In the mid-1850s, a new nativist political movement gathered across the country, and nowhere did it garner more support than in Massachusetts. In 1852, nativist fraternities organized the American Party, often called the “Know Nothings” because its founders disclaimed knowledge of secret societies to which they belonged. The party’s national platform replicated that of the American Republicans, but local Know Nothings often linked nativism and anti-Catholicism to other causes. In Massachusetts, where they endorsed labor reform, abolitionism, and women’s rights, Know Nothings swept the state elections of 1854, winning the governorship, every seat in the state senate, and all but a few in the assembly. Once in power, they fired immigrants from state jobs, excluded them from the state militia, formed a committee to investigate Catholic convents, and instituted a literacy test for voters. They also enlarged the public school system, required that industrial workers under fifteen attend school several months of the year, abolished imprisonment for debt, granted property rights to married women, and passed resolution after resolution against slavery.
Conditions in the mills continued to deteriorate, all the more swiftly after the economy slipped into a depression in 1857. In 1859, about 500 women—all immigrants and mostly Irish—struck several Lowell mills to protest wage cuts. None of the Yankee women supported the strike, and the low rates remained in force.
The most persistent and pernicious division among American workers was the color line. Not a single labor union federation included both black and white workers. The National Trades Union was entirely white and not by happenstance; its member unions and city centrals admitted whites only. Black activists were invited to a National Industrial Congress exactly once, in 1851, and the white Mechanics’ Assembly of Philadelphia stormed out in protest.
A fair number of white workers supported the abolition movement. In upstate New York, the Workingmen’s Parties of the early 1830s included antislavery planks in their platforms. Later that decade, craft journeymen provided the lion’s share of signatures on the petitions that New York City’s abolitionists sent to Congress. Mill workers in Lowell organized a Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1832, and twenty years later abolitionism had a large following in factories throughout New England. After touring the region in 1852, an organizer for the American Anti-Slavery Society reported: “The factory operatives felt that the northern capitalist was closely akin to the southern slaveholder, and that the design of the Slave Power and the Money Power is to crush both black and white.” German labor radicals also took strong stands for abolition. In San Antonio, Texas, the Forty-Eighter Adolph Douai published the Deep South’s only abolitionist newspaper, until a proslavery mob ran him out of town in 1856.
For the most part, however, white workers were indifferent or hostile to abolitionism. Many argued that reform should begin at home, that white labor should focus on its own grievances. Some were put off by antislavery agitators who regarded the wage-labor system as a model of social justice. William Lloyd Garrison, the Boston editor who became the country’s most prominent white abolitionist, alienated legions of working people in the 1830s, when he attacked unionism as a “pernicious doctrine” that encouraged workers “to consider the opulent as the natural enemies of the laboring classes.” In the 1850s, abolitionists’ alliances with the Know Nothings alienated immigrants. Worker opposition to abolitionism also stemmed from desires to preserve the Democratic Party, whose core constituencies were workingmen in the North and slaveholders in the South. The Democratic press encouraged worries that the emancipation of slaves would “lower the conditions of the white laborer” by flooding the job market with new competitors.
At bottom, antiabolitionism rested on the same hard-core racism that made race riots part of the American landscape. Rioters often directed their fury at antislavery activists and symbols. For eight full days in July 1834, white mobs in New York City attacked antislavery meeting halls, stormed the home of a wealthy white abolitionist, and rampaged through black neighborhoods. Between 1832 and 1849, Philadelphia was the site of five major riots in which white workingmen invaded black districts to club and stone residents and destroy the churches and other buildings where abolitionists gathered. The Philadelphia riot of 1842 commenced with an assault on a black parade in honor of Britain’s emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean.
In black communities, abolitionism was the most vibrant social movement. In Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and other cities with substantial black populations, antislavery work went hand in hand with agitation for equal voting rights, for the right to serve on juries, and for the desegregation of public schools and transportation. Black abolitionists also took direct action to liberate fugitive slaves who had been recaptured. In 1833, an armed crowd in Detroit stopped a sheriff and his deputies from returning a Kentucky fugitive to his former master. In 1836, a group of women barged into a Boston courthouse and rescued two women fugitives. Starting that same year in New York City, many communities formed “vigilance committees” to harbor fugitive slaves, defend recaptured fugitives in the courts, and organize direct action in their behalf.
Black and white activists cooperated in the “Underground Railroad,” a clandestine network that helped up to 50,000 slaves escape to freedom. The railroad’s best conductor was Harriet Tubman. Born a slave on the Eastern Shore of Maryland around 1820, she ran away to Pennsylvania in 1849 and became a hotel waitress in Philadelphia and Cape May, New Jersey. During the 1850s, she made some twenty trips back to Maryland, led out hundreds of slaves, and inspired thousands to escape on their own.
In the workplace, as in unions, the color line was rigidly enforced. In 1838, Frederick Douglass arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the center of the U.S. whaling industry and home to mariners of all colors from all over the world. The black community numbered over 1,000 in a city of 12,000, and included African Americans, West Indians, and Africans from the Cape Verde Islands. Black men voted, the public schools were integrated, and abolitionism had broad support among whites. But when Douglass applied for caulking work at a shipyard, he was told that the white caulkers would strike rather than work alongside a black man.
