From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction 0826221351, 9780826221353

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Preface: Our War
Introduction: The Meaning of the New Birth of Freedom
Part I: The Republican Argument
1 What Were They Reconstructing?
2 The Relationship of Slavery to Southern Oligarchy
3 The Origin of Southern Oligarchy
4 The Oligarchy Rises
5 American Republicanism Regroups
Part II: The Test and Implications
6 The Evidence
7 The Burial of the New Birth of Freedom
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

FROM OLIGARCHY TO REP UBLIC AN I SM

FROM OLIGARCHY TO REPUBLICANISM The Great Task of Reconstruction Forrest A. Nabors

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOU RI PR ESS Columbia

Publication of this volume has been supported with a gift from the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy.

Copyright © 2017 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65211 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved. First printing, 2017.

ISBN: 978-­0-­8262-­2135-­3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947611

This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Typefaces: Elzevir and Bembo

STUDIES IN CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY Justin B. Dyer and Jeffrey L. Pasley, Series Editors The Studies in Constitutional Democracy Series explores the origins and development of American constitutional and democratic traditions, as well as their applications and interpretations throughout the world. The often subtle interaction between constitutionalism’s commitment to the rule of law and democracy’s emphasis on the rule of the many lies at the heart of this enterprise. Bringing together insights from history and political theory, the series showcases interdisciplinary scholarship that traces constitutional and democratic themes in American politics, law, society, and culture, with an eye to both the practical and theoretical implications. Previous Titles in Studies in Constitutional Democracy Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation James W. Endersby and William T. Horner John Henry Wigmore and the Rules of Evidence: The Hidden Origins of Modern Law Andrew Porwancher Bureaucracy in America: The Administrative State’s Challenge to Constitutional Government Joseph Postell

With gratitude and admiration for their lives, which brightened the paths and highways leading to the City upon a Hill, the author humbly dedicates this book to Mr. Alex Saunders (1900–1984), Mount Vernon, New York Mr. Martin Adler (1922–2012), Rumson, New Jersey Dr. Harry Victor Jaffa (1918–2015), Claremont, California and to my grandmother, Mrs. Kathryn Tolbert Smith (1908–1982), Fair Haven, New Jersey

Contents

Preface: Our War xi

Introduction The Meaning of the New Birth of Freedom

3

Part I: The Republican Argument

31



Chapter One What Were They Reconstructing?

33



Chapter Two The Relationship of Slavery to Southern Oligarchy

73



Chapter Three The Origin of Southern Oligarchy

105



Chapter Four The Oligarchy Rises

151



Chapter Five American Republicanism Regroups

187

Part II: The Test and Implications

223



Chapter Six The Evidence

227



Chapter Seven The Burial of the New Birth of Freedom

283

Notes 329 Bibliography 365 Index 391

ix

Preface Our War On a business trip to Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1998, I found myself on one of the streets radiating outward from the old state capitol. As I glanced at the capitol from a long distance, a tall column caught my attention. Upon that column was an armed figure with an erect and manly bearing. Even from afar, his outward form could not be mistaken for anything but a representation of a Confederate soldier; martial valor was the message. I uneasily scanned the pedestrians up and down the street, seeking the faces of my fellow citizens who had the most right to take offense at this statue. They were there, going about their business peacefully, as if they were in any other American city. In my mind was a thought best captured by Ulysses S. Grant, that Southerners had fought “long and valiantly” for a cause that was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought.”1 Years later, I left business, became a political scientist, and began studies that have led to this book. On a sunny day in the late summer of 2008, I was in Boston for an academic conference and decided to use my free time visiting the city’s colonial-­and revolutionary-­era sites. I especially wanted to visit the Boston Public Garden and Boston Common, the central point of American republicanism, where our patriot fathers assembled in defiance of monarchic rule. Approaching on foot, I paused as if struck by a thunderbolt. Rising above everything else, above the magnificent figure of Washington on horseback, was a monument of an altogether different character from the one I remembered in Raleigh, and the sight of it caught me unaware. Although I had known nothing about the existence of this monument, from afar I instantly knew what it was, stopped walking, was overcome, and had to turn my face away. xi

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For a long time after Aristotle made politics a distinct field of study, it was generally recognized that the first and most important duty of a political scientist was to identify clearly the parts and the whole of a given political society, especially who rules and by what ruling principle. This is sometimes a very difficult task. We must try to know the animating principle of the whole, the relationship of the whole and the parts, when and where the whole and the parts are coming together into greater concord, and when and where the parts are breaking away, like eddies that force a change in the direction of a river’s current, are split off into a new channel, or are reabsorbed into the main flow of the river, strengthening it. This is what all political societies do. The payoff of becoming deeply immersed in these studies is that we can recognize meaning in small details, even in aesthetics, that have been touched by organizing principles at work within the enveloping political society. For several years I had been immersing myself deeply enough in studies of the Civil War era that the minds and hearts of that past generation had become familiar to me. It was clear that what rose before me was a production of that generation, sprung from America’s republican cradle. Not a valorous soldier but a woman stands at the pinnacle of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument at Boston Common. Her posture expresses an otherworldly beauty, tenderness, and solemnity. She wears a crown of thirteen stars and cradles the American flag with one arm and with the other a drawn sword, point turned downward. This is no Winged Victory, with head held high. Rather, she gazes slightly below her, sorrowfully regarding her many lost sons from Boston. You will not find the thrill of conquest here or the commemoration of martial valor as an end in itself, but something higher, the commemoration of a hard-­won peace and the vindication of America’s founding principle, the honorable end to which they dedicated their martial valor. While preparing the manuscript for this book, I learned that the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Boston was dedicated on Constitution Day, September 17, 1877, in an elaborate ceremony and after extensive efforts that began immediately after the conclusion of the war. When I read the remarks of keynote speaker Charles Devens, they did not surprise me. His remarks run parallel to the thesis of this book and the aesthetic character of the monument. “This is no Monument to the glories of war,” he said. “Nor is this a Monument to valor only.” These were not the self-­serving words of a politician whose valor was never tested. Devens spoke as a combat veteran, one who had received multiple wounds in Civil War battles and had earned a xii

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general command. Yet with moderation and magnanimity, he discouraged “boasting or unseemly exultation” over the rebels and instead focused his audience on the nature of the cause for which he and the Massachusetts men had staked their courage.2 They fought so that “the government they had lived under might be preserved, and that the just and equal rights of all men might be maintained.” The war “was not a mere conflict of dynasties, or of families, like the English Wars of the Roses.” Such wars of succession change the ruling house, but not the system of government. In the Wars of the Roses, the Houses of York and Lancaster contended for control of the throne that would remain supreme over England’s monarchic society, no matter which victor occupied the throne. Rather, our American Civil War “was a great elemental conflict, in which two opposite systems of civilization were front to front and face to face.” By defeating the Confederacy, Devens and his comrades had emancipated “the subject race from slavery and the dominant race itself from the corrupting influence of this thraldom.” To Devens, slavery’s evil effect extended beyond the harm done to the liberty of the slave to include all members of political society. Therefore, Union victory was a victory for all Americans, everywhere, even in the defeated South: “I should think the victory won by these men who have died in its defence barren, if it shall not prove in every larger sense won for the South as well as the North.”3 From his perspective, the war had rescued the South, though devastating its lands and costing it many lives. The passages of Devens’s address that receive special attention in this book are the allusions to the struggle between “opposite systems of civilization” and to slavery’s evil effect. The effects of slavery and the division of the nation into two “opposite systems of civilization” are causally linked. Devens and his contemporaries understood that slavery’s existence transformed the character of political society, wherever slavery took root and increased. That transformed political society, or political regime, developed in a direction that deviated from the path established by the American founding fathers. The character of the inchoate regime increasingly differed from the other, until they were two fully formed regimes, and the two could no longer remain united or at peace. The difference between these two warring regimes became so sharp that they appeared to be “opposite systems of civilization,” though both were American, geographically speaking. But if the defining antecedent of “American” is the American founding, then only one side in this war was “American.” Devens’s commemoration of Boston’s war dead xiii

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intended to honor the men for restoring the founding fathers’ republican liberty in the South and for securing its preservation in the whole. Initially, the South eschewed speeches, pomp, grand ceremony, and monuments commemorating its part in the war. Southern ladies’ associations took care to bury their war dead in simple cemeteries, and that was all.4 Defeat presents itself as an obvious explanation for Southern reluctance to honor their dead more conspicuously than they did, but the unpopularity of the war within the Southern soldiering class and their families is a complementary explanation. In contrast, the soldiering class in the Union remained loyal, though they, too, were badly mauled and bloodied. White Union regiments were drawn from nine of the eleven seceding states that formed the Confederacy, the exceptions being Georgia, which supplied a battalion, and South Carolina, whereas, not counting the cleft border states, no Confederate regiments were drawn from any state remaining in the Union.5 Desertion crippled the Confederate army, and some scholars now attribute the Confederacy’s military defeat to this cause.6 But in the 1864 presidential election, the Union army rejected McClellan and the prospect of a negotiated peace with the Confederacy and instead voted to reelect Lincoln and the certain continuation of the war in which they were dying—­and they voted for Lincoln in higher proportion than the civilian public.7 The unpopularity of the war within the Southern soldiering class, that is, among ordinary Southerners, was not a surprise to contemporaries.8 In his 1877 address Devens hinted at the reason. Long before the war the bulk of the men who filled Confederate armies had lost the liberty won for them by their revolutionary fathers and had become a ruled class under their state governments, due to the baneful effect of slavery. For these ordinary Southerners, a prospective Union victory was a victory for them, and their desertions and defections to the Union army suggest that many knew or felt this and voted with their feet. Just a few years before the war, a son of North Carolina published an infamous criticism of antebellum Southern government, and its vituperation rivaled anything that the most radical Northerner had ever dared to utter. Well known to all in his generation, Hinton Helper lamented the overthrow of the republican principles of the Southern fathers—­George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Patrick Henry—­and claimed that government based upon their principles existed only in the free states of the North. Helper deprecated the oppression doled out to common white Southerners outside the planter class and placed the blame squarely upon the effect xiv

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of slavery.9 Unsurprisingly, in North Carolina during the war, unionism was strong among these subjugated whites, and Confederate state authorities visited bloody reprisals upon them in response.10 In his postbellum speech, Devens alluded to the same analysis and judgment, as published by Helper and by many others before and after the war. But Helper not only hated slavery, the cause of this oppression; he also hated the enslaved.11 The slaves’ eventual enfranchisement begins to explain why the Confederate monument on the Raleigh capitol grounds was raised and still stands today. The monument honoring the common Confederate soldier might have been a most peculiar proposition immediately after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, due to the unpopularity of the war among those whom the monument honored. But in 1867 a new phase of legislation in Congress known as congressional Reconstruction began and provided a strong pretext for ordinary Southerners to change their opinions about the North and the war. The legislation intended, as Devens said, to secure “the just and equal rights of all men,” including the millions of emancipated slaves. The unintended effect of congressionally mandated civil and political equality, as intelligent Southerners explained, was the creation of the solid South—­the eventual unity between the poor white ruled class that Helper previously defended and the white ruling class that Helper previously attacked, brought together by common opposition to the equality of freedmen.12 Now, in retrospect, all white Southerners could regard the Confederate fight against Northerners in a more favorable light than they previously did. By 1883 the people of Raleigh began to hear proposals to honor the Confederacy. Inflamed by Union memorials that he saw in Boston, Captain Samuel A’Court Ashe, a veteran of the Confederate army, returned home to Raleigh and campaigned for proper shrines and monuments. In 1895 thirty thousand people greeted the unveiling of the Confederate monument on the state capitol grounds and warmly received an address by another Confederate veteran from the officer class, Alfred Moore Waddell.13 His address joined a growing chorus in the South, poignantly memorializing the “Lost Cause,” a reinterpretation of the Civil War that attributed its origin to Northerners’ unconstitutional aggression against states’ rights. He erased antebellum Southern statesmen’s open break from the American founding fathers and made the founders and Confederates seem to be in alignment. He erased the central significance of slavery and the prominent and politically embarrassing memory of antebellum antagonism between ruling whites and ruled whites in the South.14 xv

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Thus, the political character of the antebellum South, surveyed by North Carolinian Hinton Helper, began to recede behind thickets of politically convenient revisionism, woven by men like North Carolinians Ashe and Waddell. A few Southerners persisted in acknowledging that past and the cause of their forgetfulness. After having served as an officer in the Confederate army, then as a U.S. representative from Alabama and secretary of the U.S. Navy, Hilary Herbert wrote in 1913, “The Negro and the ‘carpet-­bagger’ had compelled the whites to forget their animosities and come together to save their civilization. Hence the Solid South.”15 Indeed, in a speech in the Raleigh capitol in 1909, Ashe decried “the saturnalia of Reconstruction” and praised “full restoration of Anglo-­Saxon control” and “undying opposition to those who would destroy their civilization.”16 But the old civilization’s antebellum animosities between ruled and ruling whites never entered his speech. Ashe and others continued to push the revisionist account of the antebellum South and the Civil War, and such men did successfully alter how Americans understood the past and themselves. By 1928 the Raleigh News and Observer reported that Ashe’s “different view of the Civil War . . . has won the praise of leading New England historians and educators as well as that of [Massachusetts] Governor Fuller.”17 And so layers of misinterpretation clouded our memory of the past, aided by Americans’ desire to regenerate their Union.18 An era of forgetfulness commenced in America. Forty years after the birth of American liberty, a race of kings arose from American soil. They sprouted wherever the institution of slavery was planted, like the warriors in Greek legend who sprouted from dragons’ teeth sown into the soil of Colchis. Over time, these kingly men compacted with one another, repudiated the lofty principles of their nation’s birth, acquired rule over most of the landmass of the United States, and finally aspired to install themselves as permanent suzerains over a great empire, whether within the American Union or outside of it, it mattered not to them, except as a question of expediency. The causes of our Civil War and the difficulties of Reconstruction originate in their rise. Nobody suffered more for this political revolution against the principles of the American founding than Southerners themselves, both white and especially black. Nobody did more to bequeath the principles of the American founding to us than the men Devens honored at the foot of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Boston, on Constitution Day 1877. These men, utterly unpracticed at war, picked up their rifles, donned Union blue, and saved the xvi

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achievements of our patriot fathers from a premature and inglorious end, for Southerners as well as Northerners and for the world. Present-­d ay Americans are far more likely to know the battles of the Civil War and the wise aphorisms of Lincoln than to comprehend fully the dire course of events that those battles and his wisdom arrested. We tend to be very well aware of important aspects of the period—­of the enslavement of millions of Americans, of the results of the Civil War generation’s incomplete work during Reconstruction, of the subsequent torments and discrimination that afflicted our fellow citizens and their ancestors. We puzzle over these evils in our history, forgetting the behemoth that was the source of these evils and forgetting that the behemoth would have done worse and trampled on freedom for all, reducing millions more to political vassalage and slavery, if not for the men Devens honored. We are situated somewhat like children who have forgotten or never knew a heroic parent’s sacrifices, skill, and determination that saved us from a desolation that never came. They afforded us the luxury of our blithe forgetfulness. Today we are a prosperous and free people and can barely imagine the dark reign of tyranny, adapted for modernity, that we and other people of the world might have inherited, had they not firmly prosecuted the war to its conclusion. But they understood the nature of the struggle in which they were engaged. At Gettysburg Lincoln said as much. Liberty was in retreat; aristocracy and monarchy were in the van. The last hope for free government in the world was the rump Union, stretching from Maine to Minnesota, from Canada to the Ohio River, plus the states of Oregon, California, and Kansas. Europeans understood this as well, and the powerful enemies of republican liberty pensively watched our unfolding epic and considered intervention. When British Liberal and Oxford professor Goldwin Smith visited Boston, he warned the New Englanders, “You are fighting . . . for Democracy against Aristocracy; and this fact is thoroughly understood by both parties throughout the Old World. . . . [T]he sympathy . . . of the Aristocratic party you cannot claim.”19 Americans in government were aware of “the trans-­Atlantic sympathy of royalty and the nobility with the South” and were aware too that our war would “convulse the Governments of all Europe” and would “arouse the passions and excite the prejudices of classes and factions always inimical to our great example and experiment.” They warily braced for news of European arms reinforcing Southern armies.20 The contending aristocratic and democratic parties in Europe knew that the issue of our war determined xvii

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whether the weight of a young and powerful continent would be thrown on the scales of history for them or against them.21 If Britain entered the field in support of the Confederacy, U.S. Secretary of State William Seward vowed, “We will wrap the whole world in flames.”22 Our war narrowly escaped becoming an international war, a first world war, fought to preserve or destroy the hope of free government, in view of our doorsteps and not in faraway Europe. We have forgotten the high stakes of the contest to which Lincoln’s speech referred. When summoned by events to save us, who are their posterity, our white and black fathers stood at post and paid the unspeakable price. Their harvest of woes, their awareness of their grave legacy and their stewardship of our welfare were addressed by James Doolittle of Wisconsin in early 1864 on the floor of the United States Senate when the end of the carnage was yet beyond their horizon. On that day the Senate was embroiled in debate and Doolittle was speaking. Just then, interrupting the proceedings, a “great corps d’armée” of the Union passed outside their windows, heading out “to engage,” he observed, “in the greatest battle this continent or the world has seen for two generations.” Within earshot of the tramping divisions, Doolittle pivoted, urging his colleagues to set aside divisive policy questions which were moot until victory was secured. He reminded the Senate that upon the results of that battle and our war, “hang not only the hopes of this Republic, but the hopes of the world,” and acknowledged that England and France might still “take sides against us.” Come what may, Doolittle exhorted them to press on and complete the destruction of America’s rising and rebellious oligarchy. The result of their “gigantic struggle” would “determine whether republican government shall live or die; whether a constitutional government, resting upon the people for its support, can be maintained, or must perish forever.” For the sake of “generations to come after us,” it was necessary that they gather “our forces from the East and from the West,” and pour out “our men, our blood, our treasure…all we of this generation have and all we hope to have” – even their own sons: Our country at this hour is bleeding at every pore; every household wears the drapery of mourning; grief is an unwelcome visitor at every fireside; an unbidden guest fills the vacant chair at every family table, and, by the side of the mourning widow or mother, bends, in anguish, deep and unutterable, at every family altar. Sir, some of us have been made to drink of this bitter cup; there are some, like my honorable friend from Maine, [Mr. Fessenden] and myself, xviii

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who have been compelled to look into the graves of our sons, fallen a sacrifice to put down this unholy rebellion. And, sir, we have been made to feel, in our inmost souls, what our judgments clearly see, that the great issue of this people and specially of this present time, and before which all others should give place, is an issue of arms—­whether we shall have success or whether we shall fail in crushing the military power of the rebellion. Shall the Republic live or die? We not only know but we are made to feel that if we do not succeed in maintaining this Government and putting down this rebellion—­a nd that can only be done by force of arms—­our sons have been sacrificed in vain. But if we shall succeed, as, with the blessing of Providence, I hope and trust we may; if we shall be permitted to see that standard, under which they entered the service, float once more in triumph, with not one star obscured nor one stripe erased, over every inch of the soil of every State and Territory of the United States, we can then say to our struggling hearts, “Peace, be still! though our sons have fallen our country lives.”23

The American Republic prevailed. The nation could then begin the arduous and prolonged work of smoothing out the rebellious element that was anomalous to its republican nature and, in worldwide contests yet to come, could become a defender and not an assailant of liberty.

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INTRODUCTION

The Meaning of the New Birth of Freedom The Purpose of This Book The task of Reconstruction was the greatest of tasks that every nation must face at least once, the task of constituting or reconstituting its political regime. The survival of our republican form of government and the future prospects for equality and liberty for all depended on both the American victory in 1783 and the Union victory in 1865. After the Revolutionary War, the goal of American statesmen was to establish a republic from monarchic material. After the Civil War, the goal was equally profound, to reestablish that system of government and free way of life. Today, we do not see the similitude that we ought to see in the work of the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress and in the work of the republican delegates to the Continental Congress and the Federal Convention in 1787. We generally understand that the American revolutionaries fought against monarchy and for republicanism. If we did not understand what they were struggling against, we could not fully appreciate their revolutionary effort to establish a republic. Studies of the aims, disputes, and deeds of the Continental Congress and the Federal Convention would make much less sense. In that event, someone would have to write a book about how the delegates to the Continental Congress and the Federal Convention understood their long conflict with Great Britain. Because we generally know what they thought of that conflict, we take their cause for granted, and we see the Revolutionary War in light of the founding of the nation and the framing of the Constitution. We understand that when they established a new nation and a new law, that was the moment to which all events led and from which all 3

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events proceeded. The moment when the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress remade the nation and renewed the law is in this class of rare events. Just as we see the American Revolution in light of the American founding, we ought to see the Civil War in light of Reconstruction and not the other way around. The purpose of this book is to recover how the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress understood the prior national struggle that decisively shaped their understanding of their task. The premise of this book is that long ago, we, the American people, ceased to be fully aware of what the Republicans believed the cause of their party was and what they resisted when dark clouds gathered above the nation and then when the storm broke. We remember slavery, the principal theme of those days, but we no longer remember how they saw the political conflict at its deepest level and in its most general sense that shook the nation for decades. Because we have lost that memory, we do not completely see or study Reconstruction for what it really was, and we miss its most valuable lessons. For that reason, most of this book is devoted to this recovery, and only part of one chapter addresses Reconstruction itself. As they passed through their national crisis, the Republicans looked far backward in time and southward in direction in order to understand it and to know how to solve it. This book attempts to follow their lead, looking backward in time and into the antebellum South, where the cause of the national crisis is found. The panorama that opens to our view, through their eyes, is partially represented here. The South that they see is not one that we have understood well enough or that we can easily understand, because the further development of that South was stopped at Appomattox. To contemporary Americans from every part of the nation, schooled from birth as they are in the general idea of equality, the real political character of the antebellum South probably would seem too incredible to be true, more at home on another continent in a far-­d istant age than within our present borders not long ago, if they could travel through time and see for themselves. At their first encounter with the ruling class of the antebellum South, the same Americans who proudly wave the Confederate flag today would likely feel their American blood boil, hoist the Stars and Stripes, and reach for their guns. They know not what they do. The division of the United States into two independent nations logically followed the division of the American political regime into two inherently hostile political regimes, one republican in form, the other oligarchic. In 4

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suturing this dangerous wound, congressional Republicans not only had to recombine the sections but, most important, also had to address the profound difference in the two political regimes that caused the division. That difference explained decades of prior national history and defined their problem. When the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress addressed the national crisis and used the terms republic and oligarchy, they were using the terms of classical political science for types of political regimes. For the sake of precision, a brief review of these terms is in order. In modern social science–speak, a political regime could be termed a primary independent variable; the dependent variable is human life, everything. Therefore, when serious claims rise from the pages of primary historical documents wherein leading statesmen are repeatedly pointing to a fundamental difference in types of political regimes, future generations should sit up and take notice and then collect and seriously evaluate those claims. Because forms of political regimes are so fundamental to shaping human life in different ways, understanding them is the first order of business in understanding the past. In Aristotle’s Politics, a political regime is a system of government and a way of living, broadly understood, encompassing both law and custom, both formal government and culture. A regime is defined by the sovereign ruler or ruling body as well as by a specific way of life of political society that is causally related to the type of sovereign who rules.1 The ruler or rulers are the one or the number of persons who control the offices and institutions of government, and they are not always equivalent to the officers of government. Ruling through those offices and institutions, the sovereign ruler orders, arranges, and shapes the parts of political society, just as craftsmen work with materials to produce a finished product.2 The conduct of all activity, most notably the ruling activity of the sovereign, presupposes a superintending aim, that is, a generally discernible principle expressing the best or most choice-­worthy way of life and a standard of justice.3 All parts of political society, people and institutions, tend to assimilate the character of the ruling principle, which constrains and channels conduct and influences law and the interpretation of law. The ruling principle articulates the parts of political society and produces a way of life common to the political society but distinct from others. Only a regime, a common “way of life,” maintains a multitude of people as one political society.4 By oligarchy Republicans referred to a form of political regime defined by Aristotle as one in which a rich minority rules for the advantage of the 5

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rich minority and in which the people composing that political society are ranked.5 They are ranked because the ruling principle of that regime is the principle of natural inequality that justifies minority rule.6 In their view, white did not rule over black in the South; a few rich whites ruled over the many, both white and black. Sometimes the Republicans used the less pejorative label aristocracy, which differs from oligarchy by the character of rule but still means rule of the few. For a long time, scholars of Southern history have recognized something different about the South, especially in the antebellum South, and have coined the terms southern distinctiveness, southern exceptionalism, and southern nationalism to give a name to this difference.7 All the peculiar attributes that distinguished the antebellum slave South, and what remained of the antebellum South after the war, are the result of the development of this revolutionary political regime. The regime was revolutionary within the American Republic, because, in contrast, the American Republic was established on the opposite ruling principle of natural equality, succinctly stated in the Declaration of Independence. A republic in which the sovereign rulers are the coequal people and the majority gives the law is logically deduced from the moral axiom of natural equality.8 In Query XIII of the Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote that majority government, the Lex majoris partis, is “the natural law of every assembly of men, whose numbers are not fixed by any other law.”9 Both Jefferson and James Madison used variations of the Latin phrase to demonstrate that natural right justified only majority government.10 The assertion of the equal, inalienable, natural rights of the people determined that the people are sovereign, that the powers of government derive from them, and that majorities should govern. The American version of republicanism differed from prior models by its moral basis in natural right. Whereas the commonplace phrase vox populi vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God) means that whatever majorities decide is rightful, the American doctrine of natural right both confers legitimacy on republican majorities and limits majority rule. Jefferson wrote, “Though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” If majorities oppress others, they attack the moral basis of their own rightful authority. John Adams wrote that the American governments framed in the founding period were “the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature” and “were contrived merely by the use of reason and 6

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the senses.”11 A better motto for the unique character of the American political regime would be vox naturae vox Dei, or the voice of nature is the voice of God, because both the authority of the people and the limitations on that authority derived from moral axioms discoverable in the nature of mankind. But later generations of antebellum Southern rulers after the American founding disputed what the voice of God speaks through nature, embraced the principle of natural inequality, and abandoned natural equality; they justified their rule by the new principle and abandoned the continuing project of reforming their aristocratic political societies into republican states; they embraced slavery and abandoned antislavery sentiments and acts. This was unexpected and shifted political development in the South in a revolutionary direction. In 1785 Jefferson looked confidently into the future. Believing that the generations following his would secure emancipation and a more republican constitution in Virginia, he wrote, “It is to them I look, the rising generation, and not to the one now in power, for these great reformations.” By 1800 he noticed a surprising change among Virginia leaders, and the change did not bode well for republicanism in Virginia. “The times are certainly such as to justify anxiety on the subject of political principles, & particularly those of the public servants,” he worried. Rather than calling for more republican reforms, as Jefferson previously expected, the rising generation was instead insisting upon “restraining the elective franchise to property,” that is, to the owners of land and slaves. He confessed, “I have . . . wondered at the change of political principles which has taken place in many in this state.” When he looked outside Virginia, he paid particular attention to recreant educators: “I am still more alarmed to see, in the other states, the general political dispositions of those to whom is confided the education of the rising generation.”12 Eventually, those educators raised a generation that none of the founders anticipated. In the Virginia constitutional convention of 1829–30, delegates openly supported rule by the rich and denounced natural equality. One ridiculed majority rule, avowing, “I would not live under King Numbers,” which became a new rallying cry for the revolutionary generation of antebellum Southern leaders.13 These attacks on the foundational principles of American republicanism were launched again in the Virginia House of Delegates when they debated emancipation one last time in 1831–32.14 In the U.S. House of Representatives in 1832, George McDuffie of South Carolina also attacked majority rule as “King Numbers,” which astounded Andrew Stewart 7

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of Pennsylvania. Stewart replied, “Such a philippic against the will of the majority I have never before heard.”15 They would hear these philippics repeatedly for the next thirty years. A new generation of rulers reshaped the South around their new ruling principle. Increasingly as the years wore on, the antebellum South was oddly and uncomfortably yoked to the antebellum North. As the political development of the South veered away from the national path laid down by the American founders, both sides increasingly differed, tenuously framed by the American Union. Eventually, the Southern statesmen attempted to convert the entire nation to their system, and when the rest of the nation repelled this enterprise through normal politics, they seceded. By the time the cannons in Charleston Harbor fired upon Fort Sumter, Southern oligarchy had been maturing for many years. The development of Southern oligarchy portended the rupture of the Union, regardless of the ties that bound them together, because no ties, physical, legal, or otherwise, can overcome the difference between fundamentally opposed types of political regimes. As Aristotle taught, even if walls were built enclosing the proximate cities of Megara and Corinth, the walls would not hold these two together as one political society if their political regimes differed in form. Walls do not unify a city. What does unify a city is shared affection of the rulers for the regime. This is the preeminent condition for sustaining union. If a different type of political regime emerges in a different geographic section of a nation, making two competing regimes, the nation will inevitably divide into two nations because affections are divided.16 The profundity of the differences among political regimes runs as deep as the deepest human convictions. Aristotle observed that mankind even assimilates the gods to their own political regime.17 So did each of the dividing regimes in America, North and South. In 1858 a Southern Presbyterian minister commented on the split in religious opinion that accompanied growing intersectional enmity. Division was caused by “a complete revolution in sentiment,” which had quietly taken hold in the South.18 Oligarchy remade God into its own image, a god who smiled upon the organization of his flock into rulers and ruled, slaves and masters. The interregime conflict between North and South was a spiritual war as well. This is why division and Civil War were inevitable, why it was an “irrepressible conflict,” following the unchecked rise of the revolutionary regime in the antebellum South. Federalist 43 also recognized the mortal threat of different political regimes developing within the same nation and explains, “Governments of dissimilar 8

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principles and forms have been found less adapted to a federal coalition of any sort, than those of a kindred nature.”19 The more intimate the Union, the more dangerous this dissimilarity would be, because revolution could more easily spread and cause dissension, division, or civil war within the whole. Greater intimacy requires greater similarity. Therefore, the more intimate the Union, “the greater the right” of each member of the Union “to insist that the forms of government under which the compact was entered into should be substantially maintained.” The form of government entailed by the constitutional compact was republican, and all parties to the compact had the right to demand that all others in the Union faithfully maintain republican forms. To enforce this right, the Federalist continues, “the superintending government ought clearly to possess authority to defend the system against aristocratic or monarchial innovations,” that is, revolutionary changes in a state that wrest the sovereignty from the people and invest a few or one with the sovereignty. This argument explained the inclusion of the first clause in Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution: “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union, a republican form of government.”20 The potential power of the national government warranted by the guarantee clause was equivalent to the potential power of the dictator in Roman law. Both legal provisions were designed to unleash extraordinary power to protect the life of the nation in domestic emergencies. The Constitution alludes to the emergency, the revolutionary establishment of aberrant, antirepublican regimes in any state.21 In that case, by using the rarely invoked word shall, the Constitution orders the suspension of normal state-­federal relations and orders the national government to stretch its arm into the offending state or states and restore republicanism, returning the government to the rightful sovereign, the people. Counterrevolutionary regime change is built into the Constitution by that clause. The soul of revolutionary Southern oligarchy quickened, and its leaders moved against national republicanism, just as the political theory of the Federalist and of Aristotle predicted. The issue that the revolutionary leaders selected to be the test of their designs was the tariff law, which was enacted by the majority in Congress but defied by the state of South Carolina, culminating in the standoff of 1832–33. At that point, preservation of the Union was the most urgent priority. The Union could have let its erring sister state depart the Union in peace then, and later, in 1860–61, could have peacefully bid farewell to the other sister states also. But this could not have been a cost-­f ree, amicable divorce. Disunion at either time surely would have destroyed the 9

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American Republic and also the American model of republican government, which was designed to secure liberty. To understand that, we must briefly review what the American experiment was in 1787. When the Constitution was framed, the Americans understood that the history of republics was ridden with disasters. Madison’s “great desideratum” was to rescue republicanism “from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored.” In a republic, defined by Madison as government “which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people,” the people are sovereign, but sometimes people can be unjust and organize into groups for the purpose of assaulting the natural rights of others. When such an unjust group achieves a majority, the violent reign or end of the republic is inevitable. Other types of political regimes are not so susceptible to this problem because the rulers are capable of greater impartiality in judging conflicts among the people, since the sovereign rulers are separate from the people. But in republics, the same people who are parties to conflict are judges of the conflict. If an unjust group achieves a majority and controls the government, the despotism of the republic could be even worse than the despotism of a king. This problem explains why “popular governments have everywhere perished” and why they had a bad reputation.22 The solution, most fully explained in Federalist 10, builds upon an insight into the contrasting natures of justice and injustice. The principles of justice are self-­evident truths, visible to anyone with common sense, and disinterested people will generally favor justice in their judgments. Injustice takes many forms, and each commonly held form of injustice tends to arise from a parochial interest and tends, therefore, to be parochial in scope. In a small republic, a larger share of the people are tied to the parochial interest, fewer people are disinterested, and therefore fewer people are neutral in political affairs. Injustice is capable of achieving a popular majority in a small republic. Madison reasoned that due to the inherent difficulty of popular injustice in spreading beyond parochial interests, a solution to the problem could be to enlarge the republic and subject the whole to majority rule. By doing this, popular injustice is isolated in proportion to the size of the republic due to its parochial character and is less likely to achieve a popular majority within the whole. Each instantiation of a new form of injustice arising in any part of the extended republic would run up against a large disinterested majority of frowning voters whose judgment is not corrupted by parochial interest. By a round-­robin process of checking the successive incarnations of emerging local injustice, the people would improve each other and the whole people 10

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would more closely align to the self-­evident principles of natural justice.23 Therefore, a large republic can counter the problem. The dominant belief since time immemorial was that republics should be small, but, Madison wrote, this was an “error.”24 The Americans boldly intended to stake all the fruits of their revolution on this hypothesized and untried solution. They could foresee that their new solution to an old problem would create a new problem. The new problem was how to preserve self-­government in a republic as large as the one that they were building. A key test of republicanism is whether the people for whom the law is made are the makers of the law.25 A large republic changed conditions such that it was difficult to meet this test. In a large republic with a single government, the participation of the people in every decision by the government would be proportionately smaller than their share of participation in a smaller nation. This presented no difficulty at all if the political question concerned a national object, such as whether to go to war, because the decision equally applied to all who participated in deciding that political question. But if the question was whether to build an eleven-­m ile road in a faraway corner of the nation, the decision applied to only a very small number of local people, yet their share of participation in the government that made the decision would be very slight, so slight that it would be a mockery of republicanism to say that they were living under laws of their own making. That would not be fair and failed the republican test. In effect, the people for whom the law would be made would not be the makers of the law, due to the large size of the republic. The law would not apply to the large majority of the people who would be deciding the question for the local people affected. When an outside power makes the law for others who must live by the law, this meets the definition of imperial rule. In a large republic, all are subject to imperial rule if government is singular. As a result, the people would lose their liberty to govern themselves in republican fashion if a remedy were not found. The remedy was federalism, or “a division and organization of power” between the national and state governments, as Madison explained. Powers appropriate to national objects were enumerated and given to the national government in the Constitution. All others remained with the states. History would put this leading feature of the American model to the test, and the fate of republicanism in America and the world hung in the balance. It remained to be seen whether the state governments and national government would subsequently respect the line separating their powers. If the states breached that line, general government and union in an extended republic would be 11

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impossible. If the national government breached that line, self-­government and republican liberty would be lost. In 1830 Madison warned that “the friends of liberty and of man, cannot be too often earnestly exhorted to be watchful in marking and controlling encroachments by either of the Governments on the domain of the other.”26 As long as the constitutional balance of powers between the state and national governments was respected, all in the Republic would be well. The symmetry of the machinery of the government in the entire system was ordered around the organizing principles of natural right. The purpose of federalism was to preserve liberty by preventing imperial rule of a central government in an extended republic; the purpose of extending the republic was to preserve liberty by preventing local majority tyranny; the purpose of the guarantee clause was to preserve liberty by preventing local minority rule. The finished work, Madison wrote at the end of his life in 1830, was an “innovation and an epoch in the science of Government no less honorable to the people to whom it owed its birth, than auspicious to the political welfare of all others who may imitate or adopt it.”27 Experience, he believed, had validated the innovative theory that the Federal Convention put into practice in 1787. They had solved the great riddle of establishing durable republics. As republicanism further developed and strengthened under the Constitution, the general character of the nation would gradually but surely improve, the great evil of slavery that had been inherited from the prior monarchy would become evanescent and fade away, and natural justice would become firmly lodged as the ruling principle of the American regime. But all was not going so well. While Madison was lauding the handiwork of the framers, the rulers of the consolidating Southern oligarchy were just then beginning to test the durability of the constitutional structure. During the Nullification Crisis, John C. Calhoun, the great philosopher-­statesman of oligarchy, reinterpreted the Constitution in a manner best suited to protect their revolution. His “Exposition and Protest” imitated our founding charter, cataloging the alleged crimes of popular injustice committed by the national government, and unveiled his reinterpreted constitutional order that stymied and declared independence from majority government.28 His constitutional theories that claimed a greater share of sovereignty and power on behalf of states made political sense, because revolutionary oligarchy was anathema to the republican form that the American founders established. The new theories gave them a constitutional rationale to flout federal law that they disliked and to blunt the federal arm if it ever stretched out in their direction. But 12

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their theories were hypocritical in the extreme and a sham. The purpose of federalism in the Constitution is to preserve personal liberty and the natural right of all people to govern themselves. Oligarchy is a political regime that by definition tramples upon natural right, because the sovereign ruler is a minority that steals republican self-­government from the popular majority, which becomes a ruled class. At best, all Calhoun proved, if his interpretation was correct, was that the Constitution was fatally flawed and did not successfully protect the republican model of government that the founders wished to establish. James Madison was not fooled. The new constitutional theories had crossed his desk when a few years of life were left in him. Madison wrote, “Patrons of this new heresy will attempt in vain to mask its anti-­republicanism.” He numbered them among the “disciples of aristocracy, oligarchy or monarchy.” Although he deplored the “strange doctrines and misconceptions” coming out of South Carolina, he had to respect the ability of their author. The new theories were winning over “statesmen of shining talents,” and for that reason their power to convert others was “the more to be dreaded.”29 Neither was President Andrew Jackson fooled, nor was he deterred by South Carolina’s defiance, which was emboldened by those new theories. Jackson understood the danger “of permitting a State to obstruct the execution of the laws within its limits or seeing it attempt to execute a threat of withdrawing from the Union.” The state’s action was a revolutionary “usurpation of power” that was constitutionally delegated to the federal government. He acknowledged their “natural right . . . to absolve themselves from their obligations to the Government” only in the case of “intolerable oppression” and the exhaustion of “all constitutional remedies.” The natural right of revolution was “the ultima ratio” recognized by the Declaration of Independence, but the present case fell far short of meeting the test. The claimed violations of the rights of South Carolina were a ruse. Failing that test, the state was bound by “a sacred obligation” created by “compacts of all kinds freely and voluntarily entered into,” on which “the liberties and happiness of millions” depended.30 He asked Congress to enact such measures as were necessary to meet the crisis. Calhoun and his coadjutors rightly feared that Jackson would use the extraordinary powers conferred upon him by the Constitution. Jackson publicly warned them, “Disunion, by armed force, is treason. . . . [O]n the heads of the instigators of the act be the dreadful consequences.”31 In the Senate, Calhoun warned his Southern colleagues that the guarantee clause could “be a pretext to interfere with our political affairs, and domestic institutions, in 13

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a manner infinitely more dangerous than any other power which has ever been exercised on the part of the General Government.” The very next day in the House of Representatives, James Blair of South Carolina invoked the guarantee clause, demanding that the national government protect his class from “the dominant party” in his home state, which sought to rule over them with “a rod of iron.” Blair was a member of the Union Party, opposed to Calhoun and the nullifiers, and he warned the House that if they did not enact a bill that would authorize the Jackson administration to bring the federal power down on the South Carolina government, he and his party would be left alone to defend “their personal liberty, their lives and fortunes.” Future friends of the national government in other states would consider “the fate of the ‘Union party’ of South Carolina” and would remain quiet, while new parties like the South Carolina nullifiers challenged the “dignity of this Government, and the execution of its laws.”32 With the thundering words from General Jackson ringing in their ears, made good by his active preparations to march on South Carolina, state leaders reached compromise.33 The national government was satisfied to secure the Union rather than prolong the crisis. The American experiment in government had been successful for forty years, Jackson noted in his message to Congress, and “the hopes of the friends of civil liberty throughout the world” depended upon preserving the integrity of that government and preventing disunion.34 But, acceding to compromise, the national government exposed the liberty of South Carolinians to danger by leaving the local oligarchy intact, unmolested, and unreconstructed, as required by the guarantee clause. The spirit of compromise reached the national judiciary. Chief Justice John Marshall of Virginia had read and endorsed Madison’s rebuttal of Calhoun’s doctrines in the North American Review, and he lamented to his friend on the Court Joseph Story of Massachusetts that Americans like Madison and himself, who shared Story’s opinions, were becoming extinct in his section of the nation. “Our young men, generally speaking, grow up in the firm belief that liberty depends on construing our Constitution into a league instead of a government; that it has nothing to fear from breaking these United States into numerous petty republics. Nothing in their view is to be feared but that bugbear, consolidation; and every exercise of legitimate power is construed into a breach of the Constitution.” Marshall knew that the nullifiers agreed to the tariff compromise to stay Jackson’s arm, but still aimed for a Southern confederacy, awaiting “the decisive moment till the other states of the South will unite with them.” After the tariff settlement, he asked, “What is 14

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to become of us and our constitution? . . . Those in the South perceive no difficulty. Allow a full range to state rights and state sovereignty, and in their opinion, all will go well.”35 He gave them what they wanted, throwing them an inducement to remain in the Union. In 1833 Marshall wrote the opinion for the Supreme Court in Barron v. City of Baltimore, which bowed to Calhounism, ruling that the Bill of Rights in the Constitution limited only the federal government, not state governments.36 Just two years before, Madison wrote that the Federal Convention had considered the “obvious necessity of a control on the laws of the States, so far as they might violate the Constn & laws of the U.S.” and had chosen a “Judicial annulment of them.” The need might arise, he had explained in 1787, “to prevent instability and injustice in the legislation of the States.”37 But by ruling that state action against personal liberty guaranteed by the Constitution was not justiciable, the Court removed its aegis around popular rights against state encroachment. The decision permitted the oligarchy to crush local liberty and purge men like Blair through the ordinary operations of their state government. Beyond South Carolina, the decision opened the South to similar local revolutions, instigated by the new oligarchic men. The Southern majorities in the states where oligarchy was ascendant were sacrificed to preserve union. The rich irony of the nullifiers’ fight for states’ rights is that they would be remembered and celebrated by many as champions for local liberty against alleged federal encroachment, when in fact the oligarchs had won the legal right from the federal government to suppress local liberty. Such was the consequence of Calhoun’s intellectual alchemy practiced upon republican words and meanings in the Constitution. Although it is difficult to question its decision between gloomy and gloomier alternatives, the national government’s choice to preserve the Union over checking ascendant oligarchy ensured a pernicious result, that the guarantee clause would become impotent by disuse. Thereafter, the oligarchs who had successfully prevented the vigorous application of the guarantee clause could plausibly question the constitutionality of its appropriate exercise by the national government in future instances, because republicans could not point to any precedents of its application in like circumstances. While the United States was developing in the direction of republicanism in the earlier era, the extraordinary measure of reaching for the guarantee clause to correct antirepublican abuses had not been urgent. Under such conditions, it was prudent to avoid establishing the precedent of deploying the overawing power of the national government and to leave self-­reforming 15

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states to continue to reform themselves toward republicanism without federal coercion. But paradoxically, when the guarantee clause was most urgently needed to restore republicanism in the slaveholding states, the same states that most needed correction had sent swarms of bold oligarchic men into the nation’s republican offices, precluding any attempt by the national government to apply it. The impotency of the guarantee clause opened the need for a new, explicit grant of power to the national government that victory in war later secured. The Fourteenth Amendment was not a revolution in the idea of republicanism or republican citizenship. The American founders already devised a system of government informed by the same principles that later informed the framing of the amendment. However, the Fourteenth Amendment for the first time specified the conditions that needed to be met in order to satisfy the definition of republican in the guarantee clause and was intended to be a revolution in federal enforcement of republicanism and republican citizenship in the states. There never need be nor should there ever have been any conflict between the Fourteenth Amendment, properly applied, and federalism. All states could continue to be self-­governing, exercising any powers not explicitly delegated to the national government, and free from national government interference, as long as they continued to be genuinely republican in form. But just as the national government was not able to apply the guarantee clause to antirepublican abuses in the states controlled by the ascendant oligarchs in the antebellum period because they were part of the national government, their reentry into the national government after the “redemption” of Southern states at the end of Reconstruction similarly prevented the national government from enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment against antirepublican abuses. The long arm of Calhoun’s oligarchic constitutionalism intermeddled with the future, and new generations in the new century continued to use his old arguments against its application.38 Having forestalled national government intervention during the Nullification Crisis, the oligarchic rulers succeeded in creating space for themselves within the Union to consolidate, to build interstate unity, and to develop a new revolutionary program for the nation. Calhoun resumed his attempts to reshape American government according to his reinterpreted constitutional order, evangelized young Southerners in public service, and even persuaded many intelligent Northern statesmen of his constitutional views.39 The national government was demoralized and enervated by Calhoun’s genius and 16

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never exercised the guarantee clause until disaster came in 1861, when it was almost too late to save republicanism in America.40 Secession of eleven Southern states in 1860–61 was the ultimate test. If sustained, it meant that the Americans had not solved the riddle of establishing durable republics, as Madison believed they had. Successful secession would prove that an extended republic cannot hold together, and aspiring tyrants in America and in the world would learn how to defeat the new republican model pioneered by the Americans. Federalism, the device that the Americans had invented to protect liberty, could be exploited by any local band of tyrants to set up their own local or regional despotism and flout remediation by the central government. After the secession of the South, other ambitious characters could exploit the exposed weakness of American government, and probably the United States would permanently dissolve into pieces. The American continent would become like every other, a patchwork of nation-­ states, some better, some worse, and among the republics none so powerful as to protect liberty from external enemies. Successful secession would mean that mankind would have to choose, as they always had to choose before, between a weak republic or a powerful monarchy or aristocracy. Liberty and self-­government could be had in a weak republic, but it would be vulnerable to outside attack and internal dissolution, or civil liberty could be granted by a generous monarch or aristocracy, but in those regimes, the privilege could easily be taken back. Republicans the world over would have to discard the failed American model and return to the drawing board to find a new way to build republics that could endure. In his first message to Congress, on July 4, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln showed that he had thought hard about this problem and asked aloud, “‘Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness?’ ‘Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?’”41 Lest Lincoln leave these questions for the friends of liberty sadly to ponder amid the ruins of the American Republic, he directed the national government to preserve the Union and show that a rebellious oligarchy could not destroy the integrity of their republican system. The stakes could not have been higher. The supreme cause of this recurring conflict was the rise of the oligarchy in the South, the independent variable that is underrated or missed by many studies of the period. It relates to many other intermediate causes that antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, and civil rights studies have identified. The Southern political regime and the clash of that regime with 17

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republicanism is the background of the long drama, or context, in which to study all of these episodes and the questions they raise. The rise of Southern oligarchy hangs over events in American political, constitutional, and social history like a colossus. All Southern statesmen representing seceding states had resigned from the Senate and House of Representatives prior to the first meeting of the Thirty-­ Eighth Congress in 1863. Beginning with the meeting of that Congress, the duty of forming war and Reconstruction policy devolved upon the Republican majority that remained. This duty burdened them with a prerequisite responsibility. They could not beat a path toward national harmony and justice, as they saw it, without demonstrating to their constituents at home, to each other, and to posterity that they had developed a defensible understanding of the nature of the political forces that opposed them. They are a rich and informed source on the political character of the antebellum South. Certainly, the Republicans differed about how to accomplish their task, but they substantially agreed about what it was. To be precise, the great task of Reconstruction was not to establish equal citizenship for the emancipated slaves; rather, their task subsumed the ultimate establishment of equal citizenship, whether latterly or immediately accomplished, as prudence and opportunity dictated. Similarly, the task of the Civil War was never intended to be the abolition of slavery; rather, the task subsumed the ultimate abolition of slavery, whether latterly or immediately accomplished, again, as prudence and opportunity dictated. The ultimate goal of the Republican Party, the war, and Reconstruction was the same, to preserve and advance republicanism as the American founders understood it and wished it to be advanced, against its natural, existential enemy, oligarchy. That goal was inseparable from the goal of abolition and was inseparable from the goal of equal citizenship, because the principle of natural equality justified American republicanism and required the ultimate extinction of slavery and required equal citizenship. Likewise, slavery and discrimination on the basis of color stand on the competing moral foundation of oligarchy, the principle of natural inequality, which requires ranks. Only during Reconstruction could the Republicans carry out the mission for which they had formed their political party and for which they had fought the Civil War. The spilled blood and spent treasure in the war had purchased them the opportunity to destroy the oligarchy politically. Reconstruction meant regime change in the South, the reunion of the nation, and the refounding of the Republic on the restored 18

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principles of the American Revolution. Only by accomplishing this could the Republicans complete the great task, the unfinished work to which Lincoln alluded at Gettysburg. The Question of Southern Oligarchy The American people and the friends of free government around the world do not remember our past in the way that the foregoing summary explains, which is a great loss. They have heard other stories that shape their sense of the American past and its principles, which they do not know were so seriously embattled and nearly wiped out, with the result that their understanding and judgment of our founding principles and their authors and defenders are mixed, even jaded. The ultimate cause of this is persisting uncertainty among scholars about the great internal challenger of American republicanism that arose from one section of the nation. Scholars of the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods have not been blind to the terms aristocracy and oligarchy in the historical record, but they have mostly underappreciated what they see or have denied the applicability of the terms altogether. Many have used the label aristocracy and less so oligarchy when referring to the slaveholding class, but they have tended to regard the slaveholders as a social class—­something more powerful than an exclusive country club set, but less than an interstate ruling class that commanded and shaped the character of its political order in its geographic domain and certainly much less than an ambitious set of rulers who were determined to destroy republicanism and establish oligarchy as the dominant political regime on the American continent, as a model for the modern age. In the early twentieth century, some historians who deplored Reconstruction and black American citizenship nevertheless conceded, “The political system of the South was an oligarchy under the republican form.”42 Others acknowledged the existence of “aristocracy,” while downplaying the power of the members of that class.43 Early Marxist or Marxian scholars did pay relatively more serious attention to the references to Southern oligarchy in the historical record. To Charles Beard and Mary Beard, Reconstruction constituted a “Second American Revolution,” but they meant “revolution” according to the Marxist theory of historical development, the victory of the Northern industrial bourgeoisie over the semifeudal barons of the South.44 Because the Marxists tend to conflate superior wealth with rule, their analysis did not isolate and politically distinguish the wealthy Southern planters 19

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from wealthy Northern industrialists. Both industrialists and planters were oligarchs in their view. This obscured the different character of the South. The treatment of aristocracy or oligarchy by John Hope Franklin and Eric Foner is representative of how most Civil War and Reconstruction scholars in the twentieth century encountered and dealt with the terms. In Reconstruction after the Civil War, Franklin mentioned the “plantation aristocracy” in passing once and then in one other instance discusses the successful efforts of the old “ruling clique,” the “oligarchy,” in preserving its power after the war. This latter discussion begins and ends in barely more than a paragraph—­eight pages before the end of the book. Foner did devote some attention to the planter class’s disproportionate political influence over the antebellum slave states, toward the beginning of Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Further on the oligarchy drops out of his analysis of the question of black freedom and citizenship.45 The scholarly literature on the antebellum South is vast and growing still. Some have insisted and continue to insist that the South was democratic for whites.46 Others have tended to support the view that an oligarchic class politically dominated the antebellum South.47 Generally, the reason for this division is that few have selected the right point of departure in their investigations. In classical political science, the first questions asked to determine the fundamental nature of a political society are as follows: Who ruled? And by what ruling principle did they rule?48 These kinds of questions have been asked too infrequently.49 Over many decades, the judgments of scholars have haphazardly shifted. The high-­m inded character and landed rule of the planters seemed reminiscent of feudal aristocracy or of ruling classes in non-­Western societies. The planters seemed out of step with modernity, capitalism, and democracy, so the terms prebourgeois, premodern, and feudal were affixed to them.50 But then economic historians discovered that the planter class utilized markets, managed to achieve profitability, and was more modern and richer than previously thought, and a new view of the planters emerged as “plantation capitalists.”51 The planters were then seen to be at home with modernity, “liberalism,” capitalism, and democracy. Take away the slaves, they argue, and there is not much difference between the entrepreneurs Jefferson Davis and John D. Rockefeller. Like the dreams of an aspiring Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, dreams of becoming a planter galvanized all members of Southern society to seek to own slaves and prosper, and like our modern entrepreneurs, they came from diverse origins. This convinced some that capitalism and 20

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democracy were alive and well in the slave South. Some have maintained the position of the early Marxists, that because similar inequality of wealth prevailed in both North and South, both societies were modern, capitalistic, and oligarchical. These debates held up evidence that did not speak to these decisive questions: Who ruled? And how did they rule? We would not say that the members of a ruling royal family of a Middle Eastern nation are democrats and “oil capitalists,” simply because they have developed sophisticated methods of managing large industrial enterprises for profit, utilizing international markets. Realized dreams of owning slaves and the diverse ethnic and economic origins of slaveholders are not qualifying attributes of democracy, either. William the Conqueror, the son of a tanner’s daughter, aspired to make himself king of England and won the throne. His half-­common parentage does not mean that England under William was a democracy. The fact that Agathocles aspired to rise from poverty and succeeded in ruling ancient Syracuse does not justify our calling his brutal tyranny a democracy, either. Rather, we must ask: Who held the sovereign power? What were the key institutions that supported the sovereign? What was the principle of justice by which they ruled and by which the organization of their society was ordered? How did they formally arrange power to maintain their rule? Answers to such questions help us identify and understand a political regime. King Louis XIV was a monarch because sovereign rule was vested in his person, not because he wore ermine and purple. Stalin was a monarch. The idea that the effect of slavery warps republican societies into oligarchic political societies is as old as the American founding. For this reason, and to protect the republican regime that they were trying establish, the founders spoke and acted against slavery.52 During the 1840s and 1850s, supporters of the abolition movement, Liberty Party, Free Soil Party, and then the Republican Party picked up that idea and, with increasing alarm, warned Americans that slavery was achieving exactly that. They leveled the charge that the planters in the slave states composed an interstate oligarchy that threatened the nation. In many cases, they substantiated those charges with sophisticated political analysis, and on that basis they launched great political movements to counter the “slave power” threat. Scholars have seen their arguments and the movements they initiated, but often dismiss the substance of the charge that was at the root of those movements. The “slave-­power thesis,” in their view, was produced by the ambition of Northern politicians, who took advantage of the alleged paranoia of 21

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the American public and of a party vacuum.53 But the scholars arrive at these judgments without turning their analyses on the fundamental political character of the South and assessing whether the charges had merit. In the past twenty-­five years, more studies have substantiated the old charges about the political character and ambitions of Southern leaders. In summary, some of their key findings are as follows: the planter class of South Carolina ruled over that state consistent with an aristocratic political creed, rejected genuine republicanism, and led a rebellion against the principles and system of government advanced by the American Revolution.54 The widely observed debate on emancipation in the Virginia House of Delegates marked a turning point in Virginia and in the South, when the slaveholders renounced the republicanism of their fathers.55 An aristocratic elite worked for decades to seize control of the direction of Southern politics and finally to achieve secession.56 Proslavery interpretations of the Constitution repurposed political institutions and even directed the conduct of government officials who were personally opposed to slavery, in service to the interests of slaveholders. By the 1850s, American government appeared completely proslavery to the outside world.57 Southerners did control Northern votes in Congress, just as the Republicans claimed.58 Northerners believed that they were fighting for Union and democracy against oligarchy.59 The fear of a regenerate slave power shaped the development of the Fourteenth Amendment and Reconstruction policy generally.60 These scholars identify fear of the slave power as a rallying point for the antebellum North. However, the slave power was epiphenomenonal, evidence of something fundamentally different about the inner character of the slave South from which the slave power emanated, and scholarship has yet to lay a direct finger on its source, study it, and explain it. The cause of the antebellum slave power falls into the category of master causes of the greatest of political events, which are struggles over fundamental forms of political regimes. Contemporary recognition of the slave-­ power thesis begs deeper political questions that scholarship does not ask but are questions that the antebellum argument answered. The most important features of their argument are what modern scholarship has left out—­the cause of the slaveholders’ quest for domination over all, which is grounded in oligarchic principle manifest in their oligarchic regime, and that slavery was a means to achieving the end of their quest as well as an expression of the end state they sought. The partisans of slavery were oligarchic men who were not simply attempting to win a policy aim, the advancement of slavery. 22

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They sought that and more; they were genuinely attempting to transform the American political regime into oligarchy, just as their states had already been similarly transformed. This book certainly owes a debt and bears a connection to scholarship that has strengthened the so-­called slave-­power thesis. However, to assimilate this book into slave-­power literature would be like assimilating a book that attempts to identify the fundamental character of communism in the Soviet Union into a preexisting literature on “collectivization power.” Rather than force-­fit this work into inherited categories, we must question those categories, think anew, and reframe our understanding of the nineteenth century, and perhaps even American political development in total. We must recognize the profound regime difference between North and South and reframe scholarly literature, textbooks, and popular histories about the long period in terms of interregime conflict that, during one of its phases, took the famous form of our bloody interregime war. Strong analysis of political regimes depends upon prior engagement with classical political science, that is, political philosophy, which sheds an indispensable light on the patterns of human character and on patterns in the broad sweep of human affairs. Two scholars who combined serious studies of political philosophy and the American political regime especially helped prepare the way for reviving political analysis of the antebellum South. In Republics Ancient and Modern, Paul Rahe traced the development of ancient to modern to American republicanism. While passing through America, his sharp eye caught sight of the recrudescence of classical tyranny in the antebellum South: “If one were to analyze the Confederacy in Aristotelian terms as a political regime (politeia), one would have to say that slavery was largely determinative of the ‘disposition of offices and honors (taxis ton archon)’ within the South and that this constituted the most important part of the paideia that had gradually transformed the great multitude (plethos) of southerners into a separate and distinct political unit capable of secession and of cooperative action (praxis) in war and in peace.”61 Rahe defined and left behind a lacuna. He recognized that the antebellum South had developed its own political regime, differing from the republican regime established by the American founders, and he identified slavery as the potent institution that created it. This is the case that the Republicans made. The works of Harry Jaffa are valuable less for presenting new historical evidence than for their theoretical and interpretive strength. Bringing his command of political philosophy to the study of Abraham Lincoln, he showed 23

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that Lincoln had grown into the peerless philosopher-­statesman of American natural right, and he established Lincoln’s reputation as the savior of the American Revolution.62 Jaffa pulled back the curtain, revealing the war behind the Civil War, that is, the war of principles between American natural right and its challenger, the principle of slavery, or the old principle that justice is the right of the stronger, advanced by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic. Through teaching the inner nature of Lincoln’s statesmanship, Jaffa recovered the deep, inner struggle of the American political regime for future generations to study. He stopped short of narrating the lives of these contending principles, Northern and Southern, as they articulated and organized the parts of the opposed political societies. He understood the principle of natural inequality but never traced its influence over the origin, maturation, and character of the Southern political regime. This book is intended to fill the lacunae that he and Paul Rahe have left unfilled and to complement their work. The Plan of This Book This book is divided into two parts. Part 1 consumes the bulk of the text and presents a shared analysis of the slave South, synthesized from the writings and speeches of the Republicans who served in the Thirty-­Eighth, Thirty-­ Ninth, or Fortieth Congress from 1863 to 1869. The account draws solely from their writings and speeches dated before, during, and after their service in the Congress and, by intention, includes no other sources. Part 1 allows the Republicans to speak for themselves without mediation or interference. The point is to show how the Republican majority charged with the responsibility of reconstructing the South understood the South. The value of representing them in this way is to place their claims in a clear light before the bar of opinion. Here it is important to forewarn readers that this presentation is one-­sided in favor of the Republicans, and it is acknowledged that both sides deserve the opportunity to make their respective cases at the bar. The author is familiar with the omitted case made by the other side and generally divides its principled supporters into two groups, the deceived and those who sincerely favor rule of the few. Although the arguments by the latter are more compelling than modern prejudices allow, readers deserve to know that the reason for presenting only the Republican case here is that for many decades their full case has been advanced weakly and deserves a place at the bar also, for the benefit of the whole jury, the people, who have the largest stake in their case. 24

