Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  The harshest indictment of the South's social system came from the

  61. George E. Baker, ed., The Works of William H. Seward, 5 vols. (New York, 1853–84), IV, 289–92.

  62. CWL, IV, 24, 8.

  pen of a white southerner, Hinton Rowan Helper. A self-appointed spokesman for nonslaveholding whites, Helper was almost as eccentric in his own way as George Fitzhugh. Of North Carolina yeoman stock, he had gone to California in the gold rush to make his fortune but returned home disillusioned. Brooding on the conditions he perceived in the Carolina upcountry, Helper decided that "slavery lies at the root of all the shame, poverty, ignorance, tyranny and imbecility of the South." Echoing the free-soil argument, Helper maintained that slavery degraded all labor to the level of bond labor. Planters looked down their noses at nonslaveholders and refused to tax themselves to provide a decent school system. "Slavery is hostile to general education," Helper declared in his 1857 book The Impending Crisis. "Its very life, is in the ignorance and stolidity of the masses." Data from the 1850 census—which had alarmed the southern elite itself a few years earlier—furnished Helper information that, used selectively, enabled him to "prove" the superior productivity of a free-labor economy. The hay crop of the North alone, he claimed, was worth more than the boasted value of King Cotton and all other southern staples combined. Helper urged nonslaveholding whites to use their votes—three-fourths of the southern total—to overthrow "this entire system of oligarchical despotism" that had caused the South to "welter in the cesspool of ignorance and degradation. . . . Now is the time for them to assert their rights and liberties . . . [and] strike for Freedom in the South."63

  If Helper had published this book in North Carolina or in Baltimore, where he was living when he completed it, The Impending Crisis might have languished in obscurity. Endless recitals of statistics dulled its cutting edge of criticism. But no southern publisher would touch it. So Helper lugged his manuscript to New York, where it was published in the summer of 1857. The New York Tribune recognized its value to Republicans and printed an eight-column review. This caused readers both North and South to take notice. Helper had probably overstated the disaffection of nonslaveholders from the southern social system. Outside the Appalachian highlands many of them were linked to the ruling class by ties of kinship, aspirations for slave ownership, or mutual dislike of Yankees and other outsiders. A caste system as well as a form of labor, slavery elevated all whites to the ruling caste and thereby reduced the potential for class conflict. However poor and illiterate some

  63. From Helper, Impending Crisis of the South, as reprinted in Wish, ed., Ante-Bellum, 201, 253, 187, 181, 202.

  whites may have been, they were still white. If the fear of "nigger equality" caused most of the northern working class to abhor Republicans even where blacks constituted only 2 or 3 percent of the population, this fear operated at much higher intensity where the proportion of blacks was tenfold greater. But while Helper exaggerated yeoman alienation in the South, so also did many slaveholders who felt a secret foreboding that nonslaveowners in regions like Helper's Carolina upcountry might turn against their regime. Several southern states therefore made it a crime to circulate The Impending Crisis. This of course only attracted more attention to the book. A Republican committee raised funds to subsidize an abridged edition in 1859 to be scattered far and wide as a campaign document. The abridgers ensured a spirited southern reaction by adding such captions as "The Stupid Masses of the South" and "Revolution—Peacefully if we can, Violently if we must."64 Sixty-eight Republican congressmen endorsed a circular advertising the book.

  One of them was John Sherman of Ohio, a moderate ex-Whig who later confessed that he had signed the endorsement without reading the book. Sherman's signature caused another donnybrook over the election of a speaker of the House when the 36th Congress convened in December 1859. Though Republicans outnumbered Democrats 113 to 101 in the House, upper-South Americans held the balance of power. Republicans nominated Sherman for speaker because he seemed temperate enough to attract a few votes from these former Whigs. But discovery of his endorsement of Helper's book set off an uproar that inhibited slave-state congressmen from voting for him. Through two months and forty-four ballots the House remained deadlocked on the edge of violence. Southerners denounced Helper, his book, and anyone connected with either as "a traitor, a renegade, an apostate . . . infamous . . . abominable . . . mendacious . . . incendiary, insurrectionary."65 Most congressmen came armed to the sessions; the sole exception seemed to be a former New England clergyman who finally gave in and bought a pistol for self-defense. Partisans in the galleries also carried weapons. One southerner reported that a good many slave-state congressmen expected and wanted a shootout on the House floor: they "are willing to fight the question out, and to settle it right there. . . . I can't help

  64. Potter, Impending Crisis, 387.

  65. Ibid.; Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism 1848–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1953), 251; Edward Channing, A History of the United States, 6 vols. (New York, 1905–25), VI, 208n.

  wishing the Union were dissolved and we had a Southern confederacy." The governor of South Carolina informed one of his state's congressmen on December 20, 1859: "If . . . you upon consultation decide to make the issue of force in Washington, write or telegraph me, and I will have a regiment in or near Washington in the shortest possible time."66

  Through all this the Republicans supported Sherman, who consistently fell a few votes short of a majority. Democrats and Americans tried several combinations; a Douglas Democrat could have been elected with American support had not lower-South Democrats refused to support him. Southerners also rejected the precedent of suspending the rules to allow a plurality to elect a speaker. Having organized the Senate with sixteen of the twenty-two committees headed by southern chairmen, they were quite ready to keep the House unorganized until they got their way. "Better the wheels of government should stop [and the Union] demonstrate itself to be a failure and find an end," wrote southerners privately to each other, "than our principles, our honor be infringed upon."67 To prevent this outcome, Sherman finally withdrew, and the Republicans nominated lackluster William Pennington of New Jersey, who because of his support of the fugitive slave law a decade earlier picked up enough border-state support to win the speakership.

