There was no Southern Abraham Lincoln. Or rather, there was: He moved from his native, slaveholding Kentucky to Illinois and won political prominence there, saying things Southerners never would have tolerated. We know this, because when Lincoln eventually came to the attention of Southerners, they did not like him at all.
There was no intra-Southern rebellion against slavery by whites. The principled anti-slavers in the South—Washington, Jefferson, Madison—themselves owned slaves and hoped, at best for slavery’s gradual decline. Washington set an example by emancipating his slaves in his will. Jefferson was too much in debt throughout his life to do even that. And such men were at the summit. Antislavery sentiment declined after the founding generation passed.
As for black Southerners, they did resist and even rebel. Individuals won their freedom, if only by escaping to the North. But the slaves never acted in concert in sufficient numbers to win their freedom on the battlefield until reinforcements arrived in the person of U. S. Army troops. They found no allies among poor Southern whites. There was no 1848-style uprising of the oppressed, propertyless masses.
Why did the Southern political system enjoy such support from whites, such acquiescence from blacks? I shall argue that Eugene Genovese’s ‘paternalism’ explanation captures part of the truth. The other part, paradoxically, was that white Southerners really did govern themselves to a considerable extent, and they banded together in order to continue to do so.
The slave system was seen by whites, across social classes, as the foundation of their whole way of life, a way of life that in large measure fulfilled the American political intention of self-government, comprehending the security of natural rights. Tocqueville writes that in the South at the time of the founding “the whole race of whites formed an aristocratic body, headed by a certain number of privileged individuals,” the big planters (Tocqueville I. chapter 18). After primogeniture was abolished, free laborers in effect competed with slaves; they did not cooperate with them. Free laborers depended upon the plantation owners for work, or they worked their own small farms. No bonds between freemen (white or black) were established. (There was a bond between workers and slaves, and it was significant; but it was also international. The Confederacy expected British diplomatic recognition, on the basis of the importance of cotton imports to British manufacturers and workers. But the British workers, represented by such men as Bright and Cobden, were antislavery; they tolerated considerable hardships during the war but did not support recognition of the C. S. A. There is a difference between a temporary, though heavy sacrifice, and the prospect of a lifetime of competition at the lower end of the economic scale.)
Tocqueville to a degree exaggerates the aristocratic character of white Southerners. America, North and South, always had commercial agriculture—not a feudal order of lords and peasants (Moore 111). On the other hand, Southerners were rural capitalists, not urban capitalists, ‘bourgeois’ types. If they could not be real aristocrats, they could imitate aristocrats, try to enjoy aristocratic privileges without having a genuinely feudal social order (Moore 121). In South Carolina—admittedly, an extreme case—plantation owners deliberately undercut merchants, artisans, small farmers. There was simply no basis there for a white popular movement against planter control (Countryman 165). Such tactics were not so thoroughly successful elsewhere, but they were sufficiently successful so that the big planters controlled the state governments throughout the South between the founding and the Civil War. In other states, the other interests had more power than they had in South Carolina, but it wasn’t enough to injure planter interests.
Those interests were lucrative. Southern quasi-aristocrats made enough money to sustain themselves comfortably at the top of the social and political pyramid. Adam Smith was right; slavery contradicts commerce. The North was more prosperous than the South. But slavery does not damage commerce so much that it drives a slaveholders’ economy to disaster. By world standards, the South was prosperous. And its economy for a time complemented that of the North. From 1815 to 1830, cotton was the major cause of industrial growth in the United States (Moore 116), as the crop picked by slaves was shipped north to the textile mills of New England. The South fully participated in the burgeoning international economy, as well. By mid-century, the planters scarcely needed Northern markets anymore—or so they thought. Between 1840 and 1860, 80% of the cotton used by Britain was from the American South (Moore 116). Slave labor was integral to American industrial development for several decades. Adam Smith might have argued that such development would have been stronger and better-balance had there been no slaves, but the slaves were there and they were useed profitably by Southerners and (indirectly) by Northerners. When Lincoln assigned blame for slavery on Americans as a people, not on Southerners alone, he meant it and he was right.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, Americans told themselves, and they were far from regarding the emancipation of slaves as a narrowly economic threat. It is true that slave rebellions never posed a major military threat to any Southern government. It is true, also , that as the decades wore on, fewer and fewer Southern planters worried that the slaves could ever pose such a threat. (For example, in his voluminous writings Jefferson Davis never once worries about a rebellion on his plantation; quite the opposite, he and his wife were shocked that ‘their’ slaves ‘betrayed’ them by siding with the Yankee invaders.) But that doesn’t mean that the average Southerner did not fear slave rebellion. The example of the bloody Haitian revolution of 1791-1804 proved unsettling. The offer of freedom to slaves by Virginia governor Lord Dunmore in exchange for slave support of the Tories associated slave rebellion with tyranny—so much so that Jefferson cites such “incitements” in the Declaration of Independence’s list of indictments against George III. Even a disinterested and intelligent man like Tocqueville predicted racial extermination after abolition.