There were occasions when black and white workers made common cause. In 1835, they went on strike together at shipyards in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Racial clashes were more typical, however, especially between black workers and white immigrants. In 1842, Irish coal miners in eastern Pennsylvania violently drove black men out of the mines, and Philadelphia’s coal heavers warned that a riot would ensue if their employers hired any black men. In 1853, armed black laborers replaced Irish strikers on the Erie Railroad. In 1855, there were brawls between Irish longshoremen on strike in New York City and black men who went in to work. As Frederick Douglass observed of the longshore strike, “Colored men can feel under no obligation to hold out in a ‘strike’ with the whites, as the latter have never recognized them.”
Black workers organized local unions of waiters, barbers, sailors, and ship caulkers. Sometimes a black union cooperated with its white counterpart. In 1853 in New York City, white hotel waiters who had just organized a union sought the counsel of the Waiters Protective Association, a black union that had already won a raise. A black waiter named Peter Hickman told them, “Gentlemen, I advise you to strike . . . for $18 a month, and if the landlords of this city do not give it, that you turn out, and be assured that we will never turn in in your places at less.” When white waiters did strike, a second black union hastily formed and sent its members to take the strikers’ places. The Protective Association denounced the new group as a tool of the hoteliers and supported the strike to the end.
Mostly, black and white unions were in conflict if they were in touch at all. One of the worst confrontations erupted among caulkers in Baltimore’s shipyards, where caulking was traditionally a black trade. In 1850, members of a black Caulkers’ Association virtually monopolized the work, but over the next decade shipyards hired more and more German and Irish caulkers,
sometimes bringing them in when the Association called a strike. In 1858, the immigrants organized a rival union whose mission was to make caulking an entirely white trade. Union members mobbed black workers and petitioned the state legislature to bar them from the shipyards. As violence flared, the Caulkers’ Association was dissolved by court order, and employers recognized the white union.
Speaking for the National Reform Association, the Irish-born radical Thomas Devyr typified the white labor movement’s response when the issues of slavery and the rights of free blacks came up. “Emancipate the white man first,” he declared, “free him from the thraldom of his unsupplied wants and the day this is done, we’ll commence the manumission of the much wronged black man within our borders.” That was hardly a formula for solidarity across the color line, but it could work in unintended ways. Though many land reformers opposed abolitionism, they found themselves on a collision course with slaveholders as Americans debated slavery’s extension to the West.
WESTWARD EXPANSION AND IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT
The nation’s expansion to the Pacific coast started largely as a southern drive to acquire new lands for cotton and new states for slavery. The Deep South was mostly cleared of Indians in the 1830s. Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles were relocated to the “Indian Territory” in what is now Oklahoma. Resistance succeeded in only a few cases. In Florida, Seminole villages and sister communities of fugitive slaves fought off the U.S. Army in a seven-year war starting in 1835, and some escaped relocation. In North Carolina and Tennessee, some Cherokees got away in the winter of 1837–38, when U.S. troops rounded up 17,000 people for a forced march to Oklahoma.
In the 1820s, American cotton growers and land speculators established slaveholding settlements in Texas, a province of newly independent Mexico. They clashed with the Mexican government after it abolished slavery in 1829 and the next year enacted laws to stop the Anglos from importing slaves under the ruse that they were indentured. In 1835 Anglos rebelled, and in spring 1836 at San Jacinto they defeated an army led by Mexico’s President General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Captured in battle, Santa Anna bought his release by ceding independence to the province. It became the Republic of Texas, whose President Sam Houston had earlier been the governor of Tennessee. Almost immediately, Texas began to petition for annexation to the United States, and in 1845 it became the twenty-eighth state.
The next year Congress declared war on Mexico, and by fall 1847, U.S. troops occupied Mexico City. In return for peace, the Americans demanded the northern half of Mexico, from California to what is now western Texas. It was transferred to the United States in February 1848, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty stipulated that Mexicans living on this land would be treated as full-fledged U.S. citizens. Very quickly, however, the Americans set up special courts that reviewed Mexicans’ land claims and nullified them by the hundreds. In New Mexico, about 3.7 million acres were confiscated; in California, the Southern Pacific Railroad wound up with 11 million acres. In Arizona (part of the New Mexico territory until 1863), U.S. companies took over the copper and silver mines, bringing in white workers and a two-tier wage system, one rate for whites and a lower “Mexican wage” for people of color.
The sharpest changes occurred in California, the site of a gold rush. Just a week before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, a mechanic struck gold on a construction site at Sutter’s Mill in the New Helvetia colony near modern-day Sacramento. New Helvetia belonged to the German-Swiss entrepreneur John Sutter, who oversaw a gigantic wheat farm, a distillery, a hat factory, a blanket factory, a tannery, and various other businesses. The work was done by Indian laborers recruited from local Miwok and Nisenan settlements, paid in disks that could be redeemed for goods at Sutter’s store, and policed by his private army of 200 Indians commanded by German officers. Native Americans in California would face much worse than this after gold was discovered.