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Chapters 1 and 2 are organized according to the basic theoretical treatment of political regimes in Aristotle’s Politics. Chapter 1 begins with a founding moment, when Reconstruction began, when the Republicans expressed their common duty to refound the American political regime. They explained what opposed them, the oligarchic political regime, and identified its constituent parts. In chapter 2 the Republicans explain the connection between oligarchy and the one potent institution, slavery, that created and preserved the oligarchy. In their view, genuine republicanism and domestic slavery could not coexist in the same local domain for long. The growth of the one was fatal to the other. If domestic slavery was not checked, it perverted republican government in its domain, producing oligarchy. If slavery could be suppressed, republicanism thrived. The growth or extinction of slavery determined whether republicanism or oligarchy would prevail in a state or territorial jurisdiction. This was slavery’s political effect, as they understood it. Two anticipated, contemporary objections ought to be addressed regarding the ineluctable effect of slavery, as they saw it. First, an objector could point out that many other republics prior to the American Republic had slaves. That was a favorite point made by Southern defenders of slavery after the oligarchic revolution in the South and famously appeared as a popular view in Congress during the Missouri crisis of 1819–20, to the shock and dismay of many who sensed the coming corruption of Southern republicanism.63 Those were malinterpretations of the founders’ conception of republicanism that served the political interest of inchoate oligarchy and broke from the founders’ definition, with profound consequences. Southern oligarchs’ success at confounding the original definition still convinces many today that the meaning of the founders’ idea of republicanism was and is indeterminate. But those familiar with Federalist 39 and the writings of John Adams and James Madison might recall that they were picky and definite about which governments deserved “the denomination of a republic.”64 With respect to those ancient republics, Madison wrote, “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part instead of the whole; in the hands of property, not of numbers. All the ancient popular governments were for this reason aristocracies.”65 Although the founders did often refer to these ancient popular governments as republics in passing, they knew that when seriously evaluated against their own definition of republicanism, these republics were found sorely deficient, and Madison flatly states the reason, slavery. At best, 25

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we can say that these governments had some genuine republican features, but Madison is unequivocal when he says that they did not meet his definition. Those who argue that it is possible for republicanism and slavery to coexist put themselves in the camp of Thomas Dew and John C. Calhoun and are opposed by Madison and other American founders.66 Second, an objector could point out that slavery was present during the founding of the American Republic and was especially prevalent in the Southern states. Were these states aristocracies, too? Continuing his reflections in the same private note, Madison answers in the affirmative, writing, “The Southern States of America, are, on the same principle, aristocracies. . . . The slavery of the Southern States throws the power much more into the hands of property, than in the Northern States.”67 But it would be a mistake to say that because the Southern aristocracy during both the founding era and the antebellum era maintained widespread chattel slavery, there was no difference between them. Their leaders decisively differed, which was decisive to the direction of political development in the South during those two eras. Many, probably a majority, of those of the founding generation born into the Southern aristocracy north of South Carolina were republican revolutionaries who attempted to transform their states and the new nation in a republican direction, away from monarchy and aristocracy. Their sons and grandsons, the principled, antebellum aristocrats, or oligarchs, covered the slave states and sought to deepen and extend their rule, which was most easily accomplished by deepening and extending slavery. History uncovers this shift. Therefore, chapters 3–5 trace this history and its consequences, still relying solely on the Republicans’ writings and speeches for sources. These chapters generally follow the model of Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, which examines a political regime from a perspective that differs from that seen in the Politics. In the Constitution of Athens, Aristotle studies the political regime across time, isolating key causes; the chain of effects, including unintended consequents; and the resulting shifts in the fundamental character of the regime. These chapters recount the political history of the development and rise of Southern oligarchy before the war, showing how oligarchy contended against republicanism and altered national political development. The Republicans believed that the founders’ principled model of republicanism did not admit slavery, despite their failure to arrange its final demise in their lifetimes. Later, Southern statesmen revolutionized; they discarded the founders’ republicanism and embraced slavery, oligarchic rule, and the core regime principle, natural inequality. After the Missouri crisis and after 26

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the remarkable career of John C. Calhoun took flight, the heightening political contest over slavery became an interregime conflict between two inherently hostile political regimes within the same national union. Chapter 5 concludes in 1856, on the eve of interregime war, when the political parties completed their realignment with oligarchy and republicanism, respectively, each concentrated in one opposing section of the nation, each contending for control of the destiny of the nation. Anticipating the obvious objection that the strong continued presence of Northerners in the Democratic Party, most notably Stephen A. Douglas, might refute this thesis that the parties realigned according to different sections and different regimes, I again ask readers to consider what the Republicans say. In their view, Northern Democrats who remained in the party or who did not at least break fellowship with its Southern wing became useful tools, composing a willing or deceived fifth column for oligarchy in the North. This kind of phenomenon is not unique in world history. Within a single nation dividing along the lines of different regimes, we should predict interregime penetration, or the presence of some elements of each regime in the other. The end of part 1 concludes the Republican argument in their own words. Part 2 tests key Republican claims and addresses the implications of their argument. Chapter 6 studies the antebellum South in three institutional dimensions. The Republicans argued that Southern oligarchy used specific institutional arrangements with respect to education, property, and the organization of government. Those arrangements, the Republicans claimed, supported oligarchic rule and undermined the republican aims of the American founders. With minor exceptions, the movement to provide basic education in the free North stopped cold at the border with slavery, which was by design. The slaveholders sought to perpetuate popular ignorance among the people in the slave states. This was their policy but exactly the opposite policy of the Northern leaders. Both sides understood that diffused intelligence supports republicanism and undermines oligarchy, but diffused ignorance supports oligarchy and undermines republicanism. With respect to property, inequality of wealth in the South was a basis for oligarchic rule, but the unique character of property that was joined to inequality of property was an essential, even a more important, basis. The people in the free North were equal before the law despite unequal wealth, but in the South relative wealth determined rank in Southern political society. 27

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Liberty was an alienable possession, an acquisition reserved to the wealthy, not a natural right inalienable from one’s humanity. It should be noted that this analysis chafes against the theoretical premise of Marxist or Marxian analysis that still prevails in scholarship and tends to hold that relative wealth always determines social and political rank. For that reason, it may be difficult for some to believe that a rich Northern industrialist and a rich Southern planter materially differed. But according to republican theory, in a perfectly republican society, a rich man and a poor man would be social and political equals and corulers. In a perfectly oligarchic society, the same rich man would be the social and political superior of the same poor man; the rich man would be a ruler, and the poor man would be ruled. Certainly, republican theorists concede that serious inequality of wealth endangers the stability of republican equality, but the fact of inequality of wealth is not ipso facto proof that a change in sovereign rule, from the many to the wealthy few, has been accomplished. The character of wealth matters. In oligarchic society, its acquisition secures greater personal liberty and dominion over others. In republican society its acquisition merely secures greater bodily comforts; the possession of equal liberty is constant for all citizens. Due to the radically different character of wealth in oligarchic and republican societies, each regime shapes a very different kind of human character in its respective domain. Last, it is shown how the organization of Southern government supported the minority rule of the slaveholders. The ruling class in the antebellum South held power in their states by viva voce voting, by enumerating slaves in the apportionment of state representation, and by their monopoly on education and on the state parties. These strategies reduced popular influence in government, and the rich ruled. The national government of the Confederacy extended this system. Chapter 7 explains why studies of Reconstruction have not sufficiently factored the Southern oligarchy in explaining what Reconstruction was and its outcome. The historians became engrossed in their contemporary battle over civil rights for black Americans, and as a result the regime context in which that battle was fought during Reconstruction faded from view. The chapter revives the Republican school, an older class of histories about the antebellum period, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Scholars know and use those earlier writings but have forgotten what the defining attribute of those writings was, by which those writings can be recognized as a distinct school of literature. In the Republican school, the Southern oligarchy was 28

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the key to the most important American events of their age, but that key, it is argued, was lost. The chapter closes with a brief retelling of one aspect of Reconstruction in order to show how the inclusion of Southern oligarchy in analysis changes conclusions. This retelling uses that key to explain how long-­standing oligarchy magnified racism and latent popular violence against black Americans. The shock of Reconstruction broke open the oligarchy and released that latent popular violence like an army of demons into the Southern air. Anticipating the charge that antiblack racism is underrated as a factor in this retelling, it should be said that racism is a given factor in this account. The goal is to reach behind white supremacy, at which racism aimed, and to show that oligarchy was its parent. Racism is treated as an intermediate variable, not as an uncaused cause. Oligarchy, by its very nature, required ranks and in fact deepened them and inflamed them in the structure of antebellum Southern society. White supremacy is but one species of supremacy that all antirepublican regimes incorporate in one form or the other, and all species of supremacy are abhorrent to the idea of American republicanism, grounded in natural right. Regime change was incomplete in the South. Reconstruction partially reordered or flattened oligarchic ranks, leaving black Americans subordinate. The fact that the modern civil rights movement of the twentieth century was still necessary one hundred years after Appomattox, in order to continue the work of regime change and further flatten oligarchic ranks, testifies to the once great power and influence of the oligarchy. Finally, in response to early comments about this manuscript, I state, perhaps with some vehemence, that this is not at all a book against the South, but quite the opposite. If this is a book for or against anything, it is above all in favor of seeing politics and rendering political history from the perspective of philosophy, whatever the shortcomings of this work might be in that respect. Guided by that primary allegiance, the position of this book, it could also be said, is decidedly for republicanism as it was reconceived in America from 1776 to 1789, because it was there and then when the strongest objections that aristocracy perennially could make against rule of the many since time immemorial were answered convincingly, and it is against oligarchy, which robbed our fellow Americans, the white and black majority in the South, of their birthright, their liberty.

29

PART I

The Republican Argument

O

ften we rely upon secondhand sources to tell us what firsthand sources say, and most of the time this is practical and reliable. In the case of the Republicans who served in the Reconstruction Congress, secondary sources have not told us enough about them. Their account of the national crisis that they faced in the nineteenth century challenges Americans to revise our understanding of ourselves, challenges foreigners to revise their view of our nation, and challenges scholars to reconsider how they frame the long period before and after our war and what their new inquiries into the period ought to be. It is necessary, therefore, to reach behind secondary accounts and lay out what the Republicans had to say in their own words. Anyone fortunate enough to have received some education in Aristotelian or classical political science will instantly recognize a recurring and familiar pattern in the primary documents containing their speeches and writings. Those documents are replete with allusions to political regimes, modified by nineteenth-­century American English, and always made in connection to their great national crisis. Yet seldom is it possible to find modern scholarship devoted to studying their great national crisis that seriously weighs these references to political regimes when making sense of that past. The tendency to rely upon secondary sources has cut us off from what the Republicans actually argued. For that reason, the Republican case is presented in part 1, absent all references to existing scholarship, so that we can directly hear them.

31

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This is necessary also for the sake of economy. Their analysis is sophisticated, spread out over years, and at many points depends upon a chain of antecedent claims. If their analysis were interrupted at each point to contend with one part of the great mass of scholarly literature that addresses each point, the Republican case might never see the light of day. We would still not know what they said, in their own words. The work of representing their argument first entailed reviewing the extant speeches and writings of the Republicans who served in the Thirty-­Eighth, Thirty-­Ninth, or Fortieth Congress from 1863 to 1869. Their general views about the nature of the American political regime and its division into two regimes, one identified as oligarchical or, alternatively, as aristocratic, were compared and found to overlap. Their texts were then mined for answers to subordinate questions, prompted by Aristotelian political science. Who ruled? Who was ruled? How did they rule? What institutions supported the rulers? How did the regime develop? Who contested the regime? Again, their answers overlapped and were collected and organized in a database. Finally, their answers were combined into one joint account, which is in the form of an argument presented in the following five chapters. Their argument draws from their public discourse available in writings that they authored and in records of their public speeches and public acts. The chapters cite 100 of 299 members of the House of Representatives and the Senate who served at any time in the Thirty-­Eighth, Thirty-­Ninth, and Fortieth Congresses and who affiliated with the Republican Party. The presentation errs on the side of showing longer quotations than are typical for books of this kind. This has been done to remove any doubt about their position, their claims, and their evidence. Stray opinions that lacked consistent concurrence from their Republican colleagues were omitted, unless otherwise noted. Interpretation has been added to expound what they meant and to explain their thoughts in the context of the Republicans’ general point of view.

32

CH A PTER ON E

What Were They Reconstructing? The Duty of Congress, 1865 When the Thirty-­Ninth Congress convened on December 4, 1865, the great question facing the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives was how to rebuild the nation. During the war, Congress had addressed Reconstruction policy, but victory was the paramount concern of the government. Now the war was over. On that December day, the Congress met for the first time since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Reconstruction replaced the war as the top policy priority. The initial movements of the Congress reveal how senators and representatives understood their task. Immediately after the House of Representatives was organized, the newly elected Speaker of the House, Republican Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, delivered a short address. The subject of his address was Reconstruction policy. The duties of Congress were “as obvious as the sun’s pathway in the heavens”: “Its first and highest obligation is to guarantee to every State a republican form of government. The rebellion, having overthrown constitutional State government in many states, it is yours to mature and enact legislation which, with the concurrence of the Executive, shall establish them anew on such a basis of enduring justice as will guaranty all necessary safeguards to the people, and afford, what our Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence, proclaims is the chief object of government—­protection to all men in their inalienable rights.”1 In specifying this obligation, “to guaranty to every State a republican form of government,” Colfax quoted directly from Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution. The “first and highest obligation” of Congress warranted by the Constitution is to guarantee the establishment and maintenance of 33

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a certain kind of political regime in each of the several states. Immediately next, he said that the governments of the insurrectionary states were not constitutional. They were not constitutional because they lacked governments that were republican in form. They had deviated from that form of government; they had revolutionized. Following the defeat of the combined insurrectionary states in war, the yet unchanged fundamental political condition of these states encumbered Congress with the duty to exercise its “highest obligation,” to fulfill and maintain the constitutional guarantee of republican government. If the new state governments were to renounce rebellion, their renunciation would not by itself meet the standard of constitutional or republican government. More was expected, and Colfax explained how those states could meet the standard. When Congress enacted legislation reorganizing the state governments so that they met the “chief object of government-­protection to all men in their inalienable rights,” then those state governments would be regarded as constitutional, that is, republican in form, per Article IV, Section 4. In other words, to Speaker Colfax, the principles of the Declaration informed the meaning of that clause in the Constitution. A government that protects inalienable rights is one that meets the definition of republican. The governments in the insurrectionary states had not met that standard. After Congress successfully discharged its duty, Colfax continued, new loyal members from the former insurrectionary states would take their places in the House of Representatives, “their hearts devoted to the Union for which they are to legislate, jealous of its honor, proud of its glory, watchful of its rights, and hostile to its enemies.” His vision of patriotic unity and loyalty shared by representatives from the reconstructed states would be expected to follow the establishment of true republican government in those states, not to come before it. Colfax linked the states’ prospective loyalty, the desired effect, to the successful establishment of republican government, the cause. In so doing, he tacitly linked the cause of those states’ disloyalty to the absence of republican governments in those states. Difference between the political regime in and among the insurrectionary states and the political regime in and among the loyal states accounted for national division and disharmony. Composed of dissimilar, geographically separated political regimes, national union could not hold together. The cause of secession and the Civil War rested upon this difference. The presence and absence of slavery in the different parts of the Union constituted a salient difference between the loyal and insurrectionary states and 34

CHAPTER ONE

WHAT WERE THEY RECONSTRUCTING?

correlated to a difference in political regimes. The success of Reconstruction was predicated upon first recognizing the regime difference, which might not disappear after the imminent constitutional abolition of slavery. Colfax was pointing Congress in the direction of changing the political regimes of the insurrectionary states before political reunion could be contemplated. Over in the Senate, Republican Charles Sumner of Massachusetts introduced a blast of legislation. Almost immediately after business began, he presented six bills, one joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution, one concurrent declaratory resolution, and two sets of declaratory resolutions of the Senate. All of his proposed legislation recognized the same problem and the same higher aim that Colfax recognized in his brief speech. Senate Bill 3 was titled “A Bill to Carry Out the Principles of a Republican Form of Government in the District of Columbia.” Senate Bill 4 required voters in the formerly rebellious states to take an oath swearing to uphold a republican form of government. Senate Bill 5 was entitled “A Bill in Part Execution of the Guarantee of a Republican Form of Government in the Constitution of the United States.” It read, “Whereas it is declared in the Constitution that the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government . . . in all States lately declared to be in rebellion there shall be no oligarchy, invested with peculiar privileges and powers.”2 Senate Bill 7 was titled “A Bill to Enforce the Guarantee of a Republican Form of Government in Certain States Whose Governments Have Been Usurped or Overthrown.” This bill laid out a new plan of Reconstruction, that the rebel states would be held out of the Union and barred from participating in the national government until they could prove to the satisfaction of Congress as well as the president that they had established a republican form of government. The bill required new state constitutional conventions and banned all who took arms against the national government or served in office during the rebellion from electing delegates. To be acceptable, a new state constitution would have to incorporate in perpetuity certain provisions necessary to meet the guarantee clause. Among those provisions was that all future officers of the state would have to take the oath of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and the prescribed oath to “maintain a republican form of government.” The states could not resume their proper practical relation to the Union except by presidential proclamation, requiring the assent of Congress.3 Of the two sets of declaratory resolutions, the first set required a majority of electors in the rebel states to vote positively for five conditions of reunion, 35

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among which were “the complete suppression of all oligarchical pretensions, and the complete enfranchisement of all citizens, so that there shall be no denial of rights on account of color or race; but justice shall be impartial, and all shall be equal before the law.” The second set addressed what was not republican government, namely, governments of states wherein “large masses of citizens who have been always loyal to the United States are excluded from the elective franchise,” which would give an “oligarchical minority recently engaged in carrying on the rebellion the power to oppress the loyal majority.” The resolutions also ruled out governments of states wherein “a large proportion of native-­born citizens . . . is left wholly unrepresented.”4 Within days of convening, the Thirty-­Ninth Congress established the Joint Committee on Reconstruction by a resolution of both houses and directed the committee to report on the condition of the insurrectionary states and whether they were entitled to federal representation. The committee report named the kind of government that had developed in the insurrectionary states and contrasted that kind of government with republican government constitutionally required by the guarantee clause: “Slavery, by building up a ruling and dominant class, had produced a spirit of oligarchy adverse to republican institutions, which finally inaugurated civil war.” The first step to restoring the insurrectionary states to the Union, the committee reported, “would necessarily be the establishment of a republican form of government by the people.” In view of these circumstances, the committee recognized the constitutional duty incumbent on Congress “to guarantee to each state a republican form of government,” the report quoting Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution, as did Colfax and Sumner.5 The insurrectionary states’ governments had to be reconstructed at their foundations, from oligarchic to republican. Reconstruction meant regime change. To strengthen the foundation of republicanism, the committee proposed to amend the Constitution. That proposal became the Fourteenth Amendment, which specified the requirements that a state government had to meet to be deemed “a republican form of government.” This aimed at foreclosing the possibility that politically motivated, self-­serving arguments that disputed the meaning of republicanism could ever arise again. These officially expressed understandings of the problem of Reconstruction, and the higher aims of Reconstruction policy to deal with that problem, did not need greater elaboration. The nineteenth-­century American audience had heard all this before and would continue to hear it. Before, during, and after serving in the Reconstruction Congress, the Republicans 36

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elaborated these views. They presented detailed analyses of Southern political society that complemented and cohered with each other. In their analyses, the oligarchic rulers of the South were the root cause of all the major political difficulties of their national era. The oligarchy was the offspring of domestic slavery, and for that reason they proscribed domestic slavery as a political evil as well as a moral evil. The Republican-­led Union had recently defeated the oligarchy’s armies on the battlefield. But they believed that neither the end of the war nor the impending ratification of the constitutional abolition of slavery had sealed the end of the crisis of the house divided. The threat of losing in peacetime the advantages gained for republicanism by war precipitated Sumner’s broadside against oligarchy and the speech by Colfax. The aim of Reconstruction policy was to destroy the oligarchic regime politically, thereby forever removing that cause of civil discord and oppression within the Union, and to replant true republicanism in the insurrectionary states. Theirs was an effort to reconstruct Southern government on republican principles. Above all else, that meant the elimination of oligarchic inequality and the substitution of republican equality before the law. Ultimately, they aimed at the regeneration of American republicanism, which the Southern oligarchy had corrupted for decades, and their achievement of that aim depended upon successful regime change in the South. They regarded their own work in the same way as they regarded the work of the American founders. Both they and the founders were engaged in regime change, from monarchy in the one case and from oligarchy in the other, to republicanism. When the House of Representatives was heatedly debating what to do in February 1866, Representative Martin Welker of Ohio intervened to call attention to the weightiness of their deliberations. He repeated the refrain that became a watchword of Reconstruction Republicans, “make haste slowly,” that is, to measure carefully every step but to act decisively. Theirs was a unique charge. The current of events had handed them the opportunity to purify the Republic in all of its parts. Finally, freed from the corrupting power and influence of the crushed oligarchy, American statesmen faithful to the principles of the founding could extend those principles everywhere in the nation. If they failed in that duty, the oligarchy might return to power. The perpetuity, the very life of the nation, is now at stake. No graver or more responsible duties ever devolved on an American Congress than are now upon 37

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us. This is the time and this the occasion to settle for all time in this country the great ideas and principles lying at the foundations of our noble structure of government. Let these foundations now be made strong, that in coming time the winds and storms of rebellion and revolution may beat in vain against the grand fabric erected thereon. Our fathers made this for a free Government; one to which the persecuted and downtrodden of the world might fly and find secure asylum and equal rights. In the short period of less than a century, which is but a day in the life of a nation, the grand idea of our fathers was so far forgotten and departed from that we held four million of God’s creatures as the brutes of the field to be sold in the market, and their unrequited toil used to nurture and support a purse proud and haughty oligarchy of oppressors in the land. Let us now make it what our fathers intended it to be, and secure to all their God-­ given rights, secure equal and exact justice to all men. To accomplish this we must not be in a hurry with the work.6

The next day, on February 8, Senator Henry Lane of Indiana noted that events had placed the Republican Congress in the position of the republican fathers, as founding statesmen. Holding that trust, Lane exhorted them to refound the American Republic. He asked: What is, under Providence, the sublime mission now devolved upon the Congress of the United States? “To break every yoke and let the oppressed go free;” to batter down prison walls and prison bars; to declare the equality of all men before the law, as they are equal before God. This is the grand mission, which is now upon us, which we may not avoid or evade. And, Mr. President, history is continually repeating itself. After three quarters of a century, after we have run the round of long outrage and oppression against the poor African, to-­d ay we have come back to the proud stand-­point where our ancestors stood when they gave utterance to that proud, that noble enunciation which shook the despotisms of the world, that “all men are created equal,” have inalienable rights. After making the whole circle of history—­it has taken us seventy-­five years—­we have come back to the proud position of the fathers, and we stand upon that principle, and there may stand with safety.7

The next month Representative Godlove Orth, also of Indiana, echoed Welker’s call to “make haste slowly.” Their work, he reminded the House, was “second only in importance and difficulty to the work of the fathers.” 38

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Taking a pause from the debate, Orth accounted the work of the fathers, the late war, and their own pending work among the most consequential events for liberty in American political history, past and future: “The terrific contest has left its traces wide and deep; the foundations of society in the immediate theater of the war have been broken up; . . . the shock has shattered and broken some of the majestic columns of our political edifice; . . . the grand old foundation of the fathers, laid strong and deep in the principles of universal freedom and humanity, still remains, ready to receive a superstructure more beautiful in design, more perfect in all its parts; a superstructure which it is the duty of wise statesmanship to erect.”8 Senator Richard Yates of Illinois also regarded the importance of their work equal to the work of the fathers in the long sweep of human history. Senators, sixty centuries of the past are looking down upon you. All the centuries of the future are calling upon you. Liberty, struggling amid the rise and wrecks of empires in the past, and yet to struggle for life in all the nations of the world, conjures you to seize this great opportunity which the providence of Almighty God has placed in your hands to bless the world and make your names immortal, to carry to a full and triumphant consummation the great work begun by your fathers, and thus lay permanently, solidly, and immovably the capstone upon the pyramid of human liberty.9

The aim of the Republican Congress was to refound the American Republic on the restored principles of the American founding. The Southern oligarchy had contended against those principles upon which republicanism rested. Defeated in war, the oligarchic regime was routed but not dead. Therefore, that regime in the South stood in the way of the highest ambition of their statesmanship and the vindication of the American founding. The Ruling Class From the moment the Republican Party of Massachusetts formed in 1854, Senator Charles Sumner argued that the Southern states were oligarchies, ruled by a “caste” or “privileged class” of the few, for the advantage of those few. During his twenty-­three-­year senatorial career, Sumner reprised this theme so often and so forcefully that his Republican colleague Senator William Fessenden of Maine said, “If the brain of the honorable Senator from Massachusetts should ever chance to be dissected, I think those words 39

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[oligarchy, aristocracy, caste, and monopoly] would be found very strongly impressed on it.”10 Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts had long argued that Southern government had revolutionized during antebellum times into an oligarchic or aristocratic regime. In speeches before the war, he said that a “relentless despotism” had been established in the slave states11 and that “a mere handful of men” not only ruled the South, but also fashioned “at its pleasure the policy of the General Government.” They commanded the Northern wing of the Democratic Party as “the Emperor of Austria” commanded his army to maintain “his despotic rule in Hungary and Venetia,” and sought to extend slavery and empire into “Cuba, Central America and Mexico.”12 These aristocratic few formed an interstate ruling class “bound together by the cohesive attraction of a vast interest,” by which he meant slavery.13 Writing retrospectively after the war, Wilson showed that he never departed from these views. He wrote that within the slaveholding states, the powerful antebellum Southern slaveholders “had transformed the self-­government of freemen into the hardly disguised despotic control of an oligarchy, contemptible in point of numbers, and more contemptible in the spirit, purposes, and means of its long-­continued and fearful domination.”14 In an 1860 speech to Congress, Representative James Mitchell Ashley of Ohio claimed, “In all these fifteen slave States, a class is dominant which fills all the offices, and controls the legislative, executive, and judicial departments of the government.” In a public letter written in 1861, Ashley described this class’s political domination of the Southern states and called the rulers an “infamous oligarchy.” Again, in Congress in 1868, he spoke of this class “numbering but a few hundred thousand slave-­owners, the most offensive and infamous oligarchy in history.”15 Writing retrospectively in 1866, Representative Isaac Newton Arnold of Illinois wrote that before secession and the war, “The slaveholders in the slave States had practically subverted the Constitution and established a despotism on its ruins. . . . The despotism of the oligarchy was supreme.”16 In his two-­volume memoir of his public service published in the 1880s, James Gillespie Blaine of Maine, a past Speaker of the House, senator, and future secretary of state, also depicted antebellum Southern government as, “in short, an oligarchy.” The South was the only section in which there was distinctively a governing class. The slave-­holders ruled their States more positively than ever the 40

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aristocratic classes ruled England. Besides the distinction of free and slave, or black and white, there was another line of demarcation between white men that was as absolute as the division between patrician and plebeian. The nobles of Poland who dictated the policy of the kingdom were as numerous in proportion to the whole population as the rich class of slave-­holders whose decrees governed the policy of their States.17

In other words, the size of the Polish ruling class in proportion to the Polish political society equaled the size of the Southern American ruling class in proportion to its Southern political society. Although the Southern American ruling class lacked formal titles of nobility, their power and control over the majority population were comparable to the power of the Polish ruling classes that did possess titles of nobility. In 1886 Senator John Sherman of Ohio delivered an address titled “Grant and the New South.” The theme of the address was Reconstruction. He broached the fundamental problem of Reconstruction at the top of his address: We know what the old south was. It was an oligarchy called a democracy. I do not speak this word in an offensive sense, but simply as descriptive of the character of the government of the south before the war. . . . Less than one-­ fourth of the population were admirably trained, disciplined and qualified for the highest duties of manhood. The south was very much such a democracy as Rome and Greece were at some periods of their history; a democracy founded upon the privileges of the few and the exclusion of the many. Very much like the democracy of the barons of Runnymede, who, when they met together to dictate Magna Charta to King John, guarded fully their own privileges as against the king, but cared but little for the rights of the people.18

Sherman meant that if democracy did exist in the antebellum slaveholding South, it did in a very qualified and misleading sense—­only among the equal members of the small ruling class. This kind of equality was the kind that ruling noble peers shared among each other, as among those nobles who ruled Poland. But political equality in the antebellum South did not extend further than that, as it must in a democratic political regime. Outside the ruling class in the South, all others, black domestic slaves but also whites, were unequal and were ruled. 41

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The Southern Oligarchy’s White Vassal Class In 1852 Representative George W. Julian of Indiana recognized and described three political classes in the slave states: the rulers, the slaves, and the poor whites. According to the Census of 1850, “the slaveholders of the country,” who were the rulers of the South, amounted to “one twenty-­fi fth,” or 4 percent, of the roughly six million white Americans in the slave states and less than 3 percent of the total population. These few constituted a “wicked and domineering oligarchy.”19 This “squad of despots” ruled “the three millions and more whom they hold in bondage.” Those “three millions” were denied that principle of everlasting justice, a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work, sold like merchandise to the highest bidder, despoiled of their dearest rights and the holiest relations of life, and plundered even of their humanity by law. . . . Let no man regard lightly, either the moral or physical power of such a people; for every ray of light which dawns upon their minds, every kindling passion which fires their hearts, is the sure prophecy of their deliverance. Well may the slaveholder tremble, when he reflects that “God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

In addition, the oligarchy ruled over a separate class, “millions of their own race in the South, who hold no slaves.” Multitudes of these feel that they are crushed to the earth by this heartless aristocracy, degraded to a condition which slaves themselves need not envy, and that all hope of bettering their lot is denied them, so long as the reigning order of things continues. This hostility to slavery will increase just in proportion as its hands are strengthened and its exactions multiplied, thus hastening a fearful crisis, by the action of causes that must inevitably produce it, were the millions in bondage to continue quiet and submissive. We have good reasons for believing that at this time there are thousands among the non-­slaveholders South, . . . smarting under the relentless power of slavery, and meditating schemes of resistance.

In 1860 James Ashley similarly distinguished the ruled classes of domestic slaves and poor whites. He also contrasted the liberties of the people in the free and slave states to show where republican government did and did not exist. In the free states, “an untrammeled press and free speech are guaranteed, and public schools and a free church are secured to every inhabitant.” 42

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He continued: “These institutions the free States have, to an extent unknown to any government or people on earth; and to them, more than to any other cause, are these States indebted for their unsurpassed development, and for that prosperity and growth which have made them the wonder and admiration of the world.” But in the fifteen slave states, “practically, the reverse of all this is true.” In “all the slave States the constitutional rights of an American citizen are not respected, the constitutional guaranty for free speech and a free press is a mockery, free schools and an enlightened Christianity an impossibility.”20 First, Ashley addressed the oligarchy’s political oppression of the class of domestic slaves: “The laborers upon whose toil these States exist are slaves, and have been declared not to be citizens, though born upon the soil, but simply persons, with no moral, social, or natural rights, that the dominant race are bound to respect, if the mere IPSE DIXIT of the Supreme Court is to be regarded as law. Their obedience and subjugation are secured by enactments and usages the most barbarous and tyrannical ever known to man.”21 Immediately following, Ashley separately addressed the oligarchy’s oppression of their white political vassals: A reign of terror secures the obedience and co-­operation of the poor whites; and because of this submission, they are claimed as loyal friends of the institution of slavery. But their loyalty is, in fact, a humiliating submission to the privileged class—­a submission as abject in most of these fifteen States, as is the submission of the most spirit-­humbled slave. The guaranties of the national Constitution, so far as they affect the individual rights of an American citizen, are denied alike to all men who are not of this privileged class or their open allies; and to be an American citizen secures no protection from insult and outrage, unjust imprisonment and terrible punishments, or even death. So complete is this reign of terror, that no man can print, or speak, or preach, or pray, unless he does it in the manner prescribed by this privileged class.

Early in the war in 1862, Representative John P. Shanks of Indiana accused the Southern slaveholders of having degraded poor whites, the “poor and laboring masses who constitute the majority.” These poor had “been ignored in elections” and lacked a “voice in affairs” of government. The slaveholders’ “teachings and practices,” he said, “are at variance with the principles of liberty and genius of free government.” Among their aims was the “the subjugation of the poor of all classes.” Not only because the slaveholders led 43

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their states into a rebellion against the national government but also because they had taken away self-­government from the people in the states, Shanks believed, it was the duty of the national government to enforce Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution, guaranteeing a republican form of government to the people of those states.22 In 1864 Representative Daniel Morris of New York claimed that those who owned most of the slaves and best lands “for years have wielded the civil and the political influences which have controlled these States” and that “the white population, not owning lands, are as dependent and subservient to these ‘lords of the manor’ as are the slaves.”23 Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress who had represented low-­ slaveholding districts in slave states bordering free states before the war were particularly instructive on the character of Southern government and the plight of poor whites under those governments. Unlike Republican congressmen drawn from the free states, they lived in close proximity with slaveholders, giving them a unique view of the character of slave-­state political society. And unlike the congressional delegations from other slave states, these congressmen were not always drawn from the ruling slave-­state class. Often, this small class of representatives presented the most trenchant criticisms of Southern oligarchy, whose rule they and their oppressed constituents resisted when they could. These representatives sometimes expressed sympathy for other slave states’ nonslaveholding people whose free speech was silenced and whose political representation was denied by the minority class of rulers. These congressmen were in a better position than most to survey the character of slave-­state governments. One of these congressmen was Representative Francis Preston Blair Jr. of Missouri. He was, as Henry Wilson told the Senate, “a champion of the rights of the non-­slaveholders of the South. Let the oppressed poor whites heed the voice and follow the councils of such a leader, and the day of their deliverance from their galling degradation will soon dawn.”24 In 1858 Blair spoke on the admission of Kansas as a slave state. He began, “There is . . . one point of view in which it has not been treated in this hall.” He proposed to speak for “a large class of citizens of the southern States—­the non-­slaveholding people of those States.”25 He quoted from Southern accounts of the terrible condition of nonslaveholders in Alabama, South Carolina, and Virginia. This picture “is not true, where slavery obtains nominally, or where the slaves are few; and especially it is not true of the city and county which I represent upon this floor,” but 44

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it was a true account where slavery obtained decisively. That is, in proportion with the increase of slavery, the condition of nonslaveholders living in proximity to slavery worsened. Blair represented a district where slaves were few in number, and the conditions of the nonslaveholders were better there than in other slave states. Since his district was located in the slave state of Missouri, Blair lived close enough to the slaveholders to believe he understood them—­and he harshly denounced them. These “oligarchs” degraded “the man who lives by daily labor, and the whole class of manual laborers and operatives.” They preferred their “slaves to the citizens of the Republic, and would have the latter deprived of the right of elective franchise, as his negro slaves.”26 Blair claimed that the ruling class was intent on destroying the political liberty of the nonslaveholding class in order to reduce them to the level of the slaves. In the three pages of the Congressional Globe that recorded his speech, the term oligarchy occurs seven times, oligarchs twice. Another one of these congressmen was Senator Waitman T. Willey of western Virginia, which bordered the free states of Pennsylvania and Ohio. In an 1864 Senate speech, he also arraigned the Southern oligarchs for crushing the liberties of other Southerners as an adjunct and necessary aim of their regime. The territory constituting Willey’s West Virginia belonged to the slave state of Virginia before the war, when Willey was already engaged in politics. He claimed to know the character and aims of the Virginia oligarchy, which he deplored. Willey said that the ultimate purpose of secession, rebellion, and the founding of the Confederacy was to establish formally its oligarchic regime as an independent political nation. Of these secessionists, he argued that “their dissatisfaction went further than hostility to the Union; it consisted, in fact, in hostility to the fundamental principles of republican government. It was a revolt against popular institutions—­a repudiation of democracy. The ultimate result contemplated was and is the establishment of an oligarchy, if not a monarchy.”27 This new nation, the Confederate States of America, would complete “the destruction of the equal rights and liberties of the southern people.” Similarly, in 1865 Representative Henry Winter Davis blamed the rebellion on an “oligarchy of slaveholders” who had “brought on the war.” Davis represented a district in the border state of Maryland. Willey quoted oligarchic Southern statesmen to prove their unrepublican character and intentions. He recalled sitting in the Virginia convention of 1861 that debated secession. A committee appointed by the convention explicitly denounced democratic 45

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republicanism in its report. The report stated that, in democratic systems of government in which common laborers participated equally with others, “the tendency is to what Mr. John Randolph graphically described as ‘the despotism of king numbers.’” The committee believed that the state government should consult common laborers’ interests but not be controlled by their votes. The report blamed “unlimited suffrage” for the insecurity of property (the most prominent species of property in the South being slaves and land). Willey quoted the report’s example of agrarian (or “socialist”) misappropriation of others’ property under democratic forms of government: “This tendency to a conflict between labor and capital has already manifested itself in many forms, comparatively harmless, it is true, but nevertheless clearly indicative of a spirit of licentiousness, which must, in the end, ripen into agrarianism. It may be seen in the system of free schools, by which children of the poor are educated at the expense of the rich.”28 Willey and the Republicans knew that the Virginian aristocracy’s attacks on “agrarianism” were rational and typical of the ruling class, because the common people’s suffrages would be expected to aim at undermining the aristocracy’s land monopoly and ownership of slaves and at provisioning common school education. The Republicans knew that education monopoly, land monopoly, and especially slavery were institutional supports of oligarchic rule. The Institutions of Oligarchy: Popular Ignorance “KNOWLEDGE,” Thaddeus Stevens said in 1835, “is the only foundation on which republics can stand.”29 This theory and its opposite, that ignorance is the only foundation on which oligarchy can stand, runs through the Republicans’ criticism of the slave states’ abstention from establishing a healthy common school system. They argued that the slave-­state rulers deliberately prevented the development of common schools because popular ignorance was their policy goal. The arrangement of educational institutions in the slave states secured this goal and supported oligarchic rule. The Republicans frequently alluded to the suppression of primary education in the Southern states, in contrast to the thriving common schools of the free states. Sometimes they used evidence drawn from Southern sources to corroborate their claims. For example, in 1858, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan quoted from the annual message of South Carolina governor Whitemarsh Seabrook: “Education has been provided by the Legislature but for one class of the citizens of the State, which is the wealthy class. For the 46

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middle and poorer classes of society it has done nothing, since no organized system has been adopted for that purpose.”30 Often, they referred to Census statistics to demonstrate this sharp difference in the Southern section. In 1860 Charles Sumner noted, “Virginia, an old State, and more than a third larger than Ohio, has 67,353 pupils in her public schools, while the latter State has 484,153. Arkansas, equal in age and size with Michigan, has only 8,493 pupils at her public schools, while the latter State has 110,455. South Carolina, three times as large as Massachusetts, has 17,838 pupils at public school, while the latter State has 176,475. South Carolina spends for this purpose, annually, $200,600; Massachusetts, $1,006,795.”31 In 1864 Representative John F. Farnsworth of Illinois contrasted 1850 literacy rates between Massachusetts and Alabama. Among native white adults, less than one-­half of 1 percent in Massachusetts were illiterate, but in Alabama between 18 and 20 percent could not “read the ballot they cast, nor sign their own names to a poll-­book.”32 The Republicans generally attributed this underdevelopment of common education, in Farnsworth’s words, to the “baneful” effects of slavery. But the Republicans were more detailed in explaining the immediate cause. They believed that the dearth of common schools was no accidental effect of slavery. It was, rather, a policy calculated to produce a desired and certain outcome: the ignorance of the majority population of the South. By promoting low public intelligence, the slaveholding oligarchy could better control the ruled majority and check challenges to the regime’s power. In 1860 Representative Charles Van Wyck of New York charged Southerners in Congress: “Your despotism is as galling upon the whites as the blacks.”33 The despotism depended upon the denial of common school education to poor whites, which was the policy of the Southern state governments. Van Wyck quoted a principled defense of this policy by his colleague in the House Representative Laurence M. Keitt of South Carolina: Mr. KEITT adds: “It is also incontrovertible that all the inhabitants of a State cannot be educated; the ordinance of God condemns mankind to labor, and certain menial occupations are incompatible with mental cultivation.”34

Van Wyck first excoriated Keitt’s blasphemous denial that God’s ordinance to work fell upon his class, comprising those who did not labor, and then called the governing ways of the slave states “a system whose corner-­stone 47

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is the ignorance of the people.” He added that wherever that system spread, it “will establish the policy that labor ‘is incompatible with mental cultivation.’” This policy to perpetuate nonslaveholders’ ignorance, combined with a policy of censorship, rendered the nonslaveholders more easily controlled and ruled: “Slavery must prescribe what books they shall read. Your population is about eight million; yet you control their destinies, and compel their opinions.” By “Slavery” and “you,” Van Wyck meant the slaveholders; by “they,” he meant the Southern nonslaveholders. Van Wyck understood that the Southerners he was addressing in Congress were all slaveholders. Van Wyck correlated the Southern nonslaveholders’ lack of access to education with their political powerlessness, which Van Wyck measured by their invisibility in federal office: “How many men from the South on this floor are non-­slave-­ holders? How many in the Senate, and among the foreign appointments? . . . [Y]our own people feel more keenly than we, that ‘The badge of the slave is the scorn of the free.’”35 In 1861 one of the oligarchs’ “own people” who felt this scorn, Waitman Willey, directly explained why the oligarchy opposed free schools: “Sir, great astonishment has been expressed at the hostility of southern statesmen to popular education. But, sir, we ought not to be surprised at it. Knowledge is power; and to keep the masses in ignorance is a necessary precaution to keep them in subjection. To maintain the oligarchy of the few owning the capital, it is necessary to bind down with the slavish chains of ignorance the many who perform the labor. . . . Sir, the true reason of this hostility to popular education is hostility to democratic institutions.”36 In 1862 Willey’s colleague from western Virginia Representative Kellian Whaley similarly denounced the policy of the slaveholding aristocrats in eastern Virginia and imputed to them the same motive. The eastern Virginian aristocracy jealously guarded their power over the state. “For eighty years,” the people of western Virginia had petitioned the state government for the “oppression, insult, and contumely of eastern legislation without redress and without relief.” Forty years earlier, Whaley said, western Virginians had even attempted to separate from Virginia and escape the rule of the “eastern aristocracy,” without success. “One of the greatest injuries sustained by our western people has been an organized opposition to a system of free schools and popular education, by which the bright but untutored minds of our mountain ranges and humbler classes have not been developed, while colleges and seminaries for the rich have been fostered by eastern legislation. To keep the 48

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people in ignorance is a part of the policy of their masters, the forty thousand slave-­owners of East Virginia.”37 Whaley indicated that the nonslaveholding whites in the western part of the state were effectively slaves to “their masters,” the eastern aristocrats. Immediately next, he tabulated western Virginians’ lack of representation in the state government, linking the eastern aristocrats’ education policy to their political domination: “Since 1776, Virginia has had thirty-­three Governors, of whom West Virginia has had five, and twenty-­four United States Senators, of which West Virginia has had but three.” Markedly different results on public intelligence flowed from free states’ and slave states’ contrary policies on education. In 1861 Representative John B. Alley of Massachusetts noted this difference to explain why the Southern majority did not thwart the secessionists. “Freedom and free institutions,” he said, depended on “the intelligence of the people.” “If this Constitution and Government are overthrown, it will be by one section of the Confederacy, because its people were not sufficiently intelligent to appreciate their blessings or comprehend their value; and for them a military despotism may be demanded by the necessities of their condition.”38 Lower public intelligence was an aspect of the Southern people’s “condition,” and all of those peculiar aspects or “necessities” taken together “demanded” a “military despotism.” Alley’s analysis applied the logic behind a phrase from the Declaration of Independence: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People.” A corollary claim is that tyranny or despotism is a fit ruler of a people whose character is not free. But because the Northern people were educated, they “could no more be subjected to despotic rule than could the lightning of heaven be curbed.” To Alley, the difference in public intelligence highlighted the difference between the unfree condition or character of the Southern majority who were ruled despotically and the free character of the free-­state people who ruled themselves. In 1860 Representative Justin Morrill of Vermont made the same theoretical point on education, or the lack thereof, and the fitness or unfitness for self-­government, albeit in a different context. Morrill objected to Southern statesmen’s pressure to conquer new territories beyond the nation’s boundaries, particularly Cuba. Among his reasons for opposing “the acquisition of new territories and foreign inhabitants,” he argued: “Our Government is founded upon the intelligence and virtue of the people, and there is no other basis which can make Democracy or Republicanism possible for a day.”39 49

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Because these foreign people lacked education, Morrill explained, they would have to be held either in “pupilage,” to be trained in the arts of liberty and self-­government, or by “chastisement,” that is, despotically ruled. But according to the Republicans, the augmentation of national territory with lands populated by an ignorant majority fitted the preferred model of Southern leaders who were accustomed to despotic rule. The deficits in the condition or character that Morrill observed in foreign despotically ruled people also applied to some degree to the majority population in the Southern states. In 1862 Senator Lot Morrill of Maine claimed that the Southern majority had been “deceived and misled” into supporting secession, the purpose of which was “to overthrow republican institutions, and to erect on the ruins of the Republic an oligarchy,” that is, to change the form of the national government into one that reflected the form of government prevalent in the slave states.40 Looking to the successful conclusion of the war, Morrill counted free schools among the new institutions that the national government should plant in the South to increase popular intelligence that would counter the oligarchy’s deception. Morrill did not believe that the majority of Southerners could have wittingly supported the ultimate designs of the secessionists, since those designs were aimed at formally establishing the national independence of an oligarchic regime that had already ruled over and oppressed that majority in the Southern section. To claim that the Southern majority had wittingly supported the further entrenchment of their own domination would be “a libel on human nature,” since nobody aware of his natural right to self-­government would rationally consent to oppression. The only way the secessionists could gain the support of the Southern majority was through deception, and deception’s antidote was education, which the Southern people lacked. Anticipating the war’s end and Reconstruction, Representative James Wilson addressed the need to educate the common people of the South. This was one important task subsumed by their pending mission, “the establishment of a pure Republic.” An educated Southern people would stand as a bulwark against the regeneration of the oligarchy after the war. He looked “forward to the time when the child of the ‘poor white’ of the South shall possess the same educational advantages which the free spirit of the North has accorded to the offspring of the rich and the poor in common.”41 In the same year, Representative William B. Allison of Iowa echoed Wilson’s emphasis on the need to provide for the Southern people’s education, adding Lot Morrill’s point to his analysis. By keeping the poor Southern 50

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whites in ignorance, the Southern oligarchy easily swayed their opinions, in order to use them more easily for the regime’s purposes: “The wealthy and intelligent few have controlled and directed the poor and ignorant many, and have thus led them into the vortex of a revolution causeless as it is wicked.” The antidote to the oligarchy’s political misuse of the Southern people was education. The Southern people’s “oppressors conquered, the Government should extend to them its fostering care and protection; should encourage labor and protect all in the enjoyment of its fruits. We must restore the great body of that people by the establishment in those States of free schools and free churches.”42 To replant republicanism successfully in the South and to guard against the designs of the oligarchy to reestablish itself, the Republicans did attempt to establish improved common school education in the South. In 1866 Representative James Garfield of Ohio drew up a bill establishing the National Bureau of Education. In his speech urging his colleagues to vote for the bill, he said, “I will not trouble the House by repeating such commonplaces, so familiar to every gentleman here, as that our system of government is based upon the intelligence of the people.”43 Then he attended to the need for the development of education in the South: When the history of the Thirty-­n inth Congress is written, it will be recorded that two great ideas inspired it, and made their impress upon all its efforts; namely, to build up free States on the ruins of slavery, and to extend to every inhabitant of the United States the rights and privileges of citizenship. Before the Divine Architect builded order out of chaos, he said, “Let there be light.” Shall we commit the fatal mistake of building up free States, without first expelling the darkness in which slavery had shrouded their people? Shall we enlarge the boundaries of citizenship, and make no provision to increase the intelligence of the citizen?44

He argued that schoolmasters were needed to remove a key institutional support of the Southern oligarchy: the ignorance of the majority. The Institutions of Oligarchy: Suppression of Liberties and Denial of Rights The Republicans frequently attacked the denial of civil rights and suppression of civil liberties by the Southern state governments, which they attributed to the oligarchic rulers of those states. The Republicans accused them of 51

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suppressing freedom of speech, the press, religious expression, and political association and denying the right to habeas corpus and to due process of law. While the slave-­state governments refrained from establishing common school education, they actively promoted censorship. Republicans attributed censorship policy to the same proximate and ultimate causes that motivated the oligarchy to refrain from establishing common schools. Censorship aided in perpetuating low public intelligence among the white majority of the South, so that the slaveholding minority might more easily perpetuate their rule. With regard to specific abridgments of civil liberties, the Republicans almost always pointed to proscriptions of sentiments and associations that were antislavery in character. They understood that domestic slavery was the basis for the oligarchy’s power over the whole political community. Therefore, they did not view this class of restrictions of civil liberties as an exception to what was otherwise a free or democratic society. Since slavery was integral to the ruling oligarchy’s power, the proscriptions of antislavery speech and associations were integral to the preservation of the regime governing the Southern states. In 1856 Henry Wilson contrasted the freedom of speech in the free and slave states. On the one hand, Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia, “whose views upon this question of slavery are known to be extremely ultra,” had recently visited Boston, given a lecture, and been “received by all with . . . courtesy.” At that very time, Thomas Benton was in the North lecturing without any threat to himself, “although he holds views in regard to slavery that not one man in ten thousand in that section approves.” On the other hand, Northerners could not safely visit the slave states and speak their views without encountering threats and censorship. Wilson concluded, “In the slaveholding States free speech and a free press are known only in theory.”45 As many Republicans did until the war, Wilson detailed several examples of prominent Southerners who had affiliated with or had shown sympathy toward his Republican Party and were driven from the South. Addressing the Southerners directly, he said, “When you are able with your iron despotism to crush out all there who would go with us, you turn round and tell us we are getting up a sectional party. I assure you, there are tens of thousands of men in the South whose sympathies are with us, but they have no opportunity so to vote.”46 Wilson guessed that “thousands of men in the South”—­ probably with reference to the vassal class of nonslaveholders—­m ight have voted Republican had those states protected personal liberty. 52

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In St. Louis, he pointed out, thousands of immigrant Germans did show their inclination toward Republicans in the presidential election of 1856 and wrote “Protest” on their ballots because the slave state prohibited the name of Republican candidate John C. Frémont in the election. This demonstrated “your despotism, and shows that these men who were true to liberty in the Old World will not be false to their cherished convictions in the new.” In 1860 Wilson assailed the denial of habeas corpus and due process rights in Southern law. He held up an enactment in South Carolina by which free colored persons arriving on shipboard from the North were to be incarcerated without recourse to a writ of habeas corpus and could be sold as slaves. Others in the North believed this law was unconstitutional, and so, in 1843, “Massachusetts sent to South Carolina one of the foremost advocates and men of our State. He went to that State to have this law tested in the judicial tribunals of the country.” But South Carolina expelled him by force, “and to add to that indignity, a law was passed imposing the highest penalties if any person came into that State for the purpose of obstructing this law by any legal process.”47 For merely challenging the constitutionality of the law, an individual could be imprisoned for life. Wilson read aloud a summary of each section of the enactment to show that the South Carolina government blocked a fair legal process. He then referred to a Virginia law similar to South Carolina’s 1820 law, authorizing warrantless searches of any vessel for fugitive slaves and imposing a tax on the vessels for the cost of the search. According to Isaac Arnold, the chief magistrates of antebellum Southern state governments approved of censorship and openly flouted due process of law in order to attack antislavery men. Some slave-­state governors had offered “large pecuniary rewards” as bounties “for the persons of prominent men in the free States, because of their opposition to slavery.” Virginia governor Henry Wise had said, “‘The best way to meet abolitionists is with powder and cold steel.’” South Carolina governor George McDuffie “recommended that abolitionists be punished with death without benefit of clergy.”48 These executive actions accorded with the antirepublican character of the slave states: Neither at the bar, nor in the pulpit, neither from the newspaper, the stump, nor from the bench; among the people, before the courts, nor in the legislative halls, was the voice of liberty secured by law, permitted to be heard. Negroes, fugitives from slavery, were scourged, whipped, and in some cases burned to 53

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death. The literature of the English language, school books, and books upon religion, literature and painting, were expurgated, and the generous, manly, eloquent utterances of liberty, stricken from their pages. Such was the dark despotism which settled over the land of Jefferson and Washington.49

The power behind these oppressions, Arnold said, was “an aristocracy of slaveholders.” Leading up to the 1860 presidential election, Republicans again heard the charge that they were a sectional party. They replied that they would not be a sectional party if Southern governments respected civil liberties. Representative Owen Lovejoy of Illinois addressed the “sectional party” charge in 1859: “Oh, we have no delegates from slave States to attend our national nominating conventions! Why have we none? Mark! because, if delegates attend these conventions they are mobbed and driven into exile.”50 Lovejoy then illustrated the contrast between the freedom of political association in the free states enjoyed by minority Democrats and the political intimidation faced by would-­be Republicans in the slave states. He presented this hypothetical: “What if we, in the free States, should say to the [Northern] Democrats, ‘if you attend the [Democratic national] Charleston convention we will hang you,’ and thus keep them all at home, and then reproach them with being a sectional party, because only the slave States were represented?” The answer Lovejoy predicted would be, “‘Well, you have no votes in the slave States; your principles do not circulate with us at all; you dare not even proclaim your doctrines among us.’” The reason Republican principles did not circulate in the slave states was that Southern governments violated other civil liberties: “And why do not our principles circulate in the slave States? They used to, for they are the principles of Washington and Franklin and other founders of the Republic. The reason why our principles do not circulate in the slave States is, that this despotism has, like another Napoleon, crushed out the freedom of speech and of the press.” He predicted that if the slave states protected the liberty of “the non-­slaveholders of the South,” Republican support in the slave states would equal Democratic support in the free states. In early 1860 Charles Van Wyck made the same argument as Lovejoy: “Remove the despotism of opinion and anarchy of violence from your own people and an unfettered judgment in your own States would rally thousands around the [Republican] standard of free labor, free schools, and free soil. See the once proud State of Virginia laying her hands on the mails and authorizing some prejudiced justice to sit in judgment and condemn to the flames all 54

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publications that excite his ire.”51 He added that their outrageous system of government depended “upon the destruction of all those rights which should be the boast of a free people.” In the debates over the upcoming 1860 election, Representative Daniel Gooch of Massachusetts contrasted freedom of speech and association in the North and the South. He called on Southern leaders to “frame your platform as you please; present it, with your candidates for office, to the people. . . . We [Republicans] will do the same. If we are beaten, we will acquiesce, live in obedience to the Constitution and the laws, and see to it that the Union is preserved.”52 Gooch added, “We intend to act in good faith,” but he needed assurances that Southern statesmen would act in the same good faith, asking them to “pledge yourselves anew to the same course,” and promised that he and his Republican colleagues would “not question that you intend to do the same.” The Republican Party intended to canvass “every portion of the American people where free speech is tolerated and the rights of the citizen under the Constitution respected.” Gooch doubted that constitutional rights were respected in “every Community in the land.” If those rights were breached in the coming canvass, “we have only to say to you, perform your constitutional obligations.” He and his Republican Party proposed “to appeal to the reason and judgment of the people, not to their fears, prejudices, or passions. We hold that threats are poor arguments, and that he who addresses them to any portion of the American people fail to appreciate his audience.” At this point, Gooch balked at directly accusing Southerners of suppressing civil liberties. But secession having commenced, Gooch shed circumlocution. Less than one year later, in 1861, he directly blamed secession on the suppression of civil liberties in the South, for if the state governments had respected the rights and liberties under the Constitution, the Southern people would have directed their governments away from that course.53 Why secession now? Gooch noted that some political radicals in both sections were making demands to secede—­on the one hand, to break fellowship with the slave states; on the other, to break fellowship with the free states. He said it was not strange to find these radicals in both sections of the country, but the radicals ruled only in the South: Why this difference? The people of the North know and understand everything that pertains to the South. Your newspapers are found in all our villages, and are read by all classes of men. Southern men speak freely their opinions at 55

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the North, both in public and private. Freedom of speech and the press, liberty of thought and action, are everywhere protected. We ask no safeguard against error, but truth. Not so in the South. Your people do not understand the feeling, principles, and motives of the people of the North. No northern man, who honestly represents the sentiments of the North, is permitted to speak to your people. No northern newspaper, representing the political sentiments of the North, is permitted to enter or be read in your States. All that your people know of the principles and intentions of the Republican party they have learned from our political opponents.

