The Invisible Line

by Daniel J. Sharfstein

  Over the previous three decades, in response to abolitionists, Southerners had developed a series of arguments that tended to excuse slavery as a necessary evil, essential for the American economy, sanctioned by the Bible, historically the pathway from savagery to civilization, and regulated by the benevolent self-interest of noble masters. Fitzhugh took such arguments a step further, contrasting slavery with the horrors of free labor and pushing Southerners to “endorse slavery in the abstract.” Slavery, to Fitzhugh, “was morally right, . . . as profitable as it was humane.” In 1854 Fitzhugh published Sociology for the South—named, he wrote, for the new science of sociology that was developed to study the countless “afflictions” of industrial, free society. Fitzhugh’s book embraced a radical critique of capitalism, a view that “free competition begets a war of the wits . . . quite as destructive to the weak, simple and guileless, as the war of the sword.” As Fitzhugh saw it, in a free society “the negro . . . would be welcome nowhere; meet with thousands of enemies and no friends. If he went North, the white laborers would kick him and cuff him, and drive him out of employment.” By contrast, the plantation offered a more stable, just, prosperous, and happy life for blacks and whites alike. “At the slaveholding South all is peace, quiet, plenty and contentment,” Fitzhugh wrote. “We have no mobs, no trades unions, no strikes for higher wages, no armed resistance to the law, but little jealousy of the rich by the poor . . . We are wholly exempt from the torrent of pauperism, crime, agrarianism, and infidelity” that was ravaging Europe and the North.35

  Hart Gibson felt a rush of anticipation at the prospect of seeing this “Mr. Fitzhugh of Va.” speak. Perhaps the presentation would help Gibson’s Yankee friends understand his position, even sway a few of them, or at the very least give him more ammunition in the daily verbal battles over slavery. Maybe the evening’s speaker would show the South’s progress in becoming the equal of the North on the intellectual stage. Hart walked straight down Chapel Street, past the Green and through the downtown. It was a Wednesday after sundown. Flickering gas lamps revealed a slow throng of men and women, finished with their shifts at shops, offices, and factories, making their way home—or to bars, social clubs, or even the People’s Lectures—in the dusk.36

  Brewster’s Hall, built by New Haven’s biggest carriage manufacturer, stood just across the street from the train station, an ornate reminder that culture and ideas followed in industry’s wake. The packed auditorium rumbled with excited talk about the night’s speaker—the local papers had promised a true novelty, a “philosophical Southern” defense of slavery from “the author of what is claimed to be the most vigorous and consistent work on that side of the controversy.” Hart Gibson took his seat among Yale men, professors, and townspeople, rich and poor, young and old. Although he was one of the few Southerners there, he felt comfortable in the crowd. He shared their curiosity, even a certain bemusement at the spectacle.37

  When the clock struck eight, the auditorium hushed. The evening’s speaker took the podium to make what he called “a metaphysical and statistical argument” proving “free society a failure.” Hair combed forward and across his high forehead, Fitzhugh looked a touch like Napoleon. He relished the large audience’s rapt attention, but he had not prepared a speech for the occasion. Instead, he read directly from Sociology for the South. “Men are not ‘born entitled to equal rights’!” he proclaimed. In fact, “the weak in mind and body” were better off as Southern slaves than as free people, or rather “under that natural slavery of the weak to the strong, the foolish to the wise and cunning.” “It would be far nearer the truth,” he said, “to say ‘that some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them,’ and the riding does them good.”38

  Fitzhugh kept reading. Minutes turned to hours, and for a fidgety audience the “profound sensation” of his words gave way to cross-eyed tedium. By ten p.m. Fitzhugh had declared that Thomas Jefferson was little more than an “enthusiastic speculative philosopher” whose ideas “would subvert every government on earth.” Benjamin Franklin was “too utilitarian and material in his doctrines, to be relied on in matters of morals or government.” The Declaration of Independence was “verbose, new-born, false and unmeaning”—after all, soldiers and sailors, apprentices and wards, and “the wives in all America” had long alienated “both liberty and life.” Moreover, “all crimes are notoriously committed in the pursuit of happiness.”39