A look at the demographics shows why such apprehensions could be plausible. By 1860 the white population of the South was 9 million, of which 350,000 were slaveholders. There were 4 million slaves in the South. Most of the slaves were in the Cotton Belt, i.e., the lower South (Moore 116, 119; Genovese 5). Given such numbers, Southerners would ask, If we emancipate the slaves, where will they go? Tocquevile says that race war would be “inevitable” (I. chapter 18) because the only alternatives would be amalgamation or domination, and amalgamation was out of the question for reasons of racial antipathy (“We scarcely acknowledge the common features of humanity in this stranger whom slavery has brought among us” [I. chapter 18]). After the war, Southerners of course found a third way: a limited race war in the form of a guerrilla conflict establishing segregation with domination, the attempt to reconstitute some of the old slave society under the conditions of formal freedom. But before the war, Southerners would hardly desire to wrench their society out of joint simply in order to appease Northerners with post-Reconstruction plan of abolitionism-cum-racial-subordination. Why take the risk? Why incur the costs? Especially if you miscalculate the resolve of the North in any long war, as the Southerners did.
But if the slaveholders were the minority of whites, why did the white majority not jettison them and take over? The answer seems to be that the planters—with such men as Washington early, Calhoun later, Davis later still—were very astute politicians. The non-slaveholders concentrated in the South of the upcountry. They were independent farmers or ‘yeomen.’ the yeomen wanted nothing more than to govern themselves. Ensconced in the state legislatures, the planters wisely left them alone. Taxes were low; the hand of the state was light or nonexistent. Why rock the boat? (See Foner 11-12). Further, although 7% of the slaveholders owned 75% of the slaves (Genovese 5), the small slaveholders were interspersed with the upcountry whites . Local elite families often owned a few slaves, and exerted considerable influence. All the whites, upcountry or lowland, slaveless or slaveholding, very much preferred white supremacy to civic equality with blacks. The Virginians of the Jefferson-Robert E. Lee school, trembling over slavery in the knowledge that God is just, were perhaps more conscientious than most people, North of South. James M. McPherson presents strong evidence for the view that yeomen fought because they detested the prospect of sharing political power with black freedmen. Understanding that non-slaveholders posed a potential problem, secessionists embarked on a concerted and successful campaign to exploit that racial animosity.
It is this very American passion for self-government that accounts for the popularity of John C. Calhoun. As Ericson shows (75 ff.), Calhoun started not as a tariff polemicist or a pro-slavery champion but as a constitutional theorist concerned with local self-government. Although the debate over slavery itself sharpened (between North and South) as the secession crisis brewed, the self-government theme never went away. Planters and yeomen sincerely cared about that, and many sincerely supposed that the slave system must be maintained in order to sustain Southern self-governance. In the lower South especially, Calhoun could and did argue—in the late 1840s, in response to reports that a young Illinois Congressman named Abraham Lincoln was readying legislation to ban slavery in the District of Columbia) that emancipation in the South would result in “the prostration of the white race” because liberated blacks with citizenship rights would make alliance with Northern politicians, control patronage in the South, and ruin Southern whites.
Appeals to self-government were powerful in the upper South, also. As late as 1860-61, in the wake of Lincoln’s victory, the upper South of tobacco farmers remained in the Union after the lower, Cotton-Belt South seceded. Only when Lincoln called up troops to use against the lower South did the Virginians and other upper-Southerners secede, as a matter of principle, in defense of self-government.