“Freedom of speech and the press is everywhere in the South denied,” he continued, and free expression of opinion exposed Southerners “to indignity, and sometimes to death.” Had it been otherwise, he argued, secession would never have happened. “Distrust and fear of the Government,” as well as popular hostility toward the North, were the “natural fruits” of these proscriptions.54 In 1860 Representative Thomas Dawes Eliot of Massachusetts denied that individuals in the South had recourse to due process when charged with violating laws limiting freedom. As a result, Southern governments had delivered a crushing blow to civil liberties. First, he conceded that “the right of free discussion . . . must, perhaps of necessity, be affected, qualified, controlled, in a degree, by the character of the social or domestic institutions within the State.”55 The character of peculiar state institutions affected the different ways that laws limited free speech. If a slave-­state legislature enacted a law prohibiting the utterance of antislavery opinions in order to prevent “insurrectionary violence,” Eliot acknowledged he had “no right to violate that law. It is plain enough that free speech is to that extent controlled.” Similarly, a free-­state legislature might, “for reasons of State policy or necessity,” decide to “prohibit the dissemination of doctrines subversive of the laws of God.” Likewise, “to that extent the right of free speech would also be controlled.” The difference between the two sections that Eliot wanted to highlight was this: “But if, in a northern State, a man should disobey, claiming that the law itself was in violation of his constitutional rights, he would act at his peril, but it would be a peril under the law. He might discuss its constitutionality with perfect safety. If the law were sustained, punishment would follow his offense. That he would expect. If not sustained, his right of free speech would be vindicated. No gentleman will say, I think, that a like security would be 56

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afforded in a southern State.” Rather than giving each their day in court, Southern government tended to forbid “discussion by law,” punish “discussion by summary administration of Lynch law,” and deny “all appeals by which the constitutionality of prohibitory laws may be tested.” Like Wilson, Eliot doubted that Southern governments upheld due process of law, essential to republicanism. In this respect as well, Southern governing principles were hostile to republican government. Eliot believed that “the courts of the South” were not open, “as those of the North always are, to the freest inquiry and the fullest latitude of examination.” Because of this, “the rights of free discussion and of free speech” in the South were not acknowledged “in deed and truth,” but only “by word of mouth.” He understood the ultimate motive behind these restrictions on free speech regarding slavery. Arguing for confiscating and liberating slaves in the rebel states during the war, he said, “Slavery is the cause of this rebellion,” but he further specified that slavery was the rebels’ “power and strength.” The rebel leaders had said so, even in Congress. “We have heard it from Mr. Keitt and Mr. Stephens here, and from Mr. Keitt and Mr. Stephens there.”56 Any threat or blow to that institution sapped “the power and strength” of those who possessed political power, and this explained how and why the restriction of antislavery speech supported the maintenance of that minority’s power. Southern statesmen attempted to counter the Republicans’ arguments that poor whites were oppressed. In 1860 James Ashley took up an argument by a South Carolina representative who bragged about the happiness of the slaves and loyalty of the poor whites and who “stated that out of a large number who volunteered to go to Virginia and aid Governor Wise during the John Brown troubles, but five or six were slaveholders; and instanced this fact as proof of their loyalty.”57 At this claim, Ashley countered that slave-­state governments’ restrictions of freedom of the press were proof that this was not so: If it be true that they are thus loyal . . . why is it that this class of poor whites are not permitted to read whatever they may prefer to read, as the slaveholders do themselves? . . . There can be but one answer to these questions; and that is a distrust on the part of the ruling class of the fidelity of the poor whites, and fear of their political power, should they unite, as they might do, and, at any time, take possession of all the southern State governments, and administer them for the benefit of the whole people, instead of permitting them to be administered as they are today—­exclusively for the benefit of a class interest. 57

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In 1860 Representative Henry Dawes of Massachusetts said that a Southerner who might dare print or distribute printed antislavery material “against this self constituted censorship, is sunk beyond fathom, and the editor himself . . . is shot down and made food for dogs.” The Constitution “wraps itself like a coat of mail around the citizen, for his protection, wherever his footsteps may lead him within the broad limits of this Republic.” But in the slave states, the Constitution “is set at naught, and its very joints pierced as worthless gossamer, by the fell spirit of this demon in its mad attempt to bend every knee at its altar. . . . A Northern man may to-­d ay roam the world over, outside of the Southern States, free in thought and speech, in more safety of person than he can inside them.”58 This was an astonishing claim. Americans were freer in the unrepublican world outside the boundaries of the Republic than in the putatively republican slave states of the American South. The Institutions of Oligarchy: Organization of Government According to the Republicans, the small class of Southern slaveholders controlled Southern politics and governments and used that control for their exclusive benefit. In particular, Republicans from the border states specified how the organization of Southern state government supported oligarchic rule. Like Waitman Willey, Jacob Blair was from the western part of Virginia before the war and served in the House of Representatives when Virginia seceded and most other Virginian seats in Congress were vacated. During Reconstruction, Blair represented the new state of West Virginia. In 1862 he explained how the aristocratic eastern section of Virginia dominated his and Willey’s western section of Virginia prior to the war. In Blair’s western section, few owned slaves and the institution was dying. As a result, he said, “The habits, tastes, and industrial pursuits of the people residing in the two sections of the State are as unlike each other as perhaps any two States in the Union.”59 The people in Blair’s western section were like free-­state people, “hardy, industrious and energetic.” But they chafed under the yoke of the aristocratic eastern section. He recounted the fight between the two sections in the Virginia state constitutional convention of 1850. The western section wanted representation in the state legislature to be apportioned by “the white basis.” By enumerating white population alone and then dividing representation equally into that enumeration, the state constitution would not apportion additional representation to the eastern section on account of the eastern section possessing a much larger share of slaves. 58

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In Virginia, as in other states that enumerated slaves in apportioning representation in the state legislature, slave owners could gain disproportionate influence over the state government in this fashion. The more slaves they owned, the more representation they would receive. Similarly, slaveholding states received more representation in the U.S. House of Representatives, because Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution enumerated “three-­fi fths of all other persons,” that is, slaves, in apportioning representation to that body. But within slave states like Virginia, slaves were more numerous in proportion to the total state population than the number of slaves in the whole United States in proportion to the total national population. And slave density considerably varied within the slave states. When the slave-­state constitutions enumerated slaves in apportioning representation using the federal three-­fi fths ratio or by other formulas, intrastate sections where slaves were concentrated would receive a substantial grant of political power for slave ownership. In contrast, low slave-­owning sections of the state would lose political representation and political influence over the state. This contributed to the nonslaveholders’ loss of political liberty in the slave states and provided a direct means by which the slaveholders acquired and maintained their rule over nonslaveholders. Covering this ground, Blair explained that, in the Virginia constitutional convention of 1850, the aristocratic eastern section struck a deal with the central section of the state. This deprived Blair’s western section of the “white basis” formula they were seeking for apportioning representation to the state legislature. The aristocracy of Virginia preserved its domination. They “secured for themselves the control of the legislative department of the State until the day of judgment and a day after, and leaving those residing west of the Alleghenies to shift for themselves the best they could.”60 Blair and Willey’s western Virginia colleague Kellian Whaley summed up the instructive conflict between the slaveholding and nonslaveholding sections of their state: But the greatest wrong and insult which has degraded us politically and socially is what is called the “mixed basis of representation.” In the west portion of the State there exists a large majority of white population, and in the other portion the slave property interest, and giving rise to diversity of sentiment. The east insists upon protection of property by apportionment of representation; that the majority of the people should not rule, but the majority of interests; that the 59

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great wealth of the State is in slaves, and that the forty-­thousand slaveholders of the east should rule; that while eight hundred and ninety-­eight thousand people have, say fifty representatives, $495,000 of taxes must also have fifty representatives; that slavery, and not free white men, is the element of political power; that more than one hundred and twenty-­five thousand citizens of the west are properly denied representation in the councils of the State; that, with an immense majority of free white men in the west, the legislative power is rightly placed in the hands of the minority, giving them thirty majority on joint ballot in General Assembly, as Mr. Scott said in Virginia convention, “to secure property [slaves] by not surrendering the legislative control to a majority of mere numbers.” As Mr. Beale also said, “to protect slavery from West Virginia.”61

In Southern states that enumerated slaves in apportioning representation, each incremental slave weighted the scales of political power within the state in favor of slaveholders. Slave numbers, combined with these Southern state constitutional provisions, contributed to the elevation of Southern oligarchy and the degradation of nonslaveholders’ political liberty in the South. The increase and uneven concentration of slaves under such constitutions made this class of nonslaveholding Southerners politically irrelevant to the government of these states. Waitman Willey understood that the slave-­owning oligarchy knew what kind of national government they formed when founding the Confederacy. He adverted to antebellum slave-­state constitutions containing provisions already securing the political ascendancy of the oligarchic class in the slaveholding states, as that class had done in his own Virginia. Willey indicated that his audience of free-­state Republican senators knew this. In evidence of the secessionists’ purpose to establish an independent oligarchic regime as an independent nation, he said, “I need hardly remind Senators of the arbitrary provisions existing in the fundamental law of many of the southern States, such as the qualifications of members of the General Assembly of South Carolina, requiring that they should own slaves and land, and the apportionment of representation upon the basis of property, as in Virginia. Nor is it necessary to do more than allude to the indisputable fact that free labor in the South is everywhere esteemed as degrading.”62 Blair and his constituents experienced what the slave-­owning aristocracy did with this power in his own state. In the 1850 constitutional convention in Virginia, the aristocrats of the East also gained for themselves a provision in the constitution that exempted two hundred million dollars of slave 60

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property from taxation. But, Blair complained, “every knife and fork; every bed, whether feather or straw; every horse, mare, and gelding, whether blind, spavined, or wind-­broken; every old clock, whether it had refused to tell of the passing hours or not; in a word, every species of property, real, personal, and mixed, west of the Alleghany mountains, was taxed, taxed, taxed!” Blair’s western section of Virginia paid the state’s bills, and the state “spent millions upon millions in wild schemes of internal improvements” for the aristocratic eastern part of the state. The western people were ruled and used for the advantage of the rulers. Western Virginians, Blair said, “do not claim by birth or otherwise to be superior to their eastern brethren or their countrymen at large, [but] they do maintain they are the equals of either. . . . We do not belong to the ‘mudsills’ of society.”63 Blair’s denial that he and his constituents were “mudsills” referred to the name Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina gave to all laboring classes, free or slave, in a 1858 speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate.64 To Hammond, the laboring mudsill class was unfit for any participation in government and was not politically equal to the ruling elite. Blair imputed that same view to the aristocratic eastern section of Virginia, showing that his western Virginians were held in political vassalage by design and not by accidental circumstances. Another provision in the constitutional organization of slave state governments by which the aristocracy secured their rule was viva voce voting, or voting by live voice or open ballot. This provision required that electors declare their votes in person or on a ballot that could be viewed. In 1867 Senator Charles Drake alluded to this when proposing an amendment to a supplementary reconstruction bill. His amendment required secret ballots in elections in the former insurrectionary states and prohibited the use of viva voce or open ballots. Drake, a Missourian, strongly urged his amendment, which surprised his sympathetic Republican colleague Henry Wilson. Coming from town hall–schooled Massachusetts, Wilson did not understand the fuss. He recalled his fellow citizens’ initial enthusiasm and then indifference to their state’s adoption of a secret-­ballot law.65 But voting secrecy mattered in the domain where slavery had reigned and where the common people had reason to fear the controlling frowns of aristocrats. Drake gave a very different account of the ballot system in his state: “I have offered this amendment because of my knowledge from actual observation during a large portion of my life of the power which the minority of the people have exercised over the majority in some of the States of this 61

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Union through the viva voce system of voting. . . . It is perfectly manifest to me that whenever these States are reconstructed the power is no longer to be in the hands of their aristocracy.”66 The states would be reconstructed when the power of government was vested in the hands of the whole people, he continued. But if viva voce voting was not prohibited, “They will form their constitutions and they will perpetuate viva voce voting in every one of these States,” and then “each one of them will still be governed, as it has been in all time past, by an aristocracy.” Drake claimed that through the institution of the viva voce or open-­ballot vote alone, the aristocracy would preserve its old rule over the people, whereas in Massachusetts electors apparently became bored with the closed ballot and indifferently returned to the open ballot. This contrast highlighted the different effects of the institution among a politically equal versus an unequal people. The viva voce vote had no effect on a republican political society but provided a powerful support to the rulers in an oligarchic political society. The Institutions of Oligarchy: Land Monopoly The Republicans claimed that the interstate ruling class of the slave-­state oligarchy depended upon its monopoly of land to maintain its rule and to prevent the development of republicanism. George Julian is most instructive on the relationship between the specific arrangement of landownership in the South and the form of Southern government. Julian served as chairman of the Committee on Public Lands from the Thirty-­Eighth Congress through the Forty-­First Congress, 1863–71. The position he held afforded him unique access to information and influence on land policy and Reconstruction in the South. Since Julian was the senior House member overseeing land policy in the Republican-­dominated Congress, his position can be fairly construed as representative of Reconstruction Republican opinion on land issues. Writing retrospectively in 1884, Julian reflected that land laws “not only affect the well-­being but frequently the destiny of a people.” Then he contrasted the laws regulating the ownership and disposition of lands in the free and slave states. On the one hand, “The system of primogeniture and entail adopted by the Southern States of our Union favored the policy of great estates, and the ruinous system of landlordism and slavery which finally laid waste the fairest and most fertile section of the Republic and threatened its life.” On the other hand, “The New England States, in adopting a different system, laid the foundations of their prosperity in the soil itself. . . . Their 62

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political institutions were the logical outcome of their laws respecting landed property, which favored a great subdivision of the land and great equality among the people, thus promoting prosperous cultivation, compact communities, general education, a healthy public opinion, democracy in managing the affairs of the church, and that system of local self government which has since prevailed over so many States.”67 What form of government did the land laws in the South predestine? In 1850 Julian publicly said “a domineering oligarchy,” in 1852 a “heartless aristocracy,” in 1857 a “Slave Oligarchy” and a “merciless aristocracy in human flesh,” in 1862 a “remorseless oligarchy,” in 1863 a “mighty aristocracy based upon the ownership in men,” in 1864 a “grinding aristocracy resting upon large landed estates” and an “aristocracy founded on the monopoly of the soil,” in 1865 a “pampered oligarchy,” and in 1868 a “relentless landed aristocracy.”68 Some Republicans, including Julian, served and spoke in Congress long before Reconstruction, when they debated land policy in the territories of the United States. The higher question in those debates was whether the land policy for the territories would support the development of republicanism or oligarchy. The arguments of the Republicans in the earlier Congress cohered with their analysis of Southern land monopoly in the Reconstruction Congress. Julian first entered the House of Representatives in 1849 as a member of the Free Soil Party, dedicated to keeping U.S. territories free from slavery. In his first major speech in 1851, he advocated the passage of a homestead bill that would divide public lands as New England land was divided, into small farms for actual settlers. Julian noted that from 1785, the U.S. government had disposed of some 150 million acres of public land. The government at that time held 1.4 billion acres, nearly ten times the amount of land the government had released since 1785. The bill under consideration, Julian said, would fundamentally change American policy on public lands. Rather than using the lands to generate revenue for the U.S. Treasury or for grants to state governments, as the national government had previously done, the bill that Julian supported directed the government to give limited parcels of land to “actual settlers, on condition of occupancy and improvement.”69 This policy, he said, served the goal both of economy and of “humanity and justice.” With respect to justice, he claimed “the broad ground of natural right,” the “first principles” of government. He rejected the disposition of the public lands as “merchandise,” that is, as stolen booty for visionary projects profiting a favored few, and he disclaimed “Agrarianism,” “Socialism,” and “leveling,” 63

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which were other forms of stealing. Government, in his view, should abstain from both. Rather, he pointed out that the condition of the “vacant territory” approximated the state of nature, and he affirmed “the natural right of the landless citizen of the country to a home upon its soil.” 70 The earth was designed by its Maker for the nourishment and support of man. The free and unbought occupancy of it belonged, originally, to the people, and the cultivation of it was the legitimate price of its fruits. This is the doctrine of nature, confirmed by the teachings of the Bible. In the first peopling of the earth, it was as free to all its inhabitants as the sunlight and the air; and every man has, by nature, as perfect a right to a reasonable portion of it, upon which to subsist, as he has to inflate his lungs with the atmosphere which surrounds it, or to drink of the waters which pass over its surface. This right is as inalienable, as emphatically God-­given, as the right to liberty or life; and government, when it deprives him of it, independent of his own act, is guilty of a wanton usurpation of power, a flagrant abuse of its trust.71

When establishing new states, he continued, “these principles should always have been recognized.” Julian argued that the right to property, including property in the earth, is a natural right no less than personal rights and persists after people form the social compact and leave the state of nature. In the state of society, the people are cosovereign by right, and therefore the lands held by the American government belonged to the people, jointly, by right. Only the general good of the whole people can justify any attenuation of the natural right to the earth. Because the United States held 1.4 billion acres of public land, the government could claim no defensible reason to limit the right of the people to take possession of it. If the government withheld the people’s natural right to the earth, it would unjustly reduce many to dependency and begging. Julian asked, “Does government then fulfill its mission when it encourages or permits the monopoly of the soil, and thus puts millions in its power, shorn of every right except the right to beg?” Such neglect of the people by government had been “one of the great scourges of the world.” 72 With so much available land at the government’s disposal, national legislators “now have it in our power, without revolution or violence, to carry [their principles] into practice, and reap their beneficent fruits.” Justice in land policy would prove to the citizen that the government was faithfully serving “the promotion of the public good, by a 64

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scrupulous regard for his private interest.” Policy guided by this principle would “establish the strongest of all ties between him and the State.” He exhorted his colleagues, “Give homes to the landless multitudes in the country, and you snatch them from crime and starvation, from the prison and the almshouse, and place them in a situation at once the most conducive to virtue, to the prosperity of the country, and to loyalty to its government and laws.” Rather than becoming “paupers and outcasts,” the people “will become independent citizens and freeholders.” Seeing that their government protected their interest, citizens would become “pledged by their gratitude to the government, by self-­interest.” Due to “the affections of our nature,” that is, the affection human beings have for what belongs to them, these citizens would “consecrate to honest toil the spot on which the family altar is to be erected and the family circle kept unbroken.” They would cultivate and develop their property and build a prosperous, durable foundation for their communities, families, and religious lives. In consequence, “They will feel, as never before, the value of free institutions, and the obligations resting upon them as citizens.” 73 And according to Julian, they will fight: “Should a foreign foe invade our shores, having their homes and their firesides to defend, they would rush to the field of deadly strife, carrying with them ‘all the animosity of a personal quarrel.’” 74 Citizens in such communities feel such a strong sense of personal ownership in a nation that they regard foreign foes as personal enemies. By contrast, in a monarchy, whereby the royal head is sovereign and the proprietor of the nation, only the monarch so regards a foreign foe as a personal enemy. A nation established on the basis of every citizen owning a personal stake in the nation’s property is a nation that is owned by the people in fact as well as in law. Diffused property ownership annexes a material foundation to the legal foundation of the sovereignty of the people. In war, “an army of such men, however unpracticed in the art of war, would be invincible.” The true power of a nation, its wealth and its supply of soldiers willing to fight, is rooted in its government’s goodness, which consists in the laws’ due regard for the natural rights of the people, especially for their right to property. For his examples, Julian pointed to the nations of western Europe to show that their prosperity and strength increased “just in proportion as freedom has been communicated to the occupiers of the soil.” The changes in those western European governments’ respect for the natural rights of the people could be seen in the change in the political condition of the cultivators, from “slave” to “villains” to “metayers” and then to “farmers.” 65

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Julian looked home for examples of governments that showed an extreme form of carelessness toward the natural rights of the people. In Virginia “the soil is tilled by the slave” who “feels no interest in the government, because it allows him the exercise of no civil rights. It does not even give him the right to himself. . . . His own offspring are the property of another.” The slave, he explained, has no personal stake in the fruits of his own industry, and excellence in his work will not improve his condition, so he will not work as hard or as well as free labor. Only force impels him to toil. Julian asked, “Can the cultivation of the soil by such a population add wealth or prosperity to the commonwealth?” 75 But across the river in Ohio, “how changed the scene!” Not the lash but interest and affection “animate the toils of the husbandman, and strengthen his attachment to the government; for the man who loves his home will love his country.” His success and the success of his country are linked. He knows that while “he is rearing a virtuous family on his own homestead, he is contributing wealth and strength to the State.” These incentives encouraged the rapid growth of the Ohio population, and “new towns are springing up almost as by magic.” Manufacturing, the arts, churches, schools, and “smiling habitations” were flourishing.76 The enactment of laws that respect natural right, encompassing the rights to life, liberty, and property, accounted for Ohio’s prosperity and power. The effects of the security of these rights and, alternatively, the effects of the insecurity of these rights were indissolubly chained together. Laws that protect these rights communicate to individuals that they can expect to keep the fruit of their own unequal labors, and this would “animate the toils of the husbandman.” Even if the results of their labors disappointed their efforts, they would be free to try again, and they would remain an equal party to the social compact. They would know that their success or failure in the race of life would not impair their enjoyment of free institutions arising from the state of nature organized on that basis—­f ree churches, free schools, and freedom of speech and the press. On the other hand, carelessness of government toward the natural rights of persons logically corresponded to the disregard of property rights. Under these governments, monopolists of the soil coerced labor, and the fruit of this labor was unjustly taken from the laborer. Both slave labor and monopoly of the soil served the selfish interests of monopolists. In such a society, to work was to serve others slavishly rather than to make strides for self-­improvement. 66

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Under the former governments, independent farms cultivated by republican citizens, free institutions, and thriving political communities would predominate. Under the latter governments, wasting large estates cultivated by slaves and despotic institutions would predominate. In the first case, labor was honorable; in the second case, it was degrading. These two contrary conditions of labor in the North and South developed around contrary opinions of justice that shaped each political regime. So strong was the effect of just laws toward property, Julian believed, that where Congress did not legally block slavery from the territories but did protect the natural right to the earth, slavery could not take root. “In a country cut up into small farms, occupied by as many independent proprietors who live by their own toil, it would be impossible,—­there would be no room for it,” because slavery required large estates. The homestead bill, Julian said, was “therefore an anti-­slavery measure.” The law would “weaken the slave power by lending the official sanction of the government to the natural right of man, as man, to a home upon the soil, and of course to the fruits of his own labor.” The law would repudiate “the vicious dogma of the slaveholder that the laborious occupations are dishonorable and degrading.” 77 Due regard for equal rights corresponded to due regard for the general welfare of the people. In 1860 Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania spoke in favor of protectionist policy on trade and argued that protectionism would improve the prospects for broader employment and good wages. The diffusion of wealth would lead to the diffusion of education, which would elevate public intelligence and enhance citizens’ loyalty to free government, finally resulting in a solid republican society. He argued, “The stability of free governments depends upon the intelligence and moral culture of the governed.” 78 It followed that “the laborer and the artisan should be afforded the means of so educating their children.” The means of education were “only to be derived from the protection and encouragement of those branches of industry necessary to the development of the resources of States.” Moderate prosperity would secure the means of public education and elevate public intelligence upon which free government depended. During the war, and especially when considering confiscation of rebel property, the Republicans often recognized that the Southern land monopoly followed oligarchic principle, supported oligarchic rule, and was a powerful material barrier to the establishment of republicanism. In 1864 James Wilson of Iowa argued for land redistribution in the South. Property there, he said, “is owned by comparatively a few persons. Property is not distributed 67

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among the people there as it is in the northern States.” 79 He supported the “sale and division of the large landed estates in the South,” which “would be of incalculable benefit to the mass of the people after the rebellion passes into history.” As a result, “The people can then become landholders, and no longer be subject to the despotism with which a privileged class has heretofore ruled that whole country.” The leaders of the rebellion were “the great lordly landholders who have almost crushed humanity out of the poor people who are squatted on their princely estates.” Those rebel leaders constituted an “aristocratic class” that had held “the immense slave and land power in its hands for the purpose of crushing and grinding the common people into an intellectual darkness almost as dense as barbarism itself.” An “aristocratic few” ruled “the poor, the oppressed, the betrayed mass of the southern people.” They ruled “the people of the South with a rod of iron which pierced and seared every subject conscience before the rebellion, and now rule it.” Wilson presented his vision of triumphant republicanism, “a ‘redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled,’ South.” Together with the new South, they would “march forward in the accomplishment of the grand mission of this Republic.” Power would transfer from “the hands of a ‘cruel and remorseless’ aristocracy, and [would be] restored to the rightful possession of a whole people.” To accomplish this, “the first step” was “the destruction of that aristocratic and semi-­feudal system which has heretofore existed in the South.” He proposed to “make the mass landholders by breaking up the land monopoly of the rebel slaveholders of the South and placing land within the reach of the poor.”80 William Allison also advocated Southern land redistribution in order to destroy the oligarchy and plant republicanism. He likened the pending legislation to the recently passed homestead law for the public lands. The pending legislation opened Southern lands to homesteads for Union military servicemen and would impart the same republican effects on the political reorganization of the South that the homestead law imparted on the political organization of vacant public lands. Allison averred that “land monopoly, with its attendant evils, has ever been the bane of empire.” In Rome labor was once esteemed when proprietors tilled the soil, but when property “passed into the hands of the privileged few,” political power also passed into those same hands and labor became dishonorable. The few controlled the power and wealth of the state; the many became landless and oppressed. Mexico furnished a more contemporary example: “The successive revolutions in Mexico have been but a struggle of the 68

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people against the lordlings of the soil.” Their continuing struggles proved how difficult it was “to maintain a permanent republican government over the few selfish, proud aristocrats who own the soil and wealth of the country, even without the demoralizing and aggravating evils of slavery.” The American South had suffered from those same evils and, in consequence, could not meet the conditions prerequisite to thriving republicanism. In free states, he said, “labor must not only be free, but the cultivator of the soil must have a proprietary right in the soil itself.” On the other hand, in the slave states, “the slaveholders not only owned the soil but the labor that tilled it. Labor thus degraded became dishonorable. Here the poverty of the many, with its evils of want, of ignorance, and dependence, was to be found side by side with the excessive wealth and opulence of the few.”81 Without proprietor-­cultivators, the necessary consequences were ignorance and dependence. To reverse this condition, the South needed free education and free churches, but, Allison added, “This can only be done successfully by a division of the large estates, now abandoned, into small farms, which shall be tilled by their owners.” And, he warned, “No permanent cure can be effected except by the adoption of some permanent system looking to the division of these immense estates among those who till them, and who by every rule of justice are entitled to the fruits of their labor.” As George Julian had argued more than a decade before, Allison argued that free institutions, the bedrock of republican government, depended upon political communities formed by proprietor-­cultivators. From that new beginning, all good things would flow. Free schools, churches, production and consumption, manufacturing, and the arts would all flourish. The “slave-­pens and whipping-­post” would disappear. In his vision of the future, “The people will become homogeneous, our internal and external commerce will be increased, and with it enhanced the wealth and glory of the nation.” To reorganize Southern society on a republican basis, Julian also favored the creation of homesteads from the confiscated rebel land, warning that without this redistribution of land, the oligarchy would retain an institution that would support its regeneration and perpetuity. The few would continue to rule both the freedmen and the poor whites. Land redistribution was necessary to “secure a loyal population, since every man who has a home to love and to defend will naturally love his country.” This was necessary because the results of the war “will present the strongest temptations to land monopoly that were ever offered to the greed of avarice and power.” If Congress did not interpose, the old land monopoly “will be continued, and vitalized 69

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anew by falling into fresh hands,” and once again, “a grinding aristocracy, resting upon large landed estates, will convert the mass of the people into mere drudges and dependents.”82 The same principles Julian had invoked when arguing for a homestead bill for the territories in the 1850s recurred in the remedy he advanced for establishing republicanism in the South. He urged them, “We must not only cut up slavery, root and branch, but we must see to it that these teeming regions shall be studded over with small farms and tilled by free men.” Again he turned to natural right, just as he had done when advocating a generous land policy toward the vacant territories: We must guard the equal rights of the people as a religious duty, for “Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of man.” . . . Instead of the spirit of Caste and the law of Hate, which have so long blasted these regions, we must build up homogenous communities in which the interest of each will be recognized as the interest of all. Instead of an overshadowing aristocracy, founded on the monopoly of the soil and its dominion over the poor, we must have no order of nobility but that of the laboring masses of the country, who fight its battles in war, and constitute its glory and its strength in peace. Instead of large estates, widely scattered settlements, wasteful agriculture, popular ignorance, political and social degradation, the decay of literature, the decline of manufactures and the arts, contempt for honest labor, and a pampered aristocracy, we must have small farms, closely associated communities, thrifty tillage, free schools, social independence, a healthy literature, flourishing manufactures and mechanic arts, respect for honest labor, and equality of political rights.83

The unjust gains of the land monopolists were permitted by the unjust principle of inequality and the rejection of natural equality. As a result, the regime had laid “waste the fairest and most fertile half of the Republic, staying its progress in population, wealth, power, knowledge, civilization.”84 Julian’s favored policy would reorganize the vast expanse of Southern lands as if they were in the state of nature, just as he sought to reorganize the vacant national territories in 1851. The first principles of American republicanism, the principles of natural right, would be applied anew to the South. The reorganization of Southern society would undo decades of unjust land accumulation. This reorganization would give the inhabitants confidence in their government, which would stimulate labor. By following their self-­interest 70

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and toiling, they could expect to keep what their pursuit of happiness yielded. Free institutions would develop amid these communities of toiling cultivators. Self-­interest would bind the people’s loyalty to republicanism. The communities would resemble Northern communities, where free labor and free institutions predominated. Their answer to the question of land reform would decide the political destiny of the South, and it would determine whether the United States could truly reunite as one people, under “a new dispensation of liberty and peace.”85

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The Relationship of Slavery to Southern Oligarchy The Cause of Southern Oligarchy Attributed to Domestic Slavery The Republicans commonly ascribed the oligarchic form of Southern government to the institution of domestic slavery. Wherever it extended, slavery tended to erode republican government and the republican way of life, while steadily raising up a ruling class of slaveholders. Slavery was one of several institutions that supported the rule of the slaveholding class in the oligarchic South, but the power of this domestic institution to cause a revolutionary change in political life, from republican to oligarchic, set that institution apart from others. As Representative Delos Ashley of Nevada put it, “All the institutions of the South were based upon slavery. It was the substratum of the aristocratic system.” Acknowledging that slavery was profitable for slaveholders, Representative William Higby of California maintained that “what was sweetest of all,” sweeter than its profitability, was that it “enabled a few States and a comparatively few white people to control the Government. . . . I have declared that the institution [of slavery] is anti-­republican, and that no Government which tolerated it could be in form, body, or spirit a republican Government.” Representative Thomas Davis of New York said that slavery “has grown up a caste, an aristocracy, based upon the ownership of labor, of sinews, bones, and blood entirely inconsistent with republican government and republican institutions.” Charles Drake claimed that “intelligent Southerners” did not deny—­“ but, on the contrary, they rather seem to boast—­that the legitimate and certain effect of Slavery is to create an essential aristocracy.”1 The far-­reaching effect of slavery on the fundamental character of political society explains why the Republicans regarded slavery as a political evil in addition to a moral evil. 73

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Recounting the history of American slavery in 1864, Isaac Arnold further expounded the cause-­and-­effect relationship between domestic slavery and Southern oligarchy: Slavery had revolutionized the Government. The great principles of Magna Charta and the Declaration of Independence had ceased to have practical existence in a large part of the Union. Liberty of speech, freedom of the press, and trial by jury had disappeared in the slave States. Indeed, that portion of the so-­called Republic had ceased to be a government of law, and had become a government of a tyrannic, cruel oligarchy, more odious, despicable, and cruel than any on earth. There was no redress for any outrage, however cruel, if perpetrated in behalf and at the behest of slavery. The vengeance of the slaveholder against the man who spoke or published in behalf of liberty was sharp, speedy, and unrelenting. The bowie-­k nife and the bludgeon, the halter, and even the stake, were the instruments of violence and torture resorted to by every petty lynch judge who found any bold enough to question the divinity of the “peculiar institution.” In the slave States of this Union a freeman had no rights which a slaveholder felt bound to respect. In those States the Constitution had disappeared. I say, then, that slavery had established a revolution, overturned a republican form of government, and established a despotism in its place.2

Arnold modified Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s dictum in Dred Scott that black Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” inserting “freeman” for black Americans and “slaveholders” for the white man.3 In applying Taney’s phrase, Arnold meant to say that the effect of domestic slavery fell not upon domestic slaves alone. By precipitating a revolutionary change in the form of government from republican to oligarchical, slavery indirectly caused the political oppression of all Americans in the South, outside the minority ruling class of slaveholders. In a Boston speech in 1861, Representative George Boutwell of Massachusetts recalled a visit to the slave state of Kentucky in 1857, where he attended church services and was treated to a sermon containing three propositions, “which, as far as I could judge, were accepted by that congregation. They were, first, that the Saviour never said any thing in favor of human equality; secondly, that he never said any thing in favor of universal education; and thirdly, said the preacher, what we need is authority in the Church.”4 These propositions, Boutwell said, bore witness to the “radical changes” caused by slavery. The changes were “antagonistic to free institutions,” and, 74

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consequently, “free institutions cannot long be maintained.” In this particular case, the visible radical changes were “the denial of the equality of man” and “the denial of the right of individual opinion in matters of religion.” These radical changes corresponded with a transformation in the political regime. Under the causal influences of slavery, the South had “steadily marched towards the establishment of a military, slaveholding oligarchy.” In 1862 Boutwell reaffirmed what form of government slavery had caused, saying, “In the South, a governing class is recognized, which corresponds to the governing classes wherever an aristocracy or monarchism exists.”5 In 1864 he affirmed the inherent, mutual antagonism between slavery and republicanism, saying, “Wherever slavery exists there republicanism is not; that wherever slavery exists there a republican form of government, under the Constitution, cannot be.”6 In other words, domestic slavery unleashed forces that destroyed republican government for everyone in its domain. In another instance, Boutwell confirmed this cardinal point further, saying that legislative acts requiring the abolition of involuntary servitude as a condition of readmitting the insurrectionary states were “acts of justice which are due to one race and necessary for the salvation of the other.” In other words, the abolition of slavery was a moral debt owed to the enslaved race, but it was also necessary for the salvation of the other race that had suffered under the oligarchy. The abolition of slavery was a necessary precondition for reestablishing republican government for all people who had endured the direct and indirect effects of domestic slavery. The direct effects were the brutalities visited upon the slave; the indirect effects were the inevitable changes domestic slavery wrought on the form of government, robbing the common people of their republican liberty. The lesson that Boutwell and the Republicans drew from the national experience with slavery since the American founding was that wherever domestic slavery existed, it would destroy republican government and replace it with an oligarchic form of government. In 1862, when arguing for the necessity of abolishing slavery, Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania attributed the cause of the war to Southern oligarchy and the cause of Southern oligarchy to domestic slavery. With reference first to the war, he said, “All must admit that slavery is the cause of it. Without slavery we should this day be a united and happy people. So long as it exists we cannot have a solid Union. Patch up a compromise now and leave this germ of evil, it would soon again overrun the whole South, even if you freed three fourths of the slaves, and your peace would be a curse.” 7 75

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Why would reunion secured by a compromise on the slavery question inevitably result in renewed conflict between slave states and free states? Stevens answered that oligarchic government was the inevitable “evil” produced by the “germ” of domestic slavery. Domestic slavery, or what Stevens called “individual despotism,” brought about political despotism. The ruling class rebelled in order to establish their slave oligarchy as an independent nation, free from the limits, reproaches, and fetters of republican government: They have rebelled for no redress of grievances, but to establish a slave oligarchy which would repudiate the odious doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, and justify the establishment of an empire admitting the principle of king, lords, and slaves. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were a constant reproach to the slaveholding South. They were in palpable contradiction to their domestic institutions. They were conscious of the impropriety of being governed by a Constitution which was an evident condemnation of their actual principles, and of their institutions founded on individual despotism. They feared that the principles of freedom and of the equality of man before the law . . . might be gradually breathed from the North into southern ears and southern minds, and establish even there the doctrine of the RIGHTS OF MAN.8

The republican principles and republican organic law of the American government were in tension with the oligarchy’s institutions “founded on individual despotism.” Stevens added that American republicanism and slavery, the “germ” that generated antirepublican oligarchy, could not coexist: “The principles of our Republic are wholly incompatible with slavery. They cannot live together. While you are quelling this insurrection at such fearful cost, remove the cause, that future generations may live in peace.” Stevens stood with his Republican colleagues in the opinion that domestic slavery was a political as well as a moral evil. The political evil consisted in slavery’s tendency to overcome republican government and erect an oligarchic political regime in its place. For this reason, the partisans of republicanism and oligarchy, who understood that this was the political effect of domestic slavery, could not easily compromise on slavery policy. The ultimate perpetuity of slavery guaranteed the ultimate triumph of oligarchy; the ultimate destruction of slavery guaranteed the ultimate triumph of republicanism. Implacable support for either slavery’s ultimate perpetuity or destruction was 76

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not compromise-­k illing or irrational fanaticism. The Republicans explained that uncompromising positions on slavery questions rationally aligned the respective partisans of republicanism and oligarchy. How Slavery Causes Oligarchy: Legal Effect Representative Elihu Washburne of Illinois argued that constitutions founded on an explicitly proslavery basis would immediately produce “oligarchal” governments. That is, he argued that the enshrinement of proslavery principles or ideas in constitutions would inevitably create an oligarchic political regime. He made this claim in 1858, when the House debated whether to admit Kansas as a slave state under the Lecompton constitution, framed by proslavery men in the city of Lecompton, Kansas. The Lecompton constitution differed from all other admitted slave-­state constitutions by its provision declaring slavery to be established by “the law of nature.” Washburne pointed out that this claim directly contradicted the assertion of natural equality in the Declaration of Independence. Such a government organized on that basis assumes the principle of natural inequality and “is not republican, but oligarchal.”9 All laws and institutions in the new state would have to conform to that principle of inequality from the outset. Unlike the experience of previously admitted slave states, domestic slavery would not need to revolutionize this state’s government from republican to oligarchic gradually. The Lecompton constitution would establish the government on an “oligarchal” basis at its foundation, due to its acknowledgment of natural slavery. In this speech, Washburne said that this principle declared all were “created unequal—­part to be masters, and part slaves,” the term slaves compassing both white Americans and black Americans. The Lecompton constitution would politically enslave the white population “who break up the prairies, hew down the forests, cut through the mountains, build up cities, towns, and villages, and lay the foundations for empires on the eternal basis of virtue, intelligence, and truth.”10 He denied that these free whites, accustomed to republican government and free institutions, would freely submit to any form of mastery, domestic or political. But the political enslavement of these free whites would be the consequence of the “oligarchal” form of government that the proslavery Lecompton constitution would generate. A few years after this speech, the national constitution of the Confederate states, unlike the national constitution of the United States, did enshrine the perpetuity of domestic slavery. By Washburne’s reasoning, this government would be “oligarchal” from its founding. 77

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How Slavery Causes Oligarchy: Moral Effect What about constitutions that do not proclaim the “divinity” of slavery but tolerated its existence, while nevertheless proclaiming republican equality? How could the practical existence of slavery change the form of government, constitutionally organized on natural rights principles, to oligarchy? In 1860 Charles Sumner explained how this could happen. He noted Southern statesmen’s praise of both slavery and aristocracy and pointed out that they themselves had observed that slavery created a ruling aristocratic class. How did slavery create a governing order like an order of nobility, but without needing noble titles granting authority? Sumner explained: “The denial of all rights in the slave can be sustained only by a disregard of other rights, common to the whole community, whether of the person, of the press, or of speech. Where this exists there can be but one supreme law, to which all other laws, legislative or social, are subordinate, and this is the pretended law of Slavery.”11 The practical existence of slavery in the political community presents a permanent moral question. Is the institution just or unjust? If it is unjust, slavery cannot be defended. Moreover, it exists under a moral ban and must eventually pass away. But if the regime ruling the political community is determined to keep slavery, the only way it can justify enslaving any part of the political community is to deny the principle that demands the slaves’ freedom—­that all members of the human family, including slaves, possess an equal share of natural rights common to humanity. Next, the legal order of the regime reconstitutes itself around a new fundamental principle. If the regime is republican in form in the beginning, the sovereign people will unwittingly expose themselves to tyranny if they accept this denial of others’ natural equality. If they do, they give up the moral foundation of popular sovereignty. Natural inequality justifies rule by those who deem themselves naturally superior. Elevated by superior force, these superiors take possession of the political community’s sovereignty. These new rulers then disregard the natural rights “common to the whole community” by ruling over them, denying them their share of sovereignty and oppressing them. If it is conceded by the political community that slavery is unjust, despite its practical existence, then slavery can temporarily continue thus marked for ultimate extinction, contradicting, but not immediately commencing to destroy, the republican regime. But, Sumner said, “proclaim Slavery to be a permanent institution, instead of a temporary Barbarism, soon to pass away, 78

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and then, by the unhesitating logic of self-­preservation, all things must yield to its support. The safety of Slavery becomes the supreme law; and since Slavery is endangered by liberty in any form, therefore all liberty must be restrained.”12 Sumner maintained that only the principle of natural inequality can justify the permanence of slavery. If it is declared permanent, all things subsumed by the political regime based on that principle will be brought into conformity with that principle by the “unhesitating logic of self-­preservation.” That logic is common to all political regimes. A republican political regime will likewise bring “all things” it subsumes into conformity with natural equality by that same logic of self-­preservation. But if the republican political regime changes its disposition toward slavery, from marked for ultimate extinction to permanent, it must by necessity change the regime principle from natural equality to natural inequality to sustain the justification for slavery. The “logic of self-­preservation” then reorganizes the political regime into one that conforms to the new principle. Rule by the strong who deem themselves naturally superior characterizes the new, revolutionary regime, revolutionized by slavery. That regime is an oligarchic regime, ruled by a privileged minority rising from the political community. By that same logic, the oligarchy must restrain liberty claimed by the ruled parts of the political community in order to maintain the regime. Sumner pointed out that the oligarchy had to stamp out the remaining free institutions and free principles of the prior republican regime. The revolution would be complete when slavery and its progeny, oligarchy, were safe from all threats, institutional or moral. How Slavery Causes Oligarchy: Economic Effect In 1865 Representative James Patterson of New Hampshire furnished a different kind of theory to explain how slavery’s effects cause the development of an aristocratic political regime. “Slavery, villanage, serfdom, or any system, which lays restraints upon labor” creates two economic classes, separated by marked differences in wealth, intelligence, and manners.13 The common people become a rabble; the few become haughty. Republicanism is impossible to sustain, and aristocracy replaces it. Any system of enforced labor, where the laborer is made property, creates a landed aristocracy, and throws the wealth of the community into the hands of a few. The non-­slaveholding free population are driven from the country, or sink to the most abject poverty, and yet are too proud to engage in work, which 79

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has been degraded by Slavery. Public intelligence and public morals cannot be maintained in such a community. The poverty-­stricken masses, pressed by want and lost to self-­respect, become either a dangerous and turbulent body of malcontents, or the pliant tools of faction in the hands of an unscrupulous but un-­t itled nobility. The influence upon the holders of this species of property is not less baneful than upon the disenfranchised and hopeless chattel. Living in ease and luxury, upon gains wrung from the compulsory labor of others, they become indolent, arrogant and corrupt, and naturally desire to carry into the government of the state, the monopoly and oppression, with which they have become familiar in the institutions of social life.14

Systems of enforced labor result in extreme inequality of wealth for two primary reasons. First, the fruit of labor accrues to the owners of labor rather than to the laborer. Second, enforced labor degrades labor. Even if the local laws protect civil liberty, the commanders of labor can nonetheless abuse their command of the laborer in economic relations, because they increasingly own all the means of economic production. Due to these economic conditions, the laborer cannot choose to produce for himself, because that economic alternative becomes increasingly less available. Those outside the wealthy class then face a personal economic choice: to choose to escape their commanders and accept poverty or to choose to labor, increasing the wealth of the commanders of labor. Those who choose to work submit to the degrading oppressions under that command. The commanders of labor become accustomed to their command over the common people in economic and social life. Their economic command develops a commanding character, and they “naturally desire” to rule over the majority in political relations. The poverty and slavishness of the people inhibit public intelligence and the capacity for self-­government. Their character becomes fitted for despotism. Systems of enforced labor necessarily terminate in oligarchic rule. In his 1858 speech against admitting Kansas as a slave state, Francis Blair presented a similar theoretical account, drawn from the fall of the Roman republic. He first alluded to the political effect of permitting slavery in the territories, in order to argue for excluding the institution: “The Territories of this Government cannot be wrested from the freemen to whom they belong, to be given up to slaveholders and their slaves, in order to strengthen the oligarchy which rests upon this servile institution.” He then expounded excerpts from Hook’s History of Rome to the House of Representatives, 80

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“to show how the great Republic of antiquity fell; to decay, when it ceased to cherish the people as landholders, and became an oligarchy, by the very means now being employed in our own.” He explained that due to their access to cheap labor, the slaveholders of Rome could outbid the nonslaveholders for possession of the public land, which increased the concentration of landholding in the hands of the few, dispossessed the nonslaveholders, and increased the incentive of the slaveholders to acquire more slaves. Because free but dispossessed republican citizens of Rome did not easily submit to the command of the slaveholding patricians, the slaveholders began to acquire more slave labor from barbarian nations. These slaves, not accustomed to republican liberty, were more amenable to the individual despotism of the patricians: “So that Italy was in danger of losing its inhabitants of free condition . . . and of being overrun with slaves, and barbarians, that had neither affection for the Republic nor interest in her preservation.”15 This aggravated the destitution and disaffection of nonslaveholding Roman citizens. “To remedy these disorders,” Tribune Tiberius Gracchus proposed a law to redistribute the land that the patricians had acquired and to compensate the patricians from the public treasury. The patricians murdered him, however, before the law took effect. This political step showed that the determination of the slaveholding, land-­monopolizing patricians to dominate the free Roman plebeians economically and socially had crossed over into government. The social aristocracy fostered an oligarchic regime. Blair traced the cause of this revolution in the form of government to slavery. In 1864 Representative Reuben Fenton of New York referred to European and American histories of the ancient world to argue similarly that agrarian slavery created vast economic inequality that irresistibly resulted in political inequality. Slavery depressed the value of paid labor, and nonslaveholding freemen became poor. This gave the owners of capital a great advantage over free laborers in their capacity to accumulate additional wealth. The nonslaveholding freemen could not compete with slaveholders for the price of land, and so those who were rich in slaves and land became richer, engrossing all of the land, while the freemen became increasingly destitute. The radical inequality of wealth easily transformed the political system, resulting in the rule of an aristocratic few. This is what happened in the American South, Fenton argued. The “curse of slavery” had “demoralized the people of the South and was rapidly undermining the liberties of the whole people.”16 Waitman Willey reminded his congressional colleagues of Thomas Jefferson’s pride in having abolished the rights of primogeniture, and then said, 81

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“Sir, the proper effects of the latter bill can never be felt and enjoyed in the slave States, until slavery is abolished. Until then, the poor white man will always be kept in subjection; the land and the capital will be in the hands of the slaveholders.”17 In short, slavery sustained oligarchy even after formal institutions that supported a ruling class were abolished. How Slavery Causes Oligarchy: Effect on the Personal Character of Slaves and Nonslaveholders Slavery was a massive school of antirepublican tyranny and subjection. The Republicans often noted, in the words of Charles Sumner, “the operations of slavery on character” in “those who have been exposed to it.” Emphasizing the extent and effect of slavery on personal character, Thomas Eliot said, “No nation upon the face of the earth with whose history I am conversant has held in bondage over so wide extent of country so many millions of human beings as this nation has dared to hold under a Constitution which the people ordained to secure the blessings of liberty and to establish justice; nor has human ingenuity ever devised a system of slavery more debasing in its character to the slave or to his master.”18 The degradation of the slave and the poor white, and the elevation of the master to a position of absolute personal and political dominion, tended to destroy any sense of or respect for natural equality. As a result, slavery eroded republican mores necessary to the maintenance of republican government. Those under the political and personal rule of the master class became unfitted for freedom. In the 1850 slavery debates in Congress, Thaddeus Stevens used sarcasm to depict vividly how Southern representatives misattributed the degradation of slaves to a lower nature rather than to the temporal condition of enslavement. On the floor of the House, the slave-­state statesmen had again roundly proclaimed that slavery was a moral, political, and personal blessing; that the slave was free from care, contented, happy, fat, and sleek. Comparisons have been instituted between slaves and laboring freemen, much to the advantage of the condition of slavery. Instances are cited where the slave, after having tried freedom, had voluntarily returned to resume his yoke. Well, if this be so, let us give all a chance to enjoy this blessing. . . . If these gentlemen believe there is a word of truth in what they preach, the slaveholder need be under no apprehension that he will ever lack bondsmen. Their slaves would remain, and many freemen would seek admission into this happy condition. Let them be active in 82

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propagating their principles. We will not complain if they establish societies in the South for that purpose—­abolition societies to abolish freedom. Nor will we rob the mails to search for incendiary publications in favor of slavery, even if they contain seductive pictures, and cuts of those implements of happiness, handcuffs, iron yokes, and cat-­o’-­n ine-­t ails.19

If slavery really was all that the Southern representatives claimed, the North had been unjust to the South for criticizing slavery and unjust to the Northern people for having yoked them with “the cares, the troubles, the lean anxieties of freedom. This is a monopoly inconsistent with republican principles, and should be corrected.” Therefore, Stevens suggested that the Southern representatives introduce “a ‘compromise’”—­which is in quotations marks, indicating a wordplay with the compromise of 1850. By this alternative compromise, the slaves and masters should exchange conditions so that “the oppressed master may slide into that happy state.” But “it may be objected that the white man is not fitted to enjoy that condition like the black man. Certainly, at first, it will be so. But let not that discourage him. He may soon become so.” Let not the white man therefore despair on account of the misfortune of his color. Homer informs us that the moment a man becomes a slave, he loses half the man; and a few short years of apprenticeship will expunge all the rest except the faint glimmerings of an immortal soul. Take your stand, therefore, courageously in the swamp, spade and mattock in hand, and uncovered, and half-­ naked, toil beneath the broiling sun. Go home to your hut at night, and sleep on the bare ground, and go forth in the morning unwashed to your daily labor, and a few short years, or a generation or two at most, will give you a color that will pass muster in the most fastidious and pious slave market in Christendom. Your shape also will gradually conform to your condition. Your parched and swollen lips will assume a chronic and permanent thickness of the most approved style. Your feet, unconfined by shoes, and accustomed to a marshy soil, will shoot out behind and sideways until they will assume the most delightful symmetry of slavery. Deprived of all education, cut off from all ambitious aspirations, your mind would soon lose all foolish and perplexing desires for freedom; and the whole man would be sunk into a most happy and contented indifference. And all these faculties, features, and color, would descend to your fortunate posterity; for no fact is better established than that the accidental or acquired qualities of body and mind are transmissible, and become hereditary. 83

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True, your descendants will be black, stupid, and ugly. But they would only be so many incontestable evidences of their natural right and fitness for the enjoyment of this state of moral, political, and personal happiness!

Step by step, in this hypothesized reversal of roles, the newly enslaved master class would gradually assume the character of their slaves. By the end of this transformation, the description of the enslaved masters meets the exact description the master class assigned to black slaves when justifying their natural fitness to be despotically ruled. Stevens ironically used the language of the master class to mock their claims. So severe is the degrading effect of slavery on human beings that the attribution of natural inequality to biology can seem plausible. In reversed roles, the enslaved master would present qualities appearing to be “incontestable evidence” of their natural inferiority. Bondage so degrades human character that human beings in bondage develop an incapacity for republican self-­government and seem to be fitted for despotic subjugation. The Republicans mostly fell in line with Stevens on this point, blaming the slavishness of slaves on the effect of the institution and not on biology. In 1857 Henry Wilson noted South Carolina senator Andrew Butler’s claim that the slaves in the South were contented. Maybe so, replied Wilson, but he then added, “I commend to him, whenever he boasts on this floor of the contentment of the bondman, the words of Edmund Burke, ‘He who makes a contented slave makes a degraded man.’” In 1868 Senator Oliver Morton of Indiana did not deny that black Americans freed from slavery might be “ignorant, imbruited, and half civilized.” But the slave states had “forbidden by law, made it a penitentiary offense to teach the negro to read and write, [had] withheld from him all the means of education and intelligence,” and in general had “degraded him by slavery.” He continued, “If he is degraded, they have made him so; slavery has made him so. If he is ignorant, they have made him so by making it a crime to teach him to read and write.”20 In 1866 Representative Glenni Scofield of New York admitted that the “colored man has never exhibited equal ability, to be sure, but he has never had equal opportunities.” Southern laws had bound him down with “heavy chains” and forbade his education. But these prohibitions proved that the slave “was strong”; otherwise, they would not need these laws. “They debased him by law to fit him for slavery, and justified slavery because he was debased.”21 Slavery had so completely debased slaves in fitting them for despotism that even sympathetic Republicans could not imagine how their condition could 84

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be reversed. Waitman Willey wondered aloud, “How many generations will it require to divest the slave of his servility, and to clothe him with the independence of the freeman?”22 Slavery had also debased the character of poor whites. In an 1858 speech, Henry Wilson devoted time in “contemplation of the blighting and crushing effects of slavery, not upon the poor bondman, but upon the non-­slaveholding poor whites of the South.” Millions lived in a worse poverty than “the poorest people of the seventeen millions of the North.”23 Quoting six sources, Southerners included, Wilson described the erosion of republican characteristics in poor whites. One South Carolinian had estimated in 1851 that 125,000 whites were unproductive, and “‘but one step in advance of the Indian of the forest.’” Another said that “the poor are very poor. . . . The little they get is laid out in brandy and not in books or newspapers; hence they know nothing of the comparative blessings of our country.” One traveler, comparing poor whites to the “Spanish and Indo-­H ispano races,” said, “They are more ignorant, their superstitions are more degrading, they are much less industrious, far less cheerful and animated, and very much more incapable of being improved and elevated, than the most degraded peons of Mexico.” Wilson quoted Frederick Olmsted, who had reprinted a rice planter’s report, that “they seldom have any meat, except they steal hogs, which belong to the planters or their negroes. . . . They are small, gaunt, and cadaverous, and their skin is just the color of the sand hills they live on. They are quite incapable of applying themselves to any labor, and their habits are very much like those of the old Indians.” Another source said that in New York, “half of them would be considered objects of charity.” Wilson quoted Representative J. H. Lumpkin of Georgia, who had described the poor white class as “degraded, half-­fed, half-­clothed, and ignorant . . . without Sabbath schools, or any other kind of instruction, mental or moral, or without any just appreciation of character.” Wilson complemented Lumpkin’s account of these Georgians, again quoting Olmsted: “It is evident that a large part of the people of Georgia still have the vagrant and hopeless habits and character of Oglethorpe’s first colonists, somewhat favorably modified, it is true, by the physical circumstances which have made them superior to absolute charity or legal crime, and also, perhaps, by the influence of a freely preached, though exceedingly degraded, form of Christianity. They are still coarse and irrestrainable in appetite and temper; with 85

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perverted, eccentric, and intemperate spiritual impulses; faithless in the value of their own labor, and almost imbecile for personal elevation.” Another slave-­state source, taking a view of all nonslaveholding whites in the South, reported that succeeding generations were “less educated, less industrious, and in every point of view, less respectable than their ancestors.” Another reported, “Poverty, ignorance, and superstition are the three leading characteristics of the non-­slaveholding whites of the South.” Representative Samuel Miller of New York described poor whites as an exploited and ostracized class, for whom “there was no place” in Southern society. “The poor white was a mere hanger-­on—­a miserable, despised tool of the slave-­master.” Representative Thomas Shannon of California blamed slavery for creating “the poor white trash, whose vocation is pander and pimp to the vices of both master and slave, and ultimately dependent on both, having no recognized condition, and enjoying none of the privileges of the governing or governed class, but an outcast from both and despised by both.”24 James Garfield bore witness to the effect of slavery’s debasement of the poor whites. Fresh from military service in the war, in 1864 Garfield spoke of his personal experience at the front lines in Tennessee, reckoning the wrongs suffered by the poor white Southern population. He concluded, “[The slaveholders] have so long believed themselves born to rule, that they will rule the poor man in the future, as in the past, with a rod of iron. The landless man of the South has learned the lesson of submission so well that when he is confronted by a landed proprietor he begins to be painfully deferential; he is facile and dependent, and less a man.”25 Under slavery, poor whites had become the detritus of slave society. How Slavery Causes Oligarchy: Effect on the Personal Character of Masters No single speech or writing of a Republican who served during Reconstruction more thoroughly addressed the effect of slavery on masters than the dramatic speech of Charles Sumner in 1860 upon his return to the Senate. After more than three years spent away from the Senate recuperating from Preston Brooks’s attack, Sumner retook his vacant seat. The effect of slavery on the character of the master occupied the bulk of his time. The clear inference of this speech was to the character defects of the class of men to which his assailant, Brooks, belonged. Without a doubt, he intended his performance, as well as his analysis, to demonstrate the difference between the republican and oligarchic character. 86

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Sumner’s beating in 1856 had excited the nation and earned Brooks praise from Southern slaveholders and their adjunct press.26 What would Sumner say in his return address? Observing that “time has passed, but the question remains,” Sumner announced his intention to renew his attack on slavery, to resume “the discussion precisely where I left it.” Sumner was demonstrating firmness, though his opinions had nearly cost him and might yet cost him his life, because “ours is no holiday contest . . . but it is a solemn battle between Right and Wrong, between Good and Evil.” He eschewed conciliation at the cost of principles. “This is no time for soft words or excuses. . . . They may turn away wrath; but what is the wrath of man? This is no time to abandon any advantages in the argument.” If he appeared bowed or chastened, he would be submitting to force and abandoning the ongoing struggle for right. Sumner disdained the coward’s path, avowing his intention to attack slavery: “About me, while I speak, are [slavery’s] most jealous guardians, who have shown in the past how much they are ready to do or not to do, where Slavery is in question. Menaces to deter me have not been spared. But I should ill deserve the high post of duty here, with which I am honored by a generous and enlightened people, if I could hesitate. Idolatry has been exposed in the presence of idolaters, and hypocrisy chastised in the presence of Scribes and Pharisees.”27 He did not hesitate to expose slavery in the presence of slaveholders. He disclaimed both uttering “personal griefs” and “personal wrongs to avenge,” since the first was the product of a “vulgar egotism”—­the self-­pity of a weak man—­and the second was the product of “a brutish nature” of one who usurped the Lord’s right to visit vengeance upon a transgressor. Sumner proposed to take the path of self-­d isinterested magnanimity. He claimed to “begin my argument with that easy victory which is found in charity.”28 That is, from charity, or love for his enemy, he was able to place the interest of the nation before the personal cause he might have against Southern senators in his presence when resuming his argument. His weapons would be his words, seeking persuasion, rather than threats seeking submission. He would rely on right for might, rather than on force to claim right. “Motive,” he said, “is to Crime as soul to body.” Slavery was the motive behind the national crimes, and therefore “it must be exhibited as it is, alike in its influence and its animating character, so that not only outside, but inside, may be seen.” The inner influence of slavery, its soul, would be presented. Sumner quoted the proslavery sentiments of Southern statesmen, some of whom he faced. They had variously hailed slavery as the essential 87

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foundation of their political institutions and way of life, ennobling to both slave and master, black and white: “Thus, by various voices, is Slavery defiantly proclaimed a form of Civilization.” To that Sumner opposed his thesis, “the essential Barbarism of Slavery.” In prior times, he admitted he had “said too little of the character of Slavery,” but “the debate is now lifted from details to principles.” Sumner signaled his preparation to give a full account, a magnum opus, on the inner soul of slavery. The longer slavery exists, he said, “the more completely it prevails, must its vengeful influences penetrate the whole social system. Barbarous in origin, barbarous in law, barbarous in all its pretensions, barbarous in the instruments it employs, barbarous in consequences, barbarous in spirit, barbarous wherever it shows itself, Slavery must breed Barbarians, while it develops everywhere, alike in the individual and the society to which he belongs, the essential elements of Barbarism.”29 Sumner drew attention away from the outward, visible epiphenomena of slavery and to its inner nature, logic, and power. Slavery reshaped the political society that admitted it, imparted its essential character, barbarism, to that political society, and reorganized it around that central principle. The inner character of slavery corresponded to the inner character of the political regime, which bred men with its corresponding character, American barbarians. Sensitive to rising conflict, many had objected to the characterization of the strife between North and South as between the two civilizations of “Freedom and Slavery,” Sumner observed. But this characterization, despite the sensitivities of some, was not strong enough; it was “mistaken.” Rather, Sumner said, “Sir, in this nineteenth century of Christian light there can be but one Civilization, and this is where Freedom prevails. Between Slavery and Civilization there is essential incompatibility. If you are for the one, you cannot be for the other; and just in proportion to the embrace of Slavery is the divorce from Civilization.”30 Sumner recast the conflict between freedom and slavery as a conflict between civilization and barbarism. Barbarism rested upon the law of slavery, which was that “man, created in the image of God, is divested of the human character, and declared to be a ‘chattel,’—­that is, a beast, a thing, or article of property.” In support of this, Sumner cited slave-­state laws. South Carolina defined slaves as “chattels personal.” Maryland defined a slave as an “article,” equivalent to “working beasts, animals of any kind.” The law of slavery recognized that “man can hold property in man,” abrogated “the relation of husband and wife” and “the parental tie,” closed “the gates of knowledge,” and appropriated “the 88

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unpaid labor of another.” What was the “single motive” of these five barbarisms recognized by slave-­state law? Sumner quoted Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, a sitting member of that Congress, who said that slavery was “‘but a form of civil government for those who are not fit to govern themselves.’” That statement, resting on a claim of natural inequality, was an “outrage,” invented to justify the “profit” and “power” of the master. “American Slavery, as defined by existing law, stands forth as the greatest organized Barbarism on which the sun now looks. It is without a single peer. Its author, after making it, broke the die.”31 The American law of slavery did not derive from common law, Roman law, Koranic law, or Spanish law, since these bodies of law afforded more privileges and rights than the American law of slavery, such as protections for marriage, parental ties, the freedom of children, and restrictions on punishment. The American law of slavery did not derive from English or American statutes, since, by “positive and repeated averment of the Senator from Virginia [Mr. Mason], and also of other Senators, . . . in not a single State of the Union can any such statutes establishing Slavery be found.”32 Then Sumner lit this explosive charge: “No, sir; not from any land of civilization is this Barbarism derived. It comes from Africa, ancient nurse of monsters; from Guinea, Dahomey, and Congo. There is its origin and fountain.” Sumner contended that the law of slavery in the slaveholding South derived from the customs of Africa. He traced the absolute dominion of the master over the slave as property from the right asserted in Africa by captors of others in war, transferred from the captor to the slave trader and from the slave trader to the American planter. And Sumner brought forward evidence. The Georgia Supreme Court justified the Georgia planters’ license to hold slaves as chattel on that basis, and Sumner quoted and cited the court’s opinion. Therefore, he continued: It is natural that a right, thus derived in defiance of Christendom, and openly founded on the most vulgar Paganism, should be exercised without any mitigating influence from Christianity; that the master’s authority over the person of his slave—­over his conjugal relations—­over his parental relations—­over the employment of his time—­over all his acquisitions, should be recognized, while no generous presumption inclines to Freedom, and the womb of the bond-­ woman can deliver only a slave. . . . Thus are the barbarous prerogatives of barbarous half-­naked African chiefs perpetuated in American Slave-­m asters.33 89

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Sumner seriously maintained that American slave masters had absorbed the customs of African chiefs and framed those customs into American law. The political society of the slave South was reproducing the political society of Africa. The character of slave masters was assimilating the character of African chiefs. The most prominent principle of the slave master and African chief is violence, for, according to Sumner, “slavery is founded on violence, as we have already too clearly seen; [and] can be sustained only by kindred violence, sometimes against the defenseless slave, sometimes against the freeman whose indignation is aroused at the outrage.” Unaware of their warped character, the slave masters “unblushingly” avow “barbarous standards of conduct. . . . The swagger of a bully is called chivalry; a swiftness to quarrel is called courage; the bludgeon is adopted as the substitute for argument; and assassination is lifted to be one of the Fine Arts.”34 “Bad as slavery is for the slave, it is worse for the Master.” Sumner proceeded to recite American and European authorities’ condemnation of slavery’s effect on the slave master’s character. American founder George Mason said that “every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant,” and Thomas Jefferson said that slavery “transforms those into despots.” Philosopher John Locke declared slavery to be “the state of war continued.” Adam Smith said, “There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving.” Their masters were “wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.” Dr. Samuel Johnson confessed he did not know of anyone who would willingly abstain from advancing Christianity, unless it was “the planters of America, a race of mortals whom, I suppose, no other man wishes to resemble.” Sumner quoted an exchange of letters between Condorcet and Voltaire on the brutality of the slave master, “the American savage.” Speaking of the Africans, Montesquieu ironically said, “It is impossible that we should suppose these people men; because, if we supposed them men, the world would begin to think that we ourselves were not Christians.” And Tocqueville reasoned, “The legislation of the Southern States with regard to slaves at the present day exhibits such unparalleled atrocities as suffice to show that the laws of humanity have been totally perverted, and to betray the desperate position of the community in which that legislation has been promulgated.”35 90

