FOR
SOPHIE AND BEN
Never, perhaps, since the period when history first speaks to us of the doings of man, did a year open upon the world that promises to be more rife with improvements and mighty changes, than that which commences today. The W0RLD is in a state of revolution.
—Robert Dale Owen, The Free Enquirer, January 1, 1831
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
ECLIPSE
SLAVERY AND ABOLITION
NAT TURNER
TRAVELERS IN AMERICA
THE VIRGINIA DEBATE OVER SLAVERY
RELIGION AND POLITICS
RELIGION AND REFORM
WOMEN AND WORKING CLASSES
ANTI-MASONS AND NATIONAL REPUBLICANS
ANDREW JACKSON’S ADMINISTRATION
STATE AND NATION
INDIANS
BANK OF THE UNITED STATES
NULLIFICATION
JULY 4, 1831
MACHINES AND NATURE
RAILROADS AND REAPERS
TOCQUEVILLE AND BEAUMONT
JOHN JAMES AUDUBON AND CHOLERA
MOUNT AUBURN CEMETERY AND FRANCES TROLLOPE
CHRONOLOGY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY LOUIS P. MASUR
NOTES
INDEX
Copyright Page
ECLIPSE
Everyone knew it was coming. “THE GREAT ECLIPSE OF 1831 will be one of the most remarkable that will again be witnessed in the United States for a long course of years,” alerted Ash’s Pocket Almanac. One editor reported that the February 12 eclipse would even surpass historic occasions when “the darkness was such that domestic fowls retired to roost” and “it appeared as if the moon rode unsteadily in her orbit, and the earth seemed to tremble on its axis.”1
On the day of the eclipse, from New England through the South, Americans looked to the heavens. One diarist saw “men, women and children … in all directions, with a piece of smoked glass, and eyes turn’d upward.” The Boston Evening Gazette reported that “this part of the world has been all anxiety … to witness the solar eclipse … . Business was suspended and thousands of persons were looking at the phenomena with intense curiosity.” “Every person in the city,” noted the Richmond Enquirer, “was star gazing, from bleary-eyed old age to the most bright-eyed infancy.”2
2. Hutchins’ lmproved Almanac … for the Year of Our Lord 1831 (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)
Unlike previous celestial events, thought some commentators, the eclipse of 1831 would not produce superstitious dread that the world would end. “Idle fears and gloomy forebodings of evil formerly raised by the appearance of phenomena caused by the regular operation of natural laws,” one writer claimed, “have yielded to pleasing admiration; a change which the march of science and general diffusion of knowledge have largely contributed to effect.” Another writer mocked the notion that eclipses were “signs or forerunners of great calamities.” Eclipses, he thought, “necessarily result from the established laws of the planetary revolution, and take place in exact conformity with those laws … . Those who entertain the opinion that eclipses of the sun are tokens of the Divine displeasure can produce no warrant from scripture for their irrational belief. If we would look for the signs of the displeasure of God towards a nation, we can see them, not in eclipses, but in national sins and depravity of morals.”3
Rational explanations of atmospheric events, however, offered little solace to most Americans. In many, “a kind of vague fear, of impending danger—a prophetic presentiment of some approaching catastrophe”—was awakened, and “the reasonings of astronomy, or the veritable deductions of mathematical forecast,” did little to diminish the anxiety. One correspondent reported that an “old shoe-black accosted a person in front of our office, the day previous to the eclipse, and asked him if he was not afraid. For, said he, with tears in his eyes, the world is to be destroyed tomorrow; the sun and moon are to meet … and a great earthquake was to swallow us all!—Others said the sun and the earth would come in contact, and the latter would be consumed. Others again, were seen wending their ways to their friends and relations, covered with gloom and sadness; saying that they intended to die with them!” The day after the eclipse, preachers employed Luke 21:25 as the text for their sermons: “there shall be signs in the sun.” “In strict propriety of language,” one minister observed, “it is not the sun that is eclipsed. Not the slightest shadow is cast upon the least portion of his broad disk. His beams are shot forth precisely the same. It is over us only that the momentary darkness is spread, and it is truly the earth that is eclipsed.”4
The spectacle, however, proved anticlimactic. “The darkness being less visible than generally expected,” the heaven-gazers felt “bamboozled.” “At the moment of greatest obscuration,” reported one paper, “a foolish feeling of disappointment was generally prevalent and this was expressed by many in such terms as they might have used after having been taken in by the quacking advertisement of an exhibitor of fireworks or phantasmagoria. It was not half as dark as they expected.” “The darkness was that of a thunder gust,” snorted one observer: “The light of the sun was sickly, but shadows were very perceptible.” “The multitude have been sadly disappointed,” reported one editor. “They looked for darkness and the shades of light; they expected to drink in horrors, and feel the power of superstition without its terrors or apprehensions; they expected to work by candlelight, see cows come home, and poultry go ultimately to roost—to count the stars and tell them by their names; in short, to see something that they might talk about now and hereafter—something to tell their children and grandchildren.”5
With the anticipation more disturbing than the event, some sought to cast blame. Almanac makers and newspaper editors were chastised for their extravagant predictions of darkness and glowing descriptions of the wonders that would be seen. Some thought the astronomers deserved condemnation for offering elaborate calculations that fizzled. Others blamed regional temperaments for the heightened expectations. “Our Yankee proneness to exaggeration,” thought the Boston Patriot, “was manifested in a ludicrous manner on the occasion of the late eclipse.” Southerners agreed: “Our eastern brethren are, as usual, up in arms about the matter—they talk of a convention. Truth to say, expectations were scarcely realized. On such occasions, people now-a-day show a shockingly morbid appetite—they look for portentous signs, for ghastly gleanings of fiery comets, the rushing up, with dire intimations of the ‘northern lights,’ and expect to see ‘clouds of dark blood to blot the sun’s broad light, / And angry meteors shroud the world in night.’”6
