The Great Stain

by Noel Rae

  Next, Helper set out “to open the eyes of the non-slaveholders of the South to the system of deception that has so long been practiced upon them” by the selfish manipulations of the planter aristocracy—these “august knights of the whip and the lash,” these “haughty cavaliers of shackles and handcuffs.” Although “the white non-slaveholders of the South are in the majority, as five to one, they have never yet had any part or lot in framing the laws under which they live. There is no legislation except for the benefit of slavery and slaveholders.” Thanks to the “demagogical manoeuverings of the oligarchy,” poor whites were led to believe that “slavery is the very bulwark of our liberties, and the foundation of American independence.” But in truth they were reduced to a state whose “freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated. How little the ‘poor white trash’, the great majority of the southern people, know of the real condition of the country is, indeed, sadly astonishing.” In sum: “Never were the poorer classes of a people, and those classes so largely in the majority, and all inhabiting the same country, so basely duped, so adroitly swindled, or so damnably outraged.”

  Another point: “slavery is the parent of ignorance, and ignorance begets a whole brood of follies and of vices … A free press is an institution almost unknown at the South. Free speech is considered as treason against slavery; and when people dare neither speak nor print their thoughts, free thought itself is well nigh extinguished. All that can be said in defense of human bondage may be spoken freely; but question either its morality or its policy, and the terrors of lynch law are at once invoked to put down the pestilent heresy … Slavery tolerates no freedom of the press—no freedom of speech—no freedom of opinion … Where free thought is treason, the masses will not long take the trouble of thinking at all.”

  Well reviewed in the North, The Impending Crisis was reviled in the South. In the Senate, Asa Biggs of North Carolina denounced Helper as “dishonest, degraded and disgraced … an apostate son catering to a diseased appetite at the North.” In response, Helper armed himself with a revolver and a bowie knife—he was, after all, and as he kept insisting, a true son of the South—and rushed to the Capitol to avenge himself. Not finding Senator Biggs, he instead attacked a Congressman who he believed had also slandered him, but was pulled off before he could do serious harm. Meanwhile his book sold very nicely, some fourteen thousand copies in the first year alone, and ten times that number in a special abbreviated edition; several hundred copies were also burned at public bonfires throughout the South.

  Another way to end slavery was to subvert its economic underpinnings—depose King Cotton, and those he held in bondage would be freed. Cotton itself could not of course be done away with, but what if it were raised in some other part of the world, and under different conditions? This possibility was the subject of an 1839 letter from Wendell Phillips to the English radical, George Thompson. “I am rejoiced to hear of your new movement in regard to India,” he wrote. “It seals the fate of the slave system in America. The industry of the pagan [i.e. Hindus and Muslims] shall yet wring from Christian hands the prey they would not yield to the commands of conscience or the claims of religion.”

  Known as “Abolition’s Golden Trumpet” for his skill as an orator, Phillips had once been an exemplar of the Boston brahmin—a Mayflower descendant and Harvard-educated lawyer, he was wealthy, dignified and aloof—until, at the age of twenty-four, after witnessing a mob of respectable Bostonians trying to lynch William Lloyd Garrison, he underwent a sudden conversion to radical abolitionism. While he was about it, he also advocated disunion, temperance, universal suffrage, including votes for women, animal magnetism and phrenology. Alarmed at such deviant behavior, his family tried to restrain him but failed, and so now here he was in London in 1840 attending the world’s first anti-slavery convention, held under the patronage of Queen Victoria’s high-minded Prince Consort, “Albert the Good.” While there, Phillips was invited to address the mildly progressive British India Society, and chose for his topic the scheme that would seal the fate of slavery in America.

