All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  The day after Republicans unified behind Sherman, on December 6, Congressman John B. Clark of Missouri proposed a resolution unique in congressional history, that any member who had “endorsed and recommended . . . a certain book,” whose “doctrine and sentiments” he declared were “insurrectionary” was unfit to be Speaker. The dangerous book in question was The Impending Crisis of the South, written by Hinton Rowan Helper. At the suggestion of Francis P. Blair, the book, which had been published in 1857, was abridged in an edition of 100,000 copies printed by the New York Tribune that the Republican Party was circulating. Sherman had lent his name among more than sixty Republicans in its approval as a party document. Clark submitted excerpts for the record and said that those “who design to carry that treason and rebellion into effect, deserve a fate which it would not be respectable for me to announce in this House.”

  John Sherman of Ohio

  Listening to Clark, Sherman thought his proposal “seemed so ludicrous that we regarded it as manufactured frenzy.” Then John S. Millson of Virginia spoke. “One who consciously, deliberately, and of purpose, lent his name and influence to the propagation such writings is not only not fit to be Speaker, but is not fit to live,” he said. Sherman rose to submit a letter from Blair explaining that the edition of the offending book was “expurgated” of many “obnoxious” passages, that Sherman himself had not read the book, and that he was opposed to “any interference whatever by the people of the free States with the relations of master and slave in the slave States.” His concessions did not have a calming effect.

  Congressman Laurence Keitt of South Carolina, Preston Brooks’s accomplice in the caning of Sumner, read at length from Seward’s speeches and cited his “irrepressible conflict” speech, to demand of Republicans, “He is now the head of the Republican party. Do you endorse him, or do you repudiate him? . . . We mean now to defend ourselves. All we say to you is elect your candidate. Stand upon your platform, and then let each party fight out its own cause.”

  This brought Thaddeus Stevens to his feet to offer remarks dripping with sarcasm, that he did not “blame” the “gentlemen from the South” for “the language of intimidation,” which “they have tried fifty times, and fifty times they have found weak and recreant tremblers in the North who have been affected by it, and who have acted from those intimidations.” Martin J. Crawford of Georgia accused Stevens of deceiving the South “pretending to respect our rights, whilst you never intend to give us peace.” “I am not to be provoked by interruptions,” coolly replied Stevens. So began the bitter two months long battle over the Speakership.

  Hinton Helper, the son of an illiterate dirt farmer from North Carolina who died when he was a child, sought his fortune in the California Gold Rush, and failing at that wrote a devastating economic, sociological, and political critique of the South. Unable to find a publisher, even in New York, he self-published the book. The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It was a unique and inarguable statistical handbook of information on how slavery destroyed economic development, invention, education, and enterprise, while promoting poverty, disease, and ignorance. Even more it was the most insightful and scathing exposé ever written by a Southerner of “the entire mind of the South,” the mirror of an oligarchy that in its compulsion for “acquiescence with slavery” suppressed freedom of speech and thought and depended upon the “abject servilism” not just of the slaves but of “the non-slave holding whites.”

  Here was Helper’s unforgivable crime, his revolutionary call to poor whites to overthrow slavery in their own interest. “Notwithstanding the fact that the white non-slaveholders of the South, are in the majority, as five to one, they have never yet had any part or lot in framing the laws under which they live. There is no legislation except for the benefit of slavery, and slaveholders. As a general rule, poor white persons are regarded with less esteem and attention than negroes, and though the condition of the latter is wretched beyond description, vast numbers of the former are infinitely worse off. A cunningly devised mockery of freedom is guaranteed to them, and that is all. To all intents and purposes they are disfranchised, and outlawed, and the only privilege extended to them, is a shallow and circumscribed participation in the political movements that usher slaveholders into office.”

  Helper borrowed a famous phrase of Sumner’s to captiously describe slave owners, “the lords of the lash,” to designate them as the oppressors of the poor whites. “The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks, who are bought and sold, and driven about like so many cattle, but they are also the oracles and arbiters of all non-slaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated. How little the ‘poor white trash,’ the great majority of the Southern people, know of the real condition of the country is, indeed, sadly astonishing.”

  Helper’s cutting descriptions of “the slave-driving oligarchy” were endlessly creative and rivaled Sumner’s in their abuse: a “junto,” “vain-glorious, self-sufficient and brutal,” “haughty cavaliers of shackles and handcuffs,” “insulting to intelligence.” His descriptions of slavery were unrestrained as a vampiric “sum of all villainies.” “The diabolical institution subsists on its own flesh. At one time children are sold to procure food for the parents, at another, parents are sold to procure food for the children. Within its pestilential atmosphere, nothing succeeds; progress and prosperity are unknown; inanition and slothfulness ensue ; everything becomes dull, dismal and unprofitable; wretchedness and desolation run riot throughout the land; an aspect of most melancholy inactivity and dilapidation broods over every city and town; ignorance and prejudice sit enthroned over the minds of the people; usurping despots wield the sceptre of power; everywhere, and in everything, between Delaware Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, are the multitudinous evils of slavery apparent.”