However much the eclipse disappointed, it served as metaphor and omen. Edward Everett, politician from Massachusetts, reported that “a motion was made in the House of Representatives to adjourn over till Monday in consequence of the darkness which was to prevail.” The motion did not pass, and Everett quipped, “After sitting so frequently when there is darkness inside the House, it would be idle I think to fly before a little darkness on the face of the heavens.” The United States Gazette, which feverishly opposed the re-election of President Andrew Jackson, joked that “the solar eclipse has not attracted as much attention here, as the late curious obscuration of one of the smaller stars in the constellation, Jupiter Jackson.” With greater sobriety, the editor of the Philadelphia Gazette observed that “the affairs of the Eastern hemisphere … have reached a thrilling and portentous crisis. An irresistible spirit of reform seems burning with occult but mighty energy among the nations … . An eclipse in Europe at the pre
sent time might be considered as an omen. In this country, where it has lately occurred, the sunshine of regulated freedom appears alone to rest.”7
Unmoved by editorial, ministerial, astronomical, or political pronouncements and predictions, on the day of the eclipse some Philadelphians went ice-skating. The coldest winter in decades had frozen the Delaware River, and thousands of citizens chose to pass the day in recreation. The Saturday Bulletin reported, “It is probable that fifteen thousand persons were amusing themselves by sliding and skating on the river, while the numerous booths, or travelling dram-shops which were located at short distances apart, throughout the whole city front, were observed to do a brisk business in hot punch, smoked sausages, crackers, and ten-for-a-cent cigars. Sober citizens, whom we have observed never exceed a regular dog-trot, while walking our streets, were now capering around with the agility of a feather in a whirlwind.”8
3. Edward William Clay, “Skating: Scene on the River Delaware at Philadelphia, Feb.y 12th 1831” (Courtesy of The Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
One artist drew the scene. On February 12, Edward William Clay set up his easel by the Delaware River and produced an image of citizens at play. Men of all classes slip and swirl, some into one another’s arms, as they skate the day away. To the right, a rough-hewn citizen warms himself with a drink; a woman looks on contentedly. A black man, in stereotypical comic fashion, slides helplessly away, his hat lost. All is movement and motion, energy and action. But the sky is gray, the light is pale, and dusk is approaching.
SLAVERY AND ABOLITION
NAT TURNER
The heavens darkened and Nat Turner prepared to strike. Rising from the gloom of Virginia’s swamps, he resolved to slay his enemies. The February eclipse, a black spot on the sun, signaled that the time to act had arrived.
“I had a vision—and I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened—the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams.”
The visions continued—blood drops on corn, pores oozing blood, markings on bloodstained leaves. He felt the Holy Spirit within, felt awakened and ordained for some special purpose. Following the eclipse, Turner told four other slaves of the work to be done, the “work of death” to begin on the Fourth of July.
The time for violent insurrection had arrived, but no one could decide how best to proceed. The conspirators squabbled over plans and Turner became ill. The Fourth passed without a strike for freedom. And then, on Saturday, August 13, “the sign appeared again.” Across the East Coast, noted an observer in Philadelphia, the “western heavens seemed as one vast sea of crimson flame, lit up by some invisible agent. Thousands of our citizens gazed at the spectacle—some with wonder, others with admiration, and others fearful that it was a sad augury of coming evil.” 1
Newspaper editors tried at first to contain the fear that leaped like a brushfire from door to door. Word was spreading of a general insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, where the enslaved outnumbered the enslavers by over a thousand. Across Virginia there were nearly five hundred thousand slaves, and the total throughout the South reached two million souls. It could not be, they told themselves. The slaves were content. Slavery was a righteous institution. They were good masters. Indeed, some of them were. Even Joseph Travis, Nat Turner attested, “was to me a kind master.” But kindness did not save him at 2 A.M. on August 22 from the force of a blunt hatchet against his head, followed by the deathblow from an ax. Nor did it save Mrs. Travis. Nor four others, including an infant who was initially overlooked and then also killed. There were no innocents. In the stillness of a sultry night, the murders that fueled the rumors had begun.2
“On the road, we met a thousand different reports, no two agreeing, and leaving it impossible to make a plausible guess at truth.” How many slaves were involved? Some accounts said only three, some said four hundred, and some claimed over a thousand rebels, banditti, brigands, villains, wretches, monsters—called every name but men. At first, the papers reported that the insurrection was led by about 250 runaways who emerged from the Great Dismal Swamp for the purpose of “plunder and rapine,” “to rob and to do mischief.” They had come from a “Camp Meeting,” a religious revival, and were deceived by “artful knaves” into launching an attack. The plan, some said, extended deep into North Carolina, and was “started by a white man, for some design unknown.” But then rumor had it that the rebels were slaves, “the property of kind and indulgent masters.” It started not with hundreds, but with six, and “there appears to have been no concert with the blacks of any other part of the state.” The plan came from a slave, Nat Turner, a literate preacher who acted “without any cause or provocation.”3
Neither rumor offered much solace. “Runaways” meant the attack came from without; “slaves” meant it came from within. Although the one rumor frightened people by portraying the uprising as more widespread than it was, it also allowed citizens to explain the tragedy in terms of a need for food and clothing and as the work of outside agitators. The other rumor limited the scope of the event, but allowed it to be accounted for only in terms of retribution, a blow for freedom originating from inside the slave community. Had it been runaways, the residents of Southampton County might have gone on as before. But it turned out to be slaves, and Virginians knew they could “never again feel safe, never again be happy.”