  Nothing yet had so dramatized the parting bonds of Union as this struggle in the House. The hair-trigger temper of southerners is easier to understand if one keeps in mind that the contest opened just three days after John Brown was hanged in Virginia for trying to incite a slave insurrection. Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry was an ominous beginning to the fateful twelve months that culminated in the presidential election of 1860.

  66. Quotations from Nevins, Emergence, II, 121–22.

  67. E. W. Marshall to William Porcher Miles, Jan. 20, 1860, in Steven A. Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York, 1970), 109; Edward C. Bullock to Clement C. Clay, Dec. 30, 1859, in J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 390.

  7

  The Revolution of 1860

  I

  Like Dred Scott, John Brown lived the first fifty-odd years of his life in obscurity. Unlike Scott, he attained notoriety not through the law but by lawlessness. Except for a brief reappearance in the Kansas wars, however, Brown's activities for three years after 1856 were more mysterious than notorious. He made several trips east to raise money for the freedom fight in Kansas. As he shuttled back and forth, Brown evolved a plan to strike against slavery in its heartland. Like the Old Testament warriors he admired and resembled, he yearned to carry the war into Babylon. He studied books on guerrilla warfare and on slave revolts. Fascinated by the ability of small bands to hold off larger forces in mountainous terrain, Brown conceived the idea of a raid into the Appalachian foothills of Virginia. From there he would move southward along the mountains attracting slaves to his banner. In May 1858 Brown jo
urneyed with eleven white followers to a community of former slaves in Chatham, Canada. Thirty-four blacks met secretly with Brown's group to adopt a "provisional constitution" for the republic of liberated slaves to be established in the mountains. The delegates elected Brown commander in chief of the army of this new nation.1

  John Brown had never shared the commitment of most abolitionists

  1. Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (New York, 1970), 243–47.

  to nonviolence. Not for him was the Christ-like martyrdom of Uncle Tom. Brown's God was the Jehovah who drowned Pharoah's mercenaries in the Red Sea; his Jesus was the angry man who drove moneychangers from the temple. "Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin," was his favorite New Testament passage (Hebrews 9:22). Bondage was "a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war" of masters against slaves, declared the preamble of Brown's Chatham constitution. Victory over these "thieves and murderers" could be won only by a revolution. "Talk! talk! talk!" exclaimed Brown in disgust after attending a meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. "That will never free the slaves. What is needed is action—action."2

  Events during the 1850s had converted some abolitionists to Brown's view. Violence had won the Southwest from Mexico; threats of violence by southerners in Congress had opened most of it to slavery. Armed filibusters tried to win Cuba and Central America for slavery. Closer to home, the fugitive slave law did more than anything else to discredit nonviolence. Before 1850 Frederick Douglass had been a pacifist. "Were I asked the question whether I would have my emancipation by the shedding of one single drop of blood," he said in the 1840s, "my answer would be in the negative. . . . The only well grounded hope of the slave for emancipation is the operation of moral force." But a month after enactment of the fugitive slave law he changed his tune and advocated "forcible resistance" to the law. "Slave-holders . . . tyrants and despots have no right to live," said Douglass now. "The only way to make the fugitive slave law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers."3 One of Douglass's favorite sayings became, "who would be free must himself strike the blow." Like Frantz Fanon and other philosophers of anticolonial revolution a century later, Douglass came to believe that only through violence could the oppressed earn self-respect and the respect of their oppressors.

  Many free soilers in Kansas also concluded that as the slave power had lived by the sword, it must die by the sword. In 1855 a New England Garrisonian, Charles Stearns, went to Lawrence, Kansas, to open a store. Having once served a term in jail rather than serve in the militia, Stearns retained his pacifist principles during his first months in the territory. But eventually he succumbed, as he explained in a letter

  2. Ibid., 234, 271–72.

  3. Carleton Mabee, Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 through the Civil War (New York, 1970), 291–95.

  to his former mentor Garrison: "The cold-blooded murder, last night, of one of our best citizens, has decided me. I am sorry to deny the principles of Jesus Christ, after contending for them so long, but it is not for myself that I am going to fight. It is for God and the slaves." Another convert was Gerrit Smith, wealthy landowner and philanthropist of upstate New York. A vice president of the American Peace Society, Smith declared in 1856 that "hitherto I have opposed the bloody abolition of slavery." But when the slave power "begins to march its conquering bands into [Kansas] . . . I and ten thousand other peace men are not only ready to have it repulsed with violence, but pursued even unto death with violence."4

  Smith became a member of the "Secret Six" who backed John Brown's scheme to invade the South. Like Smith, the other five were men of means and standing: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Transcendental clergyman and writer; Theodore Parker, leading intellectual light of Unitarianism; Samuel Gridley Howe, a physician of international repute for his work with the blind and the deaf; George L. Stearns, a prosperous manufacturer; and Franklin B. Sanborn, a young educator and protege of Emerson. The cause that bonded these men was their support for the free-state activists in Kansas. Most of them had also participated in resistance to the fugitive slave law. Parker headed the vigilance committee in Boston, while Higginson had led the abortive attack to free Anthony Burns in 1854. Several of the Secret Six had stood by in impotent rage while the police, militia, army, and marines had marched Burns back to slavery.