  The Slave Power rested on the passivity of the “masses of white people” that “succumbs to its authority.” Told what to think and do by slaveholders, “poor whites may hear with fear and trembling, but not speak. They must be as mum as dumb brutes, and stand in awe of their august superiors, or be crushed with stern rebukes, cruel oppressions, or downright violence. If they dare to think for themselves, their thoughts must be forever concealed.”

  Helper unapologetically called himself an abolitionist, and said every Southerner should be an abolitionist, but his sympathy was not principally with the blacks. He pierced the veil of the ideology of white supremacy that raised the racial identity of poor whites above their inherent class conflict with the slaveholders, calling that ideology “the black veil.”

  The black veil, through whose almost impenetrable meshes light seldom gleams, has long been pendent over their eyes, and there, with fiendish jealousy, the slave-driving ruffians sedulously guard it. Non-slaveholders are not only kept in ignorance of what is transpiring at the North, but they are continually misinformed of what is going on even in the South. Never were the poorer classes of a people, and those classes so largely in the majority, and all inhabiting the same country, so basely duped, so adroitly swindled, or so damnably outraged. It is expected that the stupid and sequacious masses, the white victims of slavery, will believe, and, as a general thing, they do believe, whatever the slaveholders tell them; and thus it is that they are cajoled into the notion that they are the freest, happiest and most intelligent people in the world, and are taught to look with prejudice and disapprobation upon every new principle or progressive movement. Thus it is that the South, woefully inert and inventionless, has lagged behind the North, and is now weltering in the cesspool of ignorance and degradation.

  The Impending Crisis, which by early 1859 had become the greatest best-seller since Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was banned from circulation in the South in the spirit of the Gag Rule of the 1830s. Most importantly, it provided a tool for the Democrats to force a crisis on the Republicans. Helper’s book became a rallying point for the Democrats, wh
o were just short of a majority, to thwart Sherman’s election as Speaker. It was fitted into a forced logic that insisted on a continuum from John Brown to the Republican Party to Seward; now Helper was inserted into the equation. On the day Sherman was nominated, the New York Herald connected all the dots in an editorial that set the tone. “ ‘Either slavery must be abolished, or the Union must be dissolved.’ That is the argument of the bloody and brutal Rochester manifesto [of Seward]; that is the plain English of Helper’s insurrectionary and treasonable book . . . . Helper and John Brown bring them what they want. . . . John Brown puts Helper’s doctrine into execution. Thus the black republican party appears as the direct foe of the Union.”

  Roger Pryor, the fire-eating editor, now a congressman from Virginia, declared that if Sherman were elected Speaker it would give “to the South the example of insult as well as injury,” and “I would walk, every one of us, out of the halls of this Capitol.” Helper’s book, he said, was circulated “in rebellion, treason, and insurrection, and is precisely in the spirit of the act which startled us a few weeks since at Harper’s Ferry.” These talking points and words about “treason” and “insurrection” were constantly repeated. Thomas C. Hindman of Arkansas, for example, delivered a stem-winding speech denouncing “the Black Republican Bible, The Helper Book.” “The tenets and practices of the Republican party lead to civil war, to bloodshed, to murder, and to rapine. . . . This traitorous, sectional, and bloody Republican party is the one that met us at the threshold of this House, on the first day of the session demanding the Speakership.” He added to Sherman’s crimes his criticism of the Fugitive Slave Act, which made him “a practical encourager of negro-stealing, and an assistant of the underground railroad.” “In other words,” replied Sherman, “I am charged with being a Republican. That is my offense; none other.”

  The New York Tribune and Greeley naturally jumped into the fray, acclaiming Helper as more menacing to slavery than Brown. “As ‘the pen is mightier than the sword,’ so Rowan Helper, armed with facts and figures, calling upon the give millions of non-slaveholders to rise and take possession of the Southern ballot-boxes, is far more to be dreaded by the Slavery Propagandists than a thousand John Browns, armed with pikes and rifles, urging ignorant negroes to escape into the Free States.”

  Over a biblical forty days and nights, forty-four ballots were taken with Sherman falling just three votes short. Finally, he cut a deal with three Know Nothings to vote for another Republican, one who had not previously endorsed The Impending Crisis, William Pennington of New Jersey, which allowed the Republicans to organize the House and claim the chairmanships of the committees.

  The game of smearing Sherman had achieved its aim. He was not the actual target. Helper’s book was merely the available artifice. The true focus was Seward. “The defeat of Sherman was gall and wormwood to the Seward division of the Blacks [Republicans],” Senator Toombs wrote Alexander Stephens on February 10. “It brought them into national discredit and strengthened the opposition to Seward inside the party.”

