I. A FIREBELL IN THE NIGHT
This momentous question [of slavery], like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the union.
–Thomas Jefferson
In the early hours of the twelfth of April, 1861, Mary Chesnut lay in the bedroom of her Charleston, South Carolina, home, sleeplessly waiting and wondering. Until very recently her husband, James Chesnut, Jr., had been a United States Senator. Now he was a member of the Provisional Congress of the new Confederacy. With Mrs. Chesnut this April morning the nation, north and south, waited and wondered. Thunderheads of war were roiling over Fort Sumter out in the harbor. At 4:30 a.m. Mrs. Chesnut heard the "heavy booming" of a signal gun. "I sprang out of bed," she remembered, "and on my knees, prostrate, I prayed as I had never prayed before." The American Civil War had begun. "Woe to those who began this war," she warned, "if they were not in bitter earnest."
But the men who struck the first blow of the conflict were nothing if not in bitter earnest as they fired the first of more than 3,000 shells at Sumter. The object of all this violence, a lightly-armed pile of masonry off in the darkness of Charleston Harbor, was of no particular military value either to the United States or the newly-proclaimed Confederate States of America. But it had suddenly become the focus and the symbol of the political and social antagonisms that had divided North and South for the previous half-century. The long, complex, acrimonious national debate about free labor and slavery, about the primacy of the Union and the sovereignty of the states, about the meaning of liberty itself, had at last found decisively violent expression in this time and place. A Southerner at the scene thought that "All the pent-up hatred of the past months and years is voiced in the thunder of these cannon."
Some of the dramatis personae on the South Carolina shore suggested the long foreground of the conflict. When General Pierre G. T. Beauregard gave the order to fire on Sumter, his batteries were commanded by a general with the evocative name of States Rights Gist. Gist offered the honor of firing the first shot to Roger Pryor, a Virginia Congressman and long-time advocate of secession. A few days earlier Pryor had urged a Charleston crowd to "Strike a blow!" Still, when the moment came, the thought of the awful consequences of that blow weighed too heavily on Pryor. Who actually fired the first shot on that dark April morning is not clear from this distance, but a fire-eating secessionist named Edmund Ruffin could justly claim to have fired one of the first in that thunderous opening volley. And there is a certain poetic justice to his claim, for Ruffin's development of new fertilizers and innovations in land-use patterns a quarter of a century earlier had revitalized Southern soil nearly exhausted by the cultivation of cotton. As a volunteer with the Palmetto Guards on Morris Island, Ruffin was offered the honor of striking the first blow and embraced no reservations when it came to shooting at the "vile Yankee race." Ruffin was, as he said, "highly gratified by the compliment and delighted to perform the service." For the next 36 hours Confederate batteries hammered away at the helpless fort. A little after noon on the 14th of April the Union commander, Major Robert Anderson, hauled down his flag and surrendered his fort to General Beauregard, his former student of artillery at West Point. Incredibly, despite the thousands of shells fired by both sides, hostile fire killed no one. America's deadliest war had commenced without a combat death. A good deal of popular talk held that Southern independence was all but accomplished. A lady's thimble, it was said, would hold all the blood necessary to achieve it.
Perhaps the American people had been better served if more of them had thought long and hard about the implications of civil war, thoughts that occurred to Congressman Pryor apparently only in the last moments of peace. Sam Houston of Texas warned the South that independence was no more than "a bare possibility." Achieving it–if it could be achieved at all–would mean the "sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives." But in the heady enthusiasm evoked by the easy conquest of Sumter few heeded that prophetic voice. Fewer still seemed to recognize that despite increasingly angry rhetoric from both sides about an "irrepressible conflict," there was nothing inevitable about the coming of this storm.
America in the middle of the 19th century was a vigorous and successful popular democracy enjoying peace and prosperity unparalleled. A long lifetime before, on the eve of the American Revolution, St. Jean de Crevecoeur, a French aristocrat, had marvelled at the achievement of colonial America. He celebrated its "fair cities, substantial villages, extensive fields... decent houses, orchards, meadows, bridges.... Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion." Economic opportunity and "the silken bands of mild government" combined with the people's native industry and ingenuity had created "a great Alma Mater" and a sanctuary for liberty. The 80-odd years of dynamic growth since the Revolution had intensified the luster of even Crevecoeur's glowing vision. From thirteen states between the Atlantic shore and the crest of the Appalachians, the new republic now reached across the vast interior of the continent to the Pacific Ocean. It had grown four-fold, quadrupling its territory while simultaneously quadrupling its population. In the same period a revolution in transportation inspired a dramatic increase in both agricultural and industrial production. Between 1800 and 1850 the gross national product increased sevenfold–to nearly four billion dollars in 1860. As historian James McPherson writes, the United States was "the Wunderkind nation of the nineteenth century."
