On the evening of October 16, 1859, without Douglass, Brown and eighteen warriors slipped into Harpers Ferry, a small town in Virginia (now West Virginia) perched on high cliffs over the main routes into the rich Shenandoah Valley—including the slave-driver route to Kentucky. Brown and his men quickly seized the town’s federal armory, which held a massive cache of arms. He sent detachments to nearby plantations to try to recruit rebels willing to rise up against slavery, and also cut telegraph lines and stopped the eastbound evening train.
The attack went wrong from the start. Brown’s men killed a train conductor—ironically, a free African American—and then inexplicably let the train continue down the tracks to Washington, bringing news of the raid. Brown’s recruiting parties brought only four people back from nearby slave quarters. The next morning, local militia forced their way into town, shooting one of Brown’s men—an ex-slave named Dangerfield Newby. As he fell, Newby clutched at the despairing letters in his pocket. They came from his wife, Harriet, who was enslaved with their children in northern Virginia. Her last one had been written on August 16: “It is said Master is in want of monney if so I know not what time he may sell me an then all my bright hopes of the futer are blasted.” The price of slaves at the Richmond consignment market had risen above $1,000 for women like Harriet, and her owner had changed his mind about letting Newby buy her freedom. Now some militiamen paused to mutilate Newby’s corpse, cutting off his testicles and his ears as souvenirs. The rest forced Brown and his remaining men to make their stand in the armory.77
The next morning, US Marines from Washington under an army colonel named Robert E. Lee stormed the stronghold. The federals killed many raiders, including two of Brown’s sons, and captured the badly wounded Brown. Though Brown’s crimes were clearly federal, Buchanan allowed the state of Virginia to try him. The trial was a procedural travesty, but there was no lack of evidence for his conviction for inciting insurrection. Before his sentencing, Brown was allowed to speak. The New Testament on which he had sworn to tell the whole truth, he noted, commanded him to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.” As if he were bound himself, he had taken up arms to defend slaves’ right to freedom. If his sacrifice brought justice closer, then he would gladly now “mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments.” On December 2, 1859, with hundreds of militia guarding the execution site at Charles Town against a rescue attempt that never came, the state of Virginia hanged John Brown. Brown’s wife recovered his corpse and sent it to their farm in New York for burial. The bodies of the two African Americans executed with him—South Carolina fugitive Shields Green and freeman John Copeland—were taken by medical students and used as dissection cadavers.78
For seventy years, southern and northern economic and political elites—and many average white citizens—had cooperated to extract profit and power from the forced movement and exploitation of enslaved people’s bodies and minds. Always, the proslavery forces had made the rest of the United States choose between profitable expansion of the slave country or economic slowdown. Between slavery and disunion. Between supporting a party turned into a colonized host for viral proslavery dogma, or defeat in national elections. Between bills for expanding slavery into Kansas, or passing up the opportunity to build a transcontinental railroad.
John Brown and his band of futile revolutionaries signaled that the game was changing. The clarity of Lincoln’s arguments had also raised the warning, but he at least had lost in 1858, and perhaps northerners would once more flinch from containing the expansion of slavery in 1860. But somehow, in losing, Dangerfield Newby, Shields Green, John Copeland, and John Brown had won. For now southerners believed they had to choose: run the risks created by making good on the threat to leave the Union, or remain in the Union and risk another Harpers Ferry. Someone discovered a map at Brown’s Maryland hideout. Newspapers breathlessly detailed the additional targets marked on it. Whites began to look at any neighbor of uncertain origin, eyeing them as potential John Browns, seeing every newspaper report of a local murder as part of a wider plot. William Keitt, Florida slave owner and brother of secessionist politician Lawrence Keitt, had his throat slit in the middle of the night by his own slaves. A traveler from South Carolina was seized in deepest Alabama by a local mob—although eventually, when he proved that he owned slaves back home, they let him go. A Massachusetts map-dealer, peddling his wares in Georgia, was picked up by “vigilance committees.” An Irishman in Columbia, South Carolina, dared to express the opinion that slavery drove down wage rates for white laborers. A mob stripped him naked. State legislators ordered a slave to beat him, and then they poured boiling tar on his bleeding skin and doused him with feathers. The northern newspaper that interviewed the Irishman when he made it back to New York reported that “he had always voted with the Democratic Party.”79
Rumors of slave conspiracies and news of lynchings competed with each other throughout the anxious winter and spring of 1859–1860, and alongside them were stories about northern whites who heaped hagiographic praise on John Brown as he dangled. National Republican politicians disavowed the raid, but even moderate opponents of slavery expansion adopted Brown as a symbol of uncompromising resistance against much-resented slavelords. The city of Albany, New York, fired one hundred salutes to John Brown on December 2, starting at the scheduled time of his execution. Northern middle-class public culture depicted him as Christlike. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that John Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” And Henry David Thoreau, last heard from as a pacifist proponent of nonviolence, and a non-taxpaying protestor against the Mexican War, said that “for manly directness and force, and for simple truth,” all the talk of politicians could not equal “the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown.” Brown was, Thoreau believed, “the first northern man whom the slaveholder has learned to respect.”80
Certainly Brown had forced slaveholders to make new calculations. And now the long tide of slavery’s expansion across the continent and hegemony over national politics seemed to poise at a crest: Crash, or roll on forward? The crop of cotton in 1859 was astonishing—almost 2 billion pounds of clean fiber in 4 million bales. Slavery’s productivity was higher than ever—some 700 pounds per enslaved man, woman, and child in the cotton country, twenty-two times the rate in 1790. The old rules of political gravity—the way 4 million slaves multiplied by three-fifths of a vote for each, plus 4 million (and climbing) bales of cotton, plus the needs of northern politicians to maintain interregional coalitions—had all worked to keep a national minority at the controls of national policy.