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To prove how violence and not humanity shaped the political society of the slave states, Sumner quoted public Southern sources. One newspaper advertised a runaway slave with “holes in his ears, a scar on the right side of his forehead; has been shot in the hind parts of his legs; is marked on his back with the whip”; another described a sixteen-­year-­old girl whose rapist master had “no further use of her.” He quoted Olmsted’s interview of a slave master who explained a cure to runaways, by pulling out their toenails, and of another who cut the Achilles’ tendon of his runaway. He quoted the opinion of Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin of the North Carolina Supreme Court, who ruled that “the obedience of the slave is the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body. . . . The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.” A recent Virginia court decision had declared that “the policy of the law . . . to protect the master from prosecution, even if the whipping and punishment be malicious, cruel and excessive.” Perhaps the bleakest view into the masters’ barbaric character was their practice of selling their children, born from their slave women. The Virginia master bred slaves, and in his “crop of human flesh consists much of the wealth of his state.” The slave hunter, “with the blood-­hound as his brutal symbol,” pursued slaves, “as the hunter pursues game.”36 Because slavery was founded on violence, slave society was founded in violence, and new leaders, raised to command that society, were naturally prone to violence. By an “irresistible law,” surroundings and institutions refashioned men, Sumner argued. Some might rise above these influences, but most did not. Far from “ ‘ennobling’ the master,” slavery degraded him. His circumstances lacked anything that would “remind him of his own deficiencies, to prompt his ambition or excite his shame.” Sumner continued: “Without provocation to virtue, or an elevating example, he naturally shares the Barbarism of the society which he keeps. Thus the very inferiority which the Slave-­master attributes to the African race, explains the melancholy condition of the communities in which his degradation is declared by law.”37 Taught to believe that men can be held as an article of property, the master’s moral sense was “obscured.” He became lawless, ruling his plantation with violent force, wearing his “bludgeon, revolver and bowie-­k nife” with pride. Customary violence and not the law became the means of settling differences with other men off the plantation through duels and “street fights.” Unchristian murder, the badge of Cain, became a mark of honor and not the biblical mark of universal condemnation. Sumner then quoted slave-­state governors complaining of the violent loss of life from these confrontations. 91

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He documented repeated instances of the rough suppression of liberties in the slave states and placed the blame on the tyranny of slave masters. And this was “the social system, so much vaunted by honorable Senators, and which we are now asked to sanction and to extend.”38 Finally, Sumner arrived at “the exhibition of Slave-­Masters in Congressional history,” without making any personal allusion to his own historic experience at the hands of Brooks. Despite the “requirements of Parliamentary Law,” their violence in Congress broke “out in fearful examples. And here, again, facts speak as nothing else can.”39 Sumner recited a long list of outrages recorded in the congressional records. In 1837 a member of the House of Representatives, R. M. Whitney, explained to a committee of investigation that he could not attend “without exposing himself thereby to outrage and violence in the committee-­room.” Another testified: Mr. Peyton, a Slave-­m aster from Tennessee, and a member of the Committee, regarding a certain answer in writing by Mr. Whitney to an interrogatory propounded by him as offensive, broke out in these words: “Mr. Chairman, I wish you to inform this witness, that he is not to insult me in his answers; if he does, God damn him! I will take his life on the spot!” The witness, rising, claimed the protection of the Committee; on which Mr. Peyton exclaimed: “God damn you, you shan’t speak; you shan’t say one word while you are in this room; if you do, I will put you to death.” Mr. Wise, another Slave-­m aster from Virginia, Chairman of the Committee, and latterly Governor of Virginia, then intervened, saying: “Yes, this damned insolence is insufferable.” Soon after, Mr. Peyton, observing that the witness was looking at him, cried out: “Damn him, his eyes are on me; God damn him, he is looking at me; he shan’t do it; damn him, he shan’t look at me.”40

Wise later admitted that he had been armed and that he almost killed the witness. When James Hammond, the sitting senator of South Carolina, had previously served in the House of Representatives in 1836, Sumner recounted, Hammond had warned his colleagues that if an abolitionist fell into “our hands, he may expect a felon’s death.” In the House in 1841, William Payne, “a Slave-­ master from Alabama,” threatened that if “abolitionists, among whom he insisted the Postmaster General ought to be included,” ever visited the South, “‘he would hang them like dogs.’” On another occasion, “Mr. 92

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Dawson, of Louisiana, confronted another member of the House of Representatives, and promised to “ ‘cut his throat ear to ear,’ ” if he “did not behave better.”41 Joshua Giddings recounted that once, upon speaking about slavery in Georgia, Mr. Black, of Georgia, raising his bludgeon, and standing in front of my seat, said to me: “If you repeat that language again, I will knock you down.” It was a solemn moment for me. I had never been knocked down, and having some curiosity upon that subject, I repeated the language. Then Mr. Dawson, of Louisiana, the same who had drawn the bowie-­k nife, placed his hand in his pocket and said, with an oath which I will not repeat, that he would shoot me, at the same time cocking the pistol, so that all around me could hear it click.”42

In the Senate in 1848, Henry Foote, a slave master from Mississippi, invited “Mr. Hale, the Senator from New Hampshire, who still continues an honor to this body,” to travel to Mississippi, where “he would grace one of the tallest trees of the forest with a rope around his neck, with the approbation of every virtuous and patriotic citizen, and that, if necessary, I should myself assist in the operation.”43 In 1850 Foote confronted Senator Thomas Benton of Missouri. “Mr. Benton rose at once from his seat, and, with an angry countenance, but without weapons of any kind in his hand, or, as it appeared afterward before the Committee, on his person, advanced in the direction of Mr. Foote, when the latter, gliding backward, drew from his pocket a five-­chambered revolver, full loaded, which he cocked. Meanwhile Mr. Benton . . . exclaimed: ‘I am not armed. I have no pistols. I disdain to carry arms. Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire.’”44 Not long after, Foote challenged Benton to a duel from the floor of the Senate in veiled but unmistakable language. The Senate did nothing. In 1852 “Mr. Clemens, a Slave-­master of Alabama,” challenged Robert Rhett to a duel. The Senate called none to order. In 1854 Senator Judah Benjamin from Louisiana, “who is still a member of this body, ardent for Slavery, while professing to avoid personal altercation in the Senate . . . , proceeded most earnestly to repel an imagined imputation on him by Mr. Seward, and wound up by saying: ‘If it came from another quarter, it would not be upon this floor that I should answer it.’”45 In that very session, Senator Jefferson Davis, “who speaks so often for Slavery,” had praised the duel as a means of settling quarrels “and vindicating 93

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what is called personal honor; as if personal honor did not depend absolutely upon what a man does, and not what is done to him.” Also in that session in the House, Sumner quoted the interruptions of Owen Lovejoy by a host of Southern representatives whose invectives included calling him a “black-­ hearted scoundrel and nigger-­stealing thief,” a “perjured villain,” and a “despicable wretch.” One threatened, “And if you come among us, we will do with you as we did with John Brown—­hang you as high as Haman.”46 In referring to these examples, Sumner said that he meant to show how such conduct violated “the first principles of Parliamentary Law.” But it would be too much to expect these men to restrain themselves “while Slavery prevails here, for the Duel is a part of that System of Violence which has its origin in Slavery.” He continued, “Men are transformed into wolves.” Slavery impels men to violence and to violate the rules of debate as a means of settling disagreement, “not knowing that there is a serener power than any found in personalities, and that all severity which transcends the rules of debate becomes disgusting.” Violence degrades the man who is the mouthpiece for violence and slavery. “Of course, on such occasions, amidst all seeming triumphs, the cause of Slavery loses, and Truth gains. If men cannot afford to be decent, they ought to suspect the justice of their cause, or at least the motives with which they sustain it, but our Slave-­Masters, not seeing the indecency of their conduct, know not their losses.”47 In a republican political community, governing itself on the basis of natural equality, reason in debate, not violent force, decides political questions. In the eyes of a republican people, threatened and actual violence proves nothing. In fact, these examples, which “might be multiplied indefinitely,” Sumner continued, “attest the weakness of their cause. It requires no special talent to estimate the insignificance of an argument that can be supported only by violence.” But to members of a political community that governs itself on the basis of violent force, reason in debate is not sovereign in deciding political questions. At bottom, might makes right. In parliamentary councils, when reason expends itself short of victory, the issue is not settled until force is resorted to and expends itself. Paradoxically, the slave masters can accept the sovereignty of reason in debate only by “the cultivation of those principles which make Slavery impossible.”48 Sumner pointed out that pride made the slave masters unconscious of the “fatal influence” of slavery, “which completes the evidence of the Barbarism under which they live.” It was “natural that a cherished practice should blind those who are under its influence,” and indeed the slave master exulted “in 94

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his unfortunate condition.”49 The slave masters’ deformities of character appeared to themselves as the distinctiveness of superiority. Pride in their mastery had not only made them unconscious of their wrongs that had deformed them, but also made them forgetful of their republican fathers’ proscription of their wrongs. Sumner, along with his associates whose fellowship he saluted at the beginning of his return speech for “thinking alike concerning the Republic,” found “in the boasts of Slave-­masters new occasion to regret that baleful influence under which even love of country is lost in love of slavery.” The slave masters had reversed the meaning of the “great motto of Franklin,” so that “Where liberty is, there is my country” had become “Where slavery is, there is my country.” In their pride, the slave masters had forgotten or scanted the fact that Jefferson and Washington were abolitionists. They had threatened or had made good on threats to shoot, beat, hang, and stab their colleagues in Congress for having “simply expressed the recorded sentiments of Washington, Jefferson and Franklin.” The fathers “looked down upon Slavery,” but the slave masters of the present age “look up to Slavery.” Sumner continued, “The first, recognizing its wrong, were at once liberated from its insidious influence; while the latter, upholding it as right and ‘ennobling,’ must naturally draw from it motives of conduct. The first, conscious of the character of Slavery, were not misled by it; the second, dwelling in unconsciousness of its true character, surrender blindly to its barbarous tendencies.”50 The difference between the slaveholding abolitionist fathers and the proslavery slave masters of the day consisted in the former’s immunity to and the latter’s infection by the contagion attacking the soul. The republican fathers believed in popular rule and tried to doom slavery; the latter-­d ay slave masters believed themselves born to rule and were trying to spread slavery. Their embrace of slavery accounted for the latter’s moral crimes against the slave and their political crimes against the rule of the people. Sumner had given a complete and prophetic account of the character of the slave masters, explaining why they could not easily respect any law conflicting with the law of their own political mastery. This account explained why they seceded. They could not tolerate the lawfully expressed will of the people if it differed from their own. They intended to rule. On a different occasion, Representative Tobias Plants of Ohio presented a theory of the effect of slavery on the character of masters that complemented Sumner’s. His theory was unmistakably inflected by classical training, though he made no direct references to Greek authors. Plants began with the 95

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premise that “the constitutions, laws and institutions of a people are but the outgrowth of the wants, development and the culture of that people.”51 That is, a common spirit or character arises from the political culture of the people and is impressed upon the formal organization of government. Plants continued, saying that “the community has within it the germs of all possible forms of government by reason of the various characters of the individuals who compose it.” Every community possesses different types of individual character, each sharing in the specific character unique to different forms of government. These individual characters, in their “germ” form, represent the diversity of character types found within humanity: “The good and the bad, the educated and the ignorant, the simple and the crafty, the benevolent and the selfish, the inborn democrat and the natural tyrant” are all present in and part, “so to speak, of this grand man, the body-­corporate.” When political regimes are founded and government is formally organized, a ruling class is established that corresponds with a certain character type among many. At the American founding, “Selfish men would gladly have made everything subservient to their own aggrandizement, and to accomplish this would have formed an oligarchy, a monarchy, or a despotism. Good men would gladly have laid the foundations of the structure upon the broad principles of right and justice, and would have embodied them into the forms of a pure republic.” Good men prevailed, and the people were established as the sovereign rulers of the Republic upon the principle of natural equality. However, subsequent history in which slavery was permitted to live demonstrated how slavery revolutionized republican, or popular, government by directly developing the oligarchic character of the masters. Plants isolated the “essential spirit of slavery” as the “selfishness which disregards the rights of others.” That selfishness was not bounded to “geographical lines, or limited to any particular color of skin”; that is, selfishness is not peculiar to one specific place or human relation defined by an incidental attribute like skin color. Selfishness is, simply, a “sin” to which humanity is always susceptible, and it corresponds to a certain character shared by “oligarchy, monarchy or despotism.” That sin “may be just as active and remorseless in the home of a domestic tyrant in Massachusetts as upon the cane-­fields of Louisiana.” Though selfishness is found everywhere, its prevalence depends upon conditions that might feed the sin and give it scope versus counteracting forces of surrounding political society that might regulate and restrain that sin. Domestic slavery was unusual in its powerful effect on selfishness. By giving one human being absolute dominion over another, slavery tempted 96

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selfishness to expand beyond the limits of self-­control. Nothing but the conscience of the master checked the master’s selfish use of the slave’s life in any way that pleased the master, and if the master’s principle changed from the wrong of slavery to the rightfulness of slavery, the check of conscience was gone. The masters of political society became the slaves of all their selfish desires, especially “pecuniary gain and political importance and the gratification of their lusts.”52 The master resembled the classical definition of a tyrant. When spread out in society, domestic slavery created a class of tyrants, enslaved to their appetites and lusting for lawless power. They sought to break the constraints of existing law, to make themselves rulers, and to make their twisted eroticism the law. In domestic slavery, “the selfish and tyrannical found a central rallying point, which naturally drew together and to concert of action all the elements of reckless disregard of human rights, corresponding in the body-­corporate to the animal propensities in the man.” Those simultaneously habituated to tyranny by slave mastery naturally coordinated their actions to establish themselves and their rule, in “disregard of human rights.” Their character type was defined by enslavement to “animal propensities,” that is, the instinctive and unregulated pursuit of desires. Oligarchy was the natural political effect of inflated selfishness nurtured under the dark wing of domestic slavery. The shocking proof of slave masters’ unregulated lust was known to the Republicans. Responding to the oft-­repeated charge that Republicans’ advocacy of equality for the slave would produce racial amalgamation, Ashley answered that if not “for a negro equality all over the South that must be nameless here, there would be no blue-­eyed, light-­haired octoroons, the children and descendants of African slaves, in every southern city, and in every neighborhood.” By a nameless Negro equality, Ashley meant that the one way that Southern masters treated slaves as equals was as counterparts in forced sexual union. At least Mormon polygamy, “about which even southern Representatives profess to be so shocked,” was voluntary and had to receive church sanction. Southern slavery permitted and encouraged “an involuntary, forced, and revolting concubinage, from which there is no escape,” and there was “no law to punish the aggressor.” Most shockingly, “the offspring of this criminal negro equality are slaves.” If the law punished these crimes and liberated the ill-­used slave women and the children, slavery would immediately end. But it was “only in the land of slavery where this crime is tolerated. There it is unrestrained. There alone it is cherished.” The masters’ unpunished practice terminated in “eradicating from the heart of 97

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man all love for his own offspring, and filling the land with slaves who are the children of the dominant race.” In every “congressional district, in all the slave States of this Union,” one could find slaveholders who “own and sell their own children.” These fathers “see them toil daily beneath the lash of a taskmaster, and see them driven in coffle gangs to the southern market—­their sons to the shambles, and their daughters to the hells of southern cities.”53 Representative William Kelley of New York remembered that in 1824, when Lafayette traveled the South, he was surprised to find the “the complexion of the negro population in their cities so largely changed from what it had been at the close of the revolutionary war, and expressed the hope that in finding the two races thus blending their blood he might discover the solution of the slavery question.” Lafayette’s hope would have been plausible if the masters had repented of their unrestrained eroticism and had raised their children according to the law of paternal affection. But occupying Union armies encountered the evidence of paternal carelessness. Kelley held up a picture sent to the North by General Nathaniel Banks “of a band of slaves . . . four of whom are as white as we who hold this discussion.” They were born in Virginia and Louisiana and “were owned or sold by their fathers as negro slaves.”54 The strength of the masters’ lust not only overcame any affection for common humanity in the abstract, but also extended to vicious and unnatural treatment practiced on their own children. Their hearts were as cold and as hard as iron while their lust irresistibly impelled them to rule despotically over all. In disregard of every other law, they elevated their lust to the lofty status of law. Why Republicans Often Meant Oligarchy or Aristocracy When Saying Slavery Quite often, when the Republicans used variants of the word slavery, they were referring to the oligarchic, slave-­owning rulers of the South. Because the Republicans identified oligarchic rule with slavery, the oligarchy’s most outstanding feature, they often spoke in a manner that relied upon the audience’s common understanding of that identification. To that audience, the identification of oligarchic rule with slavery did not need explanation at every instance, because leading Republicans shared a common understanding of the oligarchic regime and its intimate connection to slavery. They often shortened their reference to the slave states’ different form of government and way of life by using the word slavery to represent all of it. The historical 98

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record contains countless occurrences of Republicans using the word slavery and its variants, such as slave power, slave interest, slavocracy, and so on, in ways that literally do not make sense, unless the identification between domestic slavery and oligarchic political regime is borne in mind. Very often, their usage of these terms can make sense only if we understand that they often used the word slavery metonymously, that is, to represent the rulers, interests, and forces of the political regime that owed its revolutionary, unrepublican character to that potent institution. Due to the generally understood, close causal relationship between slavery and oligarchy, Republicans could use these variants of the word slavery with the knowledge that their contemporaries understood the associated meaning that these terms represented. In some cases, the context in which Republican speakers and writers made metonymous usage of slavery also contains direct confirmation that this is what they meant. These cases help the reader of the historical record understand that when variants of the term slavery appear, much more meaning is often intended than domestic slavery alone. An 1864 speech by Senator Daniel Clark of New Hampshire illustrates this interpretive point. Clark cataloged slavery’s many oppressions and crimes. Slavery had “shut up to them the liberty of speech and the press.” Slavery “assaulted,” “imprisoned,” “lynched,” “expatriated,” and “murdered” citizens, “for no crime but because they testified against her.” Slavery “set up the doctrine of State rights . . . [and] made war again on Mexico for more territory.”55 Obviously, “slavery” did not commit all these evils and cannot literally be an agent of these actions. More precisely, those with the strongest interest in maintaining slavery and clothed with the political authority to maintain it committed these evils. Clark named the author of these actions, saying that slavery had “reared an aristocracy and trampled down the masses.” The aristocrats of the regime that slavery had reared did all these things. And this was a regime that trampled not only domestic slaves but also “the masses.” Slavery here is a metonym for slavery-­supported aristocracy. The reader would be mistaken to limit the interpretation of slavery in this context to mean no more than the domestic institution supported by individuals who were morally sympathetic with it. This interpretation would ignore the fundamental reorganization of the antebellum Southern political regime devoted to the preservation of slavery, the cause of this political reorganization, which Clark and many others acknowledged. In appreciating the 99

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Republicans’ identification of slavery as the cause of Southern oligarchy, the crimes attributed to “slavery” are often more accurately read as government actions whose agents were the despots of a ruling class elevated by slavery. A portion of an 1858 speech by Owen Lovejoy in the House of Representatives supplies another example like Clark’s catalog of slavery’s crimes. Lovejoy colorfully indicted slavery in this speech, which begins, “The demon of slavery has come forth from the tombs. . . . It claims the right to annihilate free schools . . . to hamper a free press, to defile the pulpit, to corrupt religion, and to stifle free thought and free speech.” In this speech, Lovejoy clarified that by the word slavery, he meant government changed by domestic slavery. He said that the national conflict over slavery was not precisely between “the North and the South, but between freedom and slavery—­between the principles of liberty and those of despotism.”56 The sectional nature of the conflict was incidental to the primary difference—­a difference in political regimes that were separated by the border between “liberty,” the domain of republican government, and “slavery,” the domain of oligarchic government. Republicans often referred to the North-­South conflict, as Lovejoy did, as a conflict between “liberty and slavery” or “freedom and slavery.” But in stating this, the word slavery included but signified more than enslavement of Africans.57 Isaac Arnold said, “It is a question between liberty and slavery; not of the black man alone, but of the white man also. Constitutional liberty and despotic slavery will struggle and contend on this continent until one or the other is subdued.”58 In these contexts, slavery carried the political meaning of the subjugation of all—­of domestic slaves as well as the subjugation of all those not sharing in, or allied with, the ruling oligarchic class. In 1862 Representative Francis Kellogg of Michigan referred to slavery as a ruler, which is literally nonsensical: “For the last ten years [when candidates for schoolteacher, clergyman, constable, or justice of the peace presented themselves] in any one of the thirty-­four States, the first question asked was ‘what are his opinions on slavery.’ . . . In the thirteen states where it has the control of the local government, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are unknown, and the laws which it enacts and enforces are more oppressive and tyrannical than the decrees of the despots of Austria.” His meaning becomes clear in light of a speech two years earlier on the same subject, freedom of speech and the press: “This freedom of speech and of the press has cost too much blood and suffering in the past to be given up now for the sake of accommodating a few thousands of an aristocracy, who rob one class of all their rights, and then bid their poorer neighbors relinquish half of theirs, so they 100

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may live on in security.”59 This shows that when Kellogg said slavery “has the control of the local government,” he meant “slaveholding aristocracy.” The Republicans often used the term slave power. In 1858 Henry Wilson said that the “gigantic slave power” was the only “power on this continent that could thus control, direct, and guide men.” Furthermore, it held “this Administration in the hollow of its hand,” and it “guides and directs the Democratic party, and which has only to stamp its foot, and the men who wield the Government of this country tremble and submit and bow to its will.” In 1860 Representative John Bingham of Ohio defined the term with reference to the abandonment of the early national policy of containing slavery: “The precepts and example of Jefferson were discarded. An influence appeared in the southern States which sought to change the settled policy of the Government, and to establish, and perpetuate the institution of slavery. This influence I shall denominate the slave power.”60 In 1862 Representative William Windom of Minnesota said that “the loyal people of this nation” would never again “confide its interests and its destiny to the slave power,” implying that the slave power had controlled the nation’s destiny. If slavery emerged intact from the war, the slave power “will inevitably renew the old struggle for supremacy. Just so long as it can aspire to rule, it will conspire to ruin the nation, and there will be no peace.” In 1864 Senator John Hale of New Hampshire recalled when “the Government of the United States, under the cruel and arbitrary sway of the slave power, in the madness of its power undertook to shut up Faneuil Hall” in Boston, by prosecuting antislavery speaker Theodore Parker in federal court “for seditious words.” Also in 1864 Thomas Shannon mentioned in passing that when the convention of California, his state, asked Congress for admission, “the slave power was then in control here, and refused to admit them” unless the Missouri Compromise line’s extension to the Pacific was ordained. This “would have cut the state in two and made the lower half a slave State.” In the same year, Representative John Baldwin of Massachusetts equated the slave power with the “vicious old political dynasty that has long controlled the Government” and still commanded “supporters at the North,” who, “forgetting or failing to comprehend the grand meaning of this Republic, brought themselves to act as if the slave power were really the fundamental law of the land.”61 Speaking for himself, but also for all these aforementioned Republicans, Henry Wilson gave the term slave power this definition: “When I speak of the slave power of this Government I mean the political influence of slavery in the Government of this country.” With Bingham, Wilson perceived that the slave 101

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power had risen after the founding generation had passed away: “When the Constitution was made there were about six hundred thousand slaves in this country. . . . Slavery as an element of political power was utterly contemptible. . . . These six hundred thousand now have increased to four million.”62 With the increase of that interest “upheld by State law . . . , the result is that men in favor of perpetuating and extending this system of slavery over this continent have obtained the control of the sovereign States of this Union.” But it would not be altogether true to say that the “slave power” completely consisted in those men. In 1862 Isaac Arnold called the leaders of secession, “the chief conspirators, Davis, Floyd, Slidell, Mason and others . . . , the instruments of the slave power” but not the slave power itself, despite their leading positions in the Confederacy.63 The Republicans’ conception of the slave power’s nature was that it was served by men, but not entirely by the men themselves. The slave power’s life in America had a beginning point—­sometime after the founding generation; it was predictably rational, dictating commands consistent with its certain character; it was instantly and recognizably different from the power that it competed against for control of American governments; it was foreign to their own character; and, as such, it was indisputably evil. The Republicans understood that the slave power emanated from the oligarchic political regime among the slave states. In 1854 Sumner had signed the public “Appeal of the Independent Democrats of Ohio in Congress to the People of the United States,” which explained that the slave power’s object was to extend slavery and, with its extension, to make not just slavery national, but also to nationalize the oligarchic political regime that correlated with slavery. The document stated that the “Federal Government, controlled by the Slave Power,” was being directed “to extinguish freedom and establish slavery in the States and Territories of the Pacific, and thus permanently subjugate the whole country to the yoke of a slaveholding despotism.”64 In 1864, Representative John Longyear of Michigan also described the slave power in terms of political regimes. He said that the arm of the slave power was reaching forth from the slave states, attempting to destroy national republicanism and liberty in favor of the establishment of a new system of government familiar to itself: In respect to slavery it is not change merely that is taking place, it is radical substitution; and of what? Of freedom for slavery; and why? Because slavery 102

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proved itself inimical to civil liberty, to the Constitution, and to republican institutions. The slave power, not content with the enslavement of its immediate victims insisted upon . . . the control of the Government, and the enslavement in fact, of all its [the national Government’s] energies, its power, its wealth and its emoluments. At length, . . . a cry went up from the great body of the people of the free States and from many in the slave States against the aggressions of the slave power and demanded that it should confine itself to its own particular domicile and not stretch its arms over the entire nation and attempt to control the liberties of the entire people.65

The slave power could not coexist with the form of government alien to its nature, which was inimical to republicanism and the Constitution framed by the republican fathers. This explained why, in the opinion of Windom and other Republicans, “so long as it [the slave power] can aspire to rule, it will conspire to ruin the nation.” From the Republicans’ point of view, unchecked oligarchy would be the ruin of the nation, whether by coercive violence or by the oligarchy’s displacement of American republicanism. In a short space of an 1862 speech, George Julian employed several of these terms together—­slavery used metonymously, slave power, and oligarchy—­a ll intimately related, which enables us to see the “slave power” connected to the political regime from whence it came: Slavery triumphed, finally, when it clutched the national Treasury, sent our Navy into distant seas, plundered our arsenals, fired on our flag, and sought to make sure its dominion by wholesale perjury, treason, rapine, and murder. . . . [S]lavery has now forced upon the nation the question of liberty or death. . . . In the year 1850, when the slave power triumphed through the “final settlement” which was then attempted, I had the honor to hold a seat in this body; and I said, in a speech then delivered, that—­ . . . Sir, these questions are no longer within the control of politicians. Party disciples, presidential nominations, and the spoils of office, cannot stifle the free utterance of the people respecting the great struggle now going on in this country between the free spirit of the North and a domineering oligarchy in the South. Here, sir, lies the great question, and it must be met. . . . Sir, I speak to-­d ay in the spirit of these words, uttered nearly twelve years ago, and verified by time.66 103

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Slavery and slave power, in this passage, signify the same thing: the powers had been contending for “a domineering oligarchy in the South” and contending against “the free spirit of the North.” Julian’s 1850 claim, that the questions of the day were “no longer within the control of politicians,” portended larger changes than ordinary political realignment. The great question then was as follows: What would issue from the interregime struggle that lay underneath the surface of normal politics? Julian claimed that time had verified his correctness in predicting great changes caused by that struggle. Following his 1850 speech, the parties did realign, and after the dust cleared, they did become sectional, each aligned to one of the two dueling regimes. The contention between the two political regimes became an interregime war that put at stake the life of each political regime. At the sight of the voluminous instances when the Republicans indicted “slavery,” later generations must understand that they were not merely engaged in moral disputation with opponents over the rectitude of slavery. Often, they were also railing against slavery’s corrosive effects on free institutions and republican government; moreover, they were railing against slavery’s offspring and patron, oligarchic government, its way of life and its rulers. In sum, when the Republicans indicted slavery, they were waging a struggle over the ultimate political question: the character and type of the American political regime. Disarmed of this meaning bound up in their usage of the word slavery, the reader cannot see the full breadth and depth of the impression oligarchic government made on the Republicans. With that meaning understood, the reader can better comprehend the centrality of oligarchic government in Republicans’ concerns about Reconstruction.

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The Origin of Southern Oligarchy The Plan of the Republican Fathers The Republicans generally agreed that the Southern oligarchy was revolutionary and not conservative, in the proper American sense of the word conservative. The word requires a referent, and to the Republicans the American founding was the logical referent of American conservatism. The rulers and defenders of the Southern regime could be deemed conservative only if the referent of their conservatism was aristocratic-­monarchic forms of government that antedated the American founding. The Republicans sometimes attributed conservatism to the oligarchy in this qualified sense. But to them it was improper to place the referent of American conservatism there. The American founders, said Senator James Nye of Nevada, “started with a new doctrine and a new theory” and “threw aside the postulates of aristocracy . . . instituting government to protect natural and personal rights.”1 Measured against that referent, the development of Southern oligarchy and the deliberate policy of extending slavery broke from and did not conform to the plan of the American founding. The aim of the Republicans was to correct that deviation and bring the nation into closer conformity with that plan. They, and not the oligarchy, were the true conservatives. In 1862 Isaac Arnold reminded his colleagues that there were some “who adopt the name of conservatives to preserve slavery,” but their conservatism was false. Those so-­called conservatives constituted “the aristocracy of slavery” and were fighting for “slavery and the subversion of constitutional liberty,” to which he added, “From all such conservatives ‘Good Lord, deliver us.’” But they, the Republicans, belonged to “another class,” the true conservatives, “who wish to preserve the Constitution, the life of the nation, liberty, and all which is dear to us.”2 105

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A single example provides ample proof of Republican agreement that the slave South had developed in an oligarchic direction and had deviated from the plan of the American founders, and that is the speech of Charles Sumner on February 5 and 6, 1866. The reaction of his Republican colleagues shows that even the opponents of his policy agreed with him. By then, the postwar Thirty-­Ninth Congress had been convened for two months, preoccupied with the question of Reconstruction policy. This policy would determine how to implement the establishment of republican government in the insurrectionary states. At that crucial time, Sumner delivered a two-­d ay speech on the meaning of American republicanism as established by the founders and the deviancy of Southern oligarchy. Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution required that the national government guarantee a republican form of government to the states. Although Congress generally agreed that the insurrectionary states were not republican, a thorough and precise definition of what constituted a republican form of government was required. Addressing the Senate, Sumner said that this was “a practical question, which you are summoned to decide.” To fulfill its constitutional duty to guarantee a republican form of government, the Senate had to “affix its meaning.” The Constitution compelled them to answer the question.3 Sumner’s speech attempted to affix a proper meaning to that definition. Among the congressional Republicans who opposed Sumner’s views of Reconstruction policy were James Blaine, William Fessenden, and Senator George H. Williams of Oregon. The occasion of Sumner’s speech was debate on the “Blaine Amendment.” In the House, Blaine had successfully advanced a proposed amendment to the Constitution, and Fessenden called for its consideration in the Senate. The proposed amendment, an early draft of what would become part of the Fourteenth Amendment, did not require states to enfranchise freedmen, but reduced the basis of apportioning representation by the number of all persons a state might exclude from the elective franchise. Sumner claimed that no amendment was necessary. The Constitution already affirmed the right of Congress to guarantee a republican form of government by regular statutory enactment, and he countered Fessenden with a substitute bill that did include the mandatory extension of the franchise. Later, Blaine wrote, “as a political argument calculated to shape and determine the legislation of Congress,” Sumner’s speech “was singularly inapt.”4 The day after Sumner’s speech, an exasperated Fessenden also attacked Sumner’s policy position, as did others.5 Williams argued that although the 106

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present majority in the Congress might agree with Sumner on “the constitutionality and expediency of such legislation,” the constitutional views of a future majority in Congress might differ, with the result that “the political rights of millions of people would be as varying as the capricious fortunes of the political parties of the country.”6 Williams meant that it did not matter that Sumner’s interpretation of the Constitution was correct, nor that Williams himself agreed with him, because his interpretation was contested. Over the prior decades, oligarchic statesmen had corrupted American constitutional interpretation in order to advance American political development in an oligarchic direction. Southern statesmen who held a self-­serving or corrupted view of the Constitution might overturn the statute through normal politics upon their return to Congress. This was why amendment to the Constitution was needed, to specify and confirm the requirements of American republicanism and close off any opening to construe the Constitution in favor of deliberate or unwitting misinterpretation created by and for self-­serving oligarchs. However, these same critics of Sumner’s policy position agreed with his speech on the Constitution, the nature of the founders’ republicanism, and the South’s deviation from republicanism. Blaine wrote that Sumner’s speech was an “exhaustive and masterly essay” and “a treatise of great value.” From the Senate floor, Fessenden said Sumner had “eloquently shown” what were “the great principles which lie at the foundation of the Constitution itself, and of all free and republican government.” George Williams effused, “Sir, I listened with profound admiration to the speech which the Senator delivered in favor of the proposed substitute. It was worthy of the subject, worthy of the occasion, worthy of the author; and when those who heard it shall be forgotten, the echoes of its lofty and majestic periods will linger and repeat themselves among the corridors of History. I cordially indorse the prevailing sentiment of that speech.” 7 This shows that the Republicans in Congress were generally united in their interpretation of the constitutional meaning of republicanism and in their understanding of the highest goal of Reconstruction, the restoration of the founders’ republicanism. Their sharp differences pertained to policy, how to achieve that higher goal. Sumner first traced the background of Article IV, Section 4. Writing before the Federal Convention, James Madison anticipated dangers to the existence of republicanism arising from the existence of slavery. Quoting and commenting on Madison’s private notes, Sumner said: “‘According to republican theory, right and power, being both vested in the majority, are held to be 107

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synonymous; according to fact and experience, a minority may, in an appeal to force, be an overmatch for the majority’; and he remarks, in words which furnish a key to the ‘guaranty’ afterwards adopted, ‘Where Slavery exists, the republican theory becomes still more fallacious,’—­thus showing, that, at its very origin, it was regarded as a check upon Slavery.”8 Sumner was showing that Madison understood the inherently antagonistic relation of slavery to republicanism: where slavery existed, “right and power” did not remain lodged in the majority, as republican theory required, but were transferred to a lodgment in the minority. An explicit guarantee of republican government was intended to provide a constitutional check upon this tendency. Sumner continued that, in their notes or speeches contemporaneous with the convention, Alexander Hamilton, Edmund Randolph, and George Mason had all strongly favored a constitutional requirement that American government be republican in form. An early proposal of the provision in the convention included the national government’s guarantee of a state’s “existing laws,” to which Gouverneur Morris objected. James Wilson amended the language with the convention’s approval, so that the national government would be required to guarantee only “a republican form of government” to the states. This showed that the convention agreed in distinguishing true republicanism from “existing laws” in deciding what should receive the guarantee. Summoning further reasons for the guarantee’s inclusion, Sumner first quoted and then commented on “the prophetic language” of Madison’s Federalist 43: “It may possibly be asked, what need there could be of such a precaution, and whether it may not become a pretext for alterations in the State governments, without the concurrence of the States themselves. . . . But who can say what experiments may be produced by the caprice of particular States, by the ambition of enterprising leaders, or by the intrigues and influence of foreign powers?” The very crisis anticipated has arrived. “The caprice of particular States” and “the ambition of enterprising leaders” have done their worst. And now the “guaranty” must be performed, not only for the sake of individual States, but for the sake of the Union to which they all belong, and to advance the declared objects of the Constitution, specified in its preamble.9

Sumner was explaining that the guarantee not only serves the advantage of the people of the state in which the government had revolutionized, but is also “a guaranty to each in the interest of all,” because the “good of all is 108

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involved in the good of each.” As the guarantor, the national government acts for each and all when it acts “on default of the party guarantied.” In other words, when one or several state governments revolutionize away from republicanism, all states are vulnerable to corruption, just as healthy parts of the body are vulnerable to a cancer in other parts. The guarantee was a remedy in the event that a state or several states might adopt a new antirepublican form of government. In that event, the nation would become divided by a fundamental difference, a difference in political regimes. But vested with the constitutional authority to conduct surgery on the antirepublican governments in those states, the national government both saves the people of those states from antirepublican tyranny and protects the other states from spreading tyranny. Sumner observed that the nation had been experiencing this crisis through the antebellum period and Civil War, against which the framers of the Constitution had provided a remedy in Article IV, Section 4. Sumner then took up this question: “What is ‘a republican form of government,’ according to the requirement of the National Constitution?” The fathers distanced themselves from prior definitions and foreign definitions of republicanism. The “most competent” of the fathers, “who disagreed on other things, agreed in discarding these examples.”10 Sumner described the fathers as lettered but thoughtful, confident, and intellectually independent men who sought to improve upon available definitions and did settle on one when they inserted the republican guarantee into the Constitution: Our fathers plainly intended a government representing the principles for which they had struggled. Now, if it appears that through years of controversy they insisted on certain principles as vital to free government, even to the extent of encountering the mother country in war,—­that afterward, on solemn occasions, they heralded these principles to the world as “self-­evident truths”—­that also, in declared opinions, they sustained these principles,—­a nd that in public acts they embodied these principles,—­then is it beyond dispute that these principles must have entered into the idea of the government they took pains to place under the guaranty of the nation.11

The reason the fathers struggled and then warred against the mother country was “to establish the very principles for which [Sumner] now contend[s] . . . , [t]o secure the natural rights of men.” Sumner continued: “The first object was not independence, but the establishment of these principles and when at last independence began, it was because these principles could be 109

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secured in no other way. Therefore the triumph of independence was the triumph of these principles, which necessarily entered into and became the animating soul of the Republic then and there born.”12 Marshaling broad historical testimony, Sumner showed that the purpose of the Revolution was to establish “a Republic, with Liberty and Equality as animating principles, where government stood on the consent of the governed,” based on natural right. When the fathers declared independence, “they continued loyal to their constant vows.”13 In their bills of rights, the states also proclaimed this doctrine. At the close of the war, Madison composed a similar doctrine that George Washington promulgated in a general order issued from his camp: Let it be remembered that it has ever been the pride and boast of America, that the rights for which she contended, were the rights of human nature. By the blessing of the Author of these rights, on the means exerted for their defence, they have prevailed against all opposition, and form the basis of thirteen independent states. No instance has heretofore occurred, nor can any instance be expected hereafter to occur, in which the unadulterated forms of Republican Government can pretend to so fair an opportunity of justifying themselves by their fruits. In this view the citizens of the United States are responsible for the greatest trust ever confided to a political society.14

From events prior to the Revolutionary War through the war’s end, and throughout their lives, Sumner showed, the fathers sustained the same principles, “testifying to the government they founded and upheld.”15 A tolerably distinct, recurring definition of republican government could be found in their broadly overlapping opinions. Sumner provided supporting exegeses of the professions of founders Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Adams, Roger Sherman, John Adams, Charles Pinckney, Luther Martin, George Mason, and John Taylor of Caroline.16 In sum, the quotations Sumner read from his speech all conjoined natural right to republicanism. They professed their belief in natural equality with respect to liberty, from which they derived the rightfulness of popular sovereignty. Republican government was the only legitimate form of government, resting upon the consent of the governed, because the fact of natural equality admitted no other form. But by “consent of the governed,” the fathers meant both that the government had to register the collected will of the governed 110

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political community and that the government could not violate the natural rights of any member of the political community. Natural rights both conferred lawfulness on the will of the majority and limited what the majority could rightfully do. Sumner then recited the public acts of the founding generation that confirmed this meaning.17 Concluding this section of his speech, Sumner announced to his colleagues: I offer you the American definition of a Republican form of government. In vain do you cite philosophers or publicists, or the examples of former history. Against these I put the early and constant postulates of the Fathers, the corporate declarations of the Fathers, the avowed opinions of the Fathers, and the public acts of the Fathers, all with one voice proclaiming, first, that all men are equal in rights, and, secondly, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed; and here is the American idea of a Republic, which must be adopted in the interpretation of the National Constitution.18

He then addressed one plausible objection to his proof: “the contemporary recognition of Slavery.” But he thought it enough to remind the Senate that “our fathers did not recognize Slavery as a permanent part of our system, but treated it as exceptional and transitory.” And in fact, “becoming a freeman,” the slave stepped into republican citizenship. Sumner gave examples showing that “at the adoption of the National Constitution,” the founding generation “refused to recognize any exclusion from the elective franchise on account of race or color. The Fathers knew too well the requirements of a republican government to sanction such exclusion.”19 Over the course of dissecting the opinions and acts of the founding generation, Sumner took care to distinguish the fathers’ republicanism from the form of antirepublicanism that had brought America to a crisis. Franklin’s 1736 writing on popular government, foreshadowing republican government, held it to be created for “the good of the whole,” to which Sumner added, and “not for an odious oligarchy or an aristocratic class.” On Jefferson’s criticism of excluding taxpaying and fighting men from representation, Sumner commented, “Thus did he scout out the whole wretched pretension of oligarchy and monopoly by which citizens are deprived of equal rights.” Quoting Hamilton, Sumner said that, “as long as offices are open to all men and no constitutional rank is established, it is pure republicanism.” Then Sumner added for emphasis: “Not for an oligarchy but for all, is a republic created.”20 111

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By contrasting the founders’ republicanism with oligarchy on these particular points, Sumner reminded the Senate how the insurrectionary states had violated Article IV, Section 4, which the Senate was bound to enforce. As he continued his speech, Sumner read the interstate political regime of the Southern states out of the protection of the Constitution: A republic, like a democracy, cannot tolerate inequality. Wherever a favored class appears, whether in one or the other, its republican character ceases. It may be an aristocracy or oligarchy, but it is not a democracy or a republic. It is not difficult to classify our Rebel States. They are aristocracies or oligarchies. An aristocracy, according to the etymology of the word, is the government of the best. An oligarchy is the government of the few, and is not even an aristocracy, but an abuse of aristocracy, as despotism is the abuse of monarchy. . . . To show that our Rebel States are aristocracies or oligarchies might suffice. But we must not forget, that, born of Slavery, they have the spirit of that iniquity, so that they are essentially of a low type. Founded on color of the skin, they are, beyond question, the most senseless and disgusting of all history. Would you learn to what they must incline? Listen to the frank words of the Venetian master, the famous Father Paul, [who] counsels the privileged class how to use their powers. “If a noble,” says he, “injure a plebeian, justify him by all possible means; but should that be found quite impossible, punish more in appearance than in reality. If a plebeian insult a noble, punish him with the greatest severity, that the commonalty may know how perilous it is to insult a noble.” . . . But this same spirit predominates still in the Rebel States. It rages there with more revolting cruelty than Venice ever witnessed. And such is the government now claiming recognition as “republican.” . . . Clearly, most clearly, and beyond all question, such a government is not “republican in form.” Call it oligarchy, call it aristocracy, call it caste, call it monopoly; but never call it a republic.21

Plebeians and nobles deserved unequal punishments for the same offense, which meant they were not equal before the law. “The same spirit” of inequality distinguished the American South. In this speech, Sumner touched only briefly on the point of departure of these states’ development from the fathers’ republicanism. Since the founding, the origin of the rebellion of oligarchy against republicanism proceeded from South Carolina, spreading outward and enveloping other states. 112

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Georgia was an early compeer of South Carolina in political character. In his account of the public posture of all the states during the founding generation, Sumner made exception for those two states. Georgia was “fitful,” never quite embracing republican practice, and in stronger terms, Sumner described South Carolina as “the persistent marplot of republican institutions.” These antirepublican states then acquired a defender and promoter. “False evangelist” John C. Calhoun of South Carolina openly rejected the fathers’ principles of republicanism when he “audaciously announced in the Senate that to declare all born free and equal was ‘the most dangerous of all political errors’; that it had ‘done more to retard the cause of liberty and civilization, and is doing more at present, than all other causes combined’; and that ‘we now begin to experience the danger of admitting so great an error to have a place in the Declaration of our Independence.’” Sumner commented, “To repel such effrontery is not enough; it must be scorned. . . . The whole assumption is ignoble, utterly unsupported by history, and insulting to the Fathers, while offensively illogical and irreligious.”22 But the effrontery had taken root. The oligarchic revolution spread from South Carolina and Georgia and eventually overtook other states where slavery had continued past the founding era. Having delivered his treatise on American republicanism to the U.S. Senate, Sumner vindicated the constitutional power of the guarantee clause and prepared his colleagues finally to deploy that power. The Republican Fathers and Slavery Why was slave state oligarchy allowed to grow, revolutionize, and supplant the republican system that was patronized, planned, and established by the American founders? Were the founders aware of the revolutionary effect that domestic slavery would bear upon their political establishments? Or did they unwittingly sow the seeds of their republican regime’s destruction by including slavery among the elements of their political society? The Republicans maintained that the founders opposed slavery on principle and did understand slavery’s antirepublican character and effects. Their new nation inherited but crippled slavery. Wounded, slavery was expected to die, but instead it escaped its intended mortality and then recovered and gained in strength. At the time of the American founding, the republican fathers and the public anathematized slavery. In the language of Representative Orris Ferry of Connecticut, the founders regarded slavery as an “unholy thing.” “Our fathers,” Thomas Shannon said, “were abolitionists.” Reflecting on the 113

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founders’ antislavery aims, William Fessenden remarked, “Of course they wanted it to die; they thought it ought to die; they desired that it should perish.”23 In 1854 Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio denied that “the founders of the Constitution were lovers of injustice and slavery.” Gentlemen “may preach until doomsday that the fathers believed slavery to be right,” but to say so was “a libel on them—­it is a gross slander upon their memories.” All the founders “whose names are held sacred, and are revered among the American people” treated “it as a great stigma upon the Republic which they had formed.” They wished that “the time would come, and come soon, when it would be blotted out forever. Not to wish this, would make them fiends instead of patriots.” Wade dared anyone in the august body to tell him “who it was in the olden times, in the better days of our Republic, that rose up as the advocate of eternal chains and slavery to any class of the human race.” Nobody of that description could “be found upon the record of those great men who made their impress on our Constitution.”24 In an 1858 speech to his constituents, Representative Jehu Baker of Illinois encouraged his listeners to “look back to the beginning of our government,” and they would “find that there was scarcely any difference of opinion in relation to slavery.” Not only in the North but also in the South, “and quite universally,” Americans regarded slavery as “a great and deplorable evil.” Baker quoted Daniel Webster, who had said that “the eminent men, the most eminent men, and nearly all the conspicuous politicians of the South, held the same sentiments; that slavery was an evil, a blight, a blast, a mildew, a scourge and a curse.” The founding generation “expected that on the stoppage of the importation of slaves, slavery would begin to run out, and gradually disappear from the country.” He called out the antislavery positions of “Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Henry, Lee, and the whole rank and file of illustrious men of that day.” Antislavery sentiment was the rule “with scarcely an exception. . . . Such was the original state of opinion in the whole country.” In 1860 Henry Dawes denied that any founders supported slavery, but said, “They all, with one accord, and with a concurrent and solemn testimony swelling into a volume, pronounced the institution of slavery an unmitigated wrong, a blighting curse to the land it rests upon, a sin and a crime in the people who gather its guilty fruits.”25 In the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court grounded its decision in an alternate history of slavery and the American founding, an account that John Hale gainsaid in 1858. The court had claimed, Hale said, that the 114

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right to hold and traffic in slaves “at the time of the American Revolution, and at the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution, was so universally acknowledged and recognized . . . that no man thought of disputing it.” Upon this alleged fact, it followed that “even the great and sublime truths which are embodied in the Declaration of Independence” did not apply to slaves. Hale retorted that the “the truth of history” showed otherwise.26 When challenged to vindicate the truth of history, Hale did what many Republicans routinely did—­they let loose a blast of research, reading the antislavery pronouncements of the fathers into the columns of the Congressional Globe.27 They especially quoted southern founders in the presence of the southern founders’ proslavery successors in Congress. At that time, numerous Reconstruction Republicans served in the Congress, and then it was that they developed the habit of reading folios of founding-­era antislavery quotations from public acts, speeches, and both private and public writings. These Republicans included Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, Representative Reuben Fenton of New York, Representative Charles Van Wyck of New York, Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin, Representative Thomas Eliot of Massachusetts, Representative Cadwallader Washburn of Wisconsin, Representative John Alley of Massachusetts, Representative James Ashley of Ohio, and Senator Waitman Willey of West Virginia.28 By far, they referred to and quoted the Declaration of Independence and its language, proclaiming that “all men are created equal” more than any other statements. Next most often, they quoted the Virginians, including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, George Mason, James Madison, and Patrick Henry. They quoted Jefferson’s attack on slavery’s injustice and warping effect on the character of masters, from his Notes on the State of Virginia. They highlighted Washington’s expressed hope that legislative measures would abolish slavery and his promise that he would always vote for abolition. They repeated Mason’s statements on slavery’s devastating effect on laboring whites and its “pernicious” effect on the morals of masters. They quoted Madison, who said that the Constitution should not acknowledge that men could be held as property, and Henry, who said that slavery was “as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to Liberty.”29 When Hale spoke, he said he could forgive the Supreme Court that decided the Dred Scott case almost anything but the claim that “the African race was not intended to be included” in the paragraph of the Declaration that began, “We hold these truths to be self-­evident, that all men are created 115

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equal.” If antebellum political strife, the Civil War, and Reconstruction are conceived as one long, epic drama, Hale’s impassioned defense of the fathers would be a fit choice for the speech that turned the downward trajectory of the plot and fairly represented his brethren and their movement that became the Republican Party. Moved by the impending loss of what they held most dear, they defected from their political parties and formed a new one that rallied like-­m inded Americans and stepped forward from the shadows. They would not let their inheritance from the fathers go down without a fight. Leading them, Hale flung their credenda at the advancing oligarchy. His speech here is excerpted at length: Sir, the men who framed the Declaration of Independence, the men who fought the battles of liberty; and the men who wrote our Constitution, understood the meaning of language quite as well as the Supreme Court, and if I were put on oath, I should say [they understood the meaning of language] a little better. They knew the circumstances in which they were placed; they knew the crisis in which they were called to live and to act; they knew that the experiment which had been made from the beginning of time up to that day, of free government, had been a failure; they knew that every effort and every attempt that oppressed man had made had failed; and they felt that to them, at that time, and at that day, was committed, by the Arbiter of national destiny, the great question to solve for themselves, for their posterity, for all coming time, the great problem whether man was capable of free government. They went into that contest fully understanding the character of the strife by which their position was to be maintained; fully sensible of the character of the contest upon which they had entered. They went into it, as has been well said on another occasion, poor in everything but faith and courage. They were without arms, without wealth, without even a name amongst the nations of the earth, rebel provinces; but they were strong in faith, strong in hope, strong in patriotic impulse, and strong in their reliance on the Most High; and they went, taking their lives, their fortunes, and their honors in their hand. They threw themselves into the world’s Thermopylae of that day, and they declared that they held certain great truths to be self-­evident, and that among these truths was, that all men were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Why? Not because it was written in the musty folios of speculating philosophers; not because it was found in the writings of patriots of other days; not because their fathers had vindicated on the field of battle their right to be free; not because the old British Commoners had brought King Charles to the block; not because their 116

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old Puritan ancestry, on the battle-­fields of Naseby and of Marston Moor, had written in their own blood, on their own country’s soil, their determination to be free. No, sir, none of all these; but they said that man was entitled to be free, because he was endowed by his Creator with that right. They stopped nothing short of the throne of eternity. They ignored all human reasons, all human platforms, and all human authority, and with unclouded eye fixed their gaze upon the eternal throne, and laid the foundation of the institutions, which they were to build upon the eternal justice of God. That, sir, is what the revolutionary fathers did; and when the contest was over, when the dust and the blood of battle had disappeared, and victory stood upon the flagstaff of their banner, these old men issued a declaration to the world. It was issued in 1780, the very year the war was over. “Let it be remembered,” say they, “finally, that it has ever been the pride and boast of America that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human nature.” They contended for no class, no condition. They contended for humanity. No matter, in the language of the Irish orator, what complexion, incompatible with liberty, an Indian or an African sun may have burned upon him, when he stands erect in the image of his Maker, a man, then say the fathers of the Revolution, “There stands one for whom we have fought; there stands a man who was involved in the great issues which led to the revolutionary war, and which we have vindicated with our blood.” They continue further: If justice, good faith, honor, gratitude, and all the other qualities which ennoble the character of a nation and fulfill the ends of government, be the fruits of our establishments; the cause of liberty will acquire a dignity and luster which it has never yet enjoyed, and an example will be set which cannot but have the most favorable influence on the rights of mankind. There is the idea; true to their principles, true to the avowals of public sentiment, with which they went into that contest.