As for poor whites, with little or no property, they too consented to the system. They saw the prospect of emancipated slaves as an immediate threat to their own meager livelihood. If the participated in the slave patrols, they could get their own sense of being in command. Planters prudently discouraged fraternization among slaves and poor whites, not only informally but with legal restrictions (Genovese 22-23).
With regard to the yeomen and the poor whites, the planters enjoyed the very significant advantage of information control. Speakers at Southern political barbecues acted like teachers, instructing ‘students’ on the finer (and not-so-fine) points of policy and Constitutional rights, mostly as presented through the Calhounian lens. The barbecues were like “political schools wherein lectures were delivered for the education of the masses: (Silbey 57). It would be surprising to learn that the lessons offered presented abolitionism in a positive light. Increasingly, one of the lessons taught was a very old one: ‘Us against Them,’ that is, we decent Southern folk against those tariff-imposing, slave-loving barbarians of the North. New England is indeed the New England, and we Southerners will hang together or be hung, separately. Whereas on Indian policy the Southern states and the federal government effectually—one driving Indians out, the other holding open the door (Tocqueville I. chapter 18), no such collaboration existed on slavery, at least in Southern eyes. Rather, they saw the encirclement of the South. To stifle internal faction, foment a sense of external threat, Machiavelli advises.
Churches cooperated with these strategies. Jefferson and other founding-generation anti-slavery Southerners could at times believe, or at least hope, that secular progress would send slavery to a gradual and peaceful oblivion. The Northern slaves did abolish slavery in the years after the founding. Slaves in Southern states, they told themselves, would take longer to emancipate, but someday emancipation would be feasible. But nineteenth-century Americans experienced the Second Great Awakening. They were substantially more religious than the founding generation had been. This increased religiosity gave abolitionism a much harder edge, as so many historians have said. But it may have given pro-slavery advocacy a harder edge, as well. As one’s religiosity increases, the need for a stronger justification of a dubious practice also increases. Slavery started to be presented not as a necessary evil but as a ‘positive good.’ Slaveholders did enough in the way of humanitarian care for slaves to tell themselves they were good masters, pursuing the aristocratic practice of noblesse oblige (Genovese 1976 62-68). This ethos culminates in Jefferson Davis’s claim—made by many Southerners of the time—that black slavery was divinely ordained, as may be seen in the Old Testament’s strictures concerning the tribe of Ham. Or, as Frederick Douglass said, speaking from a rather different point of view, “religious slaveholders are the worst” (Douglass, chapter 10). Tocqueville argues that liberty in the United States requires strong bonds, of which religious bonds are among the most important (I. chapter 3; I. chapter 17). The strength of social bonds makes up for the weakness of government, prevents weak governments from collapsing. Those who govern by consent must appeal simultaneously to principle and to self-interest (I. chapter 3). Selective quotation from the Bible can appeal mightily to both, thereby winning the most ardent assent.
The slaves themselves, despite their substantial numbers, were eminently controllable. though numerous, slaves were outnumbered, except in South Carolina. Sheer force made them feel their minority status more acutely. By the 1820s, a master could kill his slave with impunity (Genovese 37); the slave patrols were active. slave escape was difficult, if only because there was nowhere nearby to run and hide. The fugitive railroad beckoned some, but if anything this was a safety valve, allowing the most courageous and vigorous slaves a convenient self-exile. Slaves were also dispersed, with no good way to communicate and thereby coordinate resistance. Also, as Douglass so eloquently shows, slavery was degrading. Having cut Africans off from their own communities, from many of their customs, and their means of education, slaveholders deliberately deprived slaves of modern education, as well. Douglass’s personal testimony on this point (Douglass, chapter 6) is confirmed by Tocqueville (I. chapter 18).