  Finally, Fitzhugh declared that free society was “theoretically impracticable,” “afflicted with disease,” and proven a failure “from history and statistics.” He stepped back and basked in the applause. If he had expected a hostile reception from an auditorium full of Yankees, he was pleasantly surprised to be “listened to politely throughout.” Afterward he received the congratulations of various New Havenites and Yale professors, mostly of the abolitionist stripe. In truth, Fitzhugh had bored the crowd into submission. The next day a local paper offered that “no one was convinced by his attempted arguments; many were amused by their novelty; a few were saddened that a man whom nature evidently intended for a genial gentleman, possessing common sense, and ordinary mental ability, should have the end of his production thwarted by the mere fact of topical location under the influences of slavery.”40

  Hart Gibson watched agog as the slavery question—a struggle that everyone knew portended national tragedy—unraveled into farce. In Gibson’s delicate phrasing, Fitzhugh was “a very gentlemanly looking man but it was obvious that neither nature or art intended him for a public speaker.” A less secure man might have despaired at Fitzhugh’s debacle or felt compelled to defend him. But Gibson, ever the aristocrat, was able to consider the speech with something approaching critical distance. “A more hopeless & enormous failure can not easily be conceived,” he wrote.

  Fitzhugh’s contrast between the free market’s horrors and slavery’s caring community rang false to the sugar planter’s son. Perhaps the slavery Fitzhugh knew in the Virginia Tidewater was different from what Gibson had seen at Bayou Black. More important, the plantation life that Gibson knew was aggressively capitalist. Regardless of whether blacks were economic actors, the Gibsons were constantly competing with whites in markets for land, slaves, and sugar. And they had won. Hart Gibson walked back up Chapel Street to Brick Row, one of many Yalies chuckling over the evening’s events.41

  The next night Gibson returned to Brewster’s Hall, joined in the audience by George Fitzhugh, to hear a rebuttal by the eminent abolitionist Wendell Phillips. The Boston lawyer dismissed Fitzhugh’s argument with a rhetorical flick of the hand. “He who looks backward upon the past and present of Virginia,” Phillips said, “and thinks that her sociality is sound, or that the ulcer eating into her prosperity is Free Trade and not Slavery, is like the old sailor who complaining of the effects of his grog, found the fault not in his rum, but in his water!” Phillips made a fiery call for “all men [to] have their rights—no matter whether the Union goes to pieces or not!” and he attacked the political conservatism of American religion, declaring that “a Church at peace in the presence of oppression is not the Church of Christ.”42

  While Fitzhugh pronounced Phillips’s speech to be “flat treason and blasphemy—nothing else,” Hart Gibson was enthralled. Part of what made Phillips so appealing was that his brand of antislavery belief did not engage in the wishful thinking, all too common among abolitionists, that the Constitution outlawed slavery. Rather, Phillips relied on blunt realism to explain the stranglehold that the “slave power” had on American politics and life. Like Gibson, he recognized that Americans were a “new people” driven by wealth. “I find no fault with this,” he said. “I do not whine over it . . . There is much to be done. There are roads to build; there are hundreds of interests to be provided for, and material prosperity is the mission of the age.”

  Because slavery had enormous market value—$2 billion at Phillips’s count—its legitimacy as an institution naturally followed. “Before
that amount of money,” he told the New Haven crowd, “the sanguine Yankee’s imagination shrinks back.” Phillips combined his economic realism with a wickedly cynical assessment of the give-and-take of politics that precluded the adoption of an abolitionist agenda: “A politician serves God so far as that does not offend the Devil.”43

  Phillips’s pessimism about the present made his prescriptions for the future all the more radical. Only a true revolution could conquer slavery. “Make way or not,” he declared, “justice shall be done here between man and man!” If law and society stood in the way of freedom, then they had to be overthrown. “Men should obey their convictions of duty, without regard to laws and institutions,” he said. “Whether the institution is one thing or another, if it be unrighteous, let it be trampled under foot.” Let the South secede over slavery, he argued, for the economic reality would ruin them. “Sunder the Union, they could not exist, simply because they could not pay their bills. The free competition of the North would destroy them, as it supports them now.”44