When the American founders established independence with the declaration that “all men are created equal,” they did not mean “all white men,” “all free men,” or “all English speaking men.” They meant all members of the human family. They braved war to gain an improbable victory for this principle, which was the bedrock of their republicanism and the source of their antislavery sentiments. The Republicans maintained that everything that the founders said and did, including what they said and did about slavery, related to that principle like sunbeams related to the sun. Here was a hypothesis that 117

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the Republicans were willing to submit to the test of historical evidence, and they produced a large portion of historical evidence to prove their argument. The founders proscribed slavery not only on moral grounds but also on political grounds. They understood that slavery and republicanism were mortal threats to each other’s existence. Orris Ferry claimed he could bring forth “hundreds of expressions in the writings of the revolutionary fathers and of the framers of the Constitution, wherein slavery is spoken of as antagonistic to the principles of the Declaration.” John Bingham explained, “The fathers did deem the existence of this institution as incompatible with the safety of the Republic,” because they knew it was a “terrible and destructive element in our social system” and “knew well that slavery must be restricted and finally abolished, or the Republic would perish.” Henry Wilson referred to “the glorious fact that the founders of the Republic proclaimed slavery to be an evil—­a moral, social, and political evil.” As a political evil, slavery was always “an alien in America, an enemy to law and order, liberty and progress. The pages of our colonial history bear to us the amplest testimony that our fathers saw its malign influence.” At the time the Constitution was formed, said Representative Reader Clarke of Ohio, “the common sentiment” proscribed slavery both as “an outrage upon the rights of humanity” and as “a source of infinite danger if perpetuated.”30 In 1856 Senator Jacob Collamer of Vermont explained why the founders prohibited slavery in their first exercise of power under the Constitution. First, they did so “because . . . they believed that the institution was one which ought to end” and, second, due to slavery’s effects. “It was perfectly understood by our fathers . . . that where the institution was not abolished by the States themselves, it would, in its tendencies, produce a condition of society which did not comport with the great purposes, objects and views, and what was necessarily implied by popular government. Its necessary effect, it was seen, would be to elevate a limited number, and depress the mass of the white population.” Collamer conceded that “where an institution in the character of aristocracy exists,” the labor of others affords “wealth and opportunity” and “high cultivation” to “a particular set of men.” And nobody should be surprised that these men “should have a desire to cherish and sustain it.” But the effect on the majority of the free white population was opposed to the ends of that form of government established by the founders. Their vision was that the people “should conduct their labor with high intelligence, that they should be improved and elevated, and become a people better fed, better clothed, better housed, better governed, of higher intelligence, 118

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than any people under heaven.”31 That is, the founders knew that a republican nation and slavery were irreconcilable. During the war, Lovejoy quoted two founders’ acknowledgments of the mutual, inherent hostility between slavery and republicanism in order to remind his congressional colleagues that although the struggle that defenders of republicanism had been waging against slavery was eighty years old, it was a struggle necessarily mortal to one or the other. Exhorting his colleagues to move quickly toward emancipation, Lovejoy took the position that “either slavery or the Republic must perish; and the question for us to decide is, which shall it be?” To bear witness to the founders’ awareness of the irreconcilability of slavery and republicanism, he read aloud a passage by Jefferson that stated that “the liberties of a nation” can never be secure when the acceptance of slavery takes away “their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people, that these liberties are of the gift of God.” And he read from Maryland founder William Pinckney, who said, “Nothing is more clear, than that the effect of slavery is to destroy the reverence for liberty, which is the vital principle of a republic.” John Shanks said that “slavery is but treason against humanity,” leading easily “to treason against the free Government of our fathers.” He then read the same passage from Pinckney to show that the founders also knew that slavery and republicanism could never coexist. At different times, Wilson, Fenton, Lovejoy, and Willey all quoted a passage by Luther Martin, who forthrightly declared that slavery and republicanism opposed one another in irrepressible, mutual hostility: “Slavery is inconsistent with the genius of republicanism, has a tendency to destroy those principles on which it is supported, as it lessens the sense of equal rights of mankind, and habituates us to tyranny and oppression.”32 The Republicans did not need to pause to survey the history of the early Republic to their own troubled days to consider whether events had proved and fulfilled Martin’s theory. They experienced and bitterly felt its fulfillment all around them. Long before the ongoing war opened the veins of the nation, when Lovejoy quoted Martin’s words, a proslavery mob had murdered his abolitionist brother. The dissolution of republicanism in the slave states and the consequent struggle to defend and advance embattled republican liberty were aspects of their enveloping reality. If the republican fathers despised slavery—­ and feared the institution’s effects—­how did slavery enter into the political society of the founding generation? Addressing the House of Representatives in 1860, Reuben Fenton recalled, “When the declaration of our rights was proclaimed, . . . there 119

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existed among us an institution inconsistent with its great truths.”33 Fenton was reminding his hearers that when the Declaration of Independence inaugurated the birth of the United States of America, slavery already existed in every one of the colonies that collectively became the new nation. That inherited birth defect disturbed the “leading men of that day,” whose principles condemned the institution. Senator Gratz Brown of Missouri alluded to the founders’ discomfiture that slavery was “at war in theory with the Declaration of Independence upon which the colonies had reposed their cause.” Richard Yates said that when the fathers “came to form a Government, they encountered an institution which was hostile to the principle which they attempted to establish.”34 The Republicans recalled the founders’ consternation toward Britain for fastening slavery to their country. Representative John Rice of Maine remembered that “the abnormal anti-­republican system of African slavery” had been “unjustly forced upon the unwilling colonies by their unnatural mother, against the protestations of our revolutionary sires.” On account of that wrong and “other wrongs and oppressions, they asserted and won their independence.” To prove this fact, Gratz Brown also recalled, “When the resolutions were passed by the Assembly of Virginia, prior to the war, it was made one of the formal charges against the King of Great Britain that he had interfered with his veto to prohibit the abolition of slavery.” Many Republicans read aloud that charge, drafted by Jefferson, which stated that “the abolition of domestic slavery is the greatest object of desire in these colonies” and that the importation of slaves was “injurious to the lasting interests of the American states, and the rights of human nature.”35 Henry Wilson and Jacob Collamer recounted in detail how Britain planted slavery in America. British merchants profiting from slavery influenced the colonial and commercial policy of England to their advantage. The Parliament and the Crown collaborated to extend and protect slavery in the American colonies. Queen Anne even instructed the governors of New York and New Jersey to support the Royal African Company. When opposition arose in America and Britain, slavery was already a significant element in American society. Before American society became the American nation, “British avarice planted slavery in America; British legislation nurtured and sustained it; British statesmen sanctioned and guarded it.” Because the American colonies were governed and did not govern themselves, they could not stop the trade. They did protest. From 1762 until independence, “the popular leaders in New England, the middle colonies and Virginia” acknowledged 120

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“the wrongfulness of slavery” and denounced “the slave traffic and the slave-­ extending policy of the British Government.” Colonial legislatures attempted to block the importation of slaves into the colonies. Their laws opposing slave importations were “scattered along the records of colonial legislation.” The Virginia Legislature enacted a law taxing slave importations, but the Royal African Company obtained its repeal. The British government overawed every attempt of the colonies to thwart, in the language of James Madison, “this infernal traffic.” The government persisted at forcing the slave trade upon the colonies until their political bands dissolved. As late as 1775, the Earl of Dartmouth maintained that the colonies would not be allowed to “check or discourage, in any degree, a traffic so beneficial to the nation.” The historical record proved that the American revolutionaries “were not only hostile to the slave trade, but to the perpetual existence of slavery itself.”36 American political society inherited slavery, and many Americans who served in colonial governments, led the Revolution, and resisted the British government’s policy personally owned slaves. But Wade would “not charge Thomas Jefferson, nor Mr. Madison, nor General Washington, nor Mr. Randolph, nor Mr. Tucker, nor any other of the great statesmen to whom we look up with such reverence, with hypocrisy, or anything sinister or wrong.” Though “they held slaves,” this fact did not prevent them from speaking out in one voice that slavery “was an infringement on natural right”; neither “did it prevent them, on all occasions, from inveighing against the institution.” Reader Clarke acknowledged that “Washington, Jefferson, Madison and their compeers” held slaves, but they “were never imbued with its spirit, never justified it, never by one word in all their writings gave it their sanction; but through all their lives looked and prayed and labored for its abolition.” Those who equated the founders’ “temporary and unwilling connection with it as its perfect sanctification” were guilty of “an audacity that rises to the sublime.”37 As the bonds connecting America to the mother country began snapping, the founding generation acted against slavery. Wade asserted, “They made use of all the means within the legitimate compass of their power” to doom slavery. Jehu Baker claimed that “the acts of those great men . . . corresponded with the prevailing opinion of the time.”38 Demonstrating that antislavery action took hold of the national government when it first breathed, Thomas Eliot reminded his congressional colleagues, “Our earliest legislative anti-­slavery society was our first continental Congress” in 1774.39 Several Republicans recalled what that First Congress 121

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had done. The Congress declared, “God never intended a part of the human race to hold property in, and unbounded power over, others.”40 The second article of association organizing the Continental Congress of the United States said: “That we will neither import nor purchase any slave imported after the 1st day of December next, after which time we will wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities nor manufactures, to those who are concerned in it.” The fourteenth article ostracized anyone who violated the aforesaid second article of association: “And we do further agree and resolve, that we will have no trade, commerce, dealings, or intercourse whatsoever with any colony or province in North America which should not accede to, or which shall hereafter violate this association, but will hold them as unworthy of the rights of freemen, and as inimical to the liberties of this country.” It was noted that southerners George Washington, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, and John Rutledge and Edward Rutledge from South Carolina signed that agreement.41 Highlighting the antislavery acts of southerners in the founding era, John Hale quoted a resolution of the first Provincial Congress of North Carolina in 1774, which said that “we will not import any slave or slaves or purchase any slave or slaves imported or brought into this Province by others, from any part of the world, after the 1st day of November next.” He also quoted an act of the Provincial Congress of Georgia in 1775, which said that “we will neither import nor purchase any slave imported from Africa, or elsewhere, after the 15th day of March next.”42 Before the war broke out, Reuben Fenton recalled, a town meeting in Danbury, Connecticut, agreed to import no more slaves, declaring, “We cannot but think it a palpable absurdity so loudly to complain of attempts to enslave us, while we are actually enslaving others.”43 As Fenton and Charles Van Wyck separately showed, a meeting of citizens in Darien, Georgia, in 1775 declared a similar determination: To show the world that we are not influenced by any interested or contracted motives, but a general philanthropy for all mankind, of whatever language or complexion, we hereby declare our disapprobation and abhorrence of the unnatural practice of slavery in America—­a practice founded in injustice and cruelty, and highly dangerous to our liberties, debasing part of our fellow-­ creatures below men and corrupting the virtue and morals of the rest, and is laying the basis of that liberty we contend for upon a very wrong foundation. 122

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We therefore resolve at all times to use our utmost endeavors for the manumission of our slaves in this colony, upon the most safe and equitable footing for the masters and themselves.44

Before the Federal Convention met in 1787, two states, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, had completely abolished slavery in a manner demonstrating that natural rights principles were given legal standing against slavery. In separate instances, Henry Wilson and John Alley, both of Massachusetts, and Daniel Clark and John Hale, both of New Hampshire, recalled how this was done. Both states had included declarations of the equal, natural rights of mankind in their newly ratified state constitutions. In substance, those declaratory statements did not differ from the natural rights doctrine in the national Declaration of Independence or in many states’ bills of rights in their new constitutions. On the basis of those declarations, the courts of both states decided that their constitutions did not recognize slavery’s legal existence and that holding persons in bondage by custom was unconstitutional.45 These decisions suggested that, by extension, the national Declaration of Independence and the various state constitutions’ bills of rights recognizing natural equality could also be construed to forbid holding persons in bondage. Only positive recognition of slavery in state or national organic law could interfere with a state or national court from reaching the same decision on similar grounds. Isaac Arnold recounted that other states abolished slavery by legislation: Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1784; New York, by gradual emancipation, in 1799; and New Jersey, by gradual emancipation, in 1804. In different years, Hale and Representative James Rollins of Missouri quoted one such act of emancipation, the act to gradually abolish slavery in Pennsylvania in 1780, penned by Benjamin Franklin. The act said that slavery had “deprived them of the common blessing they were by nature entitled to,” which Rollins and Hale quoted to show that the act was justified by the principles of the revolution.46 Hale and Eliot both reminded Congress of an extraordinary effort by the national government, still before the Federal Convention, that would have sooner sealed the national abolition of slavery. In the Congress under the Articles of Confederation in 1784, one year after the Treaty of Paris formally ended the war, Jefferson moved that all territory then held by the national government or acquired in the future “should be forever free from what he considered the contaminating and blighting influences of human slavery.” 123

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Two southerners, Jefferson and Chase of Maryland, had a place on the committee that reported the draft bill. The report divided the territory then held and expected to be acquired by state cession into seventeen anticipated states, nine above the Ohio River and eight below. Thus, the committee had proposed to prohibit slavery from all future territories. Due to the peculiar requirements of the Articles of Confederation, the committee report failed, though six states and sixteen members voted for it against three states and seven members.47 The vote nevertheless showed that a majority of national representatives in Congress favored forever prohibiting slavery from all land the nation would henceforth acquire. Slavery narrowly escaped restriction to only the original states that had hitherto not yet abolished it. The delegates who met to revise the constitution of the national government brought with them their natural rights convictions. After quoting Washington’s antislavery opinions, Fenton reminded his congressional colleagues that the southerner presided over the convention of men who framed a constitution designed to “secure and perpetuate to themselves and posterity union, freedom, and happiness,” and those men agreed with Washington “with equal force and emphasis . . . against this evil, the wrong, and curse of human bondage.”48 The Republicans argued that these convictions influenced the development of the delegates’ new plan for the national government. In their general view, the Constitution was antislavery in spirit and used reticent language toward slavery when confronting it. To be sure, very few Republicans who served during Reconstruction came close to declaring publicly at any time that slavery was or had been unconstitutional, but they did recognize a basis on which to make that argument. At minimum, they agreed that the founders had not legally established slavery in the Constitution. Hale invoked evidence to prove that the founders “thought slavery ought not to be countenanced and allowed in the Constitution.” The delegates in the Federal Convention altered the text of the emerging Constitution consistent with their opposition to slavery. A drafted clause concerning the enumeration of population “fixed the number and said, ‘including those bound to servitude.’” But Randolph of Virginia “moved to strike out the word ‘servitude,’ and insert ‘service’ in its stead; because the word ‘servitude’ implied the condition of slaves, and ‘service’ described the obligations of free persons.” Hale added that, in the convention, James Madison objected to the use of the word slave, saying that he “thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.” In harmony 124

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with the Declaration, the Constitution, Ferry argued, “purposely, carefully, guardedly, ignores the very existence of such property.” Even the Fugitive Slave Clause eschews using the word slave, indirectly referring to those commonly called slaves but directly calling them persons, which denies they were property. The clause, Ferry said, “does not purport to restore merchandise to its owner, but a debtor to his creditor; representation and direct taxation are to be apportioned among the several States, according to an enumeration of persons, not according to an enrollment of property.”49 Under the Constitution, in his view, no man lost the title of his own person to another, but the Constitution did recognize that one man might owe a debt in labor to another. The difference between one man owning a title in another and one man held to a debt of labor to another was significant. An owned man has no rights and is chattel property; a man owing a debt of labor does have rights, the exercise of which might be limited by law or contract. But, as Jacob Collamer pointed out, the Constitution did not create the debt in labor one man owed to another. The so-­called Fugitive Slave Clause merely mandated the enforcement of that debt, if such a debt existed, and its enforcement involved a diversity of states. The “language of the Constitution,” Collamer quoted, was “‘held to service.’—­how? Under the laws of another State. ‘Held to service under the laws thereof,’ is the language.” Therefore, the Constitution did not recognize any man as property. It did recognize that some may owe a debt in labor to another, but debts in labor were not the creation of the Constitution. Collamer maintained that the Constitution’s allusion to “the laws thereof ” implied that the debt in labor was created by the states, or was a contract permitted by state law, and was not the creation of the Constitution. The common name given to the so-­called Fugitive Slave Clause after the drafting of the Constitution was, speaking in precise terms, the Fugitive Laborer Clause, because it could equally apply to persons commonly known as slaves or to a contracted employee or apprentice. Hence, the clause did not legally recognize a difference between a black American fleeing bondage and the young Ben Franklin fleeing contracted apprenticeship with his brother. Collamer went further with his proof. If a “man bound to service in one State escapes into another State, is he property there? Can the master go and take him there, and keep him there, and sell him there, and use him there? If he is like other property . . . all that would be true; but we know it is not. That provision of the Constitution declares all laws of other States that would release him from the service void; that is all.” 125

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Had the clause established and recognized “property in man,” state and territorial laws prohibiting slavery would all be unconstitutional. In that case, a master from the slave state of Maryland could retrieve an escaped slave in the otherwise free state of Pennsylvania and use the slave and sell the slave in Pennsylvania, just as a master could retrieve, use, and sell a horse. Any interdiction of the master’s disposal of the slave or horse in Pennsylvania would deprive the master of his property without due process of law, which was the basis of the later Dred Scott decision. But Collamer believed that the truth was otherwise, which meant that the Constitution merely tolerated state laws that allowed holding, limiting, and prohibiting persons bound to service, but it never recognized the constitutionality of chattel slavery. In support of his position, Collamer cited the case Prigg v. Pennsylvania, which found, “The state of slavery is deemed to be a mere municipal regulation, founded upon and limited to the range of territorial laws.” This meant that slavery was a local creation, not the creation of the Constitution. But even the Prigg decision said more than what was warranted, because the Constitution did not at all recognize the “state of slavery,” the right of man to hold property title in any other man.50 Because the Constitution did not recognize property in another man, Daniel Gooch supposed that when “two men leave a State, one man being the slave of the other,” and voluntarily enter “into another,—­where slavery is not recognized . . ., neither has any right to claim the other as a slave.” When prompted by a Southern representative, “By what law?” Gooch did not hesitate and linked natural equality in the Declaration to the equal privileges bestowed upon citizens by the Constitution: “By the law of nature; by the fact that the two men were made by God, and were entitled originally to equal rights and privileges. . . . [T]hey assume the position which God intended them to occupy, and stand upon an equality before God, and before the laws.” Outside the jurisdiction of a state that limited the rights and privileges of a person held to labor, the debtor-­creditor relationship of the putative master and slave fell away, and both were recognized as equal before the Constitution, which embodied the natural equality principle of the Declaration. So convinced was Representative Robert Hale of New York that “the institution of slavery itself has existed in defiance of the provisions of the bill of rights,” that “it was an anomaly under the Constitution,” and that “under the strict language of the Constitution,” he could not see “how it ever could have been claimed to exist.” Of course, he acknowledged it had existed, but he was distinguishing its constitutional existence from its existence by custom or state law.51 126

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In 1864 Gratz Brown also quoted Madison’s objection, noting the strange incongruity between the delegates’ free use of the word slave in their debate and discussions and their abstention from using the word slave in the Constitution’s text. From this, Brown reasoned, it was “very clear” that the founders “must have had an intention to subserve some public end when they deliberately left out of the instrument, which is the charter of our liberties, the word ‘slave.’” That public end was “to exclude from that Constitution any national recognition of slavery, to avoid any national obligation to foster or protect it, and to keep that noble muniment of our political rights free from reproach.” Also in 1864, John Farnsworth argued that when the framers adopted the Constitution, “the greatest care was taken that no words should be incorporated into that instrument which would imply that ‘man could hold property in man.’” Noting that this was Madison’s “very language” when objecting to the use of the words slave or slavery, Farnsworth added, “You may search through the Constitution from the beginning to the conclusion of it, and no stranger to the fact that slavery has existed in the United States would believe for a moment that slavery could exist under it.” This deliberate abstention from using the word slave, Farnsworth argued, showed principled consistency, for the revolutionaries had previously declared their independence while declaring the “self-­evident facts that all men were created equal, and endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”52 John Bingham apprehended that the Fifth Amendment, which protected the rights of life, liberty, and property, together with the Sixth Amendment, constituted a conflict with slavery. He communicated this indirectly, stating, “If Ohio had tolerated involuntary slavery by her constitution, or had denied to any man protection of life, liberty, or property, or trial by jury, her constitution would have been . . . violative of the fifth and sixth amendments of the Constitution of the United States.”53 The obvious inference was that states permitting involuntary slavery, whether by law or custom, were in violation of those parts of the Constitution. All of their arguments aimed at revealing how the founders’ Constitution undermined slavery. By not recognizing slavery at all, the wording of its text ameliorated the legal condition of those regarded as slaves by state law or by state custom. Slavery was commonly known to exist in the land, but it was legally unknown to exist by the Constitution that governed the land. Within the purview of the Constitution, those actually in slavery were to be regarded as persons held to labor, as persons imported for labor, and as persons 127

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specially enumerated for purposes of legislative apportionment. Persons were recognized as bearing rights by the Constitution, whether states’ organic or statutory laws stripped or protected those rights or not. As far as the Constitution was concerned, persons held to labor were not to be construed as chattel property, lacking equal, unalienable rights. The constitutional text weakened the standing of customary slavery from the perspective of the national government. The Republicans always accepted and insisted upon the similitude of the principles behind the Constitution and the principles stated by the Declaration. Representative Josiah Grinnell of Iowa claimed, “The great expounders of our Constitution have said that the Declaration of Independence itself, proclaiming all men free and equal, laid the cornerstone of our Confederacy.” When a Southern congressman asked Gooch whether the Declaration’s “higher law,” that is, “the law of nature,” overruled the provisions of the Constitution, he answered, “I tell him no. I consider the Constitution of the United States to be in accordance and in agreement with the law of nature. I consider that the Constitution of the United States does not provide for and establish the existence of slavery. The men who framed the Constitution of the United States never intended to make a Government which was to uphold and be responsible for the existence of slavery.”54 Confronted by the brute reality of slavery existing by custom, the framers nevertheless had drafted the text of the Constitution in faithful accord with the Declaration. The implication was that the framers had left behind legal ground upon which to press a constitutional case that would nationally abolish slavery, should that legal ground ever be necessary. But here the Republicans stopped short of pressing that argument. Although their demonstrations shed light on the plausible constitutionality of the position, most shied away from directly embracing it. In 1856 William Fessenden identified “a very small class, a very powerless class,” the “ultra-­Abolitionists,” who professed that “under the Constitution there is power to abolish slavery in the States, and who avow a willingness to exercise that power.” They numbered only a few and had “no power to be represented in those opinions here [in the Senate].” The “creed of the Republican party” did not accept, and “no paper of the Republican party . . . ever advocated the doctrine of the ultra-­Abolitionists.” Henry Wilson openly acknowledged that some “radical abolitionists” did espouse the view that the Supreme Court could and should emancipate all slaves in America on the same ground that the Massachusetts Supreme Court had done, but he denied that the Republican Party shared 128

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that belief. James Doolittle rejected the argument of Lysander Spooner, who had said that the Constitution “of itself, abolished slavery,” that is, completely abolished it legally but not practically. In Spooner’s opinion, slavery’s continuance since the founding was, therefore, unconstitutional but unremedied. This argument, Doolittle announced, “has not, in my opinion, the shadow of a foundation.”55 Fessenden, Wilson, and Doolittle, among others, publicly disavowed the unconstitutionality of slavery before secession, when the nation felt the strain of possible disunion. It is difficult to know to what extent these disavowals reflected prudence rather than their true constitutional judgment. As party leaders and high officeholders in the government before the war, it seems plainly obvious that they would have destroyed the possibility of peacefully securing their aims had they publicly declared slavery’s unconstitutionality, as Spooner and some other abolitionists did maintain. From the point of view of political calculation, they would have gained nothing. It seems highly improbable that a court decision freeing slaves in Southern states could have been reached. If reached, it was not likely that the decision could be politically sustained. The political sustainability of prohibiting slavery in the territories by congressional legislation and placing slavery on the course of gradual extinction seemed prospectively more plausible. Notwithstanding the Republican Party’s avowals of that more moderate position, the victory of the presidential candidate from that party sufficed to precipitate Southern secession. Given that before the war the Southern statesmen were willing to secede at the victory of a moderate platform, prudence dictated that if the true constitutional judgment of some or many Republicans was that slavery was unconstitutional, they should keep those views silent. But amid the new political conditions changed by civil war, Josiah Grinnell hinted that he did believe in the unconstitutionality of slavery when he expressed the wish “to see slavery wiped out here by a legal decision and announced by a chief justice.”56 Although Grinnell did not mention the decisions of the Massachusetts and New Hampshire courts holding slavery unconstitutional, those courts supplied precedents. The Declaration and the Constitution were both organic laws of the United States in the federal code, and, read together, they supplied the same textual ground that the Massachusetts and New Hampshire courts used to declare slavery unconstitutional. The Constitution did not positively affirm the legal recognition of slavery, and the Declaration of Independence flatly collided with slavery. 129

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If the Republicans believed that the founders deliberately placed slavery on shaky ground under their Constitution, the question remains why the founders did not employ or threaten to employ the federal courts to end slaveholding at a much earlier date. Isaac Arnold explained that the founders did not foresee slavery’s extension and that they thought “moral, legal, and constitutional means” would suffice to finish it off. They expected “public opinion” would render “its final verdict through the ballot” and “would consummate universal liberty throughout the land.” Many Republicans quoted a letter from George Washington to Robert Morris in 1786, in which he wrote, “There is only one proper and effectual mode by which [abolition] can be accomplished, and that is by legislative authority.”57 The Republican view was that the founders thought the wisest course was to frame organic laws that were hostile in principle to slavery and to tolerate slavery until the will of the people, through their legislatures, achieved final abolition. However, because the new breed of Southern statesmen, the proslavery oligarchs, had gained control of their state governments and exerted disproportionate influence over the national government, as the Republicans believed they had, the antislavery sentiments of the people, whose interests were harmed by slavery, could not bring about this conclusion. The Federal Convention had attempted to weaken slavery in another way: by restricting the ingress of slavery into the territories. John Bingham said, “When the original draft of that great instrument was reported to the convention, the provision which authorized the admission of new States into the Union contained the expressive words that ‘new States may be admitted into the Union upon the same terms with the original States.’” The convention struck out the words of that clause, because the Constitution had reserved the power of continuing the slave trade to the original states for twenty years. By striking out that clause, the delegates foreclosed the possibility that newly admitted states might invoke constitutional authority to carry on the slave trade for twenty years, just as the original states were allowed to do. Foreseeing this possible interpretation, the “fathers of the Constitution were determined that no such privilege should be guarantied or extended to any new States organized under this Constitution and admitted thereafter into the Union. . . . These words were struck out purposely, that the new States organized thereafter should not come into the Union possessed of [that] power.”58 By its ordinary enactments, the early American government struck blows against slavery on the western territorial flank. As many Republicans did, John Hale held up the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed by the Congress 130

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under the Articles of Confederation and then reenacted by the U.S. Congress, which prohibited slavery from all territory the United States then owned. Jehu Baker added that when Congress framed the ordinance, governing the territory that became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, “every member of every slaveholding State voted” for it. Furthermore, when Congress “was five times applied to for a suspension of that portion of the ordinance which prohibited slavery,” Congress refused every time.59 Doolittle recalled one of these instances, when the Indiana Territory petitioned Congress during Jefferson’s administration. Virginian John Randolph, chairman of the special committee organized to consider the petition, reported against the request, saying it would be “highly dangerous and inexpedient to impair a provision wisely calculated to promote the growth and prosperity of the Northwest Territory.” Bingham referred to the enabling act passed by Congress and approved by President Jefferson in 1802, by which the Ohio Territory was invited to form a constitution and apply for statehood. The act qualified that invitation with the condition that the state government “shall be republican in form and NOT REPUGNANT to the [Northwest] Ordinance of July 13, 1787,” which prohibited slavery.60 Bingham then pointed to similar enabling acts, prescribing the same conditions for the Indiana Territory in 1816 and approved by President Madison and for the Illinois Territory in 1818 and approved by President Monroe. President Jackson approved of an act of Congress passed in 1836 that organized the Wisconsin Territory (which covered the future states of Wisconsin and Iowa) and that similarly required all that the Northwest Ordinance required, including the prohibition of slavery. Thomas Eliot and Bingham cited a 1798 act of Congress that prohibited the foreign importation of slaves into the newly acquired Mississippi Territory, an 1803 act that prohibited slaves in the newly organized Indiana Territory, and an 1804 act that prohibited the foreign importation of slaves in the Orleans Territory.61 Such deeds, James Alley said, proved that “the avowed and determined policy” of “the fathers of the Republic” was to “make ‘freedom national and slavery sectional,’” a policy that “met with little or no opposition North or South.”62 With respect to the provision in the Constitution that barred Congress from prohibiting the slave trade until 1808, Gooch refuted proslavery statesmen, who had argued that the provision “recognizes and provides for the existence of slavery.” He claimed, “Just the reverse is true.” Every one of the thirteen states, he observed, “had the power to continue the slave trade as 131

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long as it might please,” but “yielded up that power to a Government which they knew would suppress it as soon as it had authority to do so.” Therefore, the provision showed that “the United States Government was intended and expected to be hostile to slavery and the slave trade. That power was exercised by this Government at the earliest possible moment.”63 Furthermore, before the expected ban on the slave trade, other means of frustrating the trade could be and were employed. Although Madison regretted the postponement to 1808, as Cadwallader Washburn noted, he nevertheless predicted that the trade would receive “considerable discouragement from the Federal Government.” Madison foresaw that “the prohibitory example which has been given by so great a majority [of states] of the Union” might pressure the “few states which continue the unnatural traffic.” In fact, many states did abolish the trade prior to 1808, and as a member of the early Congress, Madison acted to lead the federal government in discouraging the trade that remained. Representative Justin Morrill of Vermont recalled that “Madison and many other southern men in Congress” had tried to hamper the trade by imposing a tax on imported slaves prior to that year, when some states still allowed slave importations. But on January 1, 1808, the first year that the Constitution permitted Congress to ban the importation of slaves, the law banning the trade “was already on the statute-­book.” By banning the trade, argued Thomas Shannon, “no new additions were to be made to the stock of slaves then in the country, and it was believed that gradually and without a jar to the Federal system it would become extinct.”64 Having hemmed in slavery, denying it replenishment from the eastern ocean, denying it an outlet in the West, and having abolished it in most of the original thirteen states, the founders believed they had cornered and doomed slavery. The Republicans quoted the founders’ approving predictions of slavery’s final demise. Henry Wilson quoted Oliver Ellsworth in the Federal Convention, who predicted that “slavery would soon be only a speck in the country.” James Doolittle and Waitman Willey quoted a 1798 letter from Washington to Lafayette in which he discussed the antislavery effect of the Northwest Ordinance, predicting the eventuality of “a confederacy of free states.” Cadwallader Washburn quoted a 1785 letter from Jefferson to Dr. Price, in which he predicted emancipation in Virginia, “the next State to which we may turn our eyes for the interesting spectacle of justice.” Washburn and Willey quoted an 1814 letter from Jefferson to Edward Coles, in which he said, “The hour of emancipation is advancing” and predicted that it would not “fail to prevail in the end.” Reuben Fenton, Doolittle, and 132

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Washburn quoted a message from Jefferson in 1821, in which he said, “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free.”65 Many quoted Patrick Henry’s 1773 letter to Robert Pleasants, in which he predicted, “I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.”66 “The old fathers,” John Farnsworth said, “who made the Constitution,” and who “fought the battles of the Revolution, fought for the rights of human nature, and they believed that slavery was at war with human nature.” In framing “the Constitution upon such a base, they believed that slavery would die, and that speedily.” Isaac Arnold claimed it was “historically demonstrable that the framers of the Constitution in organizing the Government tolerated the existence of slavery as a temporary evil which they believed was in the course of ultimate extinction. They never intended it should be extended beyond the limits of the States in which it then existed.” Due to the strength of antislavery sentiment and statesmanship during the founding era, “Then, slavery was expected to speedily die out,” according to Justin Morrill. James Ashley maintained that the founders “confidently expected” that “with the adoption of the Constitution slavery would cease to exist.” Daniel Morris averred that the founders “expected it would become extinct under the workings of the Constitution.” Reflecting on the principles and deeds of the founding generation, Daniel Clark asked, “Was slavery to die out? So said and so I think believed the fathers.”67 Constraints on the Republican Fathers The founders’ “toleration of slavery,” Charles Sumner said, was “absolutely exceptional” to their republican ideas and political establishments. If the founders believed that slavery was inconsistent with and posed a great danger to their republicanism, why did they tolerate the exception of slavery at all? As Daniel Clark remarked, why hadn’t the founders’ Constitution explicitly “provided for its gradual extinction in the old States and its utter exclusion from the new”? When the Republicans surveyed why the founders had not done more to annihilate slavery, their discussions pointed to a common answer: South Carolina and Georgia. Although slavery was common to all the states at the moment of national independence, and although other states contained higher numbers of slaves, slavery’s influence on those two political societies was different. Slavery appeared to have always been more deeply embedded in their political character. Those states in particular, said Representative Burt Van Horn of New York, had always “been opposed to 133

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republican government.” They joined the Union and assented to its principles, not because they believed those principles were right but to satisfy other interests.68 From the beginning, South Carolina and Georgia fitted uncomfortably into the Republic. The representatives of South Carolina and Georgia successfully opposed the slave-­trade proscription in the first draft of the Declaration. Jefferson’s draft reported to the Continental Congress included reproaches of the British king for sanctioning the slave trade. The text, quoted by Cadwallader Washburn, James Doolittle, John Henderson, and other Republicans, denounced the trade but, they argued, was equally applicable to slavery, describing the trade as “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people.” It emphasized that these persons were not chattel but “men” and referred to their captures as “crimes committed against the liberties of one people.”69 In Henry Wilson’s account, the representatives who won the exclusion of that language came from “a small but powerful class, which clung, in South Carolina and Georgia, with relentless tenacity, to the British slave-­trading and slave-­extending and slave-­ perpetuating policy.” Those states had already “broken the second article of the association of union, which prohibited the importation and the traffic in slaves.” 70 Those states had also exhibited unusually strong pro-­British sympathies during the Revolutionary War. Charles Van Wyck recounted that Tories in South Carolina and Georgia furnished sufficient numbers of soldiers to open “a new seat of war” in the conflict. Endeavoring to make some show of courtesy and avoid naked imputation, he paid tribute to the remembered patriots of that section, mixing praise for them with the claim that most were Tories who had not fully embraced the revolutionary cause for republicanism. Those Tories’ “descendants are numerous on that soil,” Van Wyck claimed, and “with their blood seem to have descended their principles.” Francis Kellogg dubbed South Carolina “famous for Tories and traitors in our Revolution.” During the Revolution, Representative George Julian claimed, South Carolina “swarmed with royalists and [T]ories.” The Carolinians who fought for the American Revolution were aristocrats who fought for their political interests and not for the principle of the struggle, for, “like the rebels now in arms against us,” they “loved slavery more than they loved their country.” “In South Carolina,” James Garfield said, “it is claimed that there were more Royalists than Whigs,” that is, more Tories than revolutionary patriots.71 134

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With characteristic thoroughness, Charles Sumner presented research in 1854, showing that South Carolina had lagged in supporting the revolutionary cause. He did this in rebuttal to a senator from that state who had attributed the success of American independence to slaveholding. Sumner viewed this as an attempt to rewrite history, adding the weighty reputations of the revolutionary patriots to the effort to extend and protect slavery. During the course of his remarks, Sumner mentioned that, in 1790, the War Department, administered by General Henry Knox, produced a report by the order of Congress on the relative contributions of men to the army during the war. Although the 1790 census showed an equality of population between northern and southern states, northern states furnished three men to the Continental army for each man furnished by southern states and four men to the militia for each man furnished by the southern states. “But the disparity swells,” Sumner continued, when comparing Massachusetts to South Carolina. Of Continental troops and authenticated militia, Massachusetts furnished 83,092 men, while South Carolina furnished 5,508 men, a difference of 16 to 1. In 1778 the regular troops in the southern department of the war were supplied by South Carolina and Georgia and numbered 800 men. The next year, the South Carolina governor offered a proposal to the British to make his state neutral. Washington sent General Nathanael Greene, a Rhode Island native, to rescue that section of the country. Greene reported, “The Whigs seem determined to extirpate the Tories, and the Tories the Whigs. . . . If a stop cannot be soon put to these massacres, the country will be depopulated in a few months more, as neither Whig nor Tory can live.” 72 After Sumner’s presentation, an acrimonious debate ensued in both houses of Congress regarding South Carolina’s conduct in the Revolution, a debate that renewed in 1856. At that time, Henry Wilson entered the field, drawing evidence from the testimony of both Continental army officers and Carolina authorities. Whereas Bostonians forced the British to realize they were not safe in Massachusetts, “where friends always find a welcome, and foes are apt to find a grave,” the British settled comfortably in Charleston. They were well provisioned and unmolested by the city population, while Greene’s army was starving in the country. South Carolina “had a large class of Tories. There was a civil war in that State, and more than that, thousands and tens of thousands of her sons sought protection by the British flag.” Wilson quoted Greene, who had said that Carolinians exhibited “far greater attachment to their interests than zeal for the service of their country.” At another time, Wilson quoted the testimony of South Carolina patriot Francis Marion. 135

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When Baron DeKalb “expressed amazement that so many ‘South Carolinians were running to take British protections,’” Marion answered, “The people of Carolina form two classes, the rich and the poor. The poor are very poor: the rich, who have slaves to do all their work, give them no employment. Unsupported by the rich, they continue poor and low-­spirited.” The poor were uneducated; “hence, they know nothing of the comparative blessings of our country, or the dangers which threaten it; therefore, they care nothing about it. The rich are generally very rich; afraid to stir lest the British should burn their houses, and carry off their negroes.” Marion explained that “ignorance begat toryism” in Carolina, against which he contrasted New England and its republican people. There, “Religion had taught them . . . that virtue is not to be attained without knowledge; nor knowledge without instruction; nor public instruction without free schools.” The abundance of Tory sympathies and indifference to the wrong of slavery reflected the fact that the population of South Carolina, both rich and poor, generally lacked New England’s republican character. Waitman Willey concurred with Wilson. In South Carolina during the Revolution, he said, “The attachment of the people to aristocratic institutions of the mother country was the hardest to subdue. This attachment was never wholly extinguished.” 73 James Garfield and William Kelley distinguished South Carolina’s unrepublican character from all the other states, free and slave alike, in another respect: the state’s opposition to free black suffrage. When the Continental Congress discussed the Articles of Confederation in 1778, the fourth article came up for debate. It said, “The free inhabitants of each of these States . . . shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states.” South Carolina moved to change the text of the article from “free inhabitants” to “free white inhabitants.” Congress voted down the motion. Kelley recalled this event as well as the South Carolina delegates’ persistence. Having lost the vote, they moved to amend the text in another way, replacing “the several states” with “according to the law of such States respectively for the government of their own free white inhabitants.” The Congress defeated this motion as well. Through the Revolutionary War and the adoption of the Constitution in 1788, only South Carolina’s state constitution “refused the right of suffrage to the negro.” Kelley quoted from the revolutionary-­ era state constitutions, which did not acknowledge color in providing for suffrage, and contrasted the South Carolina Constitution, which began its suffrage qualifications with the statement “every free white man.” Garfield observed that between 1789 and 1812, “Congress passed ten separate laws 136

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establishing new Territories,” and in all of them, “freedom, and not color, was the basis of suffrage.” This changed in 1812 when South Carolina successfully led the insertion of the word white in the “suffrage clause of the act establishing a territorial government for Missouri.” While most states, slave states included, had not acknowledged color as a precondition of suffrage, South Carolina always had.74 John Henderson distinguished South Carolina and Georgia’s policies toward slavery from all other states at the time of the Constitution’s adoption. Virginia held about half of the nation’s five hundred thousand slaves. Three-­ quarters of the remaining number were distributed equally among Maryland, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Virginia had resisted the British slave-­ trade policy and, as a new state, had immediately abolished it. Maryland and North Carolina had also prohibited the further importation of slaves. Georgia had resisted slave importations during the colonial period but, due “to the clamor of a few,” had changed policy. When the Constitution was adopted, Georgia still had few slaves, about the same number as New York. Though Georgia and South Carolina together contained 20 percent of the slaves owned in all the states, they alone “seemed determined on retaining it as an institution.” 75 In convention, representatives from Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina all spoke against slavery and the slave trade, which they wished to see immediately abolished by the Constitution. But Charles Pinckney, C. C. Pinckney, and the Rutledges, all of South Carolina, as well as Abraham Baldwin of Georgia, all contended that their states would not ratify the Constitution if it abolished the slave trade. Oliver Ellsworth and Roger Sherman of Connecticut palliated the convention’s dislike of leaving the slave trade intact, both men observing that slavery was becoming extinct. The committee considering the question recommended allowing the trade until 1800 and allowing a tax on imported slaves. C. C. Pinckney successfully pressed the convention to extend the year from 1800 to 1808. This was accepted, but after the Constitution’s ratification, all the states but one banned the slave trade on their own. The notable exception was South Carolina, which kept its ports open to American slave buyers and to shipments of new victims from 1803 to 1808, importing up to one hundred thousand additional slaves by some estimates. The South Carolina and Georgia delegations also persisted in making “representation partially based upon wealth, making it a controlling power in the Government.” But they won representation for a specific kind of wealth: not gold, spinning looms, or whaleboats, but persons who were not free citizens. These would be enumerated by the 137

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three-­fi fths ratio for calculating apportionment of congressional seats to the House of Representatives. Butler of South Carolina moved the provision for the rendition of fugitive slaves, which was “adopted without protest or even remark by the northern members.” 76 The Republicans widely concurred that South Carolina and Georgia forced the convention to adopt those provisions. Under pressure from those states, “our fathers in an evil hour compromised,” Richard Yates declared. Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas remembered that “Georgia and South Carolina refused to come into the Union until there had been secured three compromises for slavery.” They compromised, Glenni Scofield said, and tolerated slavery “with the understanding that it should be gradually relinquished. They did not expect both ideas, slavery and freedom, to go hand in hand throughout the whole life of the Republic. Slavery was to recede slowly and freedom follow steadily.” Whether their predilections were reasonable or not, the founders saw the direction of events pointing toward abolition. But why await the working out of justice? Why not risk the refusal of South Carolina and Georgia to ratify the Constitution? Charles Sumner approvingly quoted the Boston Recorder, which answered this question, saying “Our noble fathers submitted only because without them we could have no common national existence.” More skeptical than Sumner, Daniel Morris said that “our fathers permitted slavery from a supposed necessity,” a necessity supposed and not real. The fathers’ toleration of slavery in submitting to the supposed necessity “was their first error.” 77 But Republicans did generally agree that the fathers believed in the wisdom of compromise with South Carolina and Georgia, which depended on the soundness of their judgment that slavery was passing away. By submitting to the demands of those states, the founders allowed the introduction of inconsistency in the Constitution. Daniel Clark acknowledged that Madison, “with scrupulous care, excluded the word ‘slave’ from the Constitution, but by a fatal mistake allowed the thing itself to remain. He chased away the shadow, but left the substance, with the same fatuity that would induce a parent to call an asp or scorpion a pretty bird, and leave it to sting his offspring to death.” Slavery’s “name was not in the instrument, but her power was there.” 78 In other words, the constitutionality of slavery mattered less than the effect of the Constitution’s toleration and protection. By the effect of its provisions, slavery received protection and was thereby practically recognized, even if indirectly so. Clark admitted that Madison and the convention did 138

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not concede these provisions with the intention of securing the perpetuity of slavery, for “he and his compeers thought slavery would gradually die out.” Their error consisted in underestimating “the terrific vitality of the fiend which should so grow and strengthen.” If slavery had not possessed this “terrific vitality,” slavery might have died as the founders expected, and the provisions protecting the interests of slave owners would eventually have protected the empty air. On the contrary, the provisions protecting slave owners’ interests allowed the “terrific vitality” to operate, with the result that slavery’s growth overcame its checks. The founding generation’s antislavery legislative acts, which reflected their confidence in slavery’s ultimate demise, did not contain slavery. The Constitution’s provisions permitted slavery’s increase and amplified slavery’s “voice and her votes,” which “have been of signal potency.” Slavery “gained at a bound the legislative hall and ever since has sat and hissed and writhed about the nation’s limbs.” Since the founders had expected and desired that legislative authority, rather than court authority, would achieve final abolition, they opened the future to the hazard that proslavery advocates might arise and control legislative authority. Rather than act to abolish slavery, legislators might act to extend it. This possibility became reality because they had underestimated the “terrific vitality” of slavery, which exploited the Constitution’s provisions. Possessing power over the government out of proportion with their numbers, the advocates of slavery could advance it and even assert constitutional recognition of slavery, whether a fair reading of the Constitution or the writings of its framers warranted those positions or not. The Constitution might not have recognized the right to hold a slave, but how it stood on that question was immaterial. The Constitution allowed slavery to gain power, with which it could destroy the Constitution and republicanism. When the founders “admitted into the charter of free government the idea of human bondage,” they placed “two warring forces” into the Constitution. These forces could not coexist. Clark declined to “call to account or blame the founders of this Government,” for “they were wise and patriotic men” who “had great difficulties to contend with” and “did the best they could.” Nevertheless, the hard truth was that slavery owed “its giant growth to the Constitution.” Hence, the Republicans saw that the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia statesmen during the founding era fatally exposed republicanism to eventual overthrow. 139

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The Passive Expansion of Slavery The Republicans generally did not recall noisy opposition to the entrance of new slave states prior to Missouri’s application to enter the Union as a slave state in 1819. But neither did they recall any statesman advocating slavery’s expansion on principle. In relative quiet, slavery expanded its domain under the U.S. government, quickly breaking out of its bands established by the founding generation’s legislation. In the meantime, economic changes began to strengthen slaveholders’ interest in protecting slavery. Scofield aptly represented Republicans’ historical perspective on this period when he averred, “Territorial acquisitions and certain discoveries in the material arts, as it is said, changed the attitude of slavery altogether.” 79 By the time attitudes in public councils changed, slaveholders felt their augmented power. Kentucky was, in the words of Daniel Clark, “the first-­born slave state.” It was the first slave state admitted to the Union in 1792, only a few years after the adoption of the Constitution. Virginia had previously held both Kentucky and the Northwest territories as its own, and slavery was tolerated in both. The difference between the territories was that Kentucky bypassed status as a U.S. territory before becoming a state. The Northwest territories became territories of the United States, and under the Northwest Ordinance, which governed all U.S. territory, slavery was prohibited. However, Virginia continued to hold Kentucky until, by simultaneous action, Virginia released its claim and Congress admitted Kentucky as a state. At the time of statehood, abolitionist sentiments did curry favor in Kentucky. In preparation for applying for statehood to Congress, Kentucky delegates met in convention to frame the state constitution and nearly abolished slavery. Arnold wrote, “An effort was made to prohibit slavery which came near being a success, and which would have prevailed, but for the powerful influence of the two great slaveholding families of Breckenridge and Nicholson.” As a result, Kentucky’s future political character was sealed. Arnold added to his account that the Breckenridge who saved slavery in the Kentucky Constitution was the grandsire of John C. Breckenridge, a secessionist. Clark maintained that there was “no State among the non-­seceding States so wedded to this institution [of slavery] . . . , halting in her patriotism, limping in her support of the Government, divided betwixt her love for the Union and her love for slavery” than Kentucky.80 The next slave state to enter the Union, Tennessee in 1796, did exist as a U.S. territory prior to admission. But as Jacob Collamer and John Bingham noted, North Carolina ceded the territory of Tennessee to the U.S. 140

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government on the condition that slavery be permitted during its territorial status.81 Henry Wilson claimed that Congress accepted this conditional cession “with more or less reluctance to the hard conditions imposed.”82 Nevertheless, in preparing for application for admission as a state, Tennessee delegates met in convention to frame the state constitution and, as in Kentucky, nearly abolished slavery. According to William Kelley, the provision prohibiting slavery in the state constitution lost by a majority of one vote, but the convention did not impose a color barrier on suffrage. Free blacks could vote. Kelley did recount Tennessee’s contingent relation to slavery after its statehood. Fewer than five thousand slaves lived in Tennessee upon admission, a lesser number than in some northern states then abolishing slavery. In 1801 the legislature “conferred the power of emancipation upon the county courts of the State” to ease the restrictions on private manumissions. From 1790 to 1810, however, slave numbers had increased to forty-­four thousand. This precipitated the formation of Tennessee emancipation societies. In 1812 antislavery citizens prevailed upon the state government to prohibit the ingress of slaves from outside the state. To show the spirited opposition to slavery in the state, Kelley quoted from an 1817 emancipation society publication, “alluding to the great doctrines promulgated in the Declaration of Independence.” It declared that “every law passed by Legislatures in favor of slavery is in direct opposition to the principles of our national existence.” But when the delegates met in convention in 1834 to revise the constitution, “the slaves in the State numbered more than one hundred and fifty thousand.” Correspondingly, “the power of the slave oligarchy had increased.”83 That convention rejected emancipation petitions from sixteen counties and, in addition, revoked the right of free blacks to vote. In 1798 the U.S. House of Representatives considered legislation for the Mississippi Territory, held by Georgia but not yet ceded. Jacob Collamer and Henry Wilson both noted that slavery had already entered that territory before the Georgia cession. Nevertheless, the House acrimoniously debated prohibiting slavery, as the Northwest Ordinance had done. The leading proponents of slavery prohibition invoked the principles and purposes of the American founding in support of their measure. Notably, none of the opponents, though hotly contesting the prohibition, disputed the applicability of those principles or claimed the rightfulness of slavery. Georgia eventually followed North Carolina’s example in ceding the territory on the condition that slavery not be prohibited, although Congress did prohibit the foreign importation of slaves.84 Despite that interference, both states formed from 141

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that territory, Mississippi in 1817 and Alabama in 1819, entered the Union as slave states. When France ceded the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803, James Doolittle observed, slavery already existed there, protected by French law. Again, Congress interfered with slavery, forbidding the ingress of slaves for sale from domestic and foreign origins.85 But again, despite that interference, when Congress admitted the state of Louisiana into the Union, in 1812, slavery came with it. By 1819 Congress had admitted five new slave states: Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Somehow, despite the antislavery convictions of the leading founders and of the age, slavery spread. The Republicans did not inquire much into the reason for this relatively uncontested expansion beyond causes particular to each case, but Henry Wilson suggested one general reason. In the Mississippi Territory debate in 1798, Representative William Giles of Virginia argued that by allowing the introduction of slaves into western territories, “and thus spread themselves over a larger territory, there would be greater prospect of ameliorating their condition.”86 This conjecture assumed that due to the imminent end of foreign slave importations, the numbers of slaves in the nation would do no worse than hold constant. If that constant number were spread over a larger area, slavery would become rarer, and the malign effects of slavery on the slave and on the surrounding republican political society would become evanescent. The number of slaves would decline, denuded by private manumissions and public emancipations. Eventually, the beneficent forces of republican society would cause the last bonds of slavery to drop away. This expectation rested on secondary assumptions that slaves’ fertility rates would not exceed the replacement of those manumitted and emancipated and that the ban on the slave trade would be enforced. Such confidence encouraged a less guarded care for which districts in the United States did or did not tolerate slavery. Giles had advanced an antislavery argument for the toleration of slavery everywhere. The Republicans pointed to this period as that during which the slave states were undergoing fundamental change, that is, when the power and ambitions of oligarchy were quietly gestating. The most important event that accelerated this change was a historical accident. Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin at the end of the eighteenth century allowed cotton cultivation over greater parts of the slaveholding states and created the demand for more slaves. Prior to that invention’s industrial application, John Farnsworth said, “Our forefathers were imbued with the spirit of freedom, emancipation—­ abolition, if you please,” and from that beginning, “we took our departure.” 142

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But “men became greedy and avaricious. The invention of the cotton gin . . . made it profitable to raise men and women for the southern market.” After that, “the greed for power took possession of the slaveholders.” Representative Nathaniel Smithers of Delaware claimed that “the invention of the cotton-­g in gave a fresh impetus to [slavery’s] expansion, and by rendering it more valuable, stimulated its growth.” By “estimating his pecuniary advantages,” the slave master “lost sight of the wrong.” The “cupidity of the master” overwhelmed his conscience.87 In a public speech to his constituents, Representative Henry Deming of Connecticut declared, “The invention of Whitney adjusted the social position and relations of our Southern brethren, more decisively, than their cotton-­perfecting soil and climate.” 88 That is, the social position and relations of Southerners changed from what they were before, and all the Republicans knew that revolutionary oligarchy was the result. Senator Timothy Howe of Wisconsin said that “Eli Whitney manufactured the cotton-­g in, and the cotton-­g in manufactured the rebellion a great many years afterwards.” He drew his authority, in part, from the 1807 opinion of Supreme Court justice William Johnson, serving as judge of the U.S. Circuit Court in the District of Georgia, in a case concerning Whitney’s patent. Johnson had written that the invention changed “the whole interior of the southern States.” People “depressed in poverty . . . have suddenly risen to wealth and respectability. Our debts have been paid off, our capitals have increased, and our lands trebled themselves in value.” The extent of the value of the gin “cannot be foreseen.” To show the extent of the gin’s impact, unforeseen in 1807, Howe read the remarks of their recently departed colleague Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas, who had twice proclaimed that “Cotton is King!” in speeches intermixed with threats of secession. 89 Then Howe concluded: If the cotton-­g in had not been invented slaveholding would not have been profitable. If slaveholding had not been profitable, slaveholders would not have been rich. If slaveholders had not been rich they would not have been arrogant. If they had not bean arrogant four hundred thousand slaveholders would not have presumed to challenge dominion over twenty million freemen. Slavery without the cotton-­g in would have been a monster wrong, but it would not have been dangerous to the Republic. The cotton-­g in without slavery would have been of twice the value it has been and still would not have been dangerous to any one. 143

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Isaac Arnold also principally blamed the cotton gin for interrupting the effect of “peaceful agencies” that “would have soon made the republic all free.” The application of the gin created “immediate and enormous profits of cotton growing,” which “gave a power to slavery never before felt.” Consequently, “a powerful cotton and slave aristocracy soon grew up,” founded on an “immense property interest invested in the production of cotton, owning lands and negroes.”90 Even in slave states where cotton could not be cultivated, the effect of expanded cotton culture was felt. Slave breeding became more profitable than freeing slaves and employing them. The economic interests of non-­cotton-­ cultivating slave states incentivized them to push for the extension of territories tolerating slavery. Thaddeus Stevens vividly illustrated this point in 1850, in response to Representative Richard Meade of Virginia. Meade had argued for permitting slavery in the territories because the value of Virginia’s slaves depended on demand. “Let us pause,” said Stevens, “over this humiliating confession.” He continued: In plain English, what does it mean? That Virginia is now only fit to be the breeder, not the employer, of slaves. . . . Instead of attempting to renovate the soil, and by their own honest labor compelling the earth to yield her abundance; instead of seeking for the best breed of cattle and horses to feed on her hills and valleys, and fertilize the land, the sons of that great State must devote their time to selecting and grooming the most lusty sires and the most fruitful wenches, to supply the slave barracoons of the South! And the learned gentleman pathetically laments that the profits of this genteel traffic will be greatly lessened by the circumscription of slavery! 91

Due to the cotton gin, the increased marginal gains to slavery’s investors sufficed to erase the economic attractions of republican society. As Howe pointed out, the gin would have earned cotton cultivators more money without slave labor, but the increases with slave labor sufficed to end their contemplation of the alternative. In sum, the Republicans’ argument showed that cotton profits saved slaveholders from being forced, by economic want, to consider how to adjust to a slaveless republican society. With cotton profits, the economic allurements of republican society diminished. While slavery might impoverish the countryside generally, it could simultaneously enrich the few. To protect their gains from the votes of the many they impoverished, the few needed to monopolize political power. Fortune handed domestic 144

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tyranny a powerful economic incentive to strengthen itself politically and, in turn, to rule over all of society, not just their own estates. In the period before the Missouri controversy in 1819–20, these economic influences were restructuring slaveholding society, while the antislavery elements showed signs of overconfidence. To mark how unaware of these changes the founding generation was, Isaac Arnold pointed out that when abolitionist founder John Jay “negotiated what is called ‘Jay’s treaty,’ with England in 1794, he did not know that cotton was an article of export, so small was then the quantity of this staple product.” From the adoption of the Constitution to the end of the War of 1812, Wilson wrote, slaves “had doubled in numbers and increased at least fivefold in value.” The demand of cotton cultivation stimulated the domestic slave trade and a black market of smuggled slave importations, annually amounting to several thousand. By that time, “the South, then under the complete control of the slave-­masters, was gaining a like ascendancy over the Federal government, and a dominating influence over the non-­slave-­holding states.”92 The Missouri Controversy From the Republican point of view, the crisis in the 1850s dubbed the “house divided against itself ” or the “irrepressible conflict” by Lincoln and Seward, respectively, was the later eruption of a chronic crisis that began with the Missouri controversy of 1819–20. The struggle decided whether Missouri, and future states carved out of the Louisiana Territory, would come into the Union slave or free. In their shorthand expressions, the Republicans typically described the conflict as between slavery and freedom, sectionally arrayed and equipoised against each other. But knowing the effects of slavery, the Republicans understood, just as they believed the actors in the Missouri drama and subsequent territorial struggles understood, that the stakes included but exceeded what territories would tolerate slavery in the future. They saw that the Missouri controversy inaugurated an interregime conflict between maturing oligarchy concentrated among the slave states and maturing republicanism among the free. The United States was tearing apart along an interregime divide, the same line dividing the domains of freedom and slavery. The competition for the character of the territories, free or slave, was also a competition for the soul of the nation and for the character of its political regime, oligarchic or republican. They remembered that the controversy surprised the American people. James Blaine recalled, “Suddenly, without warning, the North and the 145

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South, the free States and the slave States, found themselves arrayed against each other,” and this “marked a distinct era in the political thought of the country, and made a profound impression on the minds of patriotic men.” The nation learned that “between the adoption of the Federal Constitution and the admission of Missouri, there had been a great change in the Southern mind, both as to the moral and the economic aspects of slavery,” and this was due to the quiet increase in the productive cultivation of “the cotton-­plant.”93 Benjamin Wade remembered, when he was a young man, “how anxiously the people of that part of the country to which I belong looked to the progress of that question through Congress. I remember the fearful struggle that took place between the different sections of the country, and how anxious our forefathers were lest it should prove utterly disastrous to the union of the States which they then cherished.”94 Wade’s recollection that the struggle arrayed sections against each other showed that Southern statesmen had been transforming themselves from slaveholding abolitionists, allied in the effort to blot out slavery, to sectional advocates for the advance of slavery. This placed a strain on the Union between free and slave states that caused anxiety for Wade’s people. But the people of the states of the former Northwest Territory, like Wade’s Ohio, had another reason to be anxious. Many of them, having escaped the domain of slavery, shared a special reason to have sympathy for westward-­traveling settlers. From an analysis of census data, Jacob Collamer showed that more native-­ born Virginians who had emigrated settled in free states than in slave states, and many of these Virginian and other slave-­state emigrants settled in the states of the former Northwest Territory. Senator Oliver Morton of Indiana wrote that his state had probably “a larger proportion of inhabitants of Southern birth or parentage . . . than any other free state.”95 These people had, Collamer said, removed to free states so that they would “not lose position by caste”; that is, they relocated to a domain where they would become equal members of political society. These slave-­state emigrants were seeking to settle in republican political society. Collamer quoted the early debates in the Virginia House of Delegates, in which “those gentlemen say their free white population, who are degraded by labor in a slaveholding country, are fleeing.”96 But as slavery spread, nonslaveholding free people would have fewer places to find refuge from oligarchic rule. Charles Sumner reviewed events from the onset of conflict in the 1819 Congress to the enacted compromise in 1820. In February 1819, James Tallmadge of New York proposed an amendment to a reported bill, enabling 146

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Missouri to apply for statehood. At that time, the slave states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi had already been added to the Union, and Tallmadge’s amendment ensured that Missouri would become free. Counteramendments, negotiations, and a bitter floor debate followed. In the meantime, a pending bill to organize the Arkansas Territory with slavery was enacted and aggravated the ongoing slavery debate in connection with Missouri. In the same session, Alabama was admitted as another slave state. These two new victories for slavery attended the end of the Missouri question, when a majority voted for a compromise. Congress restricted slavery from above the southern border of Missouri at 36º30´ and allowed slavery below that line.97 The concession to slavery below that line conspicuously broke from the free-­soil policy of the founders in 1787, a policy that had already been breached in the interim without national uproar. The compromise replaced that former policy with a new one, equidivision of new territory between freedom and slavery. That concession to slavery, Sumner said, “was justly repugnant to the conscience of the North, and ought never to have been made.” But it was only by that concession that the Union was preserved, as Sumner’s remarks made clear. The nation learned that a class of determined advocates of slavery’s extension, unknown among the founders, had risen in the land. Before the Missouri controversy, Americans might have lightly regarded the significance of the admittance of Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi as slave states by reason of exceptional circumstance. But during the Missouri controversy, they now learned, in the words of Sumner, that “the original policy of our Fathers in the restriction of Slavery, was suspended, and this giant wrong threatened to stalk into all the broad national domain. Men at the North were humbled and amazed. The imperious demands of Slavery seemed incredible.”98 The slave statesmen’s power now forced the advocates of freedom to give them title to half the nation’s territory. The new character of slave-­state statesmen gave an indication that political society in the slave states was changing. John Bingham explained that the reason members of Congress fought equally hard for the restriction north of that line was that they “doubtless felt, and knew, that slavery was subversive of the ends of all free government, a violation of justice and of the rights of the enslaved, and contrary to the spirit of our free Constitution.” In addition to knowing slavery’s wrong and hostility to the Constitution, they knew and felt its effects on republican government. That they “knew” these things but also “doubtless felt” them refers 147

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to their firsthand experiential knowledge of slavery’s effects and character. Specifically, the antislavery congressmen “knew, that in the wrong in which this institution has its inception, there was no law to restrain the enslavement of all classes and races of men; that the brute force, by which the inherent rights of the black race had for centuries been cloven down, was not likely to be restrained from inflicting like cruelties and oppressions upon the white race.”99 Those who were neither masters nor domestic slaves, the free whites, would also become slaves after a certain kind—­a vassal class—­wherever slavery was planted. This accounted for why Benjamin Wade could still remember “how anxiously” his people in Ohio followed the course of the conflict in Congress. When Congress adjourned with the settlement of the Missouri question still pending, Sumner recalled, “The whole subject was adjourned from Congress to the people. Through the press, and at public meetings, an earnest voice was raised against the admission of Missouri into the Union without the restriction of Slavery. Judges left the bench, and clergymen the pulpit, to swell the indignant protest which went up from good men, without distinction of party or of pursuit.” In public meetings at Trenton, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the Massachusetts cities of Worcester, Salem, and Boston, Sumner noted, the people organized. Memorials, petitions, and prayers were sent from villages and towns against the admission of Missouri as a slave state, and like resolutions were enacted by the legislatures of New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, New York, and Indiana. The legislature of Pennsylvania “unanimously asserted at once the right and the duty of Congress to prohibit Slavery west of the Mississippi, and solemnly appealed to her sister States ‘to refuse to covenant with crime.’”100 Among the outraged in the nation were some members of the politically declining category of slaveholding abolitionists. Nathaniel Smithers of Delaware recalled how his slave state responded to the Missouri controversy: “A resolution was adopted by the General Assembly with entire unanimity in the House of Representatives and with but two dissenting voices in the Senate, declaring that in the admission of any State into the Union, it was not only the right but the duty of Congress to require, as an inviolable condition, the fundamental provision that it should forever thereafter be free from slavery.”101 Representative Aaron Cragin of New Hampshire remembered that “a very large majority” of the free states’ representatives refused to vote for the compromise measures, not because they opposed the restriction above 148

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36º30´, but because they opposed the admission of Missouri as a slave state. For these Northerners, slavery had extended far enough, and they were unwilling to exchange the founders’ free-­soil policy for a divided-­land policy. The compromise, Cragin said, “was generally regarded as a southern victory,” and he brought out the contemporaneous writing of Charles Pinckney of South Carolina to demonstrate Southern exultation. “We have carried the question,” Pinckney wrote, that will “give the South, in a short time, an addition of six, and perhaps eight members to the Senate of the United States. It is considered here, by the slaveholding States, as a great triumph.”102 Continuing, he represented the loss of the territory north of the compromise line to slavery restriction as no loss, since it was a “vast tract, uninhabited.” Pinckney was one of the members of the South Carolina delegation in the constitutional convention of 1787 who had insisted upon the extension of the slave trade, and the Republicans remembered him apart from the majority of the southern founders. Unlike the majority, he was not a slaveholding abolitionist. The remarks of Cragin and the Republicans on the Missouri controversy pinpointed that conflict as the moment when the nation knew that the character type of the slaveholding abolitionist statesman, acting in favor of a completely free republic, was fading. Instead, the new generation of Southern statesmen was following the example of statesmen like Pinckney, who was partial to spreading and increasing the incubus. The changes that the slave states were undergoing appeared to be following the model of South Carolina. They saw that the entrance of Missouri as a slave state changed the strategic equilibrium between slavery and freedom, oligarchy and republicanism. In Congress, Isaac Arnold reflected, “to the thoughtful observer,” the conflict between the Northern democracy and “a ruling class with power based on slavery . . . was early seen to be ‘irrepressible.’” The Missouri controversy was the “earliest important exhibition of this ‘irrepressible conflict,’ after the adoption of the Constitution.” As a thoughtful observer, the “philosophic statesman” could see the irrepressible conflict brewing and could only hope the conflict would be peacefully resolved. The Missouri events, however, were filled with evil portents. Later, Arnold wrote that the strategic importance of Missouri “was not fully appreciated by the free States at that time.” The entrance of Missouri into the Union as a free state would have precluded the irrepressible conflict. Missouri commanded “the centre of colonization” in America. If Missouri had been a free state, “free labor would have passed along the valleys of the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Arkansas to the 149

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West, and to Northern Texas. As a slave State it crowded off the current of free labor to the Northwest. By this success the slaveholders secured the most commanding position in Central America, and prolonged the power of slavery for forty years.”103 Senator George Edmunds of Vermont described the Missouri Compromise as “a hollow truce.” The conflict between liberty and slavery, “‘the irrepressible conflict of opposing civilizations,’ had been thus postponed for another day.” In the interim, Edmunds continued, “the theories of government, identical with the one side or the other of that great question, thus left to smother for a mighty conflagration, were in active contest.”104 As he saw the outcome, each side rebounded from the Missouri controversy straight into the philosopher’s den, where they worked out their ideas and perfected their polemics. The two political regimes were preparing for their next inevitable collision. Eventually, they would compete for ascendancy in America.