  The controversy over The Impending Crisis, however, did not relent. It boiled over on the floor of the House with a speech by Owen Lovejoy on April 5, 1860, in which he called slavery “the sum of all villainy.” A mocking voice shouted, “You are joking.” As Lovejoy spoke he wandered toward the Democratic side of the chamber. Pryor of Virginia angrily walked to confront him. “It is bad enough to be compelled to sit here and hear him utter his treasonable and insulting language; but he shall not, sir, come upon this side of the House shaking his fist in our faces.” John F. Potter of Wisconsin, a Republican, stepped toward Pryor. “We listened to gentlemen on the other side for eight weeks, when they denounced the members upon this side with violent and offensive language. We listened to them quietly and heard them through. And now, sir, this side shall be heard, let the consequences be what they may.” Amid calls for Lovejoy to be seated or to continue, Barksdale of Mississippi, who had acted as Brooks’s bodyguard while he beat Sumner, shouted, “Order that black-hearted scoundrel and nigger-stealing thief to take his seat, and this side of the House will do it.” Other members and Barksdale again called him a “nigger thief.”

  Lovejoy declared he had endorsed Helper’s book, and if it was “treason,” as Pryor had said, “I did it.” “You may kill Cassius M. Clay, as you threaten to do; but ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,’ ” quoting the saying of an early Christian theologian that became a credo of English Protestant martyrs. “You may shed his blood, as you shed the blood of my brother on the banks of the Mississippi twenty years ago—and what then?” The blood of his brother, Elijah P. Lovejoy, the first martyr of the abolitionist cause, killed in Illinois for publishing an antislavery newspaper, was his inspiration. “A Republican Party will spring up in Kentucky and all the slave states ere long,” he said, an implicit comparison of the Republicans to the early Protestants.

  “What is the objection to the book?” Lovejoy went on. “The objection is that a citizen of the United States, an American citizen, addressed himself to his fellow-citizens, in a peaceful way, through the press, and for this you find fault with him and say that he must be hanged. . . . Has not an American citizen a right to speak to an American citizen? I want the right of uttering what I say here in Richmond. I claim the right to say what I say here in Charleston.”

  “You had better try it,” threatened Milledge L. Bonham, who had succeeded Preston Brooks in his seat from upcountry South Carolina. Lovejoy replied that he could question monarchy in England, “but I cannot go into the slave State and open my lips in regard to the question of slavery.” “No,” interrupted Martin of Virginia, “we would hang you higher than Haman.” Yet Lovejoy continued. “You drive away young ladies that go to teach school; imprison or exile preachers of the Gospel; and pay your debts by raising the mad-dog cry of abolition against the agents of your creditors.”

  “The meanest slave in the South is your superior,” sneered Barksdale of Mississippi. Lovejoy wondered if American rights were “less sacred” than the ancient claim of liberty, “I am a Roman citizen.” “This is my response to the question why I recommended the circulation of the Helper book.” He was interrupted again and again. “And if you come among us, Martin repeated, “we will do with you as we did with John Brown—hang you as high as Haman. I say that as a Virginian.” “I have no doubt of it,” said Lovejoy.

  After Lovejoy finished, Roger Pryor of Virginia challenged John Potter of Wisconsin to a duel, demanding “satisfaction” for his insolence. Potter chose bowie knives as the weapons. Pryor’s second called the knives a “vulgar, barbarous, and inhuman mode.” The challenge was withdrawn. Potter was hailed in the Northern press as a hero.

  On the day Lovejoy defended free speech of the House floor, Reverend Daniel Worth, a friend of Helper, was convicted in North Carolina for circulating his book. It was the reason that Lovejoy was speaking. Worth had been arrested the previous Christmas for his crime. The National Era stated, “We should literally have no room for anything else, if we were to publish all the details of whippings, tar-and-featherings, and hangings, for the utterance of Anti-Slavery opinions in the South.” Worth was found guilty of selling the book, a verdict upheld by the North Carolina Supreme Court. After his conviction, the legislature amended the law to make distributing an “incendiary” book a crime punishable by death.

  On the same day the House went down the rabbit hole chasing John Sherman for endorsing The Impending Crisis, the Senate created a Select Committee to Inquire into the Late Invasion and Seizure of the Public Property at Harper’s Ferry. Senator Mason was appointed its chairman and Senator Davis acted as chief prosecutor. Davis announced that the ultimate culprit was his colleague who had faithfully sat by his bedside through his recent illness. “I will show before I am done,” declared Jefferson Davis on December 8, “that Seward, by his own declaration, knew of the Harper’s Ferry affair. If I succeed in showing that, then he, like John Brown, deser
ves, I think, the gallows, for his participation in it.”

  Seward and Wilson were questioned about their encounters with Hugh Forbes and their advance knowledge of Brown’s plans, which they categorically denied. Their appearances nonetheless highlighted their guilt by association. Howe and Stearns testified that they knew nothing beforehand of Brown’s raid. “Never,” said Howe. “I should have disapproved of it if I had known of it,” said Stearns, “but I have since changed my opinion.” Jefferson Davis asked him about Brown’s visit to the Bird Club at the Parker House. “What kind of a house is this Parker House?” “It is one of the best eating-houses in the town,” Stearns replied. Davis’s interest in the well-known hotel “excited a good deal of amusement in Boston,” wrote Stearns’s son. That summer, on a vacation to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Davis passed through Boston, where he dined at the Parker House “to see what it was like.”