The success of the United States, however, had significance in a much larger context. For the nation was more than a powerful economic engine; it was in its very conception a daring social and political experiment. The American body politic rested on two core convictions: civil liberty and human equality. Beyond America's shores these articles of political faith were by no means universally shared. Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French historian, thought that "two streams flowed forth" from the French Revolution, "the first led mankind toward free institutions, the other led mankind toward absolute power." When Americans looked eastward toward Europe at mid-century, they saw absolutism ascendant nearly everywhere. France was virtually a political community of one–Emperor Louis Napoleon. King Frederick and the Junkers exercised ruthless power to preserve a feudal order in Prussia. Terror and tyranny reigned in the vast Russian empire. A divine-right monarch sat on the throne of Spain.
Even Great Britain with its long tradition of political and social reform made progress only slowly. As historian Allan Nevins points out, in England at mid-century the "cardinal points of the People's Charter, universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, abolition of property qualifications for the House, and salaries for members, were still to be gained." In the United States, however, these articles were civil rights Americans had exercised for more than three generations. The American example was a city upon a hill, and in principle and practice it said to the world that "suffrage should be the right of every adult male, that the highest authority should repeatedly be given to men of the poorest origins, that public moneys should be spent on schools and not armies, [and] that social equality be enforced by opinion as vigorously as it was protected by law." Thomas Jefferson in his First Inaugural voiced a conviction shared by thoughtful men and women everywhere: America was "the world's best hope" that civil liberty and free institutions would endure and prevail in a despotic world.
But the threat to free institutions did not come from despotism abroad. The threat came from American slavery on American soil. Perhaps the figure of Jefferson himself most vividly illustrates this terrible paradox at the heart of American society. A disciple of the European Enlightenment, the Virginian was both a rational and visionary thinker. He had "sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." He had articulated for Americans their first and best principles, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." But on the serenely beautiful grounds of Jefferson's Monticello home black men and women labored in unrequited toil. They were owned by Thomas Jefferson, and over them he governed with virtually absolute power. Indeed, Jefferson's problem was the nation's.
1) Sleeping Serpent
When a Dutch frigate brought 20 black Africans to work the tobacco fields of Jamestown in 1619, the planters may have made an unthinking decision with unforseen consequences, but two centuries later those consequences were coming into focus with disturbing and divisive clarity. In truth, the problem of chattel slavery had never been far from the surface of the national consciousness. "There was never a moment," wrote John Jay Chapman, "when the slavery issue was not a sleeping serpent. That issue lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787." The Constitution itself embodied the first great compromise with slavery, agreeing that three-fifths of slaves within a given state would be counted for purposes of both taxation and representation in Congress. The language of the Consitution suggests the framers' ambivalence. It recognized that there were "such Persons" who were not citizens, but nowhere did it use that hard and uncompromising word 'slaves.'
The sleeping serpent that was chattel slavery would not remain long asleep. It was first stirred by the muscular growth of the United States itself. Throughout the first half of the 19th century America was growing rapidly, but in very different ways and in different sections. In the Northeast, modern finance capitalism was emerging. The factory rather than the farm was becoming the most important source of economic strength, drawing more and more of its people into burgeoning cities. In the old Northwest, a system of diversified agriculture had emerged which depended on internal improvements in transportation to get its goods to markets in a wider world. In the old Southwest, free-labor and slave-labor interests were in uneasy equilibrium. In the same period a simple machine by a Yankee inventor, the cotton gin, was making a Cotton Kingdom of the old South. One crucial consequence of this economic diversity was a new consciousness. As the historian Avery Craven writes, "Economic consciousness" became "the basis of sectional consciousness."
This consciousness began to generate stresses in the American system as Americans became increasingly convinced that sectional differences were necessarily competing–and perhaps ultimately incompatible–interests. As the North grew in population, industrial strength, and capital, the South grew increasingly anxious about this shift in power. A French observer about mid-century put the case clearly and concisely: the North grew every day "more wealthy and densely populated while the South is stationary or growing poor.... The first result of this growth is a violent change in the equilibrium of power and political influence. Powerful states become weak, territories without a name become states.... Wealth, like population, is displaced. These changes cannot take place without injuring interests, without exciting passions."