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John C. Calhoun, Philosopher and Statesman In 1862 Charles Drake resorted to describing the basic frame of American political history in order to speak about the war in which the nation was then engaged. Albeit united by a common government, the Northern and Southern sections of the nation had developed in contrary political directions, as “all candid observers know,” he said. The Northern section was “in its nature and principles essentially democratic,” the Southern section “essentially aristocratic.” He added, “Each obeyed the law of its own condition.” The Southern aristocracy was “born to authority” and “tenacious of power.” They could not “tolerate a majority not controlled by them.”1 In obedience to the law of its own condition, “the aristocratic minority would, with absolute certainty, separate itself, by violence, if necessary, from the democratic majority, the very hour it could no longer subject that majority to its will.” Indeed, when power shifted to the Northern people due to the North’s more rapid growth, the aristocracy “struck its first blow at American Republicanism.” The war had been “certain to come,” and when the first blow was struck, it was aimed “with a relentless purpose to destroy.”2 Although the foregoing account had become obvious to Drake and the Republicans once hostilities commenced, the war had not been entirely foreseeable to them: “For many years we refused to believe that the Southern aristocracy would seek that terrible resort, because it seemed out of the range of any imaginable possibility that the descendants of our Revolutionary sires could ever strike at the life of their glorious Country.” That is, it seemed too incredible to be true that Drake’s generation of Southern statesmen could differ so profoundly from their forebears. But they showed that they were in fact a different kind of men altogether. “We forgot,” Drake continued, “that 151

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an aristocracy ruled the South, and that aristocracies stop not at blood to hold and perpetuate their predominance.” Drake expressed a common opinion among the Republicans, that between the Revolution and the Civil War, the character of Southern statesmen had been radically transformed. In 1776 they were willing to shed their own blood to defend the rights of mankind; by 1861 they were willing to spill blood to assail the rights of mankind. The rebellion in 1776 was a republican revolution; the rebellion in 1861 was an “aristocracy revolting against the people.”3 From the Republican point of view, the Missouri controversy was a prominent event in the ongoing and general transformation of Southern statesmen from ambitiously republican to ambitiously oligarchic. Prior to the Missouri controversy, the Northern people could justifiably assume that the system of government and way of life in the Southern states were developing in a republican direction, as they were in the North, because so many of the most famous republican founders were from the Southern states. But the Missouri controversy had begun to awaken the American people in the free states to the truth. Thereafter, they understood that the influence of the republican principles in the Declaration of Independence on Southern government and society was waning and that the influence of slavery was strengthening. Still, the ambitions of the generation of Southern statesmen exhibited during the Missouri controversy were tame in comparison to the ambitions of Southern statesmen in Drake’s generation. The assessment of the Republicans was that the Missouri Compromise thwarted the spread and development of republicanism across the nation, but the Kansas-­Nebraska Act three decades later threatened the life of American republicanism. It was South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun, the Republicans believed, who decisively reshaped Southern statesmen and decisively changed the course of national events over those decades. His national political career began in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1811, when he was twenty-­ eight. By the close of his life and career in 1850, the representatives of the republican people in the free states and the oligarchic rulers of the slave states were struggling for control of the national government, contending for republicanism and oligarchy, respectively. The Republicans held Calhoun responsible, far more than anyone else, for the advance of revolutionary Southern oligarchy after the Missouri controversy. They recognized that by the force of its intrinsic attributes, slavery had been transforming Southern political society as it spread and increased. To that structural cause of revolutionary change, Calhoun added a superior 152

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guiding mind. Looking back, the Republicans traced every contentious event in their party’s new but momentous career to Calhoun’s influential statesmanship. Congress felt his influence in national affairs so strongly that his name echoed in its two houses for twenty years after his death in 1850, as the records of the Congressional Globe well testify. In Republican eyes, he was a great, wicked, and ingenious man. They both admired and loathed his qualities as a statesman, and some would even profess their admiration and loathing for him at the same time. Representative John Wentworth of Illinois wrote that it would be unjust to say that Calhoun “ever did or said an uncivil thing.” Calhoun’s life, he said, “shows us how very bad a very good man can be. His life was spotless, but his influence was extremely deleterious.” In an 1860 speech, Charles Sumner said of Calhoun that he “possessed an intellect of much originality and boldness,” but also, “All that the Republican Party now opposes may be found in John C. Calhoun.”4 Calhoun brought new political principles, new constitutional doctrines, an ambitious vision, and carefully developed methods of realizing his ambitions. With regard to his plans, he was as incapable of candor, though seeming candid, as Sumner was incapable of subtlety. His paramount aim, said Representative Ralph Buckland of Ohio, was “the subjection of the Government to the control of the slave aristocracy of the South, or the dismemberment of the Union and the formation of a confederacy founded on human slavery.”5 The Republicans deduced his designs from his theories and the practical statesmanship Calhoun exercised throughout his public life. In the aftermath of the Missouri controversy, Calhoun’s project to build an empire ruled by the slaveholding oligarchy began in earnest. Two interrelated motives, the steady advancement of oligarchic rule and the extension and perpetuity of slavery, drove Calhoun’s public conduct. These motives were the mirror opposite of the American founders’ motives, perpetual republican rule and the ultimate extinction of slavery. To achieve his ends, Calhoun presented his doctrines in such a way that they would seem to defend, and not destroy, the Constitution and seem to fulfill, and not defeat, the founders’ aims. By seeming to venerate the republican principles of the fathers, and by professing to interpret the Constitution strictly, he could appeal to others’ patriotism and reverence for the founders in support of his doctrines, which in reality served the purpose of quietly destroying and replacing the founders’ political regime. Whether authentic or not, a recollected conversation between Commodore Charles Stewart and Calhoun captured the Republicans’ sense of Calhoun’s 153

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motives. In a public letter quoted by Daniel Gooch and by other Republicans, Stewart recalled that he and Calhoun were on intimate terms during the War of 1812 when Calhoun was a young and able member of the House of Representatives. In one part of their conversation, regarding the southern section of the country, Calhoun admitted to Stewart, “That we are essentially aristocratic I cannot deny.” The sectional policy of Calhoun and his friends determined the “necessity” of associating with the Democratic Party, “however it may occasionally clash with our feelings,” because through affiliation with the party in “the middle and western States we hold power.” But if the aristocrats were to lose party dominance or to meet any other obstacle, and “we cease thus to control this nation . . . , we shall then resort to the dissolution of the Union.” In the second part of their conversation, on slavery and the American founding, Calhoun acknowledged, “The compromises in the Constitution, under the then circumstances, were sufficient for our fathers.” Gooch noted that the fathers to whom Calhoun referred were the subset of the “leading men of the South,” who looked upon slavery “as essential to their prosperity” and who desired “its permanence.” That southern type did not include “the fathers of the Republic,” who “desired and intended . . . the temporary existence of the institution.” In other words, when Calhoun referred to “our fathers” who deemed the compromises of the Constitution sufficient, he was referring to the proslavery fathers, and only the South Carolina and Georgia fathers who demanded the concessions to slavery in the Constitution could meet that general description, but not Washington, Jefferson, Henry, Madison, and other leading founders from the South. Calhoun further alleged that “under the altered condition of the country from that period” (from the founding period forward), the South had “no resource but dissolution” amid new conflicts over slavery, because “no amendments to the Constitution can be reached under the three-­fourths rule.” Gooch commented that Calhoun foresaw the improbability of ratifying an amendment to the Constitution that would provide additional security to slavery. The tide of the American Revolution threatened slaveholders like him, who wished to perpetuate and expand slavery, and as early as 1812 Calhoun was considering opportunities to reverse that tide. He looked on the compromises of the Constitution at its adoption not as the founding generation did—­as temporary expedients designed to address an inherited slave system until the nation extinguished it as expected. Rather, to Calhoun, the compromises were openings to exploit and resolve in favor of perpetual slaveholding. The first barrier to establishing the permanence of slaveholding 154

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was that proslavery slaveholders like Calhoun constituted a small minority in a large national republic. Gooch understood that Calhoun contemplated this barrier early in his national career, and his future statesmanship would attempt to surmount that barrier or, failing that, to break his section of the nation away and become independent.6 Representative Frederick Pike of Maine located the origin of Calhoun’s revolutionary statesmanship in 1820, the year when the Missouri controversy raged. Around that time, he said, Calhoun had decided that the slave states should remain in the Union only so long as they could control the national government. Like Gooch, Pike acknowledged Calhoun’s early recognition of the barrier that he and the proslavery cause faced. Although the minority slaveholders ruled in oligarchic South Carolina, majority rule predominated in the extended Republic. The population of the free states was growing faster than that of the slave states, and this posed an obstacle to Calhoun’s vision. Calhoun “saw what was coming” and sought means to ensure control by the slave states. In Jefferson’s theory of state sovereignty, Calhoun “very early saw its applicability to the quarrel he had originated with majorities.” Jefferson and Calhoun fundamentally differed in that “Jefferson was a believer in majorities,” whereas Calhoun used Jefferson’s theory as “a shield against majorities.” 7 Calhoun drew his theory of state sovereignty from the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, authored by Jefferson and Madison, respectively. Those founders, John Baldwin said, had arrayed “‘State sovereignty’ against certain acts of Congress,” the Alien and Sedition Acts. Many Republicans deplored the resolutions, as Baldwin did, calling them “notorious,” but not due to the principled positions they advanced. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions vexed them because Jefferson and Madison had inadvertently supplied a plausible but false pretext for Calhoun to claim the support of those eminent founders’ authority in advancing his revolutionary goal, oligarchic rule. The Republicans recognized that Calhoun’s theory crucially differed from the original authors’ similar theory. Baldwin said that in authoring the resolutions, Jefferson and Madison had not “understood very well what they did. Certainly they did not mean all that has since been meant by nullifiers and secessionists.”8 Jefferson and Madison invoked the sovereignty of the state to protect the people against unjust action on the part of the central government. Their doctrine, Pike said, held that a state could “annul the laws of the central power, or withdraw from the partnership,” but the only justifiable cause for 155

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these actions was when the central power “had become oppressive.” This use of the theory of state sovereignty was “a remnant of the revolutionary struggle . . . , standing in the place of, the right of revolution.” By the right of revolution, Jefferson and Madison understood that the people might disobey the government, even popular government under the Constitution, when the government became destructive of the ends for which it was established, the security of the equal natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Only then might a people “appeal to heaven,” to resistance, violence, or war. The right of a state to nullify an oppressive or unconstitutional action by the central government stood in place of the right of revolution, which was grounded in natural right. Therefore, the character of the central government’s action determined whether the state’s conduct was justifiable. Nullification of an oppressive law by a state was justified on behalf of its oppressed people. It was an extreme measure for extreme circumstances, a peaceful intermediate step before justifiable rebellion and, possibly, civil war. That was the doctrine of state sovereignty contended for by the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. Baldwin pointed out that Jefferson and Madison dropped state-­sovereignty doctrine after the crisis of the Alien and Sedition Acts had passed, when events no longer required its assertion. After the defeat of the Federalist Party, “Mr. Jefferson himself made no further use of them.” 9 Whereas the authors of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions dropped state-­ sovereignty doctrine after an unwanted crisis had passed, Calhoun twisted its principled basis and attempted to reinterpret the entire constitutional order of American government according to it. In brief, John Bingham recapitulated, Calhoun’s theory of state sovereignty held that “the Government of the United States is nothing but a mere agent, the principals of which are separate, sovereign, and independent States of the Union.” In other words, the states were supreme and the national government the creature or agent of the sovereign states. This meant that Calhoun attributed national sovereignty to the states of the Union, because, Baldwin remarked, “Sovereignty is the highest, the most absolute, and the most essential prerogative of a nation” and “cannot rightfully be predicated of any political society or community that is not a nation.” The logical consequence of the doctrine was that leaders of state government had the right to direct a state in relation to other states, just as the rulers of a nation could direct a nation in relation to other nations. State-­sovereignty doctrine just as easily implied the right to secede from the Union as national-­sovereignty doctrine implied the right to terminate a treaty. Interest, not duty, bound a state to the Union. Anticipating and refuting 156

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the false charge that he favored the centralization of power in the nation’s capital and imperial rule over states, Baldwin acknowledged, “The scope of the national Government is limited and defined by the Federal Constitution,” but the national government was not the administration of a league composed of sovereign states. “To this Government, and to this alone,” he continued, “belong the rights of sovereignty.”10 It might have been true that Calhoun did not openly counsel the policy of secession, careful man that he was, but, as Frederick Pike pointed out, secession logically derived from his state-­sovereignty doctrine just as much as nullification did. Reader Clarke, too, claimed that “supreme State sovereignty” constituted “all that is claimed in practical nullification and secession, . . . a sword to strike and a shield to protect.” The disciples of Calhoun’s “supreme State sovereignty” had claimed “the right to secede; the right to disregard the law of Congress; the right to stay in or go out of the Union at pleasure.”11 On the surface, Calhoun’s theory appeared to be the same as the theory in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, and by association with the venerable authors of those Resolutions, it might appear to be warranted by the Constitution. But these appearances were deceiving, said the Republicans. Representative Martin Thayer of Pennsylvania flatly stated, “The idea of State sovereignty as understood by the school of politicians referred to is fundamentally opposed to the Constitution of the United States.” The Republicans characteristically trotted out quotations from the generation of founding statesmen to show that they did not recognize the states as independent sovereignties under the Constitution. Charles Sumner quoted Elbridge Gerry in the Federal Convention, who affirmed that the states were never independent. Patrick Henry and George Mason opposed the ratification of the Constitution because they understood it “superseded State rights.” Sumner quoted the cover letter of George Washington as president of the convention, transmitting the draft Constitution to Congress. Washington justified the “consolidation of the union” under the proposed Constitution, because without that consolidation, it was “impracticable” to “secure all rights of independent sovereignties” to the states and, at the same time, to secure the basis of “prosperity, safety, perhaps our national existence.” And Sumner quoted Madison, the alleged source of Calhoun’s state-­sovereignty doctrine. In the Federal Convention, Madison averred, “Some contend that States are sovereign, when in fact they are only political societies. The states never possessed the essential right of sovereignty.” Thayer found evidence that Madison feared the exact result that Calhoun’s misappropriation of his 157

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ideas attempted to secure: “I apprehend the greatest danger is from encroachment of the States on the national Government. This apprehension is justly founded on the experience of ancient confederacies, and our own is proof of it.”12 Thus, while Calhoun claimed fidelity to the Constitution, his interpretation denied, and the effect of his interpretation undermined, nationhood, a central aim of the founders. Madison had lived long enough to witness Calhoun’s signal misappropriation of his and Jefferson’s theory in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, and this distressed him. John Baldwin quoted several letters in which Madison strenuously disassociates his ideas from Calhoun’s, which Madison calls “preposterous”: “If it be understood that our political system contains no provision for deciding questions between the Union and its member but that of negotiation, and thus, failing, but that of war, as between separate and independent Powers . . . [w]hat has been called Government is, on that supposition, a mere league only.” Senator Edward Baker of Oregon quoted from a letter Madison sent to Daniel Webster in 1833, in which he addresses state sovereignty and the right to nullify a national enactment or to secede. In it Madison affirms the right of a state to secede for “intolerable oppression,” which is “another name for revolution, about which there is no theoretic controversy.” But “to secede at will” is “a violation without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged.” This might have been permissible if states were independent sovereignties joined together by a treaty. It was “an undisputed fact,” however, that “the Constitution was made by the people” and therefore bound the states to the Union according to republican theory.13 States were not independent sovereignties, and the Constitution was much more than a treaty. Surely, a man as intelligent and as politically prominent as Calhoun must have known how different his theory was from the theory of the author whom he claimed to follow, the still breathing but increasingly exasperated James Madison. Yet Calhoun persisted in promoting his theory and in claiming the founder’s mantle. Why? Baldwin laid out the purpose of Calhoun’s doctrines and revealed their attractions to new young leaders of the slave states. Those state governments were “strongholds of the slave power and main defenses of its system of oligarchy.” This explained why Calhoun and his followers set forth not the national government but the states as “very sacred State ‘sovereignties,’” as “fixed, changeless, absolute something, above the people, greater than the nation, and endowed with a sort of divine right to bind and control both the people and the national Government.”14 158

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In practice, arguments derived from state-­sovereignty doctrine checked the national government and the growing popular majority in the free states. If the ruling oligarchy in the slave states disliked duly enacted federal laws, decisions by the federal courts, the results of a presidential election, or actions by the federal executive, Calhoun’s state-­ sovereignty doctrine permitted them to interpose and threaten nullification or secession. Thus, though only a minority, they could induce the American people or their officers in the national government to accede to their demands. They could strategically deploy states’ rights to control the behavior of the national majority. Calhoun’s doctrine allowed them to do all of this with a clear constitutional conscience. The national government could not safely act without first deferring to the states for approval, that is, to the slave-­state governments, controlled by the ruling oligarchy. Hence, the national majority that should otherwise have ruled by right through the federal government could rule only with permission from the oligarchic minority in the slave states, which ruled their domain by might. Calhoun’s doctrine gave the oligarchic class a self-­serving constitutionalism that resisted “King Numbers.” This increased the oligarchy’s incentive to secure or maintain their control of government in the old and new slave states. By doing so, they could rule much more than their local domain. Calhoun illuminated a path for the oligarchy to acquire rule over the nation, through means that appeared to be constitutionally justified. This would be their reward for maintaining control of the slave states and following Calhoun’s banner. Once a majority of the states were slave states, Calhoun’s state-­sovereignty theory would no longer be valuable and could be discarded, because the ruling minorities in most states would constitute the national government and fill the national offices. The admission of more slave states relative to free states would give the oligarchy the direct means to convert the national government into an oligarchy proper. To reach that goal, it was necessary to exert their disproportionate influence in the national government to spread slavery. This explained the slaveholders’ increasingly aggressive policy to expand slavery into new territories and states. The Republicans shone a bright light through the outward surface of Calhoun’s doctrine and revealed a chasm of difference between the authors of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and Calhoun. The resolutions were written for a republican people living under a republican form of government, for the purpose of protecting their constitutional liberties. Calhoun taught his constitutionalism to an oligarchy that ruled. Its master motive and 159

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the primary end it directly served were the advancement of oligarchic rule, which was completely at odds with the Constitution. John Baldwin pointed out the “very noteworthy significance” that “the disloyal crusade against the supremacy of the national Government” was undertaken for the “States, and not in behalf of the southern people.” That was because the Southern people were not the sovereign rulers of the states; the small class of oligarchs controlled the state governments and expected to rule by right. Hence, Baldwin said, it was no accident that the term State Rights was coined rather than Rights of the people, for the latter term “would not have served as well” and “would, in fact, have served to defeat rather than aid the purpose of the conspiring slavery extremists.” It was their aim “to deny the rights of the people and establish a slave oligarchy; and it was a clever artifice to use a loud clamor for State rights as a shield to cover the establishment of plantation despotisms.”15 An alert historian, Baldwin suggested, would understand the whole political history of the Southern section for the “last half century,” by tracing Southern politicians’ uses and meanings of the terms state sovereignty and states’ rights in connection with oligarchy, the motive interest behind the promotion of those ideas. He illustrated the effect of Calhoun’s doctrines by reaching into that history and highlighting an example of constitutional interpretation, given by Calhoun’s disciple “Mr. Rhett, of South Carolina.” In the U.S. Senate in 1851, Rhett redefined the meaning of the clause on treason in Article III, Section 3, of the Constitution, which says, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” Passing that clause through Calhoun’s theory of interpretation, Rhett magically transformed the plain meaning of the language, so that its new meaning was the exact opposite of the traditional meaning. Rhett argued that treason consisted in rebelling against individual states. In practice, this meant that treason consisted in rebelling against the ruling oligarchies in the slave states. Baldwin quoted Rhett, who said that treason was “a violation of allegiance to the sovereignties who established the system of government; and those sovereignties are described in the Constitution as the States. A person levying war against them, or giving aid and comfort to their enemies, is guilty of treason; showing distinctly that treason can be committed against them, and against them only.”16 Therefore, according to Rhett, if an individual or even a state betrays, attacks, or conspires against the national government in any fashion, the Constitution does not deem this conduct to be treason. But if a mob of disgruntled 160

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poor whites and rebellious slaves attacked the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina, where the South Carolina oligarchy gathered, the U.S. Constitution defines that as treason against the United States. By Rhett’s application of Calhoun’s doctrine, the Constitution of the United States bound and enforced the people’s obedience to the states. In the free states, this would pose no burden, since the state governments were accountable to the sovereign people. But in the slave states, this redefined clause in the Constitution bound the Southern people’s obedience to the oligarchy, which was not accountable to the ruled people. In this way, the slave-­state oligarchies could invoke the national power to protect their antirepublican regime and to punish its assailants, on allegedly constitutional grounds, and reverse the constitutionally mandated obligation of the national government to guarantee to each state a republican form of government, in Article IV, Section 4. Politically, Calhoun’s constitutionalism served its creator well. State-­ sovereignty doctrine loosened states’ attachment to the national government, relieved the interstate ruling oligarchy of the constitutional burden of obeying, and in fact gave them a constitutional pretext to demand that the national government obey them. As rulers of sovereign states, the oligarchy could regard the constitutional compact as a league of convenience, broken or observed, according to their interest. By that doctrine, oligarchic rulers in the slave-­state capitals were at liberty to choose whether to steer their sovereign states in obedience to the national government, which they might do if their oligarchic class controlled the national government, or to defy the national government’s authority on the allegedly constitutional grounds Calhoun gave them. Calhoun had developed theories befitting a revolutionary project. The more state sovereignty was taught, embraced, and asserted, the more weakly a state felt bound by obligation to obey the national government. The successful promotion of Calhoun’s constitutionalism was more consequential to the dissolution of the national government than whether he actually urged secession in public or private during his lifetime. At the same time, by his reticence on the question of secession, Calhoun could more easily defend himself against the justifiable imputation that he was undermining the integrity of the national government. Also, because state sovereignty seemed faithful to the American founding, its advocates could use appeals to patriotism to convince impressionable but unsuspecting minds to submit to the dictates of the doctrine, which meant submitting to oligarchic rule. Unless republican citizens were disabused of these ideas, they might hand over their freedom to 161

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the oligarchy and bend their necks to the yoke, without a fight and without realizing what they were doing. To complete the formidable foundation for his project, Calhoun needed assistance. In public and in private, he endeavored to shape a new generation of Southern statesmen to put those theories into practice. Though a political opponent, George Julian wrote that Calhoun “was most genial and kindly” and “always welcomed the society of young men who sought the aid of his friendly counsel.” Other Republicans explained why Calhoun had notably kept company with promising young Southern men. He was training a legion of young disciples in the arts of oligarchic statesmanship and rule. Calhoun shaped “a generation of young men,” said Representative Henry Raymond of New York, “nursed in the doctrine of State rights and State sovereignty, taught to believe in the right of secession, and educated in the faith that the South was the victim of northern tyranny.” This Southern leadership consisted of “men of great intellects, of iron will, of towering ambition, men fit to struggle for empire, and able to infuse their own bold and audacious tempers into the great mass of the southern people over whom their influence was absolute and unbounded.” Representative Horace Maynard of Tennessee recalled that “the right of secession and kindred heresies of the Calhoun philosophy” were taught to “a new generation of young men,” who had “migrated to every part of the southern country as editors, politicians and professional men.” Calhoun’s idea, Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan said, that the national government was poised to overwhelm the constitutional rights of the states, was a “cunningly-devised delusion, addressing itself as it did to sectional prejudice. . . . It was that terrible instrument of falsehood and deception that the Wises, the Masons, the Toombses, the Jefferson Davises, the Yanceys, the Slidells, have for long years wrought upon the popular mind of the South.”17 Calhoun did not restrict himself to proselytizing talented young men from the South to his cause, but included young Democrats from the free states as well. John Wentworth recalled that when he was first elected to Congress from Illinois as a Democrat in 1844, Calhoun practiced his arts on him. Upon his arrival in Washington, Wentworth received an invitation from Calhoun to meet him privately at his home, where Calhoun struck him as “the most charming man in conversation whom I ever heard.” Young and inexperienced as Wentworth was, the older Wentworth admitted, he was seduced, but on his way home from Calhoun’s residence, he fortuitously encountered 162

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Senator Thomas Benton, who saw Calhoun’s parting gift to Wentworth, an autographed book of Calhoun’s biography and speeches. Immediately, Benton administered the antidote to Calhoun’s black magic: Wentworth wrote that Benton “became extremely violent, averring that he could tell me every word that Calhoun had uttered. He said it was Mr. Calhoun’s custom to early procure interviews with young men, and instill into their minds the seeds of secession, nullification, and treason.”18 During the Nullification Crisis of 1831–33, Calhoun famously deployed state-­sovereignty theory on behalf of South Carolina against the tariff law passed by the U.S. Congress. This face-­off between South Carolina and the national government tested whether the state could dictate national policy or, failing that, separate. For the allegedly unconstitutional tariff, Calhoun “and his associates threatened nullification,” Daniel Gooch recalled. However, the nature of the case shed a dubious light on Calhoun’s justification for the extreme remedy of state nullification. Calhoun’s position on the unconstitutionality of the tariff was specious. James Garfield pointed out that as recently as 1814, Calhoun had spiritedly argued in favor of the tariff in Congress, which enacted it “under his lead” in 1816. Concerning the grounds for claiming the unconstitutionality of the tariff, Frederick Pike said, “The pretense was not material,” that is, the stated arguments on the unconstitutionality of the law were not really the grounds for advancing nullification. South Carolinian leaders elaborated “the ‘forty bale’ theory” to demonstrate the unjust exactions of the law, but their argument was unconvincing and pointed to another purpose, which Pike said was “separation.” For proof of that purpose, “we had at the time the testimony of Jackson and Benton. Since then evidence in convincing masses has been furnished.”19 The point gained by the nullification movement was that the rest of the nation was put on notice that South Carolina’s obedience to the national government was qualified. They might or might not obey when it suited them. Pike and other Republicans recognized President Jackson’s awareness of the purposes of nullification and Calhoun’s leadership in the crisis. James Doolittle recalled that Jackson, alert to the steps toward disunion, warned, “If another step were taken, by the Eternal, he would try Calhoun for treason, and if convicted, hang him on a gallows high as Haman’s.” Within a week, Calhoun voted for every section of Clay’s compromise bill that ended the Nullification Crisis. But Jackson understood that the disunion movement had not ended. As many Republicans did, Doolittle and Gooch quoted Jackson’s 163

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prophecy that “the tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro or slavery question.” Doolittle continued that on the eve of his death, Jackson predicted, “Posterity will condemn me more because I was persuaded not to try and hang John C. Calhoun as a traitor than for any other act of my life.” Had Jackson executed Calhoun, Doolittle added while the Civil War blazed, “we should have had no rebellion now.”20 Although South Carolina’s nullifiers backed down, Calhoun successfully used the event to advance his conversion enterprise. During the crisis, Calhoun delivered a public address from Fort Hill in 1831, aimed at the hearts and minds of Southern statesmen. Waitman Willey traced “the mighty influence which this great man exerted on southern opinion” to that moment. A Virginian, Willey well knew what Calhoun’s doctrines meant in his state and in his section of the nation. Jefferson, he said, had “enunciated the axiom that ‘absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority was the vital principle of republics.’” But with “pertinacity Mr. Calhoun resisted the application of the majority principle to our system of national government, as subversive of the rights of states.” He had “warred upon this great principle from the time of his Fort Hill address.” And, Willey later added, Calhoun’s philosophical war against the majority “found a wide-­spread lodgment in the minds of southern statesmen. An aristocratic sentiment, carefully and sedulously inculcated, had become everywhere prevalent.” Representative Joseph Segar, a fellow Virginian, also bore witness to Calhoun’s influence in his state and similarly traced it to “the time of Mr. Calhoun’s celebrated Fort Hill manifesto in 1831.” Outside the predominantly loyal western counties he represented in Virginia, Segar claimed, “Mr. Calhoun sowed broadcast those seeds of nullification and sectionalism.”21 By converting the sister states of the South to his constitutional doctrines, Calhoun built an interstate movement, and together the slave states would be more likely to dictate terms to the national government in future cases. They could use his constitutional doctrines to justify selective obedience to the national government and thrust the responsibility back upon the North to support laws and constitutional interpretation that suited the consolidating Southern oligarchy or risk disunion. It was Calhoun’s “cherished purpose,” James Ashley claimed, to force the North to agree that “slavery is recognized by the Constitution, and that Congress had no power to abolish or exclude it from the Territories, or the District of Columbia” or else to achieve a 164

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“dissolution of the Union and the organization of a southern slaveholding confederacy.”22 Like the divine rebel Prometheus, Calhoun bestowed upon slave-­state leaders an impious gift in republican America: he delivered a serviceable antirepublican philosophy that would transform them from a class of men who had accidentally found ruling power in their hands, due to the incidental structural effect of slavery, into a class determined to rule, philosophically devoted to the principle of their rule, and bent on developing their world around them in accord with their ruling idea. The result was, said Orris Ferry, that “the disciples of the Calhoun school” had “learned to distrust the people, to hate universal suffrage, and to believe in aristocracy.” Their goal was “the complete overthrow of democratic institutions, and the establishment of an aristocratic, or even monarchical government.”23 “This Revolution in Sentiment” While Calhoun was innovating constitutional doctrines to give legal protection to the political power of the developing slave-­state oligarchies, he also took new ground in national councils to advance the basis of their power, slavery. The Missouri debate had demonstrated to the nation that Southern statesmen were in the process of jettisoning the sentiments and policy of the Southerners’ forebears, the slaveholding abolitionists in the founding generation. The unapologetic defenders of slavery and state sovereignty were rising and were Calhoun’s anointed. Those who assimilated to the earlier slaveholding abolitionist archetype were dwindling and gradually becoming extinct. The Republicans linked Southern statesmen’s changing sentiments on slavery to their changing sentiments on government. The rise of the “proslavery argument” corresponded to a change in the character of Southern statesmen, from republican to oligarchical. The slavery debates in the Virginia Legislature in 1831–32 illustrated the changing character of Southern leadership. In his history of the slave power, Henry Wilson devoted a full chapter to the duel between the slaveholders of the declining type and the ascending type. The debate commenced when Thomas Jefferson Randolph, grandson of his namesake, introduced a motion intended to permit the legislature to consider a plan for gradual emancipation in the state. This, wrote Wilson, was “denounced as a monstrous proposition that struck at the foundation of republican government,” thus showing that the Virginian idea of republican government had undergone a serious 165

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transformation. Wilson commented that these debates revealed, on one side, “the evils and appalling dangers of slavery,” using “language as strong and unequivocal as any ever used by Abolitionists,” and, on the other, “the desperation of a growing class determined to cling to the evil.”24 In the debates, some praised slavery and minority rule in tones unknown to the founding generation of Virginia republicans. A Mr. Wood supported the perpetuation of slavery because it secured an aristocratic way of life for the minority slaveholders. The elegance, refinement, and oratorical achievements of Virginia’s master class, Wood claimed, were unsurpassed in the world. This became a common boast in the South, Wilson commented. But “the facts never justified such pretensions.” Southern authors were “at best of inferior rank,” and their contributions to science, letters, and the arts were meager. Later, the Civil War “tore off the mask” and revealed that their aristocratic pretensions “were shams, or at best, glaringly superficial.” But in 1831–32, a growing class of Virginians brazenly defended slavery concomitantly with the defense of aristocracy, even though some on both sides of the debate acknowledged slavery’s “dangers and difficulties not at a distance, but at home.” The Virginia Legislature would never again give further consideration to emancipation.25 The Virginia debate heralded the end of an era. Virginia, once the home of slaveholding abolitionists, was turning proslavery. Five years later, Calhoun brought their proslavery sentiments uttered in the state legislature to the floor of the U.S. Senate. Alluding to Calhoun’s speech in 1837, James Doolittle reminded his Southern colleagues in the Senate how much they had changed since the moment when Calhoun announced that slavery was “a positive good.” Once, Doolittle said, “the leading men of the South” had maintained “that slavery was an evil to be apologized for; to be borne as a necessity.” But they had “changed their ground” about slavery, now saying that the institution was “a positive good, a divine institution,” and they had changed “under the lead of Mr. Calhoun.”26 On the Senate floor in 1838, one year after his “positive good” speech, Calhoun announced that although many in the South had once believed slavery “was a moral and political evil; that folly and delusion are gone; we see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world.” In 1862 Doolittle quoted that speech also and claimed that Calhoun had introduced a “new idea that slavery was a blessing instead of a curse.” Indeed, as a curse, slavery “was acknowledged to be by all the great men of the revolutionary era.” And “from that hour down to the 166

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present moment,” Calhoun and his followers had demanded recognition of slavery “as a good thing.” Calhoun had forced this idea, as the fulcrum upon which, like Archimedes, he would move the world, first into all the political assemblies and conventions of the South; then into all the pulpits and conventions of the clergy of the South; into every legislative hall in the South; and at last into the decisions of their courts. He forced it here into both Houses of Congress until, during the last twenty years, we have heard little else from the Representatives from that section except that “slavery is a divine institution, a blessing,” and demanding that it should be recognized and regarded as such by every department of this Government, by Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court.27

Henry Wilson also quoted and marked Calhoun’s 1838 speech as a turning point. Thereafter, Calhoun’s disciples pronounced “slavery to be the corner-­stone of the republican edifice.” Inspired by such counsels, the rising young statesmen of the South contemptuously rejected the humane sentiments and republican theories of the founders of the Republic—­of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry, Mason, Martin, and their illustrious associates, and assumed slavery to be a positive good; an institution to be nurtured, extended, nationalized. New theories of constitutional construction were promulgated, the policy of slavery extension and slavery domination inaugurated, and the wicked policy of slavery aggression, for nearly a generation, has been pursued with tireless energy, in defiant mockery of the sentiments of mankind and the laws of the living God.28

Doolittle described the changed views shared by Southern statesmen, “this revolution of sentiment.” Orris Ferry decried “this . . . revolution of opinion,” that corresponded to a revolutionary change in the character of both statesmen and the governments in the slave states. By “philosophical necessity,” the “revolution of opinion” overthrew the liberties of the common people in the South, “and, in accordance with that necessity, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of elections, the very elements of civil liberty, were, one after the other, given up.”29 “The truth is,” Doolittle said when the Southerners still retained their seats in the Senate, “the South have changed their ground on the whole subject of slavery. . . . We [Republicans] stand where your fathers stood.” In the earlier 167

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days of the Republic, “your fathers . . . admitted slavery to be an evil, to be tolerated as a necessity, because you could not see your way to get rid of it; but you did not take the ground that slavery was a blessing—­that slavery was in accordance with natural right.” Reuben Fenton reminded his Southern colleagues that during the founding period, “all your early statesmen” believed “that slavery was a political, moral and social evil.” The free states had ever regarded slavery in that light and had not changed. “You, gentleman,” Reuben Fenton rebuked, “have changed from the declared opinions and purposes of the founders.” Waitman Willey informed his colleagues that “for the profession of and adherence to these principles of Washington and Madison, Marshall and Mason,” his fellow Southerners assailed him as “a political reprobate.” He turned the accusation back on his accusers, saying, “They are the real apostates. It is they who are the innovators and renegades from the early principles and policy of the South, as enunciated and maintained by the leading men of the South.” In 1864 John Sherman read copious antislavery extracts from the revolutionary era “to show how far the men who now justify and sustain slavery have departed from the teachings of their fathers.”30 They had departed so far that they would not tolerate the same antislavery utterances that their own abolitionist fathers had uttered. In 1860 Francis Kellogg expressed his incredulity that because some Republican members of the House of Representatives had endorsed Hinton Helper’s new book, The Impending Crisis, “full of damaging facts against slavery,” the Republicans in Congress “were denounced as traitors to our country, as false to our constitutional obligations.” Speaker of the House candidate John Sherman had also endorsed the book, and “never shall I forget the amazement with which I heard the distinguished and honorable member from Virginia [Mr. MILLSON, page 21 Congressional Globe] say, that ‘one who consciously, deliberately, and of purpose, lent his name and influence to the propagation of such writings, is not only not fit to be speaker, but is not fit to live! ’”31 Henry Wilson asked rhetorically, “Can we utter, in the South, the words which the fathers of the South taught us? Could the Senator from New York, [Mr. FISH] whose father fought at Yorktown, go to that field and utter the sentiments which were upon the lips of all the great men of Virginia when Cornwallis surrendered?” He could not, nor could “the Senators from New Hampshire stand on that spot once baptized by the blood of [New Hampshire patriot] Alexander Scammell, and there utter the sentiments of Henry, or of Jefferson, or of Mason.” None of them could safely “go down to Mount 168

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Vernon . . . and there repeat the words of Washington, that ‘No man desires more earnestly than I do to see slavery abolished.’” None of them could safely “go to Monticello” and “stand by the graves of Jefferson, of Madison, of Henry, of the great men of Virginia, and utter the great thoughts which they uttered for the liberty of the bondmen.” Benjamin Wade held up “General Washington,” who was himself, “according to your understanding of it, just as much an Abolitionist as you charge me with being.” He asked, “How long do you suppose that he could remain on the soil of Virginia to-­d ay, with this declaration upon his tongue?” Cadwallader Washburn defended William Seward, who had been designated “the evil genius of Democracy,” arguing that Seward had “never uttered any sentiment on this slave question” any different from the sentiments of southerners “George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison.” If those “great men were now living their persons would be unsafe to-­d ay on the soil of Virginia.” Washburn announced that a few days earlier, Virginia historian Robert Reid Howison had withdrawn from giving a lecture to a Richmond literary association because Washington’s opinions on slavery were now declared contrary to “Scripture and reason.” He added that “Jefferson, if now living would not be a welcome visitor in a Virginia community.”32 Confronted by these Republican charges, the Southern statesmen did not deny them. James Doolittle recalled that on a recent day, Senator Robert Hunter of Virginia stood up here and stated the fact frankly, . . . that we in Virginia have changed our ground; we do not stand where we stood anciently; we do not stand where our fathers stood upon this slavery question . . . we do not believe in what Washington believed and Jefferson believed and Madison believed and Monroe believed, and all the leading men of Virginia, for the first fifty years of our existence under the Constitution, believed; we have changed our opinions in Virginia, and instead of now admitting that slavery is an evil, to be restricted and discouraged, and which we may hope and pray may be someday entirely removed from the Republic, we now take the ground that it is a blessing, to be fostered, encouraged, and extended, as a benefit to the black man and a benefit to the white.33

Remarkably, Hunter’s colleague from Virginia Senator James Mason broke into the speech and confirmed that Doolittle quoted Hunter “substantially, correctly,” and added his approval to Hunter’s remarks. 169

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In 1860 Charles Van Wyck quoted several leading Southern statesmen who admitted that their sentiments on the slavery question departed from their fathers’ beliefs. Senator and future Confederate president Jefferson Davis had denominated prior antislavery sentiments an “error,” but thanks to their allegedly free discussions in the South, Davis continued, “reason” had triumphed over these “delusions.” Georgia representative and future vice president of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens looked expectantly toward the expansion of slavery, saying that “Negro slavery is but in its infancy.” He averred, “Our fathers did not understand it. I grant that the public men of the South were once against it, but they did not understand it.” In Congress Representative Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina rejected the “sentiments which the great men of the Revolution entertained upon the question of slavery,” excusing them because, he alleged, “the institution had not been discussed; its character and capacities had not been tested; besides, they were imbibed with the influence of the French encyclopedists, and were affected by the abstractions of the Declaration of Independence.”34 The Republicans linked the Southern statesmen’s embrace of the “proslavery argument” and rejection of their own republican fathers’ proscription of slavery to their embrace of minority rule and rejection of republicanism. Francis Blair referred to Calhoun’s “positive good” speech in 1837 as a turning point and added that “the Calhounites” were not the only peculiar class of politicians in thinking that an institution which gives them political power is a divine institution. All the aristocrats of England, with rare exceptions, think that primogeniture is equally divine; and it was argued in Parliament, with more earnestness, eloquence, and learning, to show that the rotten borough system was the source of English power and prosperity, than was ever exhibited in Congress to show that slavery was the secret of the marvelous greatness and growth of America. The source of these strange perversions of reason is obviously the same. It was merely because slavery, in the one case, and the rotten borough system in the other, gave the orator or his party political power.35

Slavery in the antebellum South and rotten boroughs in England both endued minority classes with ruling power, at the expense of the natural sovereignty of the people they ruled. Although these respective ruling classes declared slavery and rotten boroughs to be common goods of their communities, this could be so only if, likewise, rule by the few was the best form of 170

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government. Jacob Collamer quoted Calhoun’s speech in 1838, also maintaining that in defending slavery, Calhoun was defending aristocracy. After declaring slavery the “most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world,” Calhoun had said, “The Southern States are an aggregate, in fact, of communities, not of individuals. Every plantation is a little community, with the master at its head, who concentrates in himself the united interests; of capital and labor, of which he is the common representative. These small communities aggregated make the State in all, whose action, labor, and capital is equally represented and perfectly harmonized.” Commenting on the nature of this political society sketched by Calhoun, Collamer said, “It is obvious that it is an aristocracy. He says that these communities, of which the master or owner is the head, aggregated, make the State, and the owner is the representative of these separate communities.” Second, those who did not own plantations and slaves were “essentially left out” of Calhoun’s account. But because the slaveholders filled out the class of “common representatives,” and not the nonslaveholders, this meant that in Calhoun’s sketch, the large majority of the people in the slave states was ruled.36 The slaveholders were the “common representatives” in the same sense as kings were “common representatives” of their realms. Led by Calhoun, the new public proclamations on the moral standing of slavery indicated a significant political change. By increasingly proclaiming the moral goodness of slavery, the leaders of the slave South were publicly embracing the moral goodness of their ruling power and were showing that they intended to preserve it, at the expense of republicanism, or rule of, by, and for the people. Calhoun’s innovative doctrines on slavery and his innovative doctrines on constitutional government worked together for the same end and derived from the same source. The goodness of slavery and the goodness of minority rule both shared in the principle of natural inequality, and that principle defied the principle of natural equality in the Declaration of Independence. Charles Sumner succinctly identified this principle as the heart and soul of Calhoun’s labors, noting that “the sophistries of Calhoun” were established upon “the obvious inequalities of body and mind” and countered “the idea of human rights . . . enunciated in our Declaration of Independence.” Speaking to his constituents in 1858, Jehu Baker explained that the prevalence of support among Southern statesmen for Calhoun’s constitutional doctrines owed its origin to this “revolution of sentiment” among them: “Thus we see that 171

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an extreme pro-­slavery opinion, utterly unknown in the conservative age of the country, has grown up in a certain portion of the Southern mind, and that a new, extreme and monstrous pro-­slavery doctrine has been invented to accommodate that change of opinion.”37 Calhoun’s revolutionary gospel, the inequality of mankind, repudiated the principles of the fathers’ republicanism and repudiated the fathers’ Constitution that embodied those principles and protected that republicanism. The Calhoun Revolution Not only Southern statesmen but also the people in the free states emerged from the Missouri controversy in a much-­a ltered condition. John Henderson recounted that once free-­state people, “like the founders of the Republic,” had hoped for slavery’s “ultimate extinction” and trusted that the solution would come peacefully. In the meantime, they believed that it was their duty to respect its limits and keep it in its limits. But the battle in Congress over whether to admit Missouri with slavery durably shifted public opinion in the free states. When the “ardors of the Missouri Question” had subsided, Sumner noted, antislavery sentiment gave way to “indifference throughout the North.”38 Free-­state people had adjusted themselves to new political circumstances, and their change aided Calhoun and his revolutionary followers in his grand empire-­building project. Within the free states, slavery became a wedge issue. Struck by the slave states’ determination to expand the boundaries of slavery over Missouri, free-­ state people realized for the first time that if they refused accommodation, the South might secede. That crisis taught them that they would henceforth have to choose between preserving the Union or firmly opposing proslavery policy. In the aftermath of the Missouri controversy, many chose the Union. The Missouri Compromise had saved the Union, though conceding the state and possibly all land south of 36º30´ to slavery. The narrow escape from disunion influenced many in the free states to temper or silence their antislavery convictions. Representative John Broomall of Pennsylvania blamed “the spirit of conservatism and cowardice in the North” for compromising with proslavery interests. Zachariah Chandler recounted that the prior generation was “ready to compromise any principle; anything to save the Union.” James Ashley also identified this prior pattern of Northern conduct. Despite being “conscientiously opposed to the institution of slavery,” “thousands of patriotic citizens in the free States” cooperated and aided “this privileged class” composed of “Calhoun and his political disciples.”39 172

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The result was Northern moral decline. In 1858, noting the extraordinary and humiliating yet true claim by Senator James Hammond of South Carolina that slaveholders had ruled the nation for the prior sixty years, Elihu Washburne traced Northern demoralization to their submission to the “rule of an oligarchy.” When slave-­state statesmen pressed their demands, the Northern people “sometimes vigorously resisted, but oftener feebly opposed and then finally acquiesced.” Soon enough, a “still greater outrage” would be committed, and the North would again submit. “This continued submission, this eternal acquiescence, has dulled the sensibilities of the people of the North to that extent, that too many of them confound the surrender of sacred rights with the dictates of an honest patriotism.”40 Too many Northern people had refrained from acting on their beliefs, the natural rights principles of the Declaration, upon which the Union was consummated. They did this in a misguided attempt to carry out their patriotic duty to preserve the Union. But their appeasement of the oligarchy facilitated the gradual destruction of the republican model of government founded upon those principles. This shift in public opinion influenced the conduct and policy of their representatives. In Congress, said James Wilson, “whenever slavery became excited and angry,” free-­state statesmen would “try to appease its wrath by offering it some new hold on the life of the nation, some greater advantage over free government and human liberty.” Wilson added, “When slavery cried ‘Give, give,’ by force of habit and loss of conscience, we always responded by offering more than it demanded of us. We were the slaves of the slave power.”41 Into the breach stepped the new abolitionists, zealous men like William Lloyd Garrison, who denounced free-­state indifference to slavery and preferred a stern antislavery policy over the preservation of the Union. In the free states, abolitionism could be construed as unpatriotic because it threatened disunion. Hence, unionism and antislavery sentiment became antagonistic, sometimes violently so, and the Republicans looked back upon this free-­state history with regret. John Farnsworth remembered the subsequent “dragging of Garrison through the streets of Boston with a rope around his neck to be hanged; the issuing of a message by the Governor of Massachusetts, Edward Everett, declaring that the men agitating the slavery question were indictable at common law; . . . the murder of Lovejoy at Alton [Illinois].”42 George Julian noted that the Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia in 1831 galvanized the rise of the new abolitionism, but in that decade the new 173

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abolitionism met opposition from the national government and opposition, sometimes deadly, in the free states. After the 1837 murder of Elijah Lovejoy in the free state of Illinois, the mayor of Boston compared his assassins “to the patriots of the Revolution.” In 1838, the year Calhoun blessed slavery on the floor of the U.S. Senate, a mob burned Pennsylvania Hall, built by the Pennsylvania Anti-­Slavery Society. President Jackson’s postmaster Amos Kendall approved the “rifling of the mails and the suppression of the circulation of anti-­slavery newspapers in the South.” Congress enacted “gag rules” to suppress the reading of antislavery petitions. President Van Buren had “prostitute[d] our foreign policy to the service of slavery and the slave trade.” The national government’s “unconstitutional espousal of slavery” disgraced the nation.43 Slave-­state statesmen knew “the devotion of the free States to the Union, and the forbearance of the North” and used this Northern devotion to their strategic advantage, wrote Isaac Arnold. Henceforth, they repeatedly deployed the wedge that they had discovered during the Missouri controversy, to split free-­state people and their national representatives between their conflicting allegiances to antislavery principles and to the Union. Relying upon the strength of Northern unionism, Arnold continued, slave-­state statesmen “habitually threatened disunion whenever necessary,” in order to isolate antislavery constituencies and advance their proslavery policy. With many Republicans, James Ashley concurred with Arnold, that the statesmen had taken advantage “of the well-­k nown loyalty of the people of the free States to the Constitution and the Union, and their habitual respect for all laws . . . by threatening to dissolve the Union.”44 On the part of the Southern statesmen, the prospective dissolution of the Union did not strike the same sensitive chord with them, because their affection for the Union had slackened since the Missouri controversy, due to the intervention of Calhoun’s new doctrines. “State sovereignty,” said Martin Thayer in 1864, had for the prior thirty years become so generally embraced by Southern statesmen, and had so dulled their affection for the Union, that they did not hesitate “to cast off their allegiance as they would a worn-­out garment.”45 Whereas the free-­state people became indifferent toward antislavery policy in favor of the Union, the slave-­state statesmen had became increasingly indifferent toward union in favor of the further establishment of their ruling power and the extension of slavery. In the free states, indifference or forbearance expressed a middle position between intransigent opposition to and active support for proslavery policy. 174

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Proslavery statesmen would repeatedly lay new demands on these moderate compromisers, testing how long their unionism would hold a majority of the free-­state people to this middle position. The instrumentality of Southern statesmanship from Calhoun onward ensured that the free-­state people would continuously agonize over whether to sacrifice the antislavery convictions in favor of union or to risk disunion and affirm a stronger antislavery position. James Doolittle quoted Calhoun in his own language, exhorting his followers and stating his own intention to “force the issue” upon the North, meaning to continue to press the slavery issue, until the Northern people either acquiesced to new Southern demands or, by their resistance, justified Southern secession. Looking back during the war, Thomas Shannon admitted, “I believe now that since the days of Calhoun there has never been a middle ground.”46 In retrospect, Shannon understood that every concession to the oligarchy was a prelude to a new demand, until the nation might become fully revolutionized, a slaveholding oligarchy in its entirety. Looking forward from 1844, antislavery statesmen might have reasonably calculated that they could afford a policy of forbearance toward their proslavery counterparts. Looking at the map of the United States at that time with the eye of a future secretary of state, James Blaine explained that slavery had no place to go. North of the Missouri Compromise line, slavery was forever prohibited, and the territorial populations there were increasing. Wisconsin would soon be ready for admission. South of the line, Mexico (which still claimed Texas and lands west of Texas) blocked the growth of the U.S. slave territory in a westward direction. Only the Oklahoma Territory was available, and that was set aside as an Indian reservation. The northern boundary of the American Oregon country had not yet been established and required a new treaty with Great Britain. Democratic presidential candidate James Polk and Whig leader John Quincy Adams both advocated a northern boundary to be established at 54°40´, which would have included half of present-­d ay British Columbia, reaching the Alaskan panhandle, and it seemed that the British government was ready to accept this. Western Canada was slated for annexation into the American Union. The natural extension of the country seemed to point northwesterly, around Mexico and into western Canada, following the path of a crescent. Southern statesmen recognized this. They favored relinquishing the American claim to the northern portion of Oregon, which might have added more free states to the nation, and they calculated that the annexation of Texas, and a prospective cession of more 175

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land from Mexico, would open the westward growth of slavery. Their aim was to redirect the future extension of the nation directly westward, which was more conducive to proslavery aims. With respect to Oregon, the reply of Senator Edward Hannegan to a proslavery senator in 1845, Blaine wrote, captured “the whole case.” Hannegan responded, saying, “If Oregon were good for the production of sugar and cotton, it would not have encountered this opposition. Its possession would have been at once secured.”47 In his one-­year term of office as secretary of state in 1844–45, Calhoun was instrumental in changing the direction of American expansion in keeping with proslavery strategy. He checked the northwesterly expansion of the country and ensured westward expansion, setting the stage for the next great collision, over the slave or free status of the territories wrested from Mexico in the 1840s. Calhoun’s proslavery objective in pursuing annexation, Jacob Collamer reminded the Senate, was plainly stated in his official letter to the American minister to France. John Bingham quoted representations from Secretary of State Calhoun to the Mexican government, which also confirmed the proslavery policy intentions.48 Blaine pointed out that while Polk was campaigning for the presidency on the 54°40´ platform for Oregon, Secretary of State Calhoun personally initiated private negotiations with the British minister, settling the boundary at 49°. As for Texas, Calhoun knew that annexation of Texas and inevitable war with Mexico would open a new opportunity to seize westward land and avert slavery’s restriction to the southeastern corner of the future United States. Blaine cited the British government, which maintained that the defeat of annexation would seal slavery’s abolition in Texas, and, further, it would mortally wound slavery in the existing United States. Calhoun acted accordingly. To seize Texas, Calhoun used state-­sovereignty theory against Mexico. Texas, he instructed the American minister to Mexico, had never been a rebellious province but an independent sovereignty, and framed thus, the American policy toward annexation advanced under Calhoun’s hand. Blaine noted that the same state-­sovereignty logic deployed against the Mexican government on behalf of Texas was later deployed against the American government by the slave states, prior to secession.49 The implication was that by loosening the bonds between these lands and their respective national governments, Calhoun and the oligarchic class were following a congruent logic with the same end in view—­to carve a slave empire out of the sovereign territory of Mexico and the United States, which they eventually achieved. 176

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At the same time, by independently securing the curtailment of the northwesterly expansion of the United States, Calhoun aimed to weaken the free section of the United States. His statecraft was preparing to give the slave section of the country leverage, so that either the whole United States would become a slave empire on the ashes of republicanism or the South would become an independent empire, leaving a relatively weakened union of free states to fend for itself. In a parallel movement, Calhoun and his followers began to bring the Democratic Party more firmly into their control. Previously, the party had not endorsed the policy of Texas annexation in its party platform, but Calhoun brought with him the Southern wing and gained the party’s endorsement of the policy. Martin Van Buren of New York, the party’s expected candidate for the presidency in 1844, had opposed the annexation. Through adroit maneuvering and with the support of his Southern wing, Calhoun secured Van Buren’s defeat for the nomination in favor of James Polk and destroyed Van Buren’s career in the party he once led.50 However, Northern Democrats were not entirely aware of the proslavery purpose of annexation at the time. Partly, this was due to deception. In an 1844 speech quoted by John Bingham, Senator James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, who was “then, and ever since, the willing and supple instrument of the slave power,” had argued that the annexation of Texas would result in limiting slavery.51 The annexation of Texas was accomplished, and the Mexican-­A merican War came. But before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 ended the war, a parallel war broke out in Congress over slavery in the expected Mexican cession of territories to be gained in addition to Texas. The treaty eventually confirmed the annexation of Texas and ceded an additional nine hundred thousand square miles of territory to the United States, including California. The conflict in Congress over the Mexican cession, wrote Blaine, “was the old Missouri struggle renewed,” but due to the revolutionary political developments in the slave South, the struggle was worse. The conflict “arose as suddenly as the agitation of 1820, but gave indications of deeper feeling and more prolonged controversy.”52 A comparison between the two crises highlighted how much Southern statesmen had radicalized. Slave-­state statesmen were more justified in expecting Missouri’s admission as a slave state in 1820, because Congress had carved its territory out of the Louisiana Territory, in which France had kept slavery legal. After the Louisiana acquisition, the U.S. Congress organized the Orleans Territory and nevertheless prohibited foreign slave importations 177

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and the purchase and importation of slaves from anywhere beyond the territory. But Mexico had abolished slavery nationally, and so the midcentury debate in Congress determined the question of whether the U.S. Congress would newly implant slavery in lands that had been previously free.53 This was a substantially different circumstance in which proslavery statesmen established a new precedent. Blaine wrote, “Every acre of the nine hundred thousand square miles was free territory while under the rule of Mexico, and the Commissioners of that government were extremely anxious that the United States should give a guarantee that its character in this respect should not be changed.” Reflecting the sharply different character of his times, Nicholas Trist, the American commissioner, replied that if the ceded territory “were increased tenfold in value, and, in addition to that, covered a foot thick with pure gold, on the single condition that slavery should be forever excluded,” he wouldn’t “entertain the offer for a moment, nor even think of sending it to his government. No American President would dare to submit such a treaty to the Senate.”54 Awakened by the course of events, John Bingham said, outraged Northern Democrats, “now fully conscious of the ulterior designs of the slave power . . . determined to plant themselves on the platform of Jefferson,” by which Bingham meant the slavery prohibition in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, drafted by Jefferson. In 1846 Northern Democrats led by David Wilmot in the House of Representatives first appended an amendment to a war appropriations bill, “which required that in all the territory to be acquired . . . slavery should be forever prohibited.” Democratic state legislatures in Michigan and New Hampshire passed resolutions affirming their support of the “fundamental principles of the ordinance of 1787.”55 This amendment, the Wilmot Proviso, did not, therefore, aim at abolishing slavery, but, rather, it would prevent slavery’s ingress into already free territory. Calhoun met the difficulty by presenting a new constitutional doctrine. James Doolittle recalled that in 1847, Calhoun, now a senator again, “introduced in the Senate a resolution declaring, for the first time, this doctrine, that the Constitution, of its own force, guaranties the right to take slaves into the Territories of the United States; and at the same time, another resolution denying the power of Congress to inhibit it.”56 According to Calhoun, since the states were sovereign under the Constitution and the territories were the common property of the states, the Constitution sustained the right to own slaves in the territories. Congress could not impair that constitutional right by prohibiting slavery in the national 178

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territories. To do otherwise would be prejudicial to the equal rights of the states. This doctrine aimed at overcoming the immediate, practical problem, as Henry Wilson said, of how to fasten slavery upon “the coming free territories of Mexico.” The implications of Calhoun’s new doctrine, of course, were much more far-­reaching. Doolittle denied the fidelity of Calhoun’s doctrine to the Constitution: “Sir, the whole history of this Government, from the beginning down to 1847, was a history of prohibition or limitation of slavery on the part of Congress; and there never was an act organizing any Territory under the authority of the United States, which did not in the act itself recognize the power of Congress to legislate upon the subject of slavery previous to 1847.”57 With other Republicans, Doolittle remembered that when a member of President James Monroe’s cabinet, Calhoun had endorsed the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise bill passed by Congress that did address slavery in the territories. But under the lead of Calhoun, Doolittle continued, “prominent men at the South” had “changed their ground” and “the ground of the Democratic Party.” Thereafter, said Doolittle, Calhoun and his followers insisted that the Constitution made “slavery national and freedom sectional.” This meant that the Constitution might tolerate slavery prohibitions only in the free states and possibly nowhere. Benjamin Wade recalled Senator Henry Clay’s reaction to Calhoun’s new doctrine. Clay was “amazed and astonished” and asked him, “Where do you find your constitutional warrant for it?” But Calhoun “did not deign to reply.”58 Calhoun knew that he did not need to reply to Clay. He had already outflanked Clay. In 1860 James Ashley pointed out that immediately after Jackson vacated the presidency, Calhoun had quietly determined to gain control of the Supreme Court. By an act of Congress in 1837, the organization of federal circuit courts was revised so that “the South, with less than half the population, and not more than one-­fourth of the business in the Supreme Court, obtained a majority of the judges.” The district courts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, all slave states, composed the Eighth Circuit and those of the slave states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas composed the Ninth Circuit. Yet since the 1837 act, the widely dispersed district courts of the free states of Iowa, Wisconsin, California, Minnesota, and Oregon “have not been erected into or attached to judicial circuits, and have no representative on the bench of the Supreme Court,” despite the fact that “these States contain a population, and have an amount of judicial business equal at least to one-­third of those of the entire fifteen slave States.”59 179

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When Calhoun served as secretary of state in the presidential administration of John Tyler in 1844, “For the first time, . . . the opinions of men selected for the Supreme Court on the question of slavery were made a test of their promotion.” Tyler nominated Samuel Nelson with Calhoun’s approval, due to “his reputed fidelity to this class interest.” Thereafter, Southern statesmen gained “control of the Senate committees, especially the Judiciary Committee, to which all nominations to the Supreme Court were referred.” Ashley then recounted the history of nominations withdrawn by the executive or rejected by the Judiciary Committee, due to “their known opposition to slavery, and their belief that Congress had the power . . . to abolish and prohibit slavery in all national Territories.” Nobody could say how many able nominees were rejected due to the test of slavery because “the official action of the Senate is locked up in its secret archives, into which the people are never permitted to look by the leaders of the [Democratic Party].” Nevertheless, the twenty-­year pattern of known withdrawals, rejections, and approvals correlated with the interest of the proslavery majority on the Judiciary Committee.60 Looking back in 1860, Ashley showed what the results of this control were and could be in the future. The work of this “mere faction” ensured that the Supreme Court would deliver its proslavery opinion in Dred Scott. In Dred Scott, Justice Samuel Nelson had written, “The law of the State is supreme over the subject of slavery within its jurisdiction, except in cases where the power is restrained by the Constitution.” But because the Court held that “the national Constitution recognizes slaves as property,” Ashley continued, “It is difficult to see how it can be lawfully excluded from a Territory or State, or on what just principle the purchase and importation of slaves is declared piracy.” The Court could just as well strike down slavery prohibitions in the states and the ban on foreign slave importations, on the same grounds that the Court had struck down slavery prohibition in the territories. And just then, in 1860, a “second Dred Scott case” was due for adjudication by the Supreme Court, testing whether the state of New York could prohibit slavery. With a second Dred Scott decision in this case and the election of another proslavery president to enforce it, “the revolution inaugurated by Mr. Calhoun, less than twenty-­five years ago, [would] be complete. There will then no longer be either free Territories or free States in the American Union, but every State and every Territory, so far as the action of the national Government can decree it, will be consecrated to the everlasting curse of 180