  This scene burned in their memories. Their work for Kansas fanned the flames. It also brought them into contact with John Brown. They were ready for his message of action. Like Frederick Douglass, they had come to believe that the slaves could achieve manhood and liberation only by striking a blow themselves. Slavery "is destined, as it began in blood, so to end," wrote Higginson in 1858. "Never in history was there an oppressed people who were set free by others." Perhaps unconscious of the irony, the Secret Six (all white men) considered John Brown (also white) the ideal leader of the slaves in their strike for freedom. This grim, hatchet-faced old warrior impressed these descendants of Puritans as "a high-minded unselfish, belated Covenanter," a "Cromwellian Ironside introduced in the nineteenth century for a special purpose."5

  4. Ibid., 319, 318.

  5. Liberator, May 28, 1858; Oates, To Purge This Land, 237.

  In 1858 Brown revealed to the Secret Six his plans for an invasion of the southern Appalachians. With varying degrees of enthusiasm or skepticism they agreed to support him. Stearns diverted funds intended for Kansas to the purchase of guns and pikes to arm the slaves that Brown expected to flock to his standard. Under an assumed name Brown rented a farm in Maryland across the Potomac River from Harper's Ferry, Virginia. He planned to seize the U. S. armory and arsenal there and distribute its arms to the slaves as they joined up with him. Brown's shock troops for this purpose ultimately consisted of five black men and seventeen whites, including three of his sons. This was a pitifully small "army" to invade slave territory and attack U.S. property.

  Brown did try to attract more black recruits. In particular he urged his old friend Frederick Douglass to join him as a sort of liaison officer to the slaves. Brown met Douglass secretly in an old quarry near Cham-bersburg, Pennsylvania, in August 1859. "Come with me, Douglass," he said. "I want you for a special purpose. When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them." But Douglass refused. He was convinced that Brown had embarked on a suicidal mission, "an attack on the federal government" that "would array the whole country against us." Harper's Ferry was a "perfect steel-trap," said Douglass. Situated on a peninsula formed by the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, surrounded on all sides by commanding heights, it was indefensible against a counterattack. You will "never get out alive," Douglass warned Brown. The old warrior could not conceal his disappointment at Douglass's refusal. Other black recruits on whom Brown had relied also failed to show up. One of them wrote apologetically from Cleveland: "I am disgusted with myself and the whole Negro set, God dam em!"6

  As summer turned to fall and additional recruits did not arrive, Brown decided to go with what he had. A sort of fatalism stole over him. He wrote a "Vindication of the Invasion" in the past tense as if it had already failed. When he finally moved, in mid-October, he did so without previous notice to the slaves he expected to join him, without rations, without having scouted any escape routes from Harper's Ferry, with no apparent idea of what to do after capturing the armory buildings. It was almost as if he knew that failure with its ensuing martyrdom

  6. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (Collier Books ed., New York, 1962), 317–20; Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom: Blacks and John Brown (New York, 1974), 80.

  would do more to achieve his ultimate goal than any "success" could have done. In any event, that was how matters turned out.

  Leaving three men to guard his base, Brown led the other eighteen into Harper's Ferry after dark on October 16. They quickly captured the armory complex defended by a single watchman. Brown sent a patrol into
the countryside to pass the word among slaves and bring in several hostages, including a great grandnephew of George Washington. Having done this much, Brown sat down to wait—presumably for those black bees to swarm. But the only slaves to come in were a few brought by the patrol. Ironically, the first casualty was a free Negro baggage-master at the railroad station who was killed by Brown's bridge guard in the dark when he walked out on the trestle looking for the night watchman. Brown stopped the eastbound midnight train and held it for several hours, but then unaccountably let it proceed—to spread the alarm.

  By midmorning on October 17, residents of Harper's Ferry were sniping at Brown's men while Virginia and Maryland militia converged on the town. During the afternoon eight of Brown's men (including two of his sons) and three townsmen were killed while seven of the raiders escaped (two of them were later captured). Brown retreated with his survivors and prisoners to the thick-walled fire-engine house, where he made a stand. During the night a company of U. S. marines arrived, commanded by two cavalry officers, Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart. After the militia had declined the honor of storming the engine house, Lee sent in the marines. They attacked with battering ram and bayonets, not firing a shot in order to avoid risk to the hostages. With the loss of one man the marines killed two raiders and captured the others including Brown, who was wounded by an officer's dress sword. Less than thirty-six hours after it started, John Brown's strange effort to free the slaves was over.