But as southern Democrats looked toward the upcoming 1860 national party convention, they feared that the failure of Lecompton, the rise of the Republicans, and the possibility of an emerging consensus in the North had seemingly arrested their project of writing entrepreneurial slavery expansion permanently into the rules of the American political system. They had told themselves that their ultimate recourse was the right to secede from the Union. Secession had become a truism of southern public discourse, and disunion now seemed far more attractive than it had in the 1850 crisis. The boom decade had erased southerners’ fears that their economic system was either weak or decaying. Because “Cotton Is King,” as South Carolina’s James H. Hammond brayed in 1858 on the floor of the Senate, “no power on earth dare make war on cotton.” The North would not dare to resist their going, and cotton would allow the South to continue its decade of prosperity indefinitely.
Although Mississippi Senators Jefferson Davis and Albert Gallatin Brown introduced Senate resolutions operationalizing Dred Scott by requiring the federal government to impose a slave code on all territories, many politically active southern citizens had by early 1860 abandoned the idea of seeking solutions from normal politics. State legislatures across the South were stocking their militia armories. Some southern representative
s in Washington were plotting a coup: they themselves would seize the Capitol, and then would call their home states to send in their militias to defend a provisional government. The South Carolina legislature sent an emissary to Virginia counterparts shaken by Harpers Ferry to discuss a cooperative secession from the Union. The Mississippi legislature called for a southern convention to be held at Atlanta to consider mass exit from the Union. Florida and Alabama counterparts voted for cooperative secession.81
In the end, the coup that southwestern Democrats led was against their own party. Luck—or doom—had scheduled Charleston, South Carolina, as the site of the Democratic Party’s April 1860 national convention. There, the heirs of three score and ten years of entrepreneurship on the cotton and sugar frontiers planned to force the party to bow before them and commit to making slavery’s endless expansion a matter of national policy. Or else, as the Alabama state party had instructed its delegates, secede from the convention—what South Carolina’s Robert Barnwell Rhett called “demolition of the party.”82
The southerners opened the convention by insisting that the national party’s platform had to incorporate the federal slave code that Brown and Davis had proposed in the US Senate. The northern delegates—a majority in the convention hall—refused. Take a slave-code platform before the free-state electorate, they warned, and when the dust settled there would be left “of the Democratic party of the North scarcely one [candidate] to tell that there were Democrats living there.” You are “telling us,” said a delegate from Ohio, “that we are an inferior class of beings, that we shall not assume to have or express any opinions,” but only serve the southerners’ interests. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you mistake us. We will not do it.” The delegations of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Arkansas, and Texas stomped out. The Georgians complained that their cotton-growing counterparts should have left over a different issue—the reopening of the international slave trade—and then they, too, left. Caleb Cushing, chairing the convention, ruled that a presidential nominee needed two-thirds of the original delegates. It was mathematically impossible for Stephen Douglas, who after successfully defying Buchanan on Lecompton had the virtually united support of northern Democrats, to get the required number of delegates.83
The remaining delegates decided to reconvene in Baltimore on June 18. There the northern Democrats refused to reseat the Charleston seceders, who decided to meet across the street. Northern delegates in the main convention voiced their anger: Slave owners wanted to “rule or ruin”; “ruling niggers all their lives, [they] thought they could rule white men just the same.” They nominated Douglas. In the other convention, the secessionist Democrats wrote a pro-slavery-everywhere-and-forever platform. They nominated John Breckinridge—Buchanan’s Kentucky vice president. Meanwhile, a group of old Whigs—most of them well over sixty—added a third presidential candidate to the mix by naming Tennessee’s John Bell to the ticket of their so-called Constitutional Union Party. Many in the border states would vote for Bell as a possible way out of the madness.84
But the Black Republicans, as the race-baiting Democrats called them, had already nominated their candidate. Meeting in Chicago, the party’s chieftains rejected their most prominent national figures, William Seward and Salmon Chase. Although these men were popular among loyalists in party strongholds, in Pennsylvania and the Northwest they were viewed as radical abolitionists. The Republicans needed an electoral-vote majority. So the party turned to Abraham Lincoln. He could appear to lower North voters as a moderate who didn’t exude the moral triumphalism that clung to Chase and Seward. Yet he could also maintain the Republican case against further compromise. In 1858 against Douglas and in a widely reprinted speech at New York’s Cooper Institute in early 1860, Lincoln had argued that ending expansion would kill off slavery over the course of the next century. This solution and timeframe meant that white voters did not have to wrap their minds around an immediate transformation of racial hierarchies.85
Lincoln’s nomination may have decided the outcome of the election of 1860. The South was going to split its votes between Breckinridge and Bell. The Republicans counted on New England, Ohio, Illinois, and the far Northwest. If they also won New York and Pennsylvania, they’d have the presidency. The party organized clubs of “Wide-Awakes”—young male Lincoln supporters—who made it their business to rumpus and campaign “wherever the fight is hottest,” as the Hartford, Connecticut, club put it. State party bosses, such as Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania and Thurlow Weed of New York, also unleashed their grimy turnout mechanisms. On November 6, Lincoln carried every free state except New Jersey. In a four-way contest, he won 40 percent of the popular vote, collecting 180 of the 303 electoral votes.86
Despite Democrats’ claims that Republican victory would mean both the end of slavery and the handing-over of white women to black men, Breckinridge had not won the upper South. Some Union sentiment survived there. Without those states and their large white populations, an independent South would be smaller, its army far weaker. Now that the national electorate had chosen a “Black Republican” president, would the cotton states now back down from their politicians’ threats to secede from the Union? If they did secede, would their white citizens really resort to arms if the federal government moved—like Jackson in the nullification winter of 1832–1833—to coerce the states?