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human bondage.” The North would be absorbed into Southern oligarchy. Millions of Northerners would inherit the fate of “millions of the South who are crushed and groaning beneath this despotism—­the poor whites as well as the free and slave colored.” And this was “the ultimate purpose of the ruling class of the South.”61 All of these consequences flowed from Calhoun’s successful attempt to control the Supreme Court and plant his doctrines, which astonished Clay in 1847, in constitutional law. In the same year, 1847, Rufus Spalding addressed the state of the Union in a speech to the Ohio General Assembly, sixteen years before taking his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in the Thirty-­Eighth Congress. He warned of the unprecedented demands for slavery’s extension currently straining the nation. Though reprobating slavery, the founders acknowledged its existence under state law, in the Constitution. They assumed, he said, that slaveholders’ “self-­interest if not philanthropy” would extinguish the institution. But “Time has demonstrated the fallacy of such belief.” The Constitution should have restricted slavery to the states where it already existed, because, unpredictably, “the demands of the slaveholders have been insatiate,” and the “people of the free states have uniformly acceded to their unjust demands. . . . All great questions of governmental policy, yea and of ecclesiastical also, are made to bow to the behests of ‘the peculiar institution.’” And “Yea, more than all this; it seeks to usurp the elective franchise itself, and we are now told with an air of superlative insolence and disdain, that political organization of party may henceforth do as it will, the slave states will elect the President.” Looking ahead toward the presidential election of 1848, Spalding affirmed, “And so they will choose the president—­and rule in the councils of the nation—­and perpetuate the evils of slavery—­until the free citizens of the North, and of the East, and of the West shall, with united voice, say to the foul fiend—­‘thus far shalt thou come and no farther.’”62 One month later in Congress, Representative James Dixon of Connecticut dug in his heels, just as Spalding said was required. Dixon warned the slave states that they “should have been satisfied with the protection of the Constitution,” but now “it is time for them to be told that they can go no further.” In this speech, Dixon became the first congressman who later served during Reconstruction to affix the oligarchy label to the new ruling statesmen in the South, in the halls of Congress. He blamed the success of the slavery-­extending measures to annex Texas and instigate a war on Mexico on “recreant representatives of the Free States, who prostrated themselves in humble servility before the haughty and arrogant demands of a slaveholding 181

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oligarchy.” Future Reconstruction Republican Thaddeus Stevens was also present and prominent in the congressional debate, and he, too, denied that the Southern statesmen represented republican political societies. He commented, “Slaveholders form an untitled aristocracy, with numerous dependents. Individuals appropriate large tracts of territory to themselves, and thus prevent it from being thickly settled by freemen.” There was no middle class in the South like that in the North, because “slave countries never can have such a yeomanry; never can have a body of small proprietors who own the soil and till it with their own hands, and sit down in conscious independence under their own vine and fig tree.” The nonslaveholding freemen in the South could not meet this description; their class was “the most worthless and miserable of mankind.”63 The changed character of Southern statesmen’s demands, and the changed character of the statesmen themselves, was attracting greater attention by Northern statesmen, and they evinced a new interest in inquiring into the nature of Southern political society and their national representatives. The prospective extension of slavery would extend the breadth of these political societies, these rulers, and these ruled people. The extension of slavery threatened the founders’ republicanism. Yet Northern politicians continued to find new “middle ground” to appease the oligarchy and preserve the Union. Senator Lewis Cass, a Democrat from Michigan, had at first supported the free-­soil Wilmot Proviso, George Julian wrote. But then, facing Southern obstinacy and fearing Southern disunion, he turned against Wilmot, instead “proclaiming his gospel of ‘popular sovereignty’ in the Territories, which proved the seed-­plot of immeasurable national trouble and disaster.”64 Cass’s policy, later picked up and advanced by Senator Stephen Douglas, transferred the question of whether to establish or prohibit slavery from the Congress to the people in the territories. This new “middle ground” gave the proslavery oligarchy another opening to plant slavery in all territory, including previously free territory, and Cass was their willing instrument. The presidential election of 1848 took place amid the debate over the vast Mexican cession, and the slavery question dominated the campaign. Acting as “a perfect unit, and fully resolved upon the spread of slavery over our Territories,” Southerners in the Democratic Party unsurprisingly selected Cass as their nominee. Cass, Julian wrote, had earned the nomination “by multiplied acts of the most obsequious and crouching servility to his southern overseers. Again and again he had crawled in the dust at their feet.” The Whigs selected Zachary Taylor, a large slaveholder, who would also presumably serve the 182

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oligarchy well, and he was nominated primarily by the votes of Southern Whigs “who believed in the extension of slavery.” As a result, leading Massachusetts Whigs, including Henry Wilson, “left the Convention in disgust, and severed their connection with the party forever.”65 The slavery extensionists seemed to control both party nominees, which augured well for the plans of Calhoun and his followers. But the political middle ground in the North on which Southern statesmen had depended for their success began to weaken in the 1848 campaign. Previously, Julian wrote, some abolitionists had politically organized, forming the Liberty Party, but their presidential candidate, James Birney, received just under seven thousand votes in the 1840 campaign. This was “a small beginning, but it was the beginning of the end.” Increasingly bold proslavery policy measures strengthened the antislavery political movement around this small core. The Liberty Party first established the political creed opposing slavery’s extension that was later picked up by the larger and stronger antislavery parties in the future, the Free Soil and Republican Parties.66 In 1848 disaffected Whigs and Democrats fused with the remaining elements of the Liberty Party and formed the Free Soil Party. Meeting Calhoun’s new constitutional doctrine squarely, the party platform proclaimed that “Congress has no more power to make a slave than to make a king”; that is, the Constitution did not authorize Congress to establish slavery where it already had been prohibited. After much agony of conscience, Julian decided that he could no longer be true to his own convictions as a Whig and bolted for the Free Soilers. Whigs repeatedly charged him with “abolitionism” and labeled him an “apostle of disunion,” among other more vicious insults, and this, he said, was typical treatment for Whig Party “apostates.” Though residing in the free state of Indiana, Julian wrote, “I was threatened by mob violence by my own neighbors . . . as if slavery had been an established institution of the State.”67 Yet, ironically, the Whig Party announced in their convention, “The Whig Party is the only true Free Soil Party.” Misguided unionism explained the sharp contrast between Whig principles and the Whig course of political action. In the 1848 presidential election, support for an antislavery political party’s presidential nominee, in this case Free Soil candidate Martin Van Buren, jumped to just under one hundred thousand votes, and Free Soilers won seats in Congress.68 Opposition to slavery’s extension was beginning to gain a devoted political constituency. James Blaine wrote that the proslavery leaders expected to legislate in favor of opening all the new territories to slavery or, at minimum, to extend the 183

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Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, cutting California in half. But after winning the presidency in 1848, Zachary Taylor surprised Calhoun and his followers as well as the North by recommending the admission of California as a free state and that New Mexico remain in a territorial condition. Taylor was a Southerner and a large slaveholder but was prepared to act against slavery as the Southern fathers had, when the opportunity was presented. The rapid and fortuitous influx of antislavery men into California during the Gold Rush threw the power of numbers against slavery, and in 1849 they framed a free constitution, in the expectation of an enabling act from Congress for admission into the Union. This strengthened the president’s hand.69 When Congress convened in December 1849, Senator Henry Clay began introducing a series of compromise measures, intending to resolve forever the disputed questions about slavery, in the interests of lasting sectional peace. An exhausting debate ensued for months over how much each side was willing to compromise. Death and unexpected alliances magnified the uncertainty of the outcome. Calhoun died at the end of March 1850. The president and Clay, supported by Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, found themselves at loggerheads, with Clay and Webster conceding more, and Taylor less, to the interests of slavery, until the president suddenly died in July 1850.70 Webster’s course of action departed from his prior antislavery policy and the antislavery feelings of his New England constituency. On March 7, 1850, he pleaded for Clay’s compromise measures for the sake of preserving the Union. He urged the recognition of slavery in Texas and all future states created from Texas, although the institution did not legally exist under the Mexican government. He criticized the North for not expeditiously rendering fugitive slaves to their Southern brethren. He strongly rebuked abolitionism in the North, equating abolitionism with disunionism. The long speech shocked his constituents.71 Henry Wilson blamed the conduct of Clay and Webster for demoralizing the antislavery cause and wrote that had Taylor lived, the resulting Compromise of 1850 would not have been so favorable to the slaveholding interests. But belying his judgment, Wilson also recorded pages of Southern statesmen’s angry threats to secede and declare independence on the floors of Congress and in a separate convention in Nashville that year. Clay and Webster might have well understood that they gained as much for the antislavery cause as could be gained. Anything less might have prompted Southern leaders to secede. The prospective admission of California with its “freely selected constitution” drove Senator Pierre Soulé of Louisiana to say that the consummation of this act would be “one of the 184

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most grievous, the most revolting, and the most unjustifiable wrongs that can be inflicted upon a people, living, as we do, under a constitutional compact which proposes to establish justice and promote the general welfare. It will remain a monument of legislative recklessness and oppression; it will shame history to record it.” Such distemper is instructive. How did the decision of the people of California to frame a free constitution and the congressional majority’s decision to admit California as a free state inflict a grievous, revolting, and unjustifiable wrong and constitute oppression? And a wrong upon whom? To what wronged “people” does Soulé refer? Certainly, the nonslaveholding whites and the slaves in the South felt no wrong done to them by the admission of California as a free state. The perceived wrong and perceived oppression were felt by Soulé and his ruling class. Indeed, California’s admission, wrote George Boutwell, presaged an irrecoverable reduction of the power of Southern statesmen in the national government.72 Webster, Blaine reflected, had sacrificed his reputation with his own people at home in one final act of appeasement to placate men like Soulé. Though edging close to the brink of secession, the South would remain in the Union, hopefully forever. At the point of their enactment, the compromise measures enjoyed the support of virtually all Southern representatives, Blaine wrote, while the North was divided.73 The final adjustment that became the Compromise of 1850 included the admission of California as a free state and the recognition of the New Mexico and Utah Territories, but without any restriction on states to be formed from those territories as slave or free and a much tougher fugitive-­slave law. Boutwell pointed out that all the territory acquired from the Louisiana Purchase had been slave territory; hence, the Missouri Compromise line, prohibiting slavery to the north, was a gain for freedom. Though all the territory gained from the Mexican cession had been free, according to Mexican law, Texas was admitted as a slave state, and states formed from the New Mexico and Utah Territories were open to slavery. This was a loss for freedom. Nevertheless, the “great Senatorial leaders,” wrote Isaac Arnold, believed that “the agitation of the slavery question was forever silenced.” 74 It could not be so. The South had changed. Another event that marked this change was the demise of Senator Thomas Benton of Missouri. Benton argued more forcefully against the compromise measures, and for a stronger antislavery policy, than Clay and Webster had. Benton was a slaveholder of the older kind, a slaveholding abolitionist. Josiah Grinnell remembered that Benton had said of himself, “I am a nominal slave owner, but can only say, 185

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not in pride, that I am not the first man whose practice and theories were divergent.” When Congress paused their debates to eulogize Calhoun’s passing, John Wentworth noted that Benton was as silent as Calhoun was when John Quincy Adams died. Prodding Benton, Webster urged Benton to act magnanimously toward the dead Calhoun, whereupon Benton replied, “He is not dead, sir—­he is not dead. There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines. . . . Whilst I am discharging my duty here, his disciples are disseminating his poison all over my State.” In response to Benton’s opposition to slavery’s expansion during the debates, the legislature of the slave state of Missouri refused to reelect him as their U.S. senator. Wentworth claimed, “It was Calhounism that defeated Senator Benton’s reelection to the Senate,” and Calhounism in Kentucky “must have eventually defeated Mr. Clay, had he lived” 75 Though Calhoun was dead, the political revolution he led in the South was approaching completion, and the new generation of Southern statesmen in the nation’s capital had become restive revolutionaries. At one time, when South Carolina public men had “led the van” in support of slavery in America, said Henry Wilson, “they were disavowed by the leading men of the South, and by the men of all parties of the North.” In time, South Carolina had “impressed her ideas and imposed her policy on the South.” Calhoun had played the lead role in this enterprise of conversion. The progress of Calhoun’s career mirrored the progress of change in Southern statesmen. At last, South Carolina had “won her sister slaveholding states to her ideas and policy.” It came to pass that among the leading men in the South, “the social and political ideas of the fathers are proscribed,” but the social and political ideas of South Carolina had “attained a complete ascendancy.” The older dominant archetype of Southern statesman, like Senator Benton, had “been driven into retirement–they are ostracized, exiled, placed under the ban of empire.” The resulting conflict between North and South was, therefore, not “between the North and the South” per se. It was “between the rights of man and the privileges of an aristocratic, oligarchic class,” each principled position coinciding with a geographic locus. In the South, that locus had once been circumscribed tightly around South Carolina and Georgia, but gradually, the circle of influence expanded to wherever slavery existed and wherever Calhoun’s evangelism had spread.76

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American Republicanism Regroups “The Slumbers of the North Are O’er” James Blaine wrote that despite Northern abhorrence for the new, tougher Fugitive Slave Act, the general result of the compromise measures was that “slavery agitation had to a very large extent subsided.” John Sherman confessed that as a local Whig politician in Ohio in 1850, he had supported the compromise measures in order to restore peace between the sections of the nation, which did come. He noted that both the Whig and the Democratic Party platforms in 1852 almost identically professed support for those measures and denounced the renewal of slavery agitation in Congress. Within two years the Democratic Party broke that pledge by an act that repealed the Missouri Compromise. “No single Act of the Slave Power,” Henry Wilson wrote, “ever spread greater consternation, produced more lasting results upon the popular mind, or did so much to arouse the North.”1 To legions of people in the free states, who had previously temporized and compromised on slavery questions, the veil was torn away. The oligarchic designs of Southern leaders stood in the illuminating light of the Kansas-­Nebraska Act. Southern leaders broke the brief peace because, after the compromise measures of 1850 were enacted, they soon realized that their plan to seize Mexican lands for slavery had backfired. From their perspective, Blaine explained, the annexation of Texas as a slave state was a gain, but the unanticipated addition of California to the free states was a grievous loss, and it was no consolation that the New Mexico and Utah Territories were open to slavery. It became evident that those territories were unlikely to hold slaves in mass. Elsewhere, north of the Missouri Compromise line, slavery was prohibited. That region north and west of Missouri, extending to California and the Oregon Territory, though vast, had been mostly unknown, unorganized, and considered 187

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uninhabitable for a long time. As the real value of that region became clearer, the slaveholders foresaw what they could not see before, the steady ingress of many more free states from that region into the Union and slavery hemmed into the Southeast. Their best hope was to spread slavery into that immense territory of the Midwest, north and west of Missouri, which required the abrogation or repeal of the time-­honored Missouri Compromise.2 Henry Wilson added a defensive reason for the repeal. The weakening of slave society relative to free society necessitated more slave territory, more concessions, more demands, and more privileges in the interests of slavery. The slave states, “though starting side by side with the free States, . . . were falling signally behind in the race of life.” Although some few in the oligarchic class may well have been very rich, powerful, and well educated, “the blasting presence of slavery” generally wasted the “material, mental, and moral” resources of society. Their rate of population growth lagged behind the free states, and the cause was slavery. A “very large per cent” of Americans who settled in the West were from the poor white class in the slaveholding states. They left the South “mainly on account of slavery and the hindrances it interposed in the way of their success in life.” In addition, George Boutwell noted that slavery generally deterred European immigrants, who disproportionately chose to settle in the free states, augmenting their populations. Having chafed under the rule of the nobility for hundreds of years, these Europeans unsurprisingly settled in free states or free territory, avoiding subjugation by the new American oligarchy. As a result, Wilson explained, “the slave States were passing, by the operation of nature’s laws, into a hopeless minority.” These circumstances drove the slaveholders to pursue means to artificially boost their position in their competition with the free states. What Northerners deemed the “aggressions” of the Southern statesmen were, from the Southerners’ perspective, acts designed to compensate for their stunted development relative to the free states. After listing the slave-­state statesmen’s many “aggressions,” George Julian explained, “They knew that the exclusion of [slavery] from all Federal territory would . . . virtually sentence it to death. They believed, with our Republican fathers, that restriction means destruction.” But unlike the founding fathers, the later generations of Southern statesmen were not republican and sought to preserve their oligarchic regime and prevent its absorption into enveloping republicanism. They sought slavery’s perpetuity, not ultimate extinction. Julian bluntly observed, “They were simply obeying the law of self-­preservation.”3 188

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At this time, Blaine explained, the new generation of Southern statesmen had “other designs than those which lay on the surface.” They resolved to remain in the Union, if they “could maintain their supremacy” within it. However, “If they were to be outvoted and, as they thought, outraged by free-­State majorities, then they would break up the government and form a confederacy of their own. . . . They did not aim at small things. They had ability and they had courage. They had determined upon mastery within the Union, or a Continental Empire outside of it.”4 By spreading slavery across the Missouri Compromise line, they would extend and strengthen their interstate ruling class, move northward, and cut off the free states in the East and West. Although California had entered the Union as a free state, its two senators were Democrats and “stood by the extremists of the South as steadily as if California bordered on the Gulf of Mexico.” They might yet bring California into the Southern fold. By this plan, the Southern statesmen could either acquire mastery over the Union or create a larger expanse of slave territory that they could bring out of the Union as the foundation for their empire. Either way, the further extension of slavery was the key objective in their ambitions. They sought to find a pretext for crossing the Missouri Compromise line and “aimed to secure by far the larger share of the vast domain comprised in the United States. The design was audacious, but from the stand-­point of the men who were committed to it, it was not illogical.”5 Kansas sufficed as slaveholders’ first target for expansion. Blaine wrote that “the Southern acquisition of Kansas would pierce the very centre of the army of freedom, and would enable the South thenceforth to dictate terms to the North.” Also, the Southern statesmen knew that “all the crops grown in Missouri by slave labor could be as profitably cultivated in Kansas.” They did not necessarily need slavery to proliferate immediately in any new territory, only first to take root, because “they reckoned that States with few slaves would continue to stand for Southern institutions as stubbornly as States with many slaves.” Emancipation and manumission did occur during the founding era, especially in states with few slaves. But in their very different era, experience in the South had taught them that “emancipation had been made difficult,” even where slavery did not prevail in high proportions.6 Henry Clay of Kentucky, one of the last Southern slaveholding abolitionists, had died in 1852. The Calhoun Revolution in the South produced the new senator from Kentucky, Archibald Dixon. He, Blaine wrote, “belonged to a class of men that had been recently and rapidly growing in the 189

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South—­men avowedly and aggressively pro-­slavery.” It was “an alarming fact” that Dixon, Clay’s immediate successor, first led the South against the time-­honored slavery restrictions in the Missouri Compromise, the signal achievement of Clay. Backed by his proslavery compeers, Dixon announced that when the bill was proposed to organize the Nebraska Territory in 1854, “he would move that ‘the Missouri Compromise be repealed, and that the citizens of the several States shall be at liberty to take and hold their slaves within any of the Territories.’” 7 Dixon dutifully applied the theory of Calhoun, that the right to hold slaves followed the Constitution and the Constitution trumped the Missouri Compromise. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, chairman of the Committee on Territories, supplied a pretext for repealing the compromise that was better calculated to suit Northern sentiment. He argued that the compromise measures of 1850 had voided and rendered inoperable the Missouri Compromise line, and he instead substituted Lewis Cass’s version of popular sovereignty, or the votes of the people in the territories, not Congress, as the means to determine whether subsequently organized territory would prohibit or establish slavery.8 On January 23, 1854, Douglas introduced his bill organizing the Nebraska and Kansas Territories on the basis of popular sovereignty.9 The alarm in Congress was immediate. Almost at the same time that Douglas reported his bill, certain members of Congress released a public letter explaining the danger of the bill to the American people. Charles Sumner was among the writers and signers of the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States.”10 The appeal condemned the bill “as a gross violation of a sacred pledge.”11 Its intention was “to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, emigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.” They carefully traced the boundaries of the territory in question. If slavery were planted in all these lands, its expanded domain would “cut off the Free States of the Pacific from the Free States of the Atlantic”; slavery would extend from the Mexican border to Canada. They reviewed the legislative history to show that the rationales given for the repeal were “mere inventions, designed to cover up from public reprehension meditated bad faith.” The bill was a “plot against humanity and Democracy, . . . dangerous to the interests of Liberty throughout the world.” They appealed to the people, warning them that “the dearest interests of Freedom and the Union are in imminent peril” and admonishing them to disregard “servile demagogues” who would expect them to submit to the slaveholders’ 190

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new demands. They appealed to “Christians and Christian Ministers to interpose,” reminding them that their “Divine Religion requires them to behold in every man a brother, and to labor for the Advancement and Regeneration of the Human Race.” The repeal would break yet another precedent, this time opening American territories to slavery where “it does not exist, and where that extension involves the repeal of ancient law, and the violation of solemn compact.” They urged all to “protest earnestly and emphatically, by correspondence, through the press, by memorials, by resolutions of public meetings and legislative bodies, and in whatever other mode may seem expedient against this enormous crime.” As for themselves, they pledged “to resist it by speech and vote, and with all the abilities which God has given us.” If they lost the legislative battle, “we shall not submit. We shall go home to our constituents, erect anew the standard of Freedom, and call on the People to come to the rescue of the country from the domination of Slavery. We will not despair; for the cause of Human Freedom is the cause of God.”12 In the subsequent debates in Congress, several senators and representatives participated who would later serve as Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress. In February Benjamin Wade attacked Senator Douglas’s specious rationale for claiming that the Missouri Compromise was already void. What Douglas was really doing, Wade argued, was “legislating for the privileged aristocracy of the South, to the exclusion of the whole North.” The immense domain of unorganized territory would become a massive fiefdom for an extended aristocracy, which would welcome freemen into their society on the condition that they were willing to “degrade[e] themselves by working upon a level with your miserable slaves.” There was “an antagonism between these two principles,” the principles by which slave society and free society were organized. If slavery was planted there, the unpropertied freeman from the free state would never willingly emigrate to a domain where he would have to surrender his more exalted condition that belonged to him in the free states. The freeman’s only reasonable choice would be to remain where he was, in a free state. By opening the territories to slavery, “you as effectually blast and condemn it for all the purposes of free immigration as though you should burn it with fire and brimstone, as Sodom and Gomorrah were once consumed. Every man understands this.” In this dystopian vision of America’s future, the lands above the Missouri Compromise line would be superadded to the existing domain of the slaveholding oligarchy. The empire of the slaveholding oligarchy would become the dominant element of the nation and would compress republicanism into a constricted space. In 191

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point of numbers, Wade said, the slaveholders amounted to no more than four hundred thousand, according to the last census, and the freemen numbered around thirteen million, and it was for that small minority that the bill’s parent and advocates contended. He invited Douglas to tell his Illinois constituent—­“the hard-­fisted laboring man of that great State—­that this is the principle upon which he acts.”13 Wade asked, “Sir, what will be the consequence of passing this bill?” Their broken faith, in attempting to “legalize slavery in half a continent, and to bring it into this Union in that way,” would destroy Northern trust in future Southern offers, and the North might likewise consider all prior concessions to the slaveholders void and inoperative. More ominously, he said that the senator from Kentucky was wrong to believe that the Northern people would humbly acquiesce to this act. Wade warned him, “I tell the gentleman that I see indications entirely adverse to that. I see a cloud, a little bigger now than a man’s hand, gathering in the north, and in the west, and all around, and soon the whole northern heavens will he lighted up with a fire that you cannot quench.” Meetings were taking place everywhere where people expressed “their alarm, their dismay, their horror at the proposition which has been made here.” Wade asked him, “Do you not see that you are about to bring slavery and freedom face to face, to grapple for the victory, and that one or the other must die?” Their insistence on bringing the bill to a vote was accelerating the date of that final conflict, which Wade believed had always been inevitable, because “principles so entirely in opposition to each other, so utterly hostile and irreconcilable, could never exist long in the same Government. . . . I tell you, sir, if you precipitate such a conflict as that, it will not be liberty that will die in the nineteenth century.”14 While the debate in Congress was still raging, Charles Sumner wrote home to a friend about the disturbing new policy: “There is but one remedy,—­ Union at the North without distinction of party, to take possession of the National Government, and administer it in the spirit of Freedom, and not of Slavery. Oh, when will the North be aroused?” Indeed, they were aroused and responded exactly as Sumner hoped. The “precious repose of the country,” George Julian wrote, “was rudely shocked” by this bill. James Blaine wrote that Douglas’s bill “fairly stunned” the Northern people. They “had grown to manhood with profound respect and even reverence for the Missouri Compromise, and had come to regard it almost as sacredly as though it were part of the organic law of the Republic.” In 1864 Henry Raymond wrote that the bill had given “new and increased force to the popular feeling 192

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in favor of freedom which the proposition to repeal the Missouri Compromise had excited, and everywhere the friends of freedom gathered themselves together and rallied round her banner, to meet the conflict which was plainly now closely impending, forced upon the people by the grasping ambition of the slaveholders.”15 Northerners reacted in this way because the bill boldly threatened their self-­interest, that is, their interest in perpetuating their republican liberty in their free states and territories. Prior to the Kansas-­Nebraska bill, Henry Wilson wrote, the Northern people had been “lulled by the siren song and drugged by the sorceries of compromise.” Slavery was other people’s problem, and therefore, as long as “it was only the slave that was crushed, . . . the North, sordid and safe, accepted its existence. . . . ” But when the compromise itself was abrogated, and its obligations were treated as a thing of naught; when the monster [prepared] to spring upon the fair domain of freedom, and range at will over territory that compromise had made inviolate, then the cry of danger reached ears that were deaf to the voice of duty. Though large masses of the people were still craven, and ready, for present advantage, to eat the bread of dishonor, this flagrant outrage increased the number of those who comprehended the situation, and who were willing to co-­operate with others to resist encroachments that were becoming so serious. Men who sat unmoved under the fulminations of the Abolitionists, answering their arguments . . . that they were but the words of fanaticism and folly, did not remain quite as serene when they witnessed these encroachments.16

In short, the Kansas-­Nebraska bill opened a wide door to slavery, and Northerners regarded its prospective spread as a direct threat to themselves. The bill united Northern self-­interest in their own rights with their interest in the rights of others who were crushed by the oppression of Southern oligarchy. The pleadings of outraged humanity emanating from the slave states might soon come home and come from them. With the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise, Wilson continued, “The North was not only aggrieved and indignant at its gross breach of faith, but it was alarmed. The Slave Power had shown itself ready to oppress not only the blacks but the whites, to crush not the hitherto prostrate race alone, but the nation as well. Patriotism no less than philanthropy, self-­preservation no less than humanity, demanded action.”17 193

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Future Reconstruction Republican senators and representatives in Congress showed that they had quickly taken the measure of their constituents’ alarm. Prior to the Senate’s imminent passage of the bill in March, Benjamin Wade spoke again: “Here is a territory larger than all the free States together, situated in the very heart of the Continent, . . . capable of sustaining many millions of inhabitants.” Thirty years before, free-­state representatives had agreed to concessions demanded by the slaveholders and, in return, received the slaveholders’ agreement that this land north of the Missouri Compromise line would be perpetually reserved for freedom. “Shall this law be repealed, and the whole of this fair region opened to the inroads of Slavery?” He ascertained that his constituents expected him to use “every legitimate means to defeat the measure.” For this, senators in support of the bill branded him and his colleagues in the opposition “factionists.” But Wade pointed out that although the opponents of the bill were a minority in the Senate, they yet represented a majority of the American people. This showed “in a very strong light the anti-­democratic principle on which this body is organized.”18 His reference to the Senate’s misalignment with the popular will suggested the potential for a realignment of parties and again invoked the antidemocratic character of the proposed bill, to which Wade had already alluded in his prior speech. His further comments developed the theme of democratic and antidemocratic principles of government. The ascendancy of liberty or tyranny was at stake, in determining whether to open the unorganized territories to slavery. The Congress was engaged in “shaping and moulding the institutions of a nation in its infancy.” In whatever form they shaped those institutions in these vast territories, and in whatever form those institutions developed, the nation would develop a like form. The nature of the “political relation that the people of these Territories would sustain to us, as members of this great Republic,” depended on whether the character of those institutions would be hostile or friendly to free-­state republicanism. Hence, the character of the institutions in those territories, and subsequently the political character of the nation, depended on whether slavery or liberty was to be planted in those territories. Northern liberty would be isolated and die or would be strengthened, depending on how these territories would be organized, with or without slavery. Wade moved straight to the heart of their differences. The debate had revealed the contrary character of their principles by which each side wished to establish those institutions. During the debates, the arguments that had “been urged in defense of this measure seem to me not less extraordinary 194

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and alarming than the measure itself.” The bill’s advocates in the Senate had “assailed, denounced, and repudiated” the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the basis of American republicanism, “as self-­evident falsehoods.” Though these “doctrines grated harshly on my ear,” Wade at least paid them the compliment of maintaining moral consistency. “The advocates of this bill, in order to sustain it upon principle, have rightly judged that the Declaration of Independence must also be superseded and rendered inoperative.” But the fathers had sacrificed too much for the Declaration that they should lightly throw it away. For its “great truths,” the fathers had stood up to British power and “pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.” Under “the influence of those soul-­inspiring principles,” the fathers achieved their victory. But the modern Democratic Party had recently discovered that “these principles were all false” and branded anyone who contended for them “hypocrites or wild enthusiasts.” Be that as it may, Wade maintained, “I stand upon the good old Declaration, that all men are equal, and have inalienable rights; that is, equal in point of right; that no man has a right to trample upon another.” Wade acknowledged the observation that some do actually trample on others, but that fact does not sustain the right of natural inequality. Rather, the fact merely demonstrates that “by force or fraud,” someone wrested away another’s rights, and American justice frowns upon this violation. “Such were the doctrines of the fathers; and the oppressed of every nation will hear with dismay that they are repudiated, denounced, and denied, in the American Senate.”19 Remarkably, right there in colloquy with Wade, Senator John Pettit of Indiana brazenly denied the truth of the Declaration again and affirmed the principle of natural inequality. Wade then distilled the great contest into a difference between their contending political principles: Because a man is weak, because he is ignorant, because he is imbecile, does not confer the right upon the first man who is wiser or stronger than he to subject him to minister entirely to the wishes of the stronger man. If you come to that, . . . then we have receded to the old idea; we have not gained anything. If physical force is the rule, you have the divine right of every king, and every emperor, and every monarch, to reign over his subjects, and the right of the privileged orders everywhere. . . . I had supposed that we had been singularly privileged in coming out from that old absurdity, and making a declaration that puts us infinitely ahead of every other nation. I never heard it denied until I reached the Senate of the United States; . . . and that we are to go back for our 195

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principles of government to the thirteenth century, and find there the divine right of kings reigning in full force.20

Wade again warned the Southern senators: “You have shocked the public mind. . . . You have aroused a spirit that cannot be allayed. No man, unless he is wilfully blind, can fail to see that it is so. What do you hear but excitement—­men gathering together and counselling upon this subject in every part and parcel of the free States. It takes a pretty strong measure to stir men up to these things; and this is a strong measure—­yea, sir, it is a dangerous measure.”21 He did not understand why Southern senators for whose benefit the bill served would have expressed indifferent interest in the bill, yet pressed dangerously forward to pass it. If they were indifferent, “Why harrow up those feelings, those hard feelings, that must necessarily arise, consequent upon this?” He knew that “the public mind is excited almost to madness on this subject. The people apprehend that something is being done here to their injury, to their insecurity.”22 Repelling the charge that he and other antislavery northerners were the aggressors, Wade asked, “If you put a man into the fire and hold him there, and he undertakes to get out, is he the aggressor? Is he guilty of excitement because he resists?” In reply to the new claim that the Missouri Compromise line had been unconstitutional, Wade read aloud an excerpt of a speech by the bill’s sponsor, Stephen Douglas, during the 1850 debate. Opposing Calhoun, Douglas had argued that the territory north of the Missouri Compromise line had been consecrated forever to freedom “by the solmn guarantees of law,” and had urged the extension of the line to the Pacific. But now he was urging the repeal of the line and standing by Southerners who maintained its unconstitutionality. “Strange times,” Wade commented.23 Following Wade, William Fessenden warned that his own state legislature, a Democratic legislature, had “recently passed resolutions, almost unanimously, instructing its Senators to endeavor, by every proper means in their power, to defeat the passage of this bill in its present shape.” In this new conflict, he warned, Southern statesmen could expect a different North, a North that would firmly oppose their new demand to repeal the Missouri Compromise. Previously, Southerners had threatened disunion, and Northerners obeyed the clarion call of “concord and brotherly love,” inducing them to placate the South. The “people of the free States . . . pretty generally chose to submit.” They submitted again very recently, and the Compromise of 1850 196

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brought peace. “Suddenly, in the midst of this concord of ours” came the bill that would rob from the people of the free states what they had received for conceding so much to the slaveholders. And the bill was presented “without a word to the country.” Long before, the free states had given concessions to the slave states, and in consideration they received the promise that all territory north of the Missouri Compromise line would be forever free. He asked his Southern colleagues, did they believe that “the free States feel nothing at being robbed of their portion?” He cautioned them to take no solace in the fact that the bill’s author, Senator Douglas, was from the free state of Illinois, for “we repudiate him as acting for us in our part of the country.” To his Southern colleagues, Fessenden predicted, “Anything but peace you will have.” Northerners had heard the threat of disunion from Southerners “until we are fatigued with the sound.” This time the sound would have no effect. Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina broke into Fessenden’s speech, declaring, “If such sentiments as yours prevail, I want a dissolution right away,” to which Fessenden replied, “Do not delay on my account.”24 Having passed the Senate, the bill was taken up by the House. In April Elihu Washburne warned that it would be wrong to believe that “the North will acquiesce in this great wrong.” Rather, the result will be “the formation of sectional parties,” and “there will never be peace in the country” until Congress reestablishes the Missouri Compromise line. By repealing the compromise, the South should expect the North to declare its compromises benefiting the South “inoperative and void” and to repeal them, in like fashion. In the future, the North might one day dominate Congress “in the majesty of its power and strength” and then commence breaking down “all the compromises” in just retaliation for the South’s broken faith. Washburne denied that he had been an “agitator, no factionalist, and not much of a politician.” But if “the extension of slavery is to be the ruling policy of this Government . . . then I shall become an ‘agitator.’” He added that “the greatest reforms and the greatest discoveries that the world has ever known” were owed to agitation. Galileo, Columbus, the Pilgrims, and “our revolutionary fathers” were all agitators. And more agitation was coming. The bill had “taken a deep hold of the public mind, and there is no power on earth that can control its workings.”25 “Mr. President, it is now nearly midnight,” Charles Sumner began, in a dramatic speech to the Senate, while the House of Representatives was voting on May 22–23, 1854. Conceding “the determination of the majority” to pass the Kansas-­Nebraska bill, Sumner rose at that late hour, he said, to utter 197

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“a few words of earnest protest against the consummation of a great wrong.” He asked, without the Senate’s objection, to present remonstrances against the bill, some of which had been placed into his hand that day. No objections having been heard, Sumner proceeded to lay them before the Senate. The remonstrances came from a large number of New York citizens, the religious Society of Friends in Michigan, the Baptist clergy and laity from Michigan and Indiana, and “one hundred and twenty-­five separate remonstrances, from clergymen of every Protestant denomination in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, constituting the six New England States.” At one time, some of the clergy, “forgetful of the traditions of other days,” had acquiesced in the slaveholders’ demands, but now the clergy of many denominations, “learned divines, eminent bishops, accomplished professors, and faithful pastors . . . at last unite.”26 “‘In the name of Almighty God, and in his presence,’ these remonstrants protest against the Nebraska bill,” Sumner announced. The clergy’s united interposition at this time was appropriate, he maintained, because, “believing in God as I profoundly do, I cannot doubt that the opening of an immense region to so great an enormity as Slavery is calculated to draw down upon our country His righteous judgments.” The passage of the bill at that dark hour was a signal moment in the life of the nation and invited divine intervention. Once accomplished, their deed made “all future compromises impossible” and placed “freedom and slavery face to face, and bids them grapple.” It was time for American clergy to step forward from the temple where they had nurtured and guarded American liberty and assert their spiritual authority. Sir, from the first settlement of these shores, from those early days of struggle and privation—­through the trials of the Revolution—­the clergy have been associated, not only with the piety and the learning, but with the liberties of the country. For a long time, New England was governed by their prayers more than by any acts of the Legislature; and at a later day, their voices aided even the Declaration of Independence. The clergy of our time may speak, then, not only from their own virtues, but from the echoes which yet live in the pulpits of their fathers. For myself, I desire to thank them for their generous interposition. They have already done much good in moving the country. They will not be idle. In the days of the Revolution, John Adams, yearning for Independence, said: “Let the pulpits thunder against oppression!” And the pulpits thundered. The time has come for them to thunder again. 198

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At that moment, Senator James Mason of Virginia arose to object latently to the reception of the petitions. He cited the remonstrants’ “unchristian purposes” and “prostitution of their office.” The Northern clergy were “profaning their office, profaning the name of the Almighty” and were unworthy of association with Southern churchmen. The presiding officer, therefore, declined to accept the remonstrances. Sumner’s last task before the vote was to note that even men with spiritual authority were made to suffer the indignity of surrendering their liberty to the impious oligarchy. At another time, though Sumner did not say whether on earth or in the hereafter, Mason would repent that he had spoken so, in order “to impeach the right of clergymen to appear, by petition or remonstrance, at the bar of Congress.”27 Thus having invoked the watchful eye of Providence, Sumner gave up the floor, while the other branch of Congress sent the Kansas-­Nebraska bill to the president’s desk for his signature. The Founding of the Republican Party “The Republican Party,” wrote George Boutwell, “was the child of events.”28 The final event that precipitated the formation of the party was the passage of the Kansas-­Nebraska Act in 1854. The party’s name denoted its fundamental purpose, to protect and strengthen republicanism, the model of government established by the American founding fathers. Unlike most political parties that exist within the compass of republican government, this party was not organized merely to advance a competing policy program; it was organized to defend republican government itself against revolutionaries within the nation. Northern political opponents, who differed on policy and partisan affiliations, but who were commonly devoted to republicanism, united to make common cause against the antirepublican threat. They were a motley group. George Julian wrote that among them were “tariff men and free traders, conservative Whigs and radical Democrats, Know-­Nothings and anti-­K now-­Nothings.”29 He said that the action of the Republicans was not “inspired by a creed, but an object,” which was this one point: “that the virgin soil of our Territories should be unpolluted by slavery, and that this crime against humanity, and plague of our politics, should be denationalized.” But Julian knew that where slavery existed, political society was “dominated by a formidable oligarchy of educated land-­owners,” under whose dominion was a “large population of ignorant negroes and equally ignorant whites.”30 Hence, the men united against the threatened spread of slavery, despite their differing partisan creeds, because slavery upended 199

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republicanism. If slavery was restricted to a geographic corner of the nation, the oligarchy would be similarly restricted, while the rest of the nation would expand and grow on free soil, expanding republican political society. In that case, the power of the oligarchy relative to the power of the expanding republican portion of the nation would weaken. The oligarchy might be able to harass and annoy free society, but with diminishing power within the nation, the danger they posed to republicanism would likewise diminish. But slavery’s spread in like measure spread oligarchy and magnified the danger to republicanism. Therefore, the Republican Party was able to unite both the abolitionist humanitarian and the man indifferent to the suffering slave, because both the selfish and the selfless republican citizen could understand that their form of government that protected others’ liberty and their own liberty was under attack. Their single policy aim, to check the further spread of slavery in the territories, was the means by which they would protect their republicanism. The party was unusual, because its sole reason for existing was to contend for the political regime model established by the American founding, and that regime model entailed the ultimate extirpation of slavery. As such, it was a fundamentally conservative party, counterrevolutionary in character. Its formation was made necessary because the dominant Democratic Party had first become a vehicle for political revolution, the destruction of American republicanism and the continued expansion, development, and final triumph of oligarchy in America. Samuel Pomeroy recapitulated, “The Democratic Party—­in its early days the friend of freedom and the rights of man—­became ultimately the ally of the slave power and the embodiment of its interests.”31 James Blaine dated Van Buren’s defeat in 1844 as the beginning of Calhoun’s total influence over the Democratic Party, but it “moved so rapidly and so far, that men in the North, who wished to remain in the ranks of the Democracy, were compelled to trample on the principles, and surrender the prejudices, of a lifetime.” In particular, Reconstruction Republicans who were former Democrats deplored the transformation of their party. John Hale had left the Democratic Party and successively joined the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican Parties. He remembered Van Buren’s surprising demise at the 1844 convention, with the words, “I repeat but history when I say that the breath of slavery has made and unmade the public men of this country.” The old Democratic Party led by Andrew Jackson, said George Williams, had opposed “monopolies, class legislation, and the unjust and artificial distinctions 200

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of society.” But “Calhounism however found its way into the party and worked like poison. Contrary to the teachings of the Fathers that Slavery was a political, social and moral evil, it came to teach the ethics of Calhoun that Slavery was a political, social and moral blessing.” Charles Van Wyck professed, “Slavery is a mildew and blight” that the national government should restrain. He then asked, did not that profession of his principles “contain the recorded principles of the Democratic Party . . . from the adoption of the Constitution down to 1847?” But “allegiance to slavery propagandism” had become “the test of good fellowship” in the party. The new party leaders were determined “to crucify the memory of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe,” and because he, Van Wyck, refused to declare the enactments of the fathers “unjust, unconstitutional, and with abolition tendencies,” he was marked out as a party apostate. His principles, he maintained, were the original principles of the Democratic Party, and so, “with many Democrats throughout the Union, I could no longer worship the divinity when the spirit had fled.” James Doolittle said, “I walked the deck of the Democratic ship as long as it bore the Democratic flag,” but when “Calhounism—­which declared that the basis of republican institutions was founded upon slavery . . . became its motto, I did not follow that flag any longer.” The Democratic Party had substituted “Calhounism for republicanism, slavery for freedom, and the doctrines of Mr. Calhoun for the doctrines of Mr. Jefferson.”32 However much Calhoun and his followers tried to clothe constitutional doctrines, moral principles, and political policies in the political and legal language of the American Republic, the Republicans did not mistake its misleading outward form for its inner substance. All protestations to the contrary, they saw that Calhoun’s philosophy rebelled against the theory and principles of the American founders. Calhounism supplied a constitutional, political, and moral justification for the ruling class in the South and was inherently hostile to the republican political societies in the North. Under the influence of Calhounism, the Democratic Party was also becoming sectional. Following the Compromise of 1850, Northerners had not yet cast off their allegiances to the two national parties to form one dominant party in their section. Until the passage of the Kansas-­Nebraska Act, Henry Winter Davis said, there was no “bond of Union” among Northerners, “no one pervading and common interest so controlling as to concentrate its power and dictate its policy.” While some Northern antislavery Democrats and Whigs had defected to the sectional Liberty and Free Soil Parties, the intersectional Whig and Democratic Parties remained intact. Northern political affiliations were 201

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divided. Southern leaders were bonded together by their interest in slavery, and this allowed the South “to impose on the divided North its policy and views.”33 The passage of the Kansas-­Nebraska Act revealed the tightening alignment of the Democratic Party, the leaders of the Southern section, and Calhounism. James Blaine noted that almost all Southern Whigs in Congress voted with the Southern Democrats for the passage of the act, which ended the Whig Party in the South and doomed the Whig Party as a national organization. “Northern men,” Davis said, were “deserted by southern Whigs,” who rallied to their Southern brethren in the Democratic Party. The unity of Southern leaders behind the bill drove Northerners together. Southern leaders, Davis said, had “created a North.” Northerners united “in the negative interests of repelling the intrusion of slavery on its borders. It never united for that defensive purpose till the South united to invade the domain secured to it by the Missouri Compromise.”34 To Northern citizens who understood what was happening, compromise was thenceforth impossible, as Charles Sumner said on the night of the act’s passage. Further compromise meant surrendering the fathers’ republicanism and allowing Southern statesmen to complete their revolutionary project. Northerners were challenged to counterorganize a more effective defense of their republicanism, and the existing parties were deemed inadequate to the crisis. Massive party dealignment in the North was virtually instantaneous with the act’s passage. Northerners ignored the lead of their national parties and fused with each other in opposition to the policy manifest in the Nebraska bill. In his Recollections, published in 1895, John Sherman wrote, “It is difficult, at this distance of time, to describe the effect of the act of 1854 upon popular opinion in the northern states.” In his state of Ohio, the people were overwhelmingly opposed to the repeal of the Missouri line, and supporters of the bill were eventually turned out of office. “Party lines were obliterated. In every congressional district a fusion was formed of Democrats, Whigs and Free Soilers, and candidates for Congress were nominated solely upon the issues made by the Kansas and Nebraska bill.” By February 1855, less than one year after the enactment of the bill, Richard Yates countered the disbelieving claim of Representative Alexander Stephens of Georgia, that the recent elections constituted “no test of the popular sentiment of the free States” on “the Nebraska bill.” Indeed, Yates said, “In the whole history of legislation, from the first dawnings of our national existence down to the present time, no public measure ever met with such withering and blasting 202

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popular condemnation as did the Nebraska bill, and its authors and abettors.” He cited election returns in Ohio, New York, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Iowa and mentioned other states where new governors and legislators were chosen, and “almost the only question discussed in all these elections was the Nebraska bill. . . . The old questions of tariff and internal improvement were lost sight of.”35 Many who later served in Congress as Republicans during Reconstruction had participated in shaping the new party from the existing parties’ disaffected elements, all united in opposition to the Nebraska bill. In his Congressional Reminiscences, John Wentworth recorded evidence of meetings that he had attended around the Capitol immediately before and after the passage of the act of 1854, where antislavery Whigs and Democrats began to discuss the necessity of forming a new party, called “Republican.”36 The first state to organize a Republican Party was Michigan, on July 6, 1854, in Jackson.37 Future Reconstruction senator Jacob Howard served as the convention’s chairman of the Committee on Resolutions and personally drafted them.38 His committee presented a platform that recited the condemnations of slavery by “the Fathers of the Republic,” affirmed the incompatibility of slavery with the principles of republicanism, affirmed the constitutional right of Congress to legislate against slavery in the territories, declared themselves “independent of all former party ties,” denounced the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, demanded the repeal of the Fugitive Slave law, and announced that they were thenceforth “postponing and suspending all differences with regard to political economy or administrative policy” in order to “act cordially and faithfully in unison.” Having declared a policy “truce,” Howard’s platform identified the mission of their new party with something beyond their policy aims, that is, with the political regime established by their republican fathers, and the platform identified their party’s opponent with a different form of political regime: “Resolved, That in view of the necessity of battling for the first principles of republican government, and against the schemes of aristocracy the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed, or man debased, we will co-­operate and be known as REPUBLICANS until the contest be terminated.”39 Among the participants at the 1854 Michigan convention were future Reconstruction Republican representatives Fernando C. Beamen and Austin Blair as well as Senator Zachariah Chandler.40 Jacob Howard later served on the Senate Judiciary Committee that proposed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery and on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that 203

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proposed the Fourteenth Amendment.41 The report of his Reconstruction Committee blamed slavery for “building up a ruling and dominant class” that “had produced a spirit of oligarchy adverse to republican institutions, which finally inaugurated civil war.”42 The theme shared by the 1866 report and the 1854 platform is the antebellum development of revolutionary aristocracy or oligarchy, coextensive with slavery, and the consequent interregime conflict between the oligarchy and republicanism. Joseph P. Smith’s history of the Ohio Republican Party called future Reconstruction Republican representative William Lawrence “the father, or at least one of the fathers of the organization” in that state. Immediately after the Nebraska bill was reported in the U.S. Senate, Lawrence, then a state senator, delivered a speech at a public meeting in Columbus, which he claimed to be “probably the first in the country, of citizens, irrespective of political party views, to denounce the proposed repeal of the Missouri compromise.” Lawrence continued to organize and speak against the bill around the state, through its final enactment in May. As chairman of the anti-­Nebraska convention’s Committee on Permanent Organization, he then participated in a public call for “a State convention of citizens of all previous parties opposed to the repeal of the Missouri compromise,” scheduled for July 13, 1854, one week after the Michigan convention.43 The call expressed the hope that the delegates will be appointed in each county from all political parties; for whatever “live” issues there may be between the two great parties which divide the State, there is one question made by Southern slaveholders at this momentous crisis as common to all as the free air of heaven. It is whether this Republic and its free institutions shall be ruled by, and its great mission of freedom be sunk into, an oligarchy of slaveholders and the extension of slavery and slave power. Can any Northern man of any party hesitate upon such a question, or refuse to aid in reclaiming our free institutions from the domination of slaveholders; in purifying Northern representation in Congress from all pliant tools of Southern ambition; in breaking the chain of Southern measures now forging to bind this Republic to the car of slavery?44

Again, the Ohio call, like the Michigan platform, frames the issue as an interregime conflict between oligarchy and republicanism, and it was Lawrence who later moved to adopt the name “Republican” for their new party.45 Among those who participated in forming the Ohio state party were future Reconstruction Republican senator John Sherman, the chairman of the first 204

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state convention; Senator Benjamin Wade; and Representatives James Ashley, John Bingham, Ralph Buckland, Ephraim Eckley, James Hubbell, Rufus Spalding, and William B. Allison (whose future congressional district would be in Iowa).46 A call for an anti-­Nebraska convention in Madison, Wisconsin, to be held on the same day as the Ohio convention, July 13, appealed to “all men opposed to the repeal of the Missouri compromise, the extension of slavery, and the rule of the slave power.” The objects were “to prevent the future encroachments of the slave power, to repeal all compromises in favor of slavery, and to establish the principle of freedom as the rule of the State and National governments.” The times called “for the union of all free men for the sake of freedom. There is but one alternative. We must unite and be free, or divide and be enslaved by the praetorian bands of the slaveholders and their Nebraska allies.”47 The call recognized that the spread of chattel slavery brought political slavery as well—­“the rule of the slave power.” If they did not join together and resist the spread of chattel slavery, they themselves would be enslaved. Unity among free men, regardless of prior partisan affiliation, was necessary. The first resolution of the Wisconsin convention recognized that the Kansas-­Nebraska Act ended the possibility of compromise. There was no more middle ground between “freedom or slavery,” and the government would eventually be “devoted to one or the other.” The second resolution declared that, “in the defense of freedom,” they would “be known as Republicans,” and they pledged themselves to “bring the administration of the government back to the control of first principles.”48 Once again, the “Republican” appellation for the state party aligned with their mission—­to restore and protect the republican character of the national government, which they deemed to be directly threatened. At the time of the Wisconsin convention, future Reconstruction Republican representative Cadwallader Washburn had been engaged in managing his business holdings, but, agreeing with the convention’s platform, he accepted a nomination to run for Congress as a Republican and won office that fall, in 1854.49 Future Reconstruction Republican senators James Doolittle and Timothy Howe were state judges in 1854, and the Wisconsin state constitution prohibited judges from standing for elective office. Both took an interest in the anti-­Nebraska political activity. When pressed by a newspaperman, Judge Howe strongly endorsed the nascent Republican Party, condemned the Nebraska bill as “a piece of high-­handed and unblushing villainy,” and 205

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repeated the Wisconsin convention’s call for men to unite in a “higher and holier mission.” Within a year of the Wisconsin convention, Howe resigned his position on the bench and entered politics.50 Doolittle avoided the anti-­ Nebraska organizing because he believed it would be improper for a sitting judge to engage in politics, but soon he too resigned his judgeship, in March 1856. Five months later, he launched his political career as a Republican and became “one of the enthusiastic founders” of the Wisconsin organization.51 On July 20, 1854, two weeks after the Michigan convention and one week after the Ohio and Wisconsin conventions, Massachusetts held an anti-­ Nebraska convention. The very first resolution reported by the Committee on Resolutions read: “Resolved, That the unquestionable existence of a settled purpose, on the part of the Slave power, to convert the Republic which our fathers founded on principles of justice and liberty, into a slaveholding despotism, whose vital and animating spirit shall be the preservation, propagation and perpetuation of slavery, calls for the immediate union of all true men into a party which shall make the question of Freedom paramount to all other political questions.”52 Again, the Massachusetts resolution frames the issue as an interregime conflict, warning of the slaveholders’ intention “to convert the Republic which our fathers founded” into a despotic political regime, coextensive with slavery. The resolution appeals to Massachusetts men to subordinate “all other political questions” to the paramount question, the survival of republicanism. Future Reconstruction Republican senator Henry Wilson attended that convention and proposed the second resolution: that “we hereby form ourselves into the Republican Party of Massachusetts.” At the subsequent Republican State Convention of Massachusetts, the first reported resolution stated that “the Republican Party . . . may justly claim to be the true National and Democratic party,” thereby indirectly denouncing the formally named Democratic Party as undemocratic. The reason given by the resolution is that the Republican Party, “disregarding the aristocratic, hereditary distinction of birth and color[,] maintains the right of all men to freedom and equality before the law,” whereas the Democratic Party heeded aristocratic distinction and did not maintain the right of equality before the law.53 A week after the bill was enacted in May, Charles Sumner responded to an inquiry from a Massachusetts political committee about the future. He explained the necessity of forming a new political party. Neither the Whig nor the Democratic Party was competent to defend liberty, because each party depended upon its “slaveholding wings.” The Northern portion of each 206

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party was forced to yield “all that is dear to it,” and while Northerners “vainly” considered themselves part of a national party, their membership in each slaveholder-­controlled national party helped to install “the sectional power of Slavery in the National Government.” The result of this, Sumner said, at the Republican State Convention of Massachusetts, four months later, was that an “Oligarchy of Slaveholders” was “now ruling the Republic.” Addressing the question “What are our political duties here in Massachusetts at the present time?” Sumner answered, “this Oligarchy which, at every political hazard, we must oppose, until it is overthrown.” To achieve that great task, the North could no longer afford to dilute its strength or its principles in the two major parties. They had to form a new antislavery, antioligarchy political party that would mass the strength and devotion of the free states for republicanism. Thus, Sumner appealed to “the true-­hearted, magnanimous citizens ready to place Freedom above Party, and their Country above Politicians,” and asked them to “leave old parties.” In his letter to the Massachusetts committee, he urged them, “Abandon old party ties; forget old party names; let by-­gones be by-­gones; and for the sake of Liberty, and to secure the general welfare, now unite against the Despotism of Slavery, and in this union let past differences disappear.” Policy differences had to be set aside in order to defend the political regime from internal threat. To great applause at the convention, Sumner announced, “As REPUBLICANS, we go forth to encounter the Oligarchs of Slavery.” On the campaign trail for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Sumner explained how the Southern statesmen controlled the national government and how they were actively repurposing its institutions and changing its form for oligarchy. Then he restated the purpose of the Republican Party: to “expel the Slave Oligarchy from all its seats of National power, driving it back within the states.”54 Here again Sumner framed the formation and aims of the Republican Party in opposition to an attempt to convert the American Republic into an oligarchy resembling the model of the Southern states. In some free states, the organization of the state parties was halting, and their platforms were less comprehensive. For example, Indiana’s republican organization in 1854 was at first denominated the “People’s Party,” and its platform, George Julian wrote, “was narrow and equivocal.” But the generally expressed mission of the movement in the free states was to join together, regardless of prior political affiliation, for the protection of American republicanism against antirepublicanism, coextensive with slavery. The first platform of the national Republican Party, published in 1856, reflects this mission. Its preamble referred to the call for the national Republican 207

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convention, addressed to the American people, “without regard to past political differences or divisions,” who were “opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise” and “to the extension of slavery into free territory” and “in favor of . . . restoring the action of the Federal Government to the principles of Washington and Jefferson.”55 The first resolution affirms that “the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence” are the same principles “embodied in the Federal Constitution.” Calhoun and his followers had denounced the principles of the Declaration and praised the Constitution, at least their version of the Constitution, as they re-­created it through reinterpretation, divested of the principles of the Declaration. But the Republican platform recognized that the plan for government in the Constitution was faithful to the principles of the Declaration and ought to be read that way. The resolution declares that the maintenance of those principles “is essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions.” Since the principles of the Declaration constituted the moral foundation of American republicanism, the removal of that foundation doomed American republicanism. The second resolution claims the founding fathers’ legacy for their party. Both the “republican fathers” and the party were pledged to upholding the natural rights recognized by the Declaration and for which government under the Constitution was formed. The fathers had carried out that pledge by abolishing slavery in all parts of the national territory and by prohibiting the deprivation of natural rights in their Constitution. Therefore, the Republican Party acknowledged the duty to resist the spread of slavery within the exclusive jurisdiction of national government, because slavery stripped away those natural rights promulgated by the republican fathers’ Declaration and protected by the republican fathers’ Constitution: That with our republican fathers we hold it to be a self-­evident truth that all men are endowed with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the primary object and ulterior design of our Federal Government were to secure these rights to all persons within its exclusive jurisdiction; that as our republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that no person should be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, it becomes our duty to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it for the purpose of establishing slavery in any Territory of the United States, by positive legislation, prohibiting its existence or extension therein. 208

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The Struggle for the National Government Commences The successful fusion of Northerners of all parties against the Nebraska bill in the elections of 1854 marked an unprecedented moment in American history. Although the political parties did indeed differ on policy questions, as they always had, the ultimate issue that henceforth divided them was not policy merely. The subsequent formation of the national Republican Party and its state syndicates from 1854 to 1856 formally reorganized the major party movements in the United States, each aligned to two different political regimes. Each of the two major political organizations of the nation was coalescing around a different form of political regime concentrated in a different section of the nation, demarcated by the presence or absence of slavery. The Democratic Party advanced the interests of the Southern statesmen, who constituted the ruling power in the slave states and advanced the principles of oligarchy. The Republican Party contended for the interests of the free-­state people, who constituted the ruling power in their section and advanced the principles of republicanism. Opposite clusters of geography, regime principles, and political organizations were uniting, arrayed against the other. These simultaneous movements would continue to clash and build strength, attracting all the elements of the respective political societies to their opposing poles, until they were engaged in interregime war. The movement toward the alignment of the parties, opposing sections, and opposing forms of political regimes was fixed when the Republican Party rose in the North. The Whig Party was dead. “It perished, at last, in the vain effort to outdo its rival in the work of abasing itself at the feet of the slave oligarchy,” wrote Julian, and by 1856 the Republican Party had absorbed Northern Whigs.56 The Northern Democracy remained formidable through the 1850s, but nevertheless could not prevent the sectional alignment of parties and regimes and, instead, became subject to the forces of that alignment. The strength of the Northern Democracy weakened as the Southern wing forced its Northern wing to align with Southern oligarchy. The Republicans considered the Northern Democracy to be subordinate to the Southern wing. Delivering an address in Boston on the state of the nation in 1857, Representative Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts maintained that the parties were then sectional, despite the persisting strength of the Northern Democracy. As a result of the anti-­Nebraska bill fever in the North in 1854, one year later “the Representatives of the people of the North found themselves arrayed in the House of Representatives of the United States, against the party, South and North, which had supported the repeal of the 209

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Missouri Compromise.”57 Banks notably contrasted the “Representatives of the people of the North” and Northern Democrats who remained with their party. The entrance of these representatives of the Northern people in Congress marked “the first time that parties had been thus formed,” he continued. Battles over slavery had occurred before in Congress, and they did array the sections against each other, but these battles were bipartisan affairs and did not break up the major parties. The rise of the Republican Party altered the character of the party system, and that was unprecedented. The formation of a Northern party, Banks explained, “was a natural result of the attempt on the part of the late Administration to break down all barriers, executive, legislative, and judicial, which looked to the limitation of slavery by the General Government.” Therefore, the survival of the Northern Democracy depended upon its continued participation in the attempt to break down those barriers to slavery, which the Southern statesmen favored and the Republican Party opposed. To survive, the Northern wing of the Democratic Party had to become more Southern. As it did so, many Northern Democrats took flight to the Republican Party in a series of emigrations that Julian denominated the “Democratic hegira.”58 But many other Northern Democrats steadfastly remained in their party, despite its instrumentality in advancing the interests of Southern statesmen. Senator Stephen Douglas, the leader of the Northern Democracy, James Blaine wrote, went “far with the pro-­slavery men” and “had borne great burdens in their interest.” Douglas’s “adhesion to Southern interests,” Henry Wilson wrote, lasted until he could see that if he continued to acquiesce to the pressure of new Southern demands, he “could not carry Illinois.” Eventually, the drift of the two wings of the party toward their opposite poles forced him to choose sides. Before two years had passed since the first Republican Party National Convention, Douglas began to act in concert with the Republicans.59 Finally, large waves of disaffected Northern Democrats who remained loyal to Douglas flowed into the Republican Party.60 John Logan, a Republican representative from Illinois, had been a Douglas Democrat until the war and was well positioned to understand the motives of Democrats, North and South. He could explain why many Northern Democrats had held back from the Republican banner. The answer was simply stated by Douglas: “‘So long as there was hope for a peaceful solution,’” Logan quoted Douglas to have said, he had “‘prayed and implored 210

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for Compromise.’”61 For the sake of preserving the Union, Douglas allowed himself to be used by oligarchic interests. The determination of these Northern Democrats to preserve the Union did not necessarily mean that they lacked sound republican or antislavery principles. For example, Representative Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts was a Radical Republican during Reconstruction but a Douglas Democrat before the war. In his autobiography he professed his lifelong hostility to slavery and precisely stated his republican principles: “that the full and only end of government is to care for the people in their rights and liberties, and that they have the right and privilege to call on either the State, or the United States, or both, to protect them in equality of powers, equality of rights, equality of privileges, and equality of burdens under the law, by carefully and energetically enforced provisions of equal laws justly applicable to every citizen.” These tenets, he claimed, “tinged, if not permeated every public aim of my life,” and, notably, were hostile to minority rule and the minority’s proscription of others’ rights and liberties. Yet before the war in which he fought as a general officer in the Union army, Butler remained a leading Northern Democrat, was a leader of the Democratic conventions of 1860, and that year alternately supported two Southern Democrats, James Guthrie of Kentucky and even Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, for the American presidency. In preferring Guthrie, Butler explained that “he looked upon the preservation of the Union as infinitely beyond any question in regard to slavery.”62 Butler did hold antislavery and republican principles, but unionism compelled him, he believed, to suppress them. Unionism was one factor that explained why some Northern Democrats preserved their fellowship with the national party and continued to accommodate the demands of the Southern statesmen through the end of the 1850s. Logan also quoted his friend Senator James McDougall of California, another antebellum Douglas Democrat, who spoke freely about the Southerners in his party after the war began. He had also refrained from breaking his party ties, despite his private resistance to the outrageous demands of Southerners in his party. Supporting the Union war effort and repenting of his party fellowship with traitors, McDougall told the Senate that, “having been accepted and received as a Democrat of the old school from the olden time, and having fast Southern Sympathies, I did know all about them. . . . I know that secession was a thing determined upon. . . . I was advised of and understood the whole programme, knew how it was to be done in details.” McDougall had “made war” upon the secessionist conspirators in private. 211

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But once secession had come, McDougall’s unionism turned him sharply against them in public, and he wished to divulge all that he knew from his close association with them to the Senate. Looking back, he said that in fact, the nation had been “engaged in a war of opinion . . . since 1838. . . . There has been a systematic organized war against the Institutions established by our fathers, since 1832. This is known of all men who have read carefully the history of our Country. If I had the leisure, or had consulted the authorities, I would give it year by year, and date by date, from that time until the present, how men adversary to our Republican Institutions have been organizing War against us, because they did not approve of our Republican Institutions.”63 This credible testimony invoked by Logan substantiated the assessment of the Republican Party founders. They were correct in their belief that the Democratic Party was a vehicle for the destruction of republicanism, which called for an organized defense. The organization of the Republican Party was imbued with that purpose. The two parties were aligned with republicanism and oligarchy, respectively. But unionism delayed many Northern Democrats, like McDougall, Douglas, Butler, and Logan, from joining that defense. Another factor accounting for the extenuation of the Northern Democracy was that some Northerners had been misled. They did not understand what the intentions of the Southern statesmen were, as McDougall understood them. The oligarchy successfully employed secrecy and deception to advance their revolution under the noses of Northerners and even gained Northern Democrats’ unwitting cooperation. During the war, Horace Maynard upbraided “the utter falsehood” of the Southern statesmen who had controlled the Democratic Party and who then concocted and controlled “the thing they call the Southern Confederacy.” He attacked their “falsehood in recounting the past, falsehood in expounding the present, and falsehood in prognosticating the future.” Maynard revealed that a long-­serving U.S. representative from Virginia had confided in him that secession “was nothing but the effect of a monstrous system of lying.”64 Southern statesmen’s principled arguments about the founding fathers, the Constitution, and republicanism amounted to a Machiavellian ruse. They cleverly invoked the concepts, traditions, and language venerated by republican America in order to coax Northern assent for their public measures, which advanced their hidden oligarchic aims, while covering up their true antirepublican character. These Southern statesmen who had controlled the Democratic Party, Maynard claimed, were “not as numerous, in point of fact, as the figures on 212

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a chess-­board.” Their partnership “is eminently a close corporation, and was so intended to be.” They constituted a “lordly and insolent oligarchy” that wielded “absolute authority over ‘the South.’” To support his revelations, Maynard pointed to his loyal colleagues in the House that day: “There are those within the reach of my voice, who also knew them, and can testify to their utter perfidy; who have been the victims of their want of principle, and whose self-­respect has suffered from their insolent and overbearing demeanor.” Men like Maynard, who had lived close to them and had felt their sting, could understand them more easily than outsiders. Without careful study and reflection, Americans who were not then living next to them, like Maynard, could not fully understand the oligarchy, because “they, like a certain school of ancient philosophers, had two sets of principles or doctrines, an exoteric and an esoteric—­one for outsiders, the other for themselves.” To outsiders, they mastered the art of disingenuously discoursing on “‘Democratic principles’ for the Democratic party.” Behind those exoteric doctrines, crafted for Democratic consumption but serving the oligarchy’s political advantage, lurked their esoteric doctrines. In the meantime, the oligarchy’s secrecy and unity helped them exploit and control gullible Northerners: No Northern man was ever admitted to their confidence, and no Southern man, unless it became necessary to keep up their numbers; and then not until he was thoroughly known by them, and known to be thoroughly corrupt. Some Northern men and many Southern men were, after a fashion, petted and patronized by them, as a gentleman throws from his table a bone or a choice bit to a favorite dog; and they imagined they were conferring a great favor thereby, which could be requited only by the abject servility of the dog. To hesitate, to doubt, to hold back, to stop, was to call down a storm of wrath that few men had the nerve to encounter, and still fewer the strength to withstand. Not only in the political circles, but in social life, their rule was inexorable, their tyranny absolute.

