrest and strikes. Of course it was, said Abraham Lincoln during a speaking tour of New England in March 1860 that coincided with the shoemakers' strike. "I am glad to see that a system prevails in New England under which laborers CAN strike when they want to (Cheers). . . . I like the system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere. (Tremendous applause.)" The glory of free labor, said Lincoln, lay in its open competition for upward mobility, a competition in which most Americans finished ahead of where they started in life. "I want every man to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition." That was the significance of the irrepressible conflict and of the house divided, concluded Lincoln, for if the South got its way "free labor that can strike will give way to slave labor that cannot!"62
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