  Phillips’s grounding in the economics of slavery and secession—his intuitive grasp of people’s motivations in a capitalist world—heightened both the transgressive nature and the seeming rightness of his message. For Gibson, it was a thrilling mix of realism and radicalism, idealism and practicality. He wrote his father that Phillips was “not the man he is reputed to be. A more elegant, polished, scholarly gentleman you will not often find in the South . . . The extent and accuracy of his learning—classical & otherwise is truly wonderful and is only equaled by the ease & elegance with which he delivers himself in public.” Gibson remained a proslavery Southerner, but he could appreciate the right kind of opposing perspective. “Boston is a contemptible place and its citizens not much better,” he wrote, “but Wendell Phillips is a splendid orator and perhaps an honest man.”45

  When Fitzhugh boarded the train south the following day, his hosts were convinced that after seeing New Haven in all its prosperity and listening to Phillips, the proslavery author had learned the error of his ways. “Fitzhugh was thunder-stricken,” wrote one abolitionist. “He had proved Free Society a failure without ever leaving his State; nobody replied to him, but he went home answered.” Yet Fitzhugh returned to Virginia more certain than ever that industrial capitalism and the free market brought temporary wealth and lasting misery, that “a change in the course of trade” would reveal the vanity and impermanence of New England’s “fine towns and cities, her mighty factories, her great commerce, her palatial private residences, and her stores and warehouses filled with rich merchandise from every region.” Only the South produced “permanent and real” prosperity. If anything, his journey to New Haven convinced Fitzhugh that the slave trade should be revived and slavery extended to the territories.46

  Hart Gibson was already looking forward to the next month’s antislavery lecture at Brewster’s Hall. It would feature Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator who insisted that “slavery ... is not mentioned in the Constitution” and denied that Congress had “any power to make a Slave or hunt a Slave.” Soon Hart would be reading law where Phillips and Sumner had studied. Then he might go to Europe, where his brother Randall was planning to travel. And finally he would settle at Hartland, his Kentucky estate. Once he did, he knew that he could no longer exist above the sectional crisis—the curiosity and independence of mind that so attracted his Northern classmates would become a liability. He would have to embrace his side and fight for it. He could already see that his older brother was losing his critical perspective. “It is a matter of small importance what New England may say or do—she is not the country,” Randall warned Hart. “She is but a patch on its surface—a ripple on the deep & wide expanding ocean of our . . . institutions.”

  After just a couple of years in New Orleans, Randall wrote, “I find my opinions as decided as if I were a member of Congress.” The Kansas-Nebraska Act, so stridently opposed in New Haven for potentially expanding slavery beyond the South, was in Randall’s view “the enumeration of a just and American principle,” an important counterbalance to violations of previous compromises by the North, which were “desecrat[ing] the Constitution” and committing “an unpardonable insult to the people of the South and of the territories.” If such views shocked his younger brother, Randall explained, “Y[ou]r opinion of the South + Southerners undergo a great change when you come among them. They are the greatest people on the face of the Earth.”47

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SPENCER

  Jordan Gap, Johnson County, Kentucky, 1855

  THE ROCK DRAWINGS THAT gave Paint Creek its name were still visible when Jordan Spencer, Malinda Centers, and their children built their new home. When they moved one hundred miles through the mountains from Clay County to Johnson in the late 1840s, they found cliffs adorned with stark lines, some red and some black. The colors never mixed. Buffalo, deer, turkeys, panthers, and rattlesnakes: with each winter, each hard rain, and each gouge of a vandal’s knife, the images faded into the sandstone.1

  The signs that another people had once lived in the hills of Johnson County, Kentucky, were fleeting. In the course of any hard day, few had a spare second to think about the past. But just as the land itself influenced how people lived their lives—what they grew, hunted, built, talked about, prayed for, and dreamed of—the earlier inhabitants had quietly shaped the new settlers’ worlds. Likely as not, when Jordan Spencer left his cabin for the three-mile journey to Paintsville, the Johnson County seat, he rode on Indian trails. Along the way, by Paint Creek, ancient burial mounds produced ceramic shards and arrowheads for burrowing animals and the occasional souvenir hunter.2

