1831

by Louis P. Masur

  Two other travelers considered the problems of slavery and race in America; unlike others, they continued to contemplate the issues once they returned home. Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Beaumont, twenty-five and twenty-nine years of age, were court magistrates under Charles X and opponents of Louis-Philippe’s rise to the throne in the revolution of July 1830. Although hostile to the new king, the young magistrates took an oath of allegiance and then sought an honorable way to wriggle out of their low position in the regime. They asked for leave to visit America to examine the prison system and report back. They hoped not only to fulfill a desire to visit North America, but also to restart their careers by becoming experts on penal discipline and by playing a role in the reform of the justice system in France. The compatriots left Le Havre on April 2 and, after a voyage that early on left Tocqueville “sick and depressed” but Beaumont “well and cheerful,” they arrived in New York thirty-eight days later. In letters written shipboard, they disclosed their intentions to extend their investigation into nothing less than the nature of America and republican government itself and revealed the analytical mind-set for which they would long be remembered. Tocqueville, for example, contemplated life on a ship, where “the necessity of living on top of each other and of looking each other in the eye all the time establishes an informality and a freedom” unknown elsewhere. “This is the true land of liberty,” he proclaimed, “but it can only be practiced between four wooden planks, there’s the difficulty.” Unlike other travelers, who came simply to praise or damn, Tocqueville and Beaumont came to understand. They wrote letters, kept diaries and journals, conducted interviews, and, in an attempt to explain America, published works that combined philosophy, history, sociology, and fiction.38

  A consensus emerged from the many conversations Tocqueville recorded in his notebook: Americans increasingly viewed slavery as an evil, but almost no one thought blacks and whites could live together peaceably. Calling slavery “the one great plague of America,” a Georgia planter told Tocqueville, “I do not think that the blacks will ever mingle sufficiently completely with the white to form a single people with them.” In Maryland, John Latrobe, son of the famed architect, proclaimed, “The white population and the black population are in a state of war. They will never mix. It must be that one of the two will surrender the ground to the other.” Joel Poinsett, a South Carolinian and former minister to Mexico, thought it “an extraordinary thing how far public opinion is becoming enlightened about slavery.” While acknowledging that the idea of slavery as “a great evil” had been “gaining ground,” Poinsett also asserted that plans to buy the slaves and transport them elsewhere were impracticable and extravagant. “I hope the natural course of things will rid us of the slaves,” he confessed, but what that course was he could not say. On October 1, Tocqueville interviewed John Quincy Adams. He asked the former president, newly elected to Congress, whether he viewed slavery “as a great plague for the United States.” “Yes, certainly,” answered Adams. “That is the root of almost all the troubles of the present and fear for the future.” The lawyer Peter Duponceau, who had settled in America during the Revolutionary War, painted the darkest picture: “The great plague of the United States is slavery. It does nothing but get worse. The spirit of the times works towards granting liberty to the slaves. I do not doubt that the blacks will all end by being free. But I think that one day their race will disappear from our land … . We will not get out of the position in which our fathers put us by introducing slavery, except by massacres.”39

  Added to what Tocqueville and Beaumont heard was what they saw. Prejudice and segregation permeated the states, free as well as slave. In Massachusetts, free blacks had the rights of citizenship, “but the prejudice is so strong against them that their children cannot be received in the schools.” At the Walnut Street prison in Philadelphia, Tocqueville noticed “that the blacks were separated from the whites even for their meals.” Beaumont attended the theater and was “surprised at the careful distinction made between the white spectators and the audience whose faces were black.” “The colour white is here a nobility, and the colour black a mark of slavery,” he wrote his brother. On October 29, they attended the horse races in Baltimore. A black man, “having ventured to come on to the ground with some whites,” received “a shower of blows with his cane without that causing any surprise to the crowd or to the Negro himself.” Of all the scenes touching on race that they witnessed, the most horrible occurred on November 4 at the Baltimore Almshouse. There they encountered “a Negro whose madness is extraordinary.” A Baltimore slave trader, notorious for his cruelty, brutalized not only the body of the enslaved, but in this case the mind as well. “The Negro,” Tocqueville recorded, “imagines that this man sticks close to him day and night and snatches away bits of his flesh. When we came into his cell, he was lying on the floor, rolled up in the blanket which was his only clothing. His eyes rolled in their orbits and his face expressed both terror and fury … . This man is one of the most beautiful Negroes I have ever seen, and he is in the prime of his life.”40

  Neither Tocqueville nor Beaumont had come to America to study race, but race forced itself on the sympathies of the travelers and figured prominently in their writings once they returned to France. Tocqueville concluded the first volume of Democracy in America (1835) with an essay on “The Present and Probable Future Condition of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States.” Reflecting upon his journey and synthesizing his experiences, Tocqueville offered a somber assessment of race in the United States. “The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union,” he began, “arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory.” Slavery, he reported, seemed to be receding, but “the prejudice to which it has given birth is immovable … [and] appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.” Blacks and whites were separated in theaters, hospitals, churches, even cemeteries, where the “distinction of condition prevails even in the equality of death.” A free person of color “can share neither the rights, nor the pleasures, nor the labor, nor the afflictions, nor the tomb of him whose equal he has been declared to be; and he cannot meet him upon fair terms in life or in death.”41