Gold seekers swarmed into California from all over the United States and Mexico and from Europe, South America, Australia, and China. Once there, they made a beeline for Indian country in the interior, where the gold was. Some Native communities were massacred, many others pushed off their land. At first they survived through wage work in mines and on ranches, but before long most of them were displaced by the many unlucky gold prospectors who needed jobs. In 1855, the U.S. Army forced California Indians onto five reservations where they would supposedly feed themselves by growing wheat, but the farms were too small to support everyone. The Indian population fell from about 150,000 in 1848 to 30,000 in 1860.
The new Anglo elite in California dreaded Mexican resistance. In July 1856, Los Angeles raised four vigilante companies to guard against “Mexican revolution” after a Californio crowd liberated a man from the city jail. Another alarm went out the following year when a young man named Juan Flores escaped from San Quentin Prison, organized a band of more than fifty Californios, and skirmished with Anglo lawmen. Again Los Angeles raised vigilantes. After an eleven-day campaign, they captured Flores and most of his men and hanged him and three others before delivering the rest to legal authorities.
Some Tejanos (Mexican Texans) took up arms as well. In 1859, Juan Cortina, son of a prominent ranching family in the Brownsville area, led some sixty guerrillas—mostly ranch hands—in a campaign to redress Tejano grievances. Proclaiming their “sacred right of self-preservation,” the band freed Mexicans from the Brownsville jail, raided the stores of Anglo merchants, and executed four Anglos who had gone unpunished for killing Mexicans. By the end of the year, Cortina had more than 1,000 followers. On December 27, they were defeated by the U.S. Army, but skirmishing continued into 1860 and Cortina was never caught.
The annexation of northern Mexico intensified the national debate over slavery. In 1848, the House of Representatives endorsed a proposal to ban slavery from the lands annexed under Guadalupe Hidalgo, but the measure failed in the Senate. That same year antislavery Democrats and Whigs broke away to form the Free Soil Party, which carried on the fight against slavery’s extension. Growing numbers of white workers and farmers supported the cause in the name of land reform, demanding that western lands be set aside for poor homesteaders, not slaveholding planters. New York’s Senator William Seward hit the nail on the head in a famous speech on the rising discord: “It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”
Congress tried vainly to put the conflict to rest with a package of laws known as the Compromise of 1850. California joined the federal union as the sixteenth free state, and the number of slave states remained at fifteen. New Mexico and Utah were recognized as formal U.S. territories without any prohibitions on slavery. Slave trading was banned from Washington, D.C., but not slavery itself. Congress pledged not to interfere with the interstate slave trade: It also passed a Fugitive Slave Act that commissioned federal marshals to hunt down runaway slaves and set up special courts to facilitate the reenslavement of anyone who got caught.
In defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act, black communities’ vigilance committees stepped up rescue activities, and more and more whites lent a hand. In one famous incident in 1851, abolitionists in the rural town of Christiana, Pennsylvania, battled a posse of slaveholders and federal agents who arrived with warrants for four runaways. Thirty-one blacks and five whites were arrested for this incident, which left a slaveholder dead and another seriously wounded. Just one person, a white man, was brought to trial, and a sympathetic jury found him not guilty.
Tensions escalated in 1854, when Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that called for “popular sovereignty”—each new state would decide for itself whether to be slave or free. This plan enraged Free Soilers and antislavery factions among the Democrats, Whigs, and Know Nothings. In summer 1854, they came together to found the Republican Party. Advancing the slogan “Free So
il, Free Labor, and Free Men,” the new party called for an end to slavery’s expansion and to federal laws supporting its existence. Warfare meanwhile erupted in Kansas; as it moved toward statehood under the popular-sovereignty plan, both slaveowners and abolitionists organized guerrilla bands to stamp out the opposition. In May 1856, violence penetrated the halls of Congress. A few days after the Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts denounced slaveholders for the “rape” of Kansas, South Carolina’s Democratic Congressman Preston Brooks beat Sumner almost to death on the floor of the Senate.
In the South, slave resistance heightened. Group escapes, plots, and mutinies were reported in Missouri and Virginia in 1850; North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia in 1851; Virginia again in 1852; Louisiana in 1853 and 1854; and Maryland, Mississippi, and Louisiana in 1855. The momentum accelerated in mid-1856, against the backdrop of a presidential election in which slavery was the principal issue. In Tennessee, four slaves working in an iron foundry near Dover were sentenced to death for plotting insurrection, and 150 black men marched on the town in an attempt to free the prisoners. In North Carolina, fugitive slaves living in the swamps near Lumberton stepped up guerrilla attacks on slaveholders and fought off posses that tried to clear the swamps. By the end of the year, every slaveholding state but Delaware was rife with news of slave riots and conspiracies, some of which involved white abolitionists. Tejanos also aided rebel slaves. In September 1856, authorities in Colorado County, Texas, expelled Tejanos for helping to arm more than 200 slaves conspiring to revolt. The Austin State Gazette reported that month that, “the lower class of the Mexican population are incendiaries in any country where slaves are held.”
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 11