  Old men and women in the area had grown up hearing firsthand tales of encounters with Native Americans. Around the time of the Revolution, an Indian raiding party had held a pioneer woman named Jenny Wiley captive just a short walk from Jordan Spencer’s cabin. After nearly a year she escaped south through the hills. In 1850 people were still telling Wiley’s story. It was a tale of constant looming threat in the wilderness outside. The world beyond one’s mountain hollow was full of things that could kill you or, just as bad, change you. Wiley had almost become an Indian, and it had taken every bit of her strength to return to her husband and remain white. Her escape route was now called Jenny’s Creek.3

  The only thing Spencer painted was his hair. It was long and red, “straight but lay a little in waves,” a neighbor reported, “always combed down slick.” No one was fooled by the color for long. When Spencer was hot, his sweat ran red down his face. It was something that people tended to remember because Spencer spent most of his days sweating.4

  Logging, farm labor, construction, in the hills or in town—Spencer worked grueling jobs. He was strong, proud, even ornery, earning him a reputation, by one neighbor’s reckoning, as a “very active, keen man.” People noticed that he was “particular” about his appearance. He rode a fine horse; “when it galloped,” a great-grandson was told, “its legs just about went over its head.”5

  Spencer was not trying to hide. What set him apart was plain to see. Decade after decade, local census-takers eyeballed the man or trusted the local lore and listed him as “mulatto.” At most, dyeing his hair seemed to turn his ancestry from something public, his race, into something private—his grooming habits. Neighbors might whisper or scratch their heads, but they did little else. In time his distinctive appearance seemed to fade into the surrounding fields and forests and mountainsides. Like the rock paintings and the burial mounds, it became something people knew was there but had stopped seeing.6

  TORCHLIGHT CURLED AND STRETCHED in the curve of glass, as the quart bottle passed from one calloused hand to another. Under a starticked sky, it looked like the men were drinking flames. Silhouetted in front of them was a mound yards long and higher than their heads. It was not full of Indian treasure—just Indian corn.7

  The Spencers’ lives were made of corn. They grew it in fields so steep that they were best harvested, one
of their great-grandsons would joke, by someone with “one leg shorter than the other.” Like everyone around them, they mortared corn into meal and baked and fried it into bread. They fed it to the cows and hogs they butchered for meat. Jordan drank corn that had been stilled into whiskey—a corncob made a handy stopper—and he and Malinda smoked tobacco through cobs hollowed out into pipe bowls. Across Appalachia, people sat on chair bottoms and children played with dolls woven from the husks. Piles of corncobs were put by the privy for people to keep themselves clean.8

  At harvesttime, the mountains were amber and red; spectral cornstalks, hacked low and stripped of leaves, studded the hillsides. Families—men, women, and children—piled their crop in barns and level clearings and invited neighbors to help them shuck and crib the corn. After long days working in their own fields, they came late in the afternoon and worked through sunset and moonrise into the night.9

  Burning with long pulls of liquor, fueled by outdoor feasts cooked in wash kettles over open fires, men divided into teams and vied to see who could shuck the most corn the fastest. A corn shucking, or husking bee, was an autumn ritual across the South, from tidewater to mountains. In plantation country, slaves from miles around had permission to attend, and shucking became a working holiday, a ritual performance of singing and taunting and joking that made fun of the masters even as they watched. In the hills there were no spectators, and it was hard to tell in the shadow of night what social distinctions might exist between neighbors.10

  A husking might start slowly, men drinking and chewing tobacco and trading tales, but the roar of competition soon took over. Clouds of dust enveloped the teams as they tore through their piles of corn, and amid accusations of cheating, neighbors often found themselves pummeling each other fist to skull. A fiddler might reel for the boys and girls of courting age, as couples walked away from the lantern light or rejoined the party. After tending the feast, women might work on a quilt; as the night grew darker, they told stories about haints and, according to one observer, “discuss[ed] the signs which, to them, betokened the near approach of the end of the world.”11