In late October, South Carolina governor William Gist had written his fellow slave-state executives to ask if they were prepared to call secession conventions if Lincoln won. The Republicans frankly stated that they intended to block the expansion of slavery, with the goal of bringing about the ultimate extinction of slavery. Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida all replied affirmatively but hoped South Carolina would take the lead. Now, on November 10, the South Carolina state legislature set an early December date for a state convention of delegates to consider secession. The other cotton states did the same. The South Carolina election was held, the convention met, and on December 20, delegates voted unanimously for secession. Within three weeks, conventions in Mississippi and Florida also voted for secession. Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana followed, and then, on February 1, 1861, Texas also seceded.87
Perhaps the majority of whites in the cotton states really felt the same imperatives as the entrepreneurs who were threatened by the closing-off of expansion, and perhaps they did not. But political leaders manipulated convention elections to make sure they would yield the desired result. The options offered to voters were limited to one pathway to secession or an-other—either “immediate,” or “cooperative,” the latter meaning they preferred to wait for other states to secede first. Even those choosing “cooperationist” secession were derided as “submissionists” willing to truckle under to Yankee tyranny. Convention delegates were also significantly wealthier than the overall white population. The median Mississippi delegate owned fifteen slaves, the Alabama delegate thirteen, the Georgians fourteen, and the South Carolinians thirty-seven. Slaveholder cooperationists elected from non-planter districts often went to state capitals under instruction from their constituents: slow down secession. Yet once they were surrounded by their economic peers, they changed their positions and gave their conventions near-unanimous outcomes.88
Still, even if the enslavers who dominated the conventions rigged the process of secession in order to defend the proslavery state they were creating, they ultimately had to appeal to the yeomen and poor whites whose doubts (and, in some cases, commitment to the Union) they had procedurally suppressed. Ever since the end of the Civil War, Confederate apologists have put out the lie that the southern states seceded and southerners fought to defend an abstract constitutional principle of “states’ rights.” That falsehood attempts to sanitize the past. Every convention’s participants made it explicit: they were seceding because they thought secession would protect the future of slavery. Lincoln’s victory led Deep South slaveholders to claim that only secession could save the South from being “strip
ped,” as one Alabama editor, a former Douglas supporter, said, “of 25 hundred millions of slave property & to have loose among us 4,000,000 of freed blacks.”89
From Missouri to Texas, from Wilmot through Kansas-Nebraska and Lecompton, political debates had been about whether or not slavery could expand, not whether or not the federal government would interfere with it in the states where it existed. But secessionists feared that they could not convince the non-slaveholding white southern majority to abandon the Union just to protect entrepreneurs’ access to future cotton frontiers. Instead, they proclaimed that by electing Republicans, the North had declared its commitment to “equality between the white and negro races,” as an emissary sent from the Mississippi convention told his Georgia counterparts. Not only had the Republican Party declared its goal to be abolition, but it “now demand[s] . . . equality in the right of suffrage, equality in the honors and emoluments of office, equality in the social circle, equality in the right of matrimony.” Not only would emancipation mean that non-planters would lose the chance to move up in the world—a chance that ownership of even one slave could represent. Worse, the everyday distinctions that gave status to all whites, especially men, would vanish. Lincoln’s victory left only one choice. Secede, or your neighbor’s field “hand” will marry your daughter. Secede, or offer up your “wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.” Republican domination, the emissary concluded, meant a “saturnalia of blood,” “a war of extermination” that would lead to the destruction of the white people by “assassinations” and “amalgamation,” or rape.90
The Half Has Never Been Told Page 54