  Tocqueville gave little credence to the argument that enlightened attitudes had precipitated the abolition of slavery in the North. Rather, the small number of slaves and their nonessential role in the Northern economy facilitated emancipation. Moreover, the gradual abolition of slavery in the North led to a double migration as slaves were shipped south and immigrants flooded Northern cities. In places such as New York, concluded Tocqueville, abolition “does not set the slave free, but merely transfers him to another master, and from the North to the South.” Of the remaining free blacks, segregation and diminishing numbers as a percentage of the population meant that emancipation posed little danger and the freedmen who remained in the North had time to learn “the art of being free.”

  “The art of being free.” The phrase encapsulated Tocqueville’s understanding, and he applied it not only to blacks but to whites as well. Struck by the differences between Kentucky and Ohio—the one a slave state, the other free—with the two separated only by a river, Tocqueville observed, “Slavery, which is so cruel to the slave, is prejudicial to the master.” He offered a reading of American character based on the “different effects of slavery and freedom.” In Kentucky, the presence of slavery degraded work and made free men idle and enervated, “ignorant and apathetic”; in Ohio, where slavery did not exist, “active and enlightened” laborers worked for prosperity and improvement. Kentuckians contented themselves with what they had; Ohioans struggled to get more, “to enter upon every path that fortune opens to [them].” Slavery undermined the work ethic and led inhabitants to live in the world of today; freedom exalted it and spawned the energy and enterprise that led to tomor
row. No wonder, he noted, that “it is the Northern states that are in possession of shipping, manufactures, railroads, and canals.” In December 1831, while in Cincinnati, Tocqueville observed, “Slavery threatens the future of those who maintain it, and it ruins the State; but it has become part of the habits and prejudices of the colonist, and his immediate interest is at war with the interest of his own future and the even stronger interest of the country … . Man is not made for slavery; that truth is perhaps event better proved by the master than by the slave.”42

  Slavery would be abolished; about that much Tocqueville was fairly certain. But he was at a loss to understand how blacks and whites could ever live together in the South. “We do not know what to do with the slaves,” a Louisville merchant told him, and that problem perplexed Tocqueville, who, early in his visit to America, confessed to “wearing myself out looking for some perfectly clear and conclusive points, and not finding any.” Along with most Americans, Tocqueville assumed that the races could not coexist. Gradual emancipation schemes that liberated future generations could not succeed, he argued, because such laws would “introduce the principle and the notion of liberty into the heart of slavery … . If this faint dawn of freedom were to show two millions of men their true position, the oppressors would have reason to tremble.” Furthermore, emancipating the slaves without providing for their survival, leaving them in “wretchedness and ignominy,” would only worsen the condition of the freedmen. “The very instruments of the present superiority of the white while slavery exists”—control of land, wealth, and arms—exposes the former slave “to a thousand dangers if it were abolished.” Following emancipation, “the Negroes and the whites must either wholly part or wholly mingle,” but Tocqueville had already concluded that prejudice and inequality made the latter impossible. If the races “do not intermingle in the North of the Union, how,” he wondered, “should they mix in the South?” Yet emancipating and removing the black race, as some advocated, was impossible. The cost of purchasing and transporting some two million slaves exceeded the revenues of the federal government. Such a scheme “can afford no remedy to the New World.”43

  Tocqueville despised slavery, but he did not believe slaves could be emancipated without being prepared for freedom. A conversation with Sam Houston on a steamboat headed for New Orleans compelled Tocqueville to think about the differences between Indians and slaves. Houston had been governor of Tennessee before temporarily abandoning his political life to live among the Cherokee Nation, where he acquired an Indian wife and a Cherokee name meaning “the Raven.” He was traveling to Washington along with a delegation to appeal to Andrew Jackson on behalf of the Southeastern tribes, who were being compelled to abandon their ancestral lands. Houston himself was in the midst of abandoning his life among the Cherokee for a career that would lead him to fame in Texas. When Tocqueville asked Houston about the “natural intelligence” of Indians, the Southerner answered, “I do not think they yield to any other race of men on that account. Besides, I am equally of the opinion that it is the same in the case of the Negroes. The difference one notices between the Indian and the Negro seems to me to result solely from the different education they have received.” Born free, the Indian could act as a free man, with intelligence and ingenuity. But “the ordinary Negro has been a slave before he was born,” and had to be taught how to live as a free man. As a slave owner in Texas, Houston would acquire the reputation of educating his slaves, but he never emancipated them. 44