  Briefly, the plan was to grow cotton in India, then largely run by the East India Company, and grow it in such vast quantities as to put slave-grown American cotton out of business. “If it is a fact that there are 24,000,000 acres within the reach of the Ganges, upon which cotton can be grown, now lying waste; if it is true that there are 54,000,000 men anxious for labor, and that their services can be had for a penny or two pence a day; if they can bring their cotton to Liverpool at four pence per pound—how can slavery stand against it?” Nor was it merely a matter of money. “It is one of the most immutable of truths, that the moment a free hand touches an article, that moment it falls from the hand of the slave … No article can be grown and manufactured at the same time by both free and slave labor. Slavery can only be maintained by monopoly; the moment she comes into competition with free labor, she dies. Cotton is the corner-stone of slavery in America; remove it, and slavery receives its mortal blow. [Cries of “Hear! Hear!” from the audience.] You may think it strange for an American to speak thus of a system that is to make bankrupt one half of his country, and paralyze the other; but though I love my country, I love my countrymen more, and these countrymen are the colored men of America. [Cheers.] For their sakes I say, welcome the bolt that smites our commerce to the dust, if with it, by the blessing of God, it will strike off the fetters of the slave! [Cheers.]”

  One wonders: was Phillips listening to what he was saying? Were there really 24,000,000 acres lying fallow on the banks of the Ganges, and 54,000,000 unemployed Indians available for hire—and at a wage of a penny or two a day? Since when had it been true that no article could be grown or made at the same time by free and slave labor? And did he really love “the colored men of America” more than he loved his country?

  At any rate, news of the Indian cotton-growing scheme caused some real anxiety in the South. “Little, perhaps, thought those young planters and overseers, when they consented to go to India, that they were to be used as tools in the unholy hands of the abolitionists!” wrote the Natchez Free Trader about some Americans who had recently been recruited by the East India Company. “England is arraying its vast moral, commercial, and political power against us” with “the express purpose of rendering the labor of three millions of black slaves in America unproductive and of no value. All India will, in a year or two, teem like a vast beehive with the cotton enterprise, cheered on by the fratricide abolitionists and mock philanthropists of the Northern States …”

  But the alarm, though real, was not that serious. Cotton had been grown in India since prehistoric times, and crops would greatly increase during the second half of the nineteenth century, but in the meantime the quantity was nowhere near enough to supply the Lancashire mills. Also, it was slow and expensive to transport—unlike American cotton, which could easily be carried in bales to the landing stage of some nearby river, Indian cotton had to be loaded on to bullock carts for the long journey to some seaport and then shipped to England via the Cape of Good Hope. This would change when railroads had been built and the Suez Canal dug, but neither happened until after the Civil War.

  The English also tried to encourage cotton-growing in West Africa, which would have had the added benefit of helping to suppress the slave trade, now illegal but still active: local rulers, realizing that more money was to be made by putting their people to work raising cotton, would stop selling them. But it took a while for that scheme to get going. In 1858, on the eve of the Civil War, cotton exports from West Africa amounted to some two thousand bales, while exports from America were well over three million.

  Angelina Grimké, the renegade member of Charleston’s upper class who with her husband Theodore Weld edited American Slavery As It Is, was also the author of An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, published in 1836. As she told her readers, what prompted her to write was her “deep and tender interest in
your present and eternal welfare”—eternal because slavery was a sin, and its punishment was everlasting damnation. She acknowledged that most of her readers would at first think that “I had been most strangely deceived,” but asked them “for the sake of former confidence and former friendship, to read the following pages in the spirit of calm investigation and fervent prayer.”

  Much of her argument was based on the Bible, “my ultimate appeal in all matters of faith and practice, and it is to this test I am anxious to bring the subject at issue between us. Let us then begin with Adam …” After proving—which was not difficult—that there had been no slavery in the Garden of Eden, she dealt with “the curse pronounced upon Canaan, by which his posterity was consigned to servitude.” But this was only a prophecy, and “prophecy does not tell us what ought to be, but what actually does take place … Prophecy has often been urged as an excuse for slavery, but be not deceived, the fulfillment of prophecy will not cover one sin in the awful day of account.”