Genovese calls plantation slavery a form of paternalism—neo-feudalism, as distinguished from true feudal patriarchy. Paternalism is somewhat ‘anxious,’ vague, unstable. This can be seen most clearly on the ‘theoretical’ level in George Fitzhugh’s notorious tract, Cannibals All! Fitzhugh wants to put forth a thoroughgoing critique of Locke and advance a return to Filmerian patriarchy. But he concedes to Locke the key point: the labor theory of value. Fitzhugh does not see that the labor theory of value puts the axe to the root of patriarchy. But paternalism does succeed in “undermin[ing] solidarity among the oppressed by linking them as individuals to their masters” (Genovese 5). Tocqueville notices one important feature of this system: “In the South the master is not afraid to raise his slave to his own standing, because he knows that he can in a moment reduce him to the dust at pleasure” (I. chapter 18). The slave got tantalizing glimpses of equality, enough in some cases to give him a stake in the system. This sort of thing was exemplified on the Jefferson Davis plantation by James Pemberton. Pemberton was Davis’s closest friend, aside from Davis’s older brother, Joseph. Davis and Pemberton went hunting together (demonstrating, among other things, that Davis trusted him with a gun). Offered his freedom if Davis died, Pemberton is said to have said, No, I want to stay and look after Mrs. Davis in her old age. Few slaves were so favored, but slaveholders were in a postion to manage incentives as well as to mete out punishments (see Douglass, chapter 2). Genovese argues that the slaves forced planters to adopt an incentives system, but the point is that the incentives system was within the slave system. Thus, for example, slaves had their place in the slaveholder’s family—as ‘children’ (Genovese 74)—but at the same time slaves feared that their real families could be broken up at any time, as indeed had already been done when they were removed from their villages in Africa by slave traders (Genovese 452).
Some slaves fought for the Confederacy. It is likely that more (180,000—12% of all U. S. troops by 1865) served in the Union army. When emancipation finally did come, the slaves showed all the characteristics of a long-divided, long-conquered people. Some celebrated. Some were apprehensive. As it happened, both groups were right, as freedom turned out to be both better than slavery and very dangerous to the former slaves. All the elaborate strategems and institutions of the slaveholders had failed to win black consent to slavery. When emancipation came, they took it, never waxing nostalgic about the good old days of gracious living, as Mrs. Jefferson Davis did. But during those old days, they never had a chance of mobilizing effectively against slavery. They were strong enough to cause poor and middle-income whites to fear them, and maintain political cohesion with the planters. They were too weak to overthrow the self-governing, slave-dominating whites.
In her book American Citizenship, Judith Shklar argues that, for the founding generation, the value of American citizenship was “derived primarily from its denial to slaves, to some white men, and to all women” (16). This is an exaggeration, inasmuch as citizenship is primarily a means of securing natural rights; the ‘primary’ contrast, if there was one, was between the full citizens of an independent republic and the subjects of a monarchic empire. The Declaration of Independence charges the king with imposing the institution of chattel slavery on the colonies, but did not compare the condition of slaves to the condition of subjects. This is not to deny that such comparisons were made—George Washington charged the British with trying to make the colonists “tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway”—but it is to deny that this ‘negative’ definition of citizenship was primary.
This notwithstanding, the farther ‘South’ one went, and the closer to the Civil War one got, the more many Americans in the South did define themselves as citizens against the conditions of slavery and the supposed character of slaves. That is, Shklar’s argument describes antebellum Southerners better than it does the American Founders or Americans generally. Political cohesion, reinforced by the ‘Us against Them’ trope, along with the unusual combination of hierarchy and laissez-faire localism practiced by the planters, made paternalism feel very much like self-government to whites, and allowed for a considerable degree of real self-government by whites.
As Lord Charnwood observes, “The South was neither base nor senseless, but it was wrong.”
Works Cited
Charnwood, Abraham Lincoln. Garden City: Garden City Publishing Company, 1917.
Countryman, Edward: The American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.
Davis, Varina: Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederat States of America: A Memoir. 2 volumes. Freeport: Books for Libraries, 1971.
Douglass, Frederick: Autobiographies. New York: The Library of America, 1994.
Ericson, David F.: The Shaping of American Liberalism: The Debates over Ratification and Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Fitzhugh, George: Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.
Foner, Eric: Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Genovese, Eugene: Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Random House, 1976.
McPherson, James M.: What They Fought For, 1861-1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.
Moore, Jr., J. Barrington: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966.
Shklar, Judith: Redeeming American Political Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Silbey, Joel: The American Political Nation, 1838-1893. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Tocqueville, Alexis de: Democracy in America. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. and Delba Winthrop translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
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