  Tocqueville concluded that Southerners had two choices. They could educate, emancipate, and intermingle with the black population or, “remaining isolated from them, keep them in slavery as long as possible.” He had no doubt that the latter would be their course, but recognized that this might terminate shortly “in the most horrible of civil wars and perhaps in the extirpation of one or the other of the two races.” Though Tocqueville tried to look ahead, he acknowledged that “in every picture of the future there is a dim spot which the eye of understanding cannot penetrate.” This much he foresaw: “Slavery, now confined to a single tract of the civilized earth, attacked by Christianity as unjust and by political economy as prejudicial, and now contrasted with democratic liberty and the intelligence of our age, cannot survive. By the act of the master, or by the will of the slave, it will cease; and in either case great calamities may be expected to ensue.”45

  Tocqueville approached the question of race as a theorist. Beaumont took a different path. He too published a work about America that flowed from his visit in 1831. Only his work was a novel about slavery that included extended appendixes about the condition of the United States. Marie, or Slavery in the United States, appeared the same year as Democracy in America. Traveling across the country, Tocqueville had often taken gun in hand to stalk game while Beaumont sat on a hillside and sketched pictures. Something of that difference carried over into their writings. Whereas Tocqueville observed, Beaumont personalized. Tocqueville, the hunter, aimed for the intellect; Beaumont, the artist, probed the emotions.

  Marie is the story of a Frenchman who travels to America in 1831 and encounters a hermit named Ludovic living outside of civilization in the wilderness near Saginaw. Like the traveler, Ludovic is something of a visionary and reformer. He comes to the United States to experience the new society and to visit his friend Daniel Nelson, who lives in Baltimore with his children, George and Marie. Ludovic falls in love with Marie, especially after a visit to the almshouse, where he sees her soothe a raging, terrified black man who believes that a slave trader seeks to cut his flesh into strips and eat them. Nelson tries to warn Ludovic away from his daughter and tells him his story. The son of a Boston merchant, Nelson as a young man went to New Orleans, where, he was told, “If you don’t die of yellow fever you will make a fortune.” He married Theresa Spencer, an orphan whose great-grandmother had been a mulatto. When Theresa’s bloodlines were revealed, the family plunged from the heights of New Orleans society to its depths. “The whiteness of Theresa’s complexion was dazzling,” recounted Nelson, but “tradition condemned her.”

  Ludovic continues to pursue Marie, and the novel goes on to offer an extended meditation on prejudice, racism, and segregation in the United States, where even those “freed from bondage … are denied entrance into free society.” Blacks, Ludovic observes, are excluded from public schools and hospitals and kept apart from whites in courts, churches, and cemeteries. “I was continually witnessing some sad happening which revealed to me the profound hatred of the Americans for the blacks,” laments Ludovic. In the United States, “there is but one crime from which the guilty can nowhere escape punishment and infamy: it is that of belonging to a family reputed to be colored. The color may be blotted out; the stain remains.” In New York, Ludovic and George are mobbed and removed from the theater when someone identifies George as a mulatto; in Baltimore, George votes but his ballot is invalidated when it is claimed he has tainted blood.

  Reluctantly, Nelson allows Ludovic and Marie to marry, but at a chapel in New York they are swarmed by a mob that denounces all abolitionists as traitors and condemns any amalgamation of the races. From there, Nelson, George, Ludovic, and Marie seek refuge in different ways. Nelson travels to Georgia to help the Cherokee, who are being forced off their lands, but his efforts are in vain. George becomes a revolutionary and heads to North Carolina to lead a combined insurrection of slaves and Indians, but the militia murder him. And Ludovic and Marie look west, away from the scrutiny of civilization and toward the solitude of the forest. But their journey exhausts the lovers, and Marie succumbs to a fever just as they reach a resting place in the “wilderness full of hope.”

  Beaumont had gone further in his assessment than most. He saw that slavery could not stand: “When one considers the intellectual movements stirring in the world, the opprobrium which stigmatizes slavery in the opinion of all peoples; the rapid conquest which the ideas of liberty over the servitude of the blacks have already made in the United States; the progress w
hich enfranchisement is continually making from North to South; the necessity in which, sooner or later, the Southern states will be substituting free for slave labor, under the threat of being inferior to the Northern states; in the presence of all these facts it is impossible not to foresee a more or less imminent epoch in which slavery will have completely disappeared from North America.” Slavery would be abolished, but black men and women, Beaumont feared, would never be free from racial prejudice: “The freed black has almost no characteristic of the freeman; in vain will the blacks receive their liberty; they will still be regarded as slaves. Custom is more powerful than law; the Negro slave has been considered an inferior or degraded being; the degradation of the slave will cling to the freed man. His black color will perpetuate the memory of his servitude, and seems an eternal obstacle to the mingling of the two races.”

  “The storm is visibly gathering,” warned Beaumont; “one can hear its distant rumblings; but none can say whom the lightning will strike.”46

  THE VIRGINIA DEBATE OVER SLAVERY

  Southerners were not deaf to the coming storm. Ever since the Revolution, when Northern states enacted plans of gradual emancipation, some Southerners had struggled with the problem of how to eradicate a system that they viewed as a “necessary evil.” Necessary because slavery provided the labor and wealth of the region. Evil because relations between white and black, and between slaveholders and non-slaveholders, created social tensions and personal excesses that were intolerable.