First reports minimized the bloodshed, stating only that several families had “fallen victim.” Though editors cautioned readers not to believe “a fiftieth part” of what they read or heard, a letter written on August 24 and published two days later claimed that between “eighty and one hundred of the whites have already been butchered—their heads severed from their bodies.” An editor for the Constitutional Whig in Richmond, John Hampden Pleasants, belonged to a mounted militia unit sent to suppress the rebellion. From Jerusalem, the main town in Southampton County, he forwarded the first accounts of the tragedy. Although rumors exaggerated the number of insurgents, “it was hardly in the power of rumor itself, to exaggerate the atrocities: … whole families, father, mother, daughters, sons, sucking babes, and school children, butchered, thrown into heaps, and left to be devoured by hogs and dogs, or to putrify on the spot.” Among those murdered were Mrs. Levi Waller and the ten children in her school, the bodies “piled in one bleeding heap on the floor.” A single child escaped by hiding in the fireplace. Pleasants misidentified Turner as “Preacher-Captain Moore” and placed the death toll at sixty-two. By August 29, when his letter appeared, the two-day insurrection was over, Turner was in hiding, and those captured rebels who survived faced trial and execution.4
For the next three months, newspapers in Virginia and throughout the nation tried to explain the tragedy. Many accounts kept returning to the innocence of children and the vulnerability of women. Near the end of the rampage, Turner’s band approached Rebecca Vaughan’s residence. It was noon. Mrs. Vaughan was laboring outside, preparing dinner, when she saw a puff of dust rising from the road. Suddenly, some forty mounted and armed black men came rushing toward the house. She raced inside, quivered at the window, and, through the snorting of horses and shouting of men, begged for her life. The shots that killed her brought her fifteen-year-old son, Arthur, from the fields. As he climbed a fence, he too was gunned down. A niece, Eliza Vaughan, “celebrated for her beauty,” ran downstairs and out the door but made it only a few steps away. One editor could not conceive of a situation more “horribly awful” than that faced by these women: “alone, unprotected, and unconscious of danger, to find themselves without a moment’s notice for escape or defence, in the power of a band of ruffians, from whom instant death was the least they could expect.”
Lurking beneath these accounts was a dread that the rebels had raped the women, that the slaveholders had failed to protect not only the lives of their wives and daughters but their purity as well. Across the centuries, accusations of rape were never far from the surface when white men thought about black me
n with white women. Virginians worried feverishly about it here. Many rumors took wing in the late days of the summer, but writers sought quickly to assure readers, “It is not believed that any outrages were offered to the females.”
Driven by hatred and fear, the forces that extinguished the rebellion displayed a ruthlessness that startled some observers. No one in the South, of course, defended the rebels, but the actions of the soldiers in putting down the rebellion generated controversy. Enacting scenes “hardly inferior in barbarity to the atrocities of the insurgents,” the militia beheaded some of the rebels in the field. One of the mounted volunteers from Norfolk had in his possession “the head of the celebrated Nelson, called by the blacks, ‘Gen. Nelson,’ and the paymaster, Henry, whose head is expected momentarily.” Soldiers stuck the severed heads of several dozen slaves on poles and planted them along the highway, a warning to all who passed by. Those who survived capture would be tried, and on September 4 the state started executing the convicted, but the summary justice in the field raised concerns. Pleasants was the first to express dismay over the decapitation of the rebels. “Precaution is even necessary to protect the lives of the captives,” he concluded. He worried that revenge would “be productive of further outrage, and prove discreditable to the country.” A week later, the paper altered its stance, stating that “the sanguinary temper of the population who evinced a strong disposition to inflict immediate death on every prisoner” was understandable and extenuated by their having witnessed unspeakable horrors to their wives and children. Readers, however, did not forget Pleasants’s initial comments; perhaps here, in his call for restraint, he took the first step that would lead to his death when, fifteen years later, the editor of the Richmond Enquirer accused him of abolitionist tendencies and shot him in a duel.
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