The extent to which passions were excited may be seen in an incendiary little book by one Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis, first published in 1857. Bruce Catton has described Helper as one "of those baffling people whose sole function, historically, is to make people angry." He was a Southerner whose love of the South was animated by fierce hatreds. He despised the planter aristocrats and held them responsible for the "countless evils which they have inflicted on society" by the perpetuation of slavery. But his hatred of slavery arose from no sympathy with the slaves. He hated black people with a hysterical fury, likening them to "wolves, jackals, hyenas... and other noxious creatures." He hoped that slavery might be destroyed and the slave exterminated with the system. Slavery debased the South, he believed, and brought Southerners "under the reproach of all civilized and enlightened nations." It was the reason the South had fallen behind the rest of the country in trade, technology, and education. It was the reason the poor white remained poor. The "first and most sacred duty of every Southerner who has the honor and the interest of his country at heart," he argued, is the abolition of slavery.
Take from The Impending Crisis its vicious race hatred and Helper was saying more or less what increasingly severe and strident Northern voices had been saying for forty years and more. White reformers like Elijah Lovejoy, Theodore Weld, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison, and free blacks like David Walker and Frederick Douglass maintained a relentless agitation against the peculiar institution. Garrison spoke for the most extreme abolitionist view. It held simply that slavery was a monstrous evil, and the Southern planter's life was "one of unbridled lust, of filthy amalgamation, of swaggering braggadocio, of haughty domination, of cowardly ruffianism, of boundless dissipation, of matchless insolence, of infinite self-conceit, of unequalled oppression, of more than savage cruelty." On the floor of the House in April of 1860 Republican Congressman Owen Lovejoy rose in anger and strode to the Democratic side of the aisle. Lovejoy–whose brother Elijah had been murdered by a pro-slavery mob in 1837–assailed slavery in vehement language, pronouncing it more vicious than robbery, piracy, and polygamy together. Equally incensed, Roger Pryor of Virginia–the man who did not fire the first shot of the Civil War–leapt from his seat swearing that he would not endure Lovejoy "shaking his fist" in the faces of Southern Democrats. More hot language was exchanged. Pryor challenged Lovejoy to a duel, and Lovejoy accepted, specifying bowie knives. The debate over slavery had intensified passions until congressmen were prepared to have at each other at knife point. Fortunately for the antagonists, gentlemen could not meet on such terms. That weapon was outside the code duello.
One consequence of the abolitionist assault on slavery was the narrowing and hardening of Southern opinion. In the early Federal Period most Southerners–like most Northerners–had believed slavery to be a national misfortune but not necessarily a permanent feature of the American landscape. Many believed that slavery should and would, in time, pass out of Southern life as it had passed out of Northern life. In fact, prior to 1830 more anti-slavery societies met below the Mason-Dixon line than above it. But a generation later the slave labor that made cotton had become the underpinning not only of the Southern economy but part of the structure of Southern society itself. By 1860 the South was producing nearly 200 million dollars' worth of cotton alone. The four million slaves, the human capital who produced this wealth, were worth two billion dollars. To free the slave would bring about the wreck of Southern society. Hence, an attack on slavery represented more than an attack on a crucially important element of the Southern livelihood, it was an attack on a way of life itself.
It followed that as the anti-slavery attacks grew more extreme, so too did the pro-slavery justifications. South Carolina's John C. Calhoun held that, far from evil, slavery was "good–a positive good." Other Southerners outreached him by arguing that the institution was blessed by divine approbation. A Baptist Convention in South Carolina, for example, held that the legitimacy of slavery "was clearly established in Holy Scripture, both by precept and example." Others turned to the natural science of the day to argue that the white race and the black had in fact arisen from separate creations. To these ethnologists and natural historians the "evidence" was compelling that the black man was a distinct and inferior creation of nature and his natural condition was bondage. Far from being dehumanizing, the institution of slavery was the surest and fastest way to lead black people to Christianity and civilization. As Northern anti-slavery invective stormed over the sin of slavery, the Southern justification took on at times a strangely rapturous tone. Slavery, one Southerner declared, had done more "to elevate a degraded race... to civilize the barbarous... to enlighten the ignorant, and to spread the blessings of Christianity, than all the missionaries that philanthropy and religion had ever sent forth." In short, a half-century of economic change had worked to bring about a thorough transformation of the Southern view of the slavery issue. Whatever private reservations individuals held (and there were many), a solid South had closed ranks in defense of slavery. On the eve of civil war a new slogan emerged, an incongruous variation on Patrick Henry's revolutionary utterance, "Give us SLAVERY, or give us death!"