  Next to be refuted was the argument that “the patriarchs held slaves, and therefore slavery is right. Do you really believe that patriarchal servitude was like American slavery? Can you believe it? If so, read the history of these primitive fathers of the church, and be undeceived. Look at Abraham, though so great a man, going to the herd himself and fetching a calf from thence and serving it up with his own hands, for the entertainment of his guests. Look at Sarah, that princess as her name signifies, baking cakes upon the hearth. If the servants they had were like Southern slaves, would they have performed such comparatively menial offices for themselves?”

  Numerous chapters and verses were then quoted to prove that servitude among the ancient Israelites was limited in duration, restrained by numerous laws, and not inheritable—“in studying the subject I have been struck with wonder and admiration at perceiving how carefully the servant was guarded from violence, injustice and wrong.” For example, “servants were set free at the death of their masters and did not descend to their heirs”; every fiftieth year was “a year of Jubilee, when all servants were set at liberty”; and “to protect servants from violence, it was ordained that if a master struck out the tooth or destroyed the eye of a servant, that servant immediately became free.” And so, “where then, I would ask, is the warrant, the justification, or the palliation of American slavery from Hebrew servitude? How many of the southern slaves would now be in bondage according to the laws of Moses? Not one!”

  Turning to the New Testament, “some have even said that Jesus Christ did not condemn slavery.” But in fact he did. “Let us examine some of his precepts. ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.’ Let every slaveholder apply these queries to his own heart: Am I willing to be a slave—am I willing to see my mother a slave, or my father, my sister or my brother? If not, then in holding others as slaves, I am doing what I would not wish to be done to me or any relative I have; and thus have I broken this Golden Rule which was given to me to walk by.”

  After establishing that there was no religious justification for slavery, Angelina asked: “But perhaps you will be ready to query, why appeal to women on this subject? We do not make the laws which perpetuate slavery. No legislative power is vested in us. We can do nothing to overthrow the system, even if we wished to do so. To this I reply, I know you do not make the laws, but I also know that you are the wives and mothers, the sisters and daughters of those who do; and if you really suppose you can do nothing to overthrow slavery, you are greatly mistaken. You can do much in every way: four things I will name. 1st. You can read on this subject. 2nd. You can pray over this subject. 3rd. You can speak on this subject. 4th. You can act on this subject.”

  To elaborate:

  1. “Search the Scriptures daily, whether the things I have told you are true. Other books and papers might be a great help to you in this investigation, but they are not necessary, and it is hardly probable that your Committees of Vigilance will allow you to have any other.”

  2. “Pray also for that poor slave, that he may be kept patient and submissive under his hard lot, until God is pleased to open the door of freedom to him without violence or bloodshed. Pray too for the master that his heart may be softened.”

  Numbers three and four—speaking and acting on the subject—would be harder. “You will perhaps say, such a course of conduct would inevitably expose us to great suffering. Yes! My Christian friends, I believe it would, but this will not excuse you or anyone else for the neglect of duty. If Prophets and Apostles, Martyrs and Reformers had not been willing to suffer for truth’s sake, where would the world have been now?”

  Her readers should also take courage from the example of their sisters in the North who “have engaged in this work from a sense of religious duty, and nothing will ever induce them to take their hands from it until it is fully accomplished. They feel no hostility to you, no bitterness or wrath; they rather sympathize in your trials and difficulties; but they well know that the first thing to be done to help you is to pour in the light of truth on your minds, to urge you to reflect on, and pray over the subject. This is all they can do for you. You must work out your own deliverance with fear and trembling, and with the direction and blessing of God, you can do it … It is manifest to every reflecting mind that slavery must be abolished; the era in which we live, and the light which is overspreading the whole world on this subject, clearly show that the time cannot be distant when it will be done. Now, there are only two ways in which it can be effected: by moral power or physical force, and it is for you to choose which of these you prefer.”

  As she drew near the end of her nonfiction work, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe also called for self-sacrifice. “Brethren in the South, there are many of you who are truly convinced that slavery is a sin, a tremendous wrong; but, if you confess your sentiments, and endeavor to propagate your opinions, you think that persecution, affliction, and even death await you. How can we ask you, then, to come forward? We do not ask it. Ourselves weak, irresolute and worldly, shall we ask you to do what perhaps we ourselves should not dare? But we will beseech Him to speak to you, who dared and endured more than this for your sake, and who can strengthen you to dare and endure for His. He can raise you above all temporary and worldly considerations. He can inspire you with that love to himself which will make you willing to leave father and mother, and wife and child, yea, to give up life itself, for His sake …”

  In 1854, to please the South and the railroad interests, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, another long step on the road to war. Under the seemingly democratic principle of “popular sovereignty,” the act left it up to the settlers themselves to decide whether the future states to be formed out of the territory should be slave or free. Almost immediately, large numbers of pro-slavery “border ruffians” accepted this invitation to mayhem and crossed over from Missouri, sometimes staying just long enough to vote—in one election 6000 votes were cast out of a qualified electorate of 1500—sometimes settling down in new homes from which they could intimidate the free-state settlers, many of whom had been sponsored by the New England Emigrant Aid Company. The resulting conflict, dubbed “Bleeding Kansas” by Horace Greeley of the New-York Tribune, was seen by many Northerners as nothing less than a clash between good and evil. As The Gun and the Gospel, by the Rev. H. D. Fisher, put it, “Robbery, murder and arson marked the march of … the border ruffians who invaded Kansas, while free-state men had come as came the Pilgrims from across the ocean, with wives and children, Bibles and hymn-books, school books and teachers—to establish a kind of Christian civilization superior to any yet developed on the American continent. It was with this last-named band that John Brown had become identified with all the zeal and enthusiasm of his rugged and devout nature. Struggling against mighty odds, this purposeful people had written on high their legend, ‘Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God!’’’

  Before long Kansas had competing constitutions and capitals, Lecompton for
the pro-slavery faction, and Lawrence for the free-staters. Two newspapers, the Kansas Free State and the Herald of Freedom, were published in Lawrence, and the New England Emigrant Aid Company had its headquarters there in the Free State Hotel. On May 21, 1856—one day before Preston Brooks viciously beat Charles Sumner in the chamber of the U. S. Senate—a pro-slavery sheriff’s posse attacked the town, beginning with a raid on the Free State Hotel’s wine cellar. After disposing of the cellar’s contents, they burned down the hotel, smashed up the newspaper presses and threw the type into the river, burned down two houses, had one of their men killed by falling masonry; and then departed. This, to the anti-slavery people, at once became known as the “Sack of Lawrence,” and was spoken of as if the whole town had been reduced to smoldering rubble. Still, it was a serious matter and, as Captain Brown put it, “something must be done to show these barbarians that we too have rights.” Many years later, James Townsley, at that time a young man who had recently settled at Pottawatomie, not far from Lawrence, told an interviewer how “something” was indeed done.

  “I joined the Pottawatomie Rifle Company at its re-organization in May, 1856.” When news came of the impending attack on Lawrence, “the company was hastily called together, and a forced march to aid in its defense immediately determined upon.” But before they could arrive, the town had been attacked, so they halted at Ottawa Creek, where “we remained in camp undecided over night, and until noon the next day. About this time, Owen Brown, and a little later old John Brown himself, came to me and said information had just been received that trouble was expected on the Pottawatomie. The old man asked me if I would go with my team and take him and his boys down there, so that they could watch what was going on. I replied that I would do so, my reason being that my family was then living on the Pottawatomie, in Anderson County. Making ready for the trip as quickly as possible, we started about two o’clock in the afternoon. The party consisted of old John Brown and four of his sons—Frederick, Oliver, Owen and Watson—Henry Thompson and his son-in-law, Mr. Winer, and myself. Winer rode a pony; all the rest rode in the wagon with me. We camped that night between two deep ravines about one mile above Dutch Henry’s crossing.