Another factor was a genuine disposition by some in the Northern Democracy to embrace the oligarchic cause of the South. These Democrats were the Southern oligarchy’s fifth column in the North. Logan quoted loyal Tennessee senator Andrew Johnson, whose close proximity to the ruling oligarchy gave him a unique perspective on them and their Northern allies. 213

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Johnson explained to the Senate that “there is a Party in the South, with associates in the North . . . , that have become tired of Free Government” and had pursued “a deliberate design for years to change the nature and character and genius of this Government.” “They raise an outcry against ‘Coercion,’ that they may paralyze the Government, cripple the exercise of the great powers with which it was invested, finally to change its form and subject us to a Southern despotism. Do we not know it to be so? Why disguise this great truth? Do we not know that they have been anxious for a change of Government for years?”65 “Coercion” was the allegedly unconstitutional exertion by the federal government to arrest secession, and the cry was raised to stay the hand of the national government. This was Calhoun’s theory of state sovereignty in action, which protected the Southern revolution against interference from the government. Despite Northern Democrats’ malingering in the 1850s, the Republican Party rapidly rose and confronted the Southern oligarchy, showing that they understood their antagonists sufficiently well. Many in the North could not be so deceived, nor would they so submit to servile obedience, nor could they be so induced to compromise to preserve the Union, for the high price of selling out their fathers’ republicanism. They posed a barrier to the oligarchy’s revolutionary project. Faced off against each other, the republican North and the Southern oligarchy contested for control of the nation. The Republicans frequently alluded to Southern statesmen’s prior control of the national government. James Blaine acknowledged Webster’s accounting in 1850, when he calculated that since the establishment of the national government, the South had received “three-­fourths of the places of honor and emolument.”66 But what ultimately mattered was the character of the Southern statesmen who held office. It mattered whether Southern statesmen like James Madison or, alternatively, John C. Calhoun administered the government. If the slaveholders had administered the government consistent with the principles of republicanism, as the slaveholding abolitionists from the South previously did, it logically followed that unified political development of the nation toward a purer form of republican government, entailing universal emancipation, would have been a more likely prospect. Crisis, sectionalism, disunion, and division might have been averted. But because the South and its statesmen had changed and embraced new political principles at war with the principles of the American founding, their strong presence in the offices gave them the opportunity to administer the 214

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governing institutions in the interest of slavery and to reshape and repurpose those institutions, consistent with oligarchic principle. Therefore, control of the national government by the free or slave section would determine whether the nation would further develop in a republican direction, as established by the founders or, alternatively, would transform itself into an oligarchy. George Boutwell noted that the terms of the “contest for supremacy” of the national government were settled after 1820. The census of that year foretold the South’s inevitable loss of the House of Representatives, even granting the enumeration of three-­fi fths slaves in the South for the purposes of apportioning representation. It was essential that Southern statesmen retain control of the Senate, and to control the Senate they needed at least to maintain an equilibrium of slave states, which they did maintain until 1850. As long as Southern senators acted together, which they did, Blaine explained, their share of Senate votes could defeat any measure obnoxious to them—­bills, treaties, or nominations of candidates to the federal judiciary, diplomatic corps, or cabinet. With the power to defeat, they gained the power to recommend and dictate terms.67 From 1820 to 1850, wrote Boutwell, Southern statesmen so skillfully used their advantage that, although they were a minority, the South “subjected the political organizations of the country to its will, and reduced an entire generation of statesmen to a condition of moral and political servitude.” Because the slaveholders acted as a unit, they “usually dictated the candidates of each party,” and in presidential elections both the Whig and the Democratic Parties “were rival bidders for southern support. The presidency was sold in the market.” Aside from the possible exception of the 1840 election of William Henry Harrison, Southern statesmen determined the president “in every contest from 1828 to 1856 inclusive.” Boutwell illustrated how powerful Southern statesmen’s national influence was, in the case of the Nullification Crisis. At bottom, nullification was “a means by which the slave-­holders attempted to assert their power in the government of the country.” Although President Jackson had crushed the nullifiers’ attempt to dictate federal law in 1832, “their policy, however, was not changed,” and they were never punished. “Indeed,” Boutwell continued, “the leaders in the treasonable scheme of nullification, including Mr. Calhoun, were soon restored to public confidence and advanced to new places of trust and power.”68 The admission of California as a free state in 1850 upset the equilibrium of slave-­and free-­state representation in the Senate, but the repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened the prospect of adding as many more new 215

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slave states and senators as the South could arrange by their united action. Although the people in the territories were supposed to settle the slave question under the Kansas-­Nebraska Act, it was early noticed that the slaveholders would gain an upper hand in determining the answer. During the 1854 Nebraska bill debates, Elihu Washburne pointed out that prior to a popular vote, slaveholders could “first go in there with their slaves; and being first on the ground, they will have a controlling influence in the election of a Territorial Legislature, which would fix the character of the Laws.” Further, the party that controlled the national government could defeat a popular vote for a slavery prohibition in the territories. Washburne asked: But suppose a Legislature should be elected which would pass a law to exclude slavery, would not such a law be likely to meet with a veto from a good Nebraska Democrat, appointed Governor by this Administration, which veto would prevent the bill from becoming a law . . . ? . . . In case such a law should be passed, would you not be likely to have some good Nebraska Democrats as Judges, who might be disposed to carry out the doctrine that I have heard so often advanced, that the Territorial Legislature would have no constitutional right to pass any law excluding slavery from the Territory? I tell you, sir, if you let slaves once go in there you will never get them out.69

Hence, whichever party could successfully install its version of constitutional interpretation on slavery in the federal judiciary, and could control nominations for the executive office, that party would influence the free or slave status of future states admitted to the Union. In turn, the balance of power in the Senate, and even the House, would shift in favor of the party that controlled the national government, further augmenting its strength. In short, the contest for the slave or free status of the territories and the contest for control of the national governing institutions were parallel struggles that would determine, as Washburne later said, whether the nation would be confirmed a “Union of republican States” or transform into “a Confederation of oligarchies.” 70 When the Thirty-­Fourth Congress met in December 1855, the representatives who took their seats were actually representatives from the two antagonistic political regimes, organized for political battle. The inchoate Republican Party commanded a bare plural majority in the House and was a minority, seventeen Republicans to forty-­three Democrats, in the Senate. Their strength thus arrayed, John Sherman wrote, the party “was about to 216

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engage in a political contest for the administration of the government.” Sherman understood the nature of the contest. In that Congress the name denoting the opposing party, the Democratic Party was “a misnomer. The word ‘Democracy,’ from which it is derived, means a government of the people, but the controlling power of the Democratic party resided in the southern states, where a large portion of the people were slaves, and the ruling class were slaveholders, and the name was not applicable to such a people.” Despite their antirepublican character, the Democrats had an advantage. The Republicans “had to contest with an adverse Executive and Supreme Court, with a well-­organized party in possession of all the patronage of the government, in absolute control of the slaveholding states, and supported by strong minorities in each of the free states.” 71 An indication that the struggle in Congress concerned fundamental things, sharply divergent principles regarding the nature of good government itself, was that congressmen could barely talk to each other. In those days, it was becoming increasingly difficult for Northern and Southern men in Washington to demonstrate intellectual sympathy for their political opponents’ point of view or to maintain cordial relations. James Blaine wrote that the Southern “point of view was so radically different from that held by a large number of Northern people that it left no common ground for action,—­scarcely, indeed, an opportunity for reasoning together.” John Sherman remembered, “The sincere friendship that often exists between political adversaries in public life were not possible during this period. Social lines were drawn on sectional lines, and in the north party lines became hostile lines.” This led to “unjust criticism” and caused the criticized man “to regard his political adversaries as enemies to their country and disturbers of the public peace.” From a philosophical distance, Sherman confessed that he, too, held strong prejudices during that period. Amicable relations were suspended because organized interregime conflict had commenced. Both sides had become fully aware that they were contending for their most dearly held things, and in that contest they were attempting to wipe out their opponents’ most dearly held things—­their different ways of life and the fundamental principles by which they lived. There could be only one victor in such a contest; the other would be left to rue an irreplaceable, lost cause—­a ll that made them feel at home in the world. These are the stakes in a struggle over the fundamental form of a political regime. This social self-­segregation in national councils was invented and promoted by the founding father of the oligarchic revolution, John C. Calhoun. 217

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John Wentworth remembered that Calhoun “deemed it his duty to define the rules which would govern his conduct with anti-­slavery men. If one of them asked him a civil question, he should give him a civil answer, and nothing more. He should never originate a conversation with one of them unless in the line of unavoidable business. If one offered to him his hand, he should take it. But he should never offer his hand to one. With this idea of Mr. Calhoun, I presume, originated at the South what is called social ostracism.” 72 When Wentworth was a Democrat and spoke warmly in favor of the annexation of Texas, “I received a great many hearty shakes from the hand of Mr. Calhoun. But when I became an advocate of the freedom of the Mexican acquisition, I received only those shakes which I went after, knowing the terms.” 73 Calhoun had created a new code of friendship for his followers. Friendship was earned by serving the interests of the Southern statesmen. Others were shunned, though they were colleagues in the government and fellow citizens. This social decree prevented the kind of intellectual intercourse with opponents that might arrest Calhoun’s propagation of new revolutionary principles. Calhoun’s rules of conduct prevented sympathetic private discussion in which the principled differences between his followers and their opponents might be brooked. In this detail also, Calhoun could be seen cultivating the revolutionary seeds that ripened in the 1850s. The primary battle fought in and out of the Thirty-­Fourth Congress was over Kansas. The Republicans’ determination “to make Kansas a free State,” Henry Wilson wrote, “was a deliberate and successful stand made by the friends of freedom against the aggressions of the Slave Power.” The Southern statesmen were likewise determined to make Kansas a slave state. The battle “foretokened a fearful contest, fierce encounters, and bloody strifes.” Neither side “fully comprehended the magnitude and violence of the struggle on which they were entering.” Once the struggle began, Wilson continued, “there seemed to be no other alternative but to advance till the superior force or tact of the one compelled the other to desist.” 74 Wilson’s personal reflections also underscore the unique nature of their conflict. Beginning with the battle over Kansas, each side saw no alternative but to fight on, despite their uncertainty of the future costs. This indicated that both sides knew that they were both fighting for self-­preservation. At stake were two radically opposed national destinies. Everyone saw, as George Boutwell wrote, that as a result of the new territorial policy, “the supporters of slavery and the devotees of freedom were invited to a contest of arms for the adjustment of a question which might and 218

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should have been settled by Congress.” 75 Both sides aided emigration to Kansas, to stake their claim for freedom or slavery, and violence erupted.76 By displacing the interregime political conflict from the national capital to Kansas, Congress, or at least the Democratic supporters of the Kansas-­Nebraska Act, had inaugurated the first phase of interregime war. Before the Thirty-­Fourth Congress met, Sherman recounted, they had already received “reports in the newspapers of gross frauds at pretended elections of rival legislatures, of murder and other crimes, in short, of actual civil war in Kansas.” The interregime conflict even invaded journalism. Sherman acknowledged that the newspaper accounts they received “were contradictory.” 77 Subsequently, regime forces clashed within and without the government, struggling for domination. The influence of the executive branch in Kansas affairs was quickly felt. President Franklin Pierce, a Democrat, recommended an appropriation to support a violent proslavery mob from Missouri styling itself the legislature of Kansas. Republicans sensed that the president had requested the appropriation so that he could throw the military onto the scales in favor of slavery, despite the fraudulence, which John Sherman knew in detail, as a member of the Kansas Investigating Committee in the House of Representatives.78 The territorial governor sent a memorial to the House of Representatives documenting electoral abuses by the Missouri proslavery “border ruffians.” President Pierce instead blamed abolitionist agitation for the disturbances in Kansas and appointed a new territorial governor who began his office by proclaiming his proslavery sympathies at a center of border ruffianism in Missouri.79 By 1856 the majority report of the Kansas Investigating Committee documenting the Kansas outrages was widely circulated. Sherman spoke forcefully in Congress against Southern support of the proslavery violence and election frauds and proposed and won adoption of an amendment to a military appropriations bill, prohibiting the president from deploying the army in Kansas. Showing his hand, the president convened both houses of Congress, asking for a repeal of the amendment. Publicity of these events, and Representative Preston Brooks’s near assassination of Charles Sumner in the Senate for his “Crime against Kansas” speech, Sherman wrote, “aroused public sentiment in the north.”80 To the Republicans, Brooks’s assault on Sumner in the Senate chamber in May 1856 and the proslavery violence in Kansas were both open attacks on republican institutions and manifested the characteristics of interregime conflict. The conduct of both sides in both cases followed the moral logic of the political regime each side represented. To Henry Wilson, the Brooks 219

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affair “fairly represented freedom and slavery as they stood at that time confronting each other.” That event was not merely symbolic, but was “typical of what was being enacted on the wider theatre of the nation.” Sumner of Massachusetts and Brooks of South Carolina hailed from the epicenters “of the two civilizations which divided the country.” The North, accustomed to obedience to the Constitution and the law, was restrained in its contest with the South, which flouted or twisted the Constitution and the law to achieve domination.81 Southern statesmen could abide the institutions of free government only if those institutions supported their policies and interests. Otherwise, they would resort to force or fraud. Unsuspecting and unprepared for the oligarchy’s mode of administering justice, Sumner was writing, his knees underneath his desk, when Brooks surprised him and began raining blows down upon his head with a cane. Senators coming to Sumner’s aid were held back by Brooks’s accomplices, Representatives Henry A. Edmundson of Virginia and Lawrence M. Keitt of South Carolina, the latter brandishing his cane and shouting, “Let them alone, God damn you!” Although Sumner was larger and more powerful than Brooks, his restraints prevented him from defending himself, and in his attempt to wrench himself free after the first blows, he ripped the bolts of the desk from the Senate floor. Brooks struck Sumner some fifteen to twenty times, breaking his cane, and continued even after his victim fell to the floor, bloody and unconscious.82 The next day after the assault, Wilson took the Senate floor and denounced the attack on free speech and constitutional government.83 Southern statesmen were resorting to brute force to bend the nation to their will, when the institutions of free government were not complying with their aims. This was precisely the point of Sumner’s speech, “The Crime against Kansas,” which had precipitated the assault.84 Sumner had said that in Kansas, “the very shrines of popular institutions, more sacred than any heathen altar, are desecrated, . . . the ballot-­box, more precious than any work in ivory or marble from the cunning hand of Art, is plundered.” To fasten slavery onto unwilling Kansas, “here in our Republic, force—­ay, Sir, FORCE—­is openly employed in compelling Kansas to this pollution, and all for the sake of political power.” Rather than condemning these abuses, Senator Butler of South Carolina had risen to attack the Republican Party as “sectional and fanatical” and had asserted the constitutional doctrine of Calhoun, that slavery prohibitions violated the equal right of the states to the territories as the common property of the states. Sumner repelled the charges. The policy of “the great fathers of the Republic” was that 220

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freedom should be national and slavery a sectional exception. The Nebraska bill that reversed that policy “was a swindle of a great cause, early espoused by Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, surrounded by the best fathers of the Republic.” He denied that by “equality under the Constitution,” the fathers meant that slave states possessed the rights “to compel fellow-­men to unpaid toil, to separate husband and wife, and to sell little children at the auction-­block” in the territories. These “asserted rights . . . shock equality of all kinds” and mocked the fathers. Butler, not the Republicans, was an “unblushing representative . . . of a flagrant sectionalism.” By maintaining the policy of the fathers, the Republican Party was “more than any other party, national,—­and that it now goes forth to dislodge from the high places that tyrannical sectionalism of which the Senator from South Carolina is one of the maddest zealots.”85 The sectionalism that Senator Butler defended was more than a Southern policy preference for the extension of slavery. Sumner looked into South Carolina and identified the nature of that sectionalism that Butler was advancing in Washington and in the territories. Butler’s South Carolina was “republican only in name, confirming power in the hands of the few, and founding the qualifications of its legislators on ‘a settled freehold estate of five hundred acres of land and ten negroes.’” In Washington, members of these interstate ruling classes in the slave states constituted a “Slave Oligarchy now controlling the Republic.”86 They were attempting to substitute forcibly their sectional proslavery policy for the republican fathers’ antislavery national policy. By doing so, the Southern statesmen were also expanding the basis for their sectional system of government, minority rule. They were attempting to substitute their oligarchic system of government for the fathers’ republican system. In Kansas Southern statesmen were engrafting their political regime onto that territory before statehood, and they were employing the tool—­ force—­that was characteristic of their regime and hostile to republicanism. Force, not persuasion, was the natural tool of proslavery men in Kansas and of the ruling class in the slaveholding states to gain what men would not freely give, by their votes or by their labor. For that reason, Southern statesmen were the true sectionalists and revolutionaries. This was the speech that Brooks had “read . . . twice over carefully,” he announced to Sumner, immediately before his first blow. By beating Sumner, Brooks proved Sumner’s argument. When Wilson rose to condemn the assault on the following day, he deferred to “older Senators . . . to vindicate the honor and dignity of the Senate.” No Democrat stepped forward, so 221

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Republican senator William Seward thereupon proposed a resolution for the formation of a committee, selected by the president, to make inquiry. But Senator James Mason amended the resolution so that the Senate, with its Democratic majority, would select the committee, which subsequently included only Democrats and did nothing. In the South, “leading public men and presses” praised the deed “so that,” wrote Wilson, “the bludgeon became the weapon of honor, the bully the hero of the hour.”87 Southern approval proved Sumner’s analysis even further. That fall in 1856, the nation faced a presidential election. To some in the North, the Democrats’ nomination of James Buchanan promised an end to the conflict between the sections and parties. Sherman and Blaine agreed that Buchanan of Pennsylvania appeared to be a good choice at the time. Northerners believed that Buchanan, with his vast and distinguished experience in government service, his conciliatory approach to conflict, and his Northern roots, would quiet the violence and ensure free and fair elections in Kansas, resulting in the prohibition of slavery. That expectation, weighed against Republican nominee John C. Frémont’s poverty of experience in public affairs, held many Northern Democrats in the party. Northern and Southern Democrats remained sufficiently united to secure Buchanan’s election.88 Buchanan would be a bitter disappointment. Rather than quell interregime conflict in favor of liberty, he allowed it to worsen under his watch.The flashes of violence on the plains of Kansas had been signs that interregime conflict within the Union was becoming interregime war. The North, liberty, and the republicanism of the fathers were arrayed against the South, slavery, and oligarchy, deceptively hiding its nature behind the misleading name of the party it controlled.

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T

he republicans laid out their argument as a series of testable hypotheses. The most important and overarching hypothesis was that the antebellum South developed toward oligarchy. If that hypothesis holds and is broadly accepted, and if its implications are understood, our understanding of the American past, including how that past has affected our present, must change. Selective evidence exists that could be brought forward to challenge the argument of the Republicans. Aristotelian theory predicts that we should find some evidence on the contrary, proving the presence of some oligarchic elements in the North and some republican elements in the South. Actual political regimes are rarely, if ever, entirely uniform, and they never perfectly approximate any of the fundamental forms of political regimes. Aristotle recognized that cities with distinctive regimes contain parts that are characteristic of regimes different from the specific regime that contains those parts.1 One might find genuinely oligarchic men in a democracy and democratic men in an oligarchy. What allows us to say that the regime is one definite type, despite the presence of these different elements, is that one element is dominant and rules. A regime is an oligarchy when the oligarchic element rules according to the oligarchic ruling principle, despite the presence of democratic elements within the city. Over time, the oligarchic regime might

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become less generally oligarchic if the popular element becomes generally stronger, or the oligarchic regime might become generally more oligarchic if the popular element becomes weaker.2 In addition to dealing with the reality that regimes contain contrary elements, the further difficulty of testing the Republican hypothesis is that if an oligarchy ever did develop and rule the South, it did so within a vast landmass, far greater than the size of one Greek city, and never did live long enough as a separate nation to reveal what its intentions were with more clarity. We are left with the task of searching for the development of a distinct regime that was, if it existed at all, formally united to another and in which we must expect to find many elements that contradict the Republican hypothesis. The solution to this analytical problem is to cut through the mass of evidence and search for classes of evidence that are dispositive. One class of such evidence is institutional arrangements that would have been key supports of oligarchic rule and in which we would expect to see the oligarchic principle inscribed. Education is the first and most obvious institution to examine: first, because Republicans pointed to the condition of education in the South in support of their hypothesis and, second, because lawgivers construct education to cultivate the character of the regime, and if not, the regime is imperiled, as Aristotle recognized.3 Hence, we should see if educational arrangements in the South supported oligarchic rule. Next, property arrangements are examined. The Republicans argued that the Southern minority hoarded property and prevented the many from prospering, not due to greed simply but owing to their oligarchic presumption that they had a possessory right of ownership to the largest share of everything in political society. Aristotle also saw this presumption as a hallmark of oligarchic regimes.4 In fact, he said that the truly essential characteristic of oligarchy is not that the rulers are few in number, which is an incidental though almost a universal fact of oligarchy, but rather rule by the wealthy.5 Wealth rules and determines the character of the entire political society. Finally, the structure of Southern government is examined to see whether the wealthy few did in fact control and make provision for their control of Southern political society. Chapter 6 targets these institutional arrangements to test the Republican hypothesis. The value of this test may be less in its results than in its demonstration. The test cannot be exhaustive given the mass of scholarly literature touching on these issues, but it does show one approach to determining 224

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what the character of a political regime is and, specifically, what the political character of the antebellum South was. The findings at least seem strongly suggestive that the Republicans were correct about the general direction of political development in the South. These institutional arrangements supported rule of the few, and the results that those institutional arrangements produced, far from being accidental, were justified on oligarchic grounds by their advocates. Chapter 7 begins by attempting to answer the following question: If the Republicans were correct, why have scholars, not to mention the American people, forgotten such a fundamental fact about our country, so pregnant with implications about our system of government and way of life today? One cause may very well be the demise of Aristotelian political science in America over the past hundred years, which attenuated the interest in and dulled the sensibilities for political regimes. But also political forces since the end of the nineteenth century caused this forgetfulness, which is explained. This explanation is important, because without it, many might doubt that prior generations of scholars who lived closer to the past in question missed such a fundamental fact. Sometimes, different political purposes coincide in inducing all parties in a continuing political contest to bury or move beyond certain aspects of the past—­which is, in fact, what happened. Finally, a brief account of the process of Reconstruction as it pertains to race and equality is presented, but in the context of regime change. The purpose of this account is to demonstrate how the reinsertion of Southern oligarchy in studies of the nineteenth century changes our findings and understanding of American political development.

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Education For a long time, historians of education have recognized that basic education was much more broadly diffused in the antebellum Northern states than the Southern states.1 Although the scholars have not yet agreed upon the precise factor that explains this difference, one leading historian of education narrowed down the field of candidates to one factor, slavery.2 As table 1 demonstrates, illiteracy and slavery were strongly correlated in 1860. The illiteracy rate of native-­born, free adults (column D) rose wherever slavery was present (C). This supports the claim of Republican Charles Van Wyck, that “your own people feel more keenly than we, that ‘The badge of the slave is the scorn of the free.’”3 Only one slave state, Texas (8 percent), had a lower illiteracy rate of native-­born free adults than one free state, Indiana (11 percent), but many poor Southern whites had migrated to Indiana, which probably accounts for Indiana’s high illiteracy rate among Northern states.4 The table is sorted by total adult illiteracy (E), which combines the fractions of the total population who were adult slaves, and who are presumed illiterate, and native and foreign-­born illiterate adults. This column illustrates Van Wyck’s other claim, that the slave states upheld “a system whose corner-­stone is the ignorance of the people.”5 At one time, two leading Northern and Southern statesmen agreed upon the importance of basic education to republicanism. John Adams wrote that “education is more indispensable, and must be more general, under a free government than any other.” Since time immemorial, he wrote, despotisms of all kinds had made war against liberty, but if the principles of natural right were laid before the people, the light of understanding would spread and “the 227

PART II TABLE 1.

THE TEST AND IMPLICATIONS

Illiteracy versus slavery in 1860

A State South Carolina Mississippi Alabama Louisiana Florida Georgia North Carolina Virginia Arkansas Tennessee Texas Kentucky Delaware Maryland Missouri Indiana California Illinois Iowa Massachusetts New Jersey Minnesota New York Ohio Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island Michigan Vermont Wisconsin Connecticut Maine New Hampshire

B Free/Slave

C Slave Density (slaves as % of total population)

Slave Slave Slave Slave Slave Slave Slave Slave Slave Slave Slave Slave Slave Slave Slave Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free Free

57 55 45 47 44 44 33 31 26 25 30 20 2 13 10 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

D E Native-born, free adult Total adult illiteracy rate (%) illiteracy rate (%) 12 10 18 12 16 18 26 18 19 20 8 18 25 14 14 11 7 7 6 0 5 2 2 6 6 4 2 3 0 1 0 1 1

61 61 55 53 53 53 48 42 40 39 36 32 27 23 20 11 8 8 7 7 7 6 6 6 6 6 6 5 5 5 3 3 3

Source: “Illiteracy in the United States,” Appendix F, in Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Condition and Improvement of Public Schools in the District of Columbia, Submitted to the Senate June 1868, and to the House with Additions June 13, 1870, by U.S. Bureau of Education, 808–11. 228

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more disciples they will have.” Thomas Jefferson’s “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” noted that in the past, “those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.” A general education would also find and develop talent that nations had always neglected in favor of the well-­born and the rich. Adams recognized that the laboring classes “are not always the meanest; there arise, in the course of human life, many among them of the most splendid geniuses, the most active and benevolent dispositions, and most undaunted bravery.” Likewise, Jefferson acknowledged those “talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich . . . perish without use, if not sought for and cultivated.”6 Although they agreed on the principles of education policy, their sections differed in putting these principles into practice. In the early national period, education in the South was not so widespread as in the North. Traditionally, southern schools served a few families who would jointly pay the teacher’s fee. Sometimes, prestigious families would organize, endow, and supervise the schools, which then became permanent private academies.7 Northerners presumed that elementary education was a necessity, and the northern literacy rate, especially in New England, exceeded the South’s rate.8 The northern people also sensed that their communities were incomplete without a school. When northern populations grew at a distance from an existing school district, the distant people demanded a school district for themselves. A resident in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, recalled, “Whenever a neighborhood felt the need of a schoolhouse, one was erected at some point convenient to those who contributed towards its erection. The patrons selected trustees, whose duty it was to take charge of the school property and to select a teacher for the school.”9 Education was a community affair rather than a concern of a few families, as it was in the South. But southern statesmen initially showed that they intended to implement republican principles of education and catch up to northern standards. Their states lacked the stronger cultural foundations of the northern people. To remedy this deficiency, Southern statesmen attempted to build general education from the top down. The delegates who framed North Carolina’s state constitution in 1776 included an educational provision requiring its legislature to establish schools and to make them available “at low prices.” The Georgia Constitution of 1777 similarly ordered that “schools shall be erected in each county, and supported at the general expense of the State.”10 229

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Jefferson’s plan for Virginia provided for three levels of education, all funded by a county tax.11 Southern statesmen repeatedly echoed Adams and Jefferson, calling for popular education to strengthen republicanism and protect it from subversion. In 1803 Governor James Turner of North Carolina reminded the legislature that popular enlightenment is “the most certain way of handing down to our latest posterity, our free republican government,” because “education is the mortal enemy to arbitrary governments, and the surest basis of liberty and equal rights.” He asked for “the establishment of schools in every part of the State.” In 1811 Governor Benjamin Smith, also of North Carolina, warned, “In despotic governments, where the supreme power is in possession of a tyrant or divided among an hereditary aristocracy . . . the ignorance of the people is a security to their rulers.” Smith recommended that “a certain degree of education should be placed within the reach of every child of the State.”12 In 1811 Governor Henry Middleton of South Carolina recommended “the propriety of establishing free schools, in all those parts of the state where such institutions are wanted,” because “one of the first objects of a government, founded on popular rights, should be to diffuse the benefits of education as widely as possible.”13 All of these calls failed to achieve their intended aim. In 1779 Jefferson’s school plan came before the Virginia Legislature and was defeated. When the legislature finally enacted his plan in 1796, a change in wording permitted the wealthy to kill the plans in operation.14 The bill did not require but rather gave permission to the counties to fund and set up the schools themselves.15 Jefferson lamented that the county justices, who decided whether to implement the plan, were “generally of the more wealthy class” and “were unwilling to incur that burthen.”16 When their principles were put to the test, Virginia’s leaders chose to protect their wealth rather than to build up the republican character of their citizens. In South Carolina, the people petitioned for free schools, and the legislature passed a school bill in 1811.17 But the new law deepened class division. School districts were created, and the district commissioners were required to prefer the poor for admission to the free schools, which thereafter became schools for the poor. To obtain state aid, families had to humiliate themselves and take a “pauper’s oath.”18 In addition, the law permitted the commissioners to give the public funds to private academies for the wealthy. The state had already created and funded South Carolina College in 1801. Rather than building a system of common school education, the law created separate and 230

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unequal systems of education for rich and poor, funded by the common treasury. These systems remained in place until after the Civil War. Soon, Virginia emulated South Carolina. In 1818 the legislature passed over Jefferson’s plan again and instead created a pauper school fund and established and funded the University of Virginia.19 Jefferson disapproved of Virginia’s policy, lamenting the neglect of “primary schools” in 1820, and warning that Virginia was “fast sinking” and “becoming the Barbary of the Union.” The people had raised enough money, and “it should be employed . . . for their greatest good,” their general education. He asked, “Would it not have a good effect for the friends of this University to take the lead in proposing and effecting a practical scheme of elementary schools?” In Virginia as well, the pattern of education consisted in two separate and unequal systems until after the Civil War. In 1826 Governor John Tyler of Virginia held up the free school system of New York, asking the legislature to imitate that model, “embracing all, and alike available to all.”20 But Tyler was not reelected, and his bill did not pass. Instead, the legislature enacted a law providing for a “district free-school system” that authorized but did not require county commissioners to divide their counties into districts for the establishment of free schools, open to all free white children. Voluntary contributions had to fund the construction of schools. The commissioners could direct tax revenues to the support of these schools at their discretion. In practice the commissioners focused on the pauper schools instead.21 The legislature of North Carolina did nothing to establish free schools for decades, despite the requirement in their constitution, while the population of North Carolina sank into deeper illiteracy and ignorance. The Georgia Legislature also flouted its constitutional requirement and instead followed the example of South Carolina and Virginia. In 1821 the legislature set aside half of its school fund for paupers and the other half for private academies. Students could receive funding only by taking the pauper’s oath. In 1833 an anonymous author in the Southern Banner complained that Georgia’s educational system was “anti-­republican in its tendency,” because “here as in an Aristocracy the poor are taxed for the benefit of the rich.” Public funds built Georgia’s “Colleges and Universities . . . but who reaps the benefit? The rich.”22 While the southern state governments strayed from their original mission and were funding pauper schools for the poor and academies and colleges for the rich, northern communities were making progress toward universal basic education. The proportion of children enrolled in elementary school 231

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was rising more quickly in the Northeast than elsewhere, particularly among female children. By 1830 most white Americans in the North had access to elementary education. Enrollment rates in the South were lower.23 The North sustained this progress whether the state governments supplied encouragements or mandates. In 1789 the Massachusetts Legislature passed a law, similar to its colonial law, requiring that towns maintain a school. But most towns already maintained a school and did offer a partially free elementary education. Responding to the complaint of the governor of New York, George Clinton, that a 1795 education law favored “the children of the opulent,” the legislature passed another law lavishing aid on local common school committees for five years. The law was not renewed, yet enrollments of pupils under twenty years old in New York increased from an estimated 37 percent to 60 percent from 1800 to 1825. Connecticut did provide generous financial support to local “school societies,” approximating a district system, and some American and foreign commentators regarded the common school system so funded the best in the country.24 Like the pauper schools in the South, urban charity schools in the North began as free schools for the poor. These schools transformed into common school systems, the forerunner of modern public school systems, serving all for free. At first, private benevolence and fear of city-­dwelling youth growing into adult criminals motivated the establishment and funding of charity schools. In time, advocates for poor school funds advanced republican arguments.25 Boston’s city missionary Joseph Tuckerman believed that “if every child in our country, and in the world, between the ages of four and fourteen were in a school . . . and should receive as much instruction as could be given to them, it would be found that in the diversity God has made of human capacities . . . there is an ample provision for the whole number which is wanted for every service.”26 This was pure republican theory, reminiscent of Adams and Jefferson. The urban charity schools eventually attracted and admitted children from higher socioeconomic positions. The charity school systems of New York and Philadelphia first changed into common school systems. After 1820 urban common school systems grew and received public funds and oversight. They accomplished in the cities what the northern district schools had already been doing since before the Revolution. After the 1830s the gap between northern and southern basic education steadily widened until the Civil War. In the North leading educational reformers Horace Mann in Massachusetts, Calvin Stowe in Ohio, Henry 232

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Barnard in Connecticut, and John Pierce in Michigan all urged reform, relying primarily on arguments to educate children for republican citizenship. All of them preached the power of education to elevate character and develop individual potential as far as the pupil’s talent could go, no matter how humble or unfortunate the child’s origins. All of them recognized that the opportunity to advance was the first fruit of republican society, and education was the surest prop of republicanism. All of them learned the gospel of education from personal experience in New England, where all were born and raised. Barnard came from a middling Connecticut family; the rest knew privation and were left fatherless as children, Mann at age thirteen, Stowe at six, Pierce at two.27 But all owed their success and social respectability to education. The common schools saved their lives, imbued in them a love of learning, and gave them a fair start in life. They worked hard, rose, and then became evangelists for common school education and by extension for American republicanism, to both of which they owed so much. Had not their New England forebears valued education and established schools, they would not have been in the position from which they could diffuse it further still, within their own New England and beyond. The arguments of the reformers drew from the theory of the founders. In an 1837 report to the Ohio Legislature, Stowe’s central point was that “republicanism can be maintained only by universal intelligence and virtue among the people. . . . And do not patriotism and the necessity of self-­ preservation, call upon us to do more and better for the education of our whole people, than any despotic sovereign can do for his?” In his third report to the Michigan Legislature in 1838, Pierce wrote that “generally diffused education, combining the great powers of intelligence and a pure virtue, is the only safeguard of our public and our private rights; and upon the progress of this alone, depends the future permanence and character of all our republican institutions.” In 1871, as the first commissioner of the newly created U.S. Department of Education, Barnard wrote, “The problem to be solved under a republican government . . . is not the education of the few, or even the many, but of all.” Mann dilated on the dependence of republicanism on education more than any other of his compeers. In his Tenth Annual Report in 1846 as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Mann wrote, “Since the achievement of American independence, the universal and ever-­repeated argument in favor of free schools has been, that the general intelligence which they are capable of diffusing . . . is indispensable to the continuance of a republican government.”28 233

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The reformers aimed at programmatic public management over education, so that education would be more efficient, uniform, and consistent with national purposes. They favored the institution of state superintendents of public instruction, organization directed by the state government, and increased public expenditures. They pushed for a lengthened annual schooling period, higher wages for teachers, libraries, uniform textbooks, teacher training schools, education periodicals, and other reforms. All of these reforms aimed at diffusing the benefits of education by increasing the scale of schools, expanding student enrollments, and improving the quality of instruction under education officials’ supervision. Buoyed by the appeal of their arguments to their public, they did generally succeed at centralizing the oversight and funding of education at the state level in the free states. Although school enrollments in the free states were already rising when they began their reform work, enrollments further increased through 1860. However, the reform movement that they initiated barely affected the South.29 In the South new principles appeared in new arguments leveled against common school education. In 1830 Professor Thomas Cooper at South Carolina College published an attack on northern common school education plans in the Southern Review. “These schemes” were “neither just, nor expedient, nor practical.” Relying heavily on the remarks of John Randolph of Roanoke in the Virginia convention of 1829–30, he attacked majority rule. Taxation to fund common school education was “wanton plunder” and would inculcate “hatred among the persons of no property” toward those with property. Because “nature has made no two men equal in strength of body or strength of mind,” he concluded that the rich were rich because they were naturally superior. Adams and Jefferson also believed that some are more naturally talented than others, but Cooper assumed that natural superiority or inferiority is unalterably transmitted to children, not randomly diffused by nature. Cooper justified withholding education from the poor. Their education would make them a public nuisance. Finally, Cooper uncovered the nerve of his argument: “We deny that all men are created equal. We deny that any two men that ever lived were created equal in any one assignable circumstance. We deny that any human creature has any unalienable rights. We deny that there are any natural rights. . . . We assert that all rights, of whatever description, and without any exception, are the creatures of society, and of society alone.”30 Therefore, even if a poor child was born with superior talent, whoever controlled society had the right to assign him to an inferior place for life. This 234

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was not unjust, he maintained, because might determined right and justice. “Resist, if you have the force to justify resistance; if not, quit the country or submit.”31 Cooper sketched an oligarchic argument against republican education, and in a short time, the same argument spread among southern leaders in opposition to general education. Principled respect for property rights and its corollary, principled commitment to limited government, do not explain southern reluctance to fund common schools, although they did sometimes claim this ground.32 Cooper’s argument does not rule out taxation and state activism per se but rules it out only on behalf of the inferior poor. In fact, southern state governments did tax all to fund the private academies and colleges for the benefit of rich children. The one section of the country that supported education with the least government coercion and general taxation was New England, where local communities banded together, raised funds, hired teachers, and built schools. When general education succeeded at all in the antebellum South, the people took matters into their own hands, just as the people of New England had done, but the slaveholders used state power to thwart their efforts. Slavery was sparse in Washington County, in the southwestern corner of Virginia. As the 1829 state law permitted, the people decided to pool their own efforts, tax themselves, and organize common schools, without state aid. By 1835 thirty-­eight school districts operated. Educational development there and in the northern townships in the founding period were parallel, sharing the characteristic of fewer slaves, a stronger republican character, and a commitment to common schools.33 This success led to greater agitation in the 1840s and 1850s for a statewide system in Virginia. These efforts were defeated by “the interests of the academies and colleges of the State,” that is, the wealthy. They turned the aristocratic label back onto their opponents, ridiculing “the privileged class, the aristocracy of poverty,” who sought common schooling for all.34 In 1839 the North Carolina Legislature finally fulfilled its constitutional duty and enacted its first public school law. The law established county boards of education, which were required in order to divide the county into school districts, and the schools would be open to all. The law also required county courts to levy a tax to support the schools. The plan would apply only to each county that voted for it, and a majority of counties did. North Carolina, alone among the antebellum slave states, built for itself a common school system ex nihilo and became the first slave state to create the office of 235

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state superintendent of public instruction. These late but earnest steps were an exception to the rule, but it was too little, too late. Despite these efforts, North Carolina had the highest adult illiteracy rate in the nation but a public school attendance rate rivaling the free states by 1860.35 Education policy changed in North Carolina because the majority gained some power when the state constitution was altered in 1835. The low-­ slaveholding western section of the state demanded common schools, while the rich in the high-­slaveholding eastern section usually opposed them, a pattern repeated all over the slave South. The North Carolina constitutional convention of 1835 retained the eastern legislators’ disproportionate representation, but weakened their strength. In addition, the amended constitution changed the electors of governor from the members of the legislature to the people. These changes and the growth of western North Carolina’s white population sufficiently tipped the scales on the common school question to the side favored by the western part of the state. 36 The North Carolina convention of 1835 directly led to the enactment of the 1839 education law, showing that the establishment of common schools in the South required the marginal increase in popular influence in state government. The same factor determined the fate of common schools in antebellum Louisiana. Since Louisiana had been a territory, private academies flourished, supported by government’s largesse. The parishes that distributed state aid had to reserve limited school enrollments for those designated poor.37 Louisiana, too, had created the distinction between the poor and the rich in their educational laws. But common folk had emigrated to the northern part of the state in large numbers in the 1830s and 1840s, creating a new bulge of political power in that low-­slaveholding section, counterbalancing the power of the rich who resided in the high-­slaveholding section.38 At the state convention of 1844, preceding the new state constitution of 1845, the secretary of the education committee reported the same complaints heard all over the slave states.39 Publicly funded teachers were incompetent and negligent. Enrollments were down. Only the wealthy were enjoying a good education. School funds earmarked for the poor stigmatized the recipients and repelled many citizens. Large state expenditures for colleges and academies benefited only the rich, because without the availability of basic education, the majority were not qualified to attend them. The 1845 constitution included an educational provision for the first time, providing for a state superintendent of public instruction, a public school fund, and free schools supported by taxation. The reforms aimed at replacing 236

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the stigmatizing poor school system with a competent public school system for all. The constitution also eliminated property qualifications for voting, which enfranchised the new mass of common folk in the northern section. Louisiana commenced building a free school system on the model of northern states.40 The slaveholders soon struck back. In 1852 a new state constitution apportioned representation in the legislature by enumerating total persons, slaves included. By this provision, they gained firm control of the state.41 That same year, the legislature abolished the office of parish superintendent, cut the state superintendent’s salary, and relieved the superintendent from visiting the parishes, with the result that the numbers of operating schools and enrollments precipitously dropped.42 The changes “seriously crippled” the embryonic free school system.43 The movement away from the establishment of common schools corresponded with the increase in power of the high-­slaveholding section of Louisiana, secured by the constitution of 1852. South Carolina’s school policy remained intact from 1811 until the Civil War. As in other slave states, the partisans who fought over educational policy were organized and arrayed along intersectional lines within the state, dividing the slaveholders from the poorer citizens. The low-­slaveholding upcountry, the northwestern section around Greensville and Spartanburg, agitated for an improved popular educational system. But because the high-­ slaveholding low country enjoyed disproportionate representation, the legislature resisted calls for common schools, sometimes with open hostility. As a result, the white majority never had access to respectable education. The teachers at poor schools, at one point, were generally adjudged as being “unqualified for their stations.”44 The county school commissioners often neglected their oversight of the schools. Illiteracy was widespread. The example of antebellum South Carolina proves that the state’s abstention from establishing a publicly funded common school system cannot be attributed to state leaders’ fidelity to limited government and principled opposition to taxes. In fact, their conduct reveals that their claimed fidelity to local liberty, limited government, and property rights in national councils was inconsistent with their practice in their state. Their inconsistency suggests that their positions advanced in national councils were unprincipled and were invoked for political expediency. The state government deliberately pursued an educational policy adverse to the people and favorable to the wealthy. Funds for the pauper schools were divided according to the same formula by which the low-­country slaveholders dominated the legislature, 237

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that is, the funds were malapportioned. Hence, in a given year in the 1840s, the poorer low-­slaveholding Spartanburg district received fifteen hundred dollars of the school funds, while the wealthier, high-­slaveholding St. Phillip’s and St. Michael’s parishes received fifty-­one hundred dollars in funds, despite the higher number of voters in Spartanburg than in the other parishes.45 The state government actively appropriated more public funds for those who needed less and appropriated less state funds for those who needed more. Also, the state government actively prevented the poorer sections of the state from helping themselves. In 1855 state senator Thomas Patterson Brockman appealed to his colleagues to pass a law allowing the people in the free school districts to tax themselves as each district might or might not wish and to use the funds to establish common schools.46 A “great many” of his constituents from low-­slaveholding Greenville abstained from taking state funds, he said, because they refused to be regarded as paupers. But he had ascertained from his constituents that, although their means were modest, the people would accept a capitation tax for the purpose of establishing a common school system. They would attend the schools if they knew that their own funds, and not funds appropriated for paupers, provided the support. This would remove the pauper stigma from the free schools. These funds, combined with the funds appropriated by the legislature to the district school commissioners, would provide enough resources to support the broader diffusion of elementary education. In the lower branch of the legislature, two representatives from Greenville and Spartanburg supported legislation with a similar funding provision along with a provision for the establishment of a state superintendent of public instruction. One representative supported the capitation tax, “in confident expectation that the day will arrive when my children, your children, and the children of us all, will be educated out of the common treasury.” These bills failed. One of the arguments in the opposition was that the tax power belonged to the state legislature, and, therefore, the local people did not have the right to tax themselves even if they chose to do so.47 The poorer, low-­ slaveholding people in the upcountry desired to pool their small resources and establish a common school system themselves, as the western Virginians and early northern townships did. But a majority of the state legislature, rather than leaving them alone and letting them do what they wished, actively blocked local self-­government. The South Carolina doctrine of local self-­ government, loudly proclaimed by the state against the national government in national councils, did not apply to a parallel case, a section within South 238

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Carolina asserting local self-­government against the state government in state councils. Barnard and Mann actively assisted the development of common school systems in the antebellum South and corresponded with their founders and leaders, who were often naturalized foreign educators or transplanted northerners.48 Predictably, their efforts attracted attention from southern opponents who tellingly argued that state funds were for free schools for the poor, not common schools for all. Some objected to the common school ideal on principle, because it was hostile to their idea of good government.49 In 1852 one southern writer rejected mixing the rich and poor in common schools. He endorsed the opposite idea that students and instruction should be segregated, not by the students’ ability, but rather “in accordance with the circumstances under which he is to commence his career in life.” This is the idea of Thomas Cooper in action. The writer agreed with “objections to sending their children to schools which are open to all indiscriminately.” Furthermore, republican theory was wrong. Education was not “the palladium of our liberties,” nor “the guide which is to lead us to eternal truth. We believe in neither of these dogmas.” The many must work with their muscles; “the privileged few must govern.” Education was for the latter but, if received by the many, “exposes them to the danger of attacks from the demagogue.” Education for the poor was stirring up agrarianism and was “only a new element of evil. There is no necessary connection between learning and freedom.”50 The republican logic of common schools clashed with oligarchic government and would lead some principled defenders of oligarchy to rise viscerally to the defense of their political regime, once they discerned what northern educators like Barnard and Mann were doing in their section of the nation. In New Orleans, New England teachers were called “mischievous spies and agents,” which, in a sense, they were.51 Sectionalism in education arose from a sharp difference in political principles, and this explains why southerners expurgated Yankee teachers, textbooks, and educational ideas.52 Northern “philanthropy” threatened the southern way of life. Evidence suggests that southerners with republican views on education knew that they ran the risk of punishment at the hands of the oligarchy. In one pathetic letter to Mann in 1839, a Mississippian ardently pleaded with him to send him educational materials, adding in a postscript, “Please Sir, not to make this communication public.”53 His correspondence indicates that he was not living in a republican political society in which the people ruled and the rights of conscience were 239

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protected. Indeed, he feared reprisals from those who were determined to keep the people in ignorance. Mann had explained that while republics depend on enlightened citizenry and free schools, “a sincere monarchist, or a defender of arbitrary power, or a believer in the divine right of kings, would oppose free schools for the identical reasons we offer in their behalf.” It was reasonable that in political regimes in which the people were not sovereign, the educational policy of the rulers would be that free schools “should be immediately exterminated.”54 This was the real reason common schools failed in the South. After he was elected to the House of Representatives, Mann brought these reflections and experience to the floor in 1848. He attacked “the oligarchy who rule the south.” Among the effects of slavery, he called attention to educational culture. The oligarchy kept the slave in ignorance because education would teach “his natural rights.” Therefore, slave education “is prohibited by statute, under terrible penalties.” Likewise, the oligarchy suppressed education of the white majority. The rulers needed ruled whites to remain ignorant and, therefore, weak. The cultivation of ignorance among slaves and the white majority preserved the slaveholders’ mastery over political society. Mann identified the source of the stereotypes of ignorant white southern “rednecks” and former slaves.55 The oligarchy deliberately neglected their natural talent, by design, for political necessity. Mann reached into his education statistics to reveal the extent of illiteracy in Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, sarcastically referring to Virginia’s “republican Government supported by the two pillars of slavery and ignorance!” He claimed to have extensively corresponded with “the intelligent friends of education in the slave States” for the prior ten years, but they could not make headway, because it was “impossible for free, thorough, universal education, to coexist with slavery. . . . Slavery would abolish education if it should invade a free State; education would abolish slavery if it could invade a slave State.”56 More precisely, the slaveholders, and not slavery, sought to “abolish education.” But these slaveholders, “the oligarchy who rule the South,” had not abolished education for their ruling class. “In one thing the South has excelled,” Mann conceded: “training statesmen.” The oligarchs hoarded education for themselves, funded by the common treasury, and withheld its blessings from others. Free states and slave states presented a contrast of opposites, republican versus oligarchical: “The free schools of the North lead 240

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to the common diffusion of knowledge and the equalization of society. The private schools of the South divide men into patricians and plebeians; so that, in the latter, a nuisance grows out of education itself.” Southern hostility to popular education followed the logic of oligarchy. In 1859 Senator James Mason of Virginia verified the general point in Mann’s speech. If Congress were to authorize the proceeds from public land sales to fund education, “Would it not be in the power of a majority in Congress to fasten upon the southern States that peculiar system of free schools in the New England States which I believe would tend . . . to destroy that peculiar character which . . . belongs to the great mass of the southern people?”57 Common schools would destroy the “peculiar character,” that is, ignorance, of the “great mass,” which was essential to oligarchy. The wayward grandson of the great Virginia republican George Mason understood that a republican education and the political character of the South, which his ruling class dominated, were incompatible. After the war, fellow Virginian and early historian of education Charles Dabney diagnosed the same cause: “An aristocratic organization of society” had blocked the establishment “of public schools, properly speaking, until the civil war had destroyed her old institutions and so prepared the way.”58 Many other southern educators corroborated Dabney’s conclusion, not long after the end of Reconstruction. At a meeting of the National Education Association’s Department of Superintendence in 1879, Georgia state school commissioner Gustavus Orr presented a paper that began by acknowledging the antebellum South and the postbellum South were “two civilizations” and “distinct.” The educational history of his own Georgia, he said, mirrored the rest of the antebellum South. Antebellum Georgia generously aided the education of the rich, especially after 1835. Georgia’s four institutions of higher education, the University of Georgia, Oglethorpe University, Mercer University, and Emory College, produced fifty-­five hundred alumni, “who have filled with honor high places in all the departments—­legislative, executive, and judicial—­of the national and of their respective State governments,” as well as distinguished men in law, medicine, theology, science, literature, and education. The private county academies educated men and women “with respectable academic attainments.”59 These academies sometimes received aid from the state but operated on private tuition. But on the subject of elementary education, the “inferior schools,” Orr admitted that the teachers of elementary institutions “were often incompetent.” 241

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No level of his state’s governments offered teaching institutes, associations, libraries, periodicals, examinations or licenses, or supervision. The teachers answered only to the patrons, who “were often utterly incompetent to judge the teacher’s qualifications.” The state government “did not propose to make even these inferior schools free.” Funds were provided for “the education of the poor.” Orr admitted that in the antebellum South, “our inferior schools were indeed very inferior” and “far behind” the northern states.60 Orr proposed the political axiom that “education by the State rests upon the sole basis of self-­protection.” What kind of state is protected by an educational policy that provides for private academies and institutions of higher education but withholds or absolutely forbids elementary education from the majority? His answer was clear that the southern state governments had placed a premium on the education of the few and on perpetuating the ignorance of the many. But “minds of thinking men” in the new postbellum southern civilization were changing.61 They were beginning to accept the necessity of education’s “greater universality.” The change portended a change in southern civilization, from oligarchic to republican. In his address to the Southern Education Association in 1899, Alabama state superintendent John Abercrombie used the terms old South and new South to distinguish the antebellum and postbellum South. The old South was “of aristocracy and bondage.” Though claiming only one-­third of the nation’s population in 1861, “the South excelled the North in the number of colleges and college professors; equaled her in the number of students enrolled in academies and colleges and universities, and approximated her in the amount of money expended for higher education.” State aid “in whole or in part” supported these colleges and universities. In turn, they produced graduates “who have not been excelled” in “science, art, literature, education, and statesmanship.” But the South neglected schools for industrial training, because the “old South did not awaken to a realization of the truth that industrial trades are as respectable as business and professional callings.” That is, the old South believed in a different truth, that the industrial trades were not respectable. Similarly, in “the matter of common school education the old South did not keep pace with the North.” But in the postbellum South, Abercrombie favored a new approach to education—­at least new to the South—­that he connected to the maintenance of free government: “We fully realize that, in a government like ours, the preservation of free institutions depends upon the general intelligence of its citizens.” Whereas government in the old South preferred to educate the few, and prevented 242

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general education, “universal education at governmental expense is now a well-­established Southern doctrine.”62 At the Ninth Conference for Education in the South, convened in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1906, Governor Joseph W. Folk of Missouri urged the conference audience to pay “more attention to the education of the many instead of devoting nearly all our energies to the education of the few.” Noting the generous allotments of public funds to universities, he said, “It is more important that all of the people have some education than that some of the people have all of the education.” Whereas in “foreign lands ruled by Kings and Emperors” only a single child needs an education “with special reference to the duties of sovereignty,” in the United States, “every child will be a sovereign,” and so attention must be paid “to instilling into the minds and hearts of the youth of the land the sacred duties of sovereignty in a free country where every man is a King.” Another speaker at that conference, Alabama state superintendent Isaac W. Hill, announced, “It was not until 1898 that public schools began to attract much attention in Alabama.”63 Writing for the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in 1900, a daughter of the South, Celestia Parrish, recalled that before the war, “Massachusetts and Connecticut were making education possible to every boy at least,” and in the southern states, the “poorer classes in the meantime were not educated at all.” To Parrish, their policy that disregarded the southern majority derived from the same principles that justified oligarchy. Noting that the poor usually could not read nor write, she asked in the voice of the slave master, “Why should they? Had not God ordained that some men should serve others?” Education in the South thrived only among “the upper classes,” who sometimes employed “tutors of the traditional type for the education of their boys, and were sending their sons back to Oxford and Cambridge for the higher training.” In the South, education “was distinctly aristocratic” and “developed a splendid superior class.” In her present time, Parrish noted the ongoing but incomplete establishment of southern public schools. She stood for universal elementary and high school education as necessary for citizenship. Yet in her day, as in the past, “A few wealthy people are still unwilling that their money should be taken to educate their neighbor’s children.” This conduct, she said, was “impossible to understand” without “recalling some of the conditions of the past.” She attributed the origin of those conditions to the aristocracy.64 The South did not begin that way. When the United States became a nation, leading Americans in the North and the South advanced arguments and framed laws calculated to secure a general education for free Americans. 243

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Over time, the free states did diffuse education more widely among the people. In the slave states, government policy departed from the educational aims of the founders and supported oligarchy. Property The founders’ republican theory of property began with natural equality. John Adams wrote that “through life,” he had “asserted the moral equality of all mankind,” attributable to “God and nature.” All have a right to liberty “derived from our Maker.” Also, “Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty.” He added, “If ‘Thou shalt not covet,’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.” Civil equality derives from natural equality, so that “each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property.”65 With Aristotle, Adams recognized that human beings are a compound of equality and inequality. He observed that “nature . . . has ordained that . . . no two creatures [shall be] perfectly equal. . . . [Nor can two creatures ever] be made so by any power less than that which created them.” Individuals are born with unequal abilities. “There are great inequalities” among mankind, including natural talent, and the “sources of inequality, which are common to every people . . . can never be altered . . . because they are founded in the constitution of nature.”66 Each member of the human family is endowed with an equal share of liberty but an unequal share of ability, by which mankind acquires unequal property. Just laws are equal laws that recognize this paradoxical constitution of human nature and equally protect what is equal and unequal in mankind. James Madison concurred with Adams. Every human being has a right, “in exclusion of every other individual,” to the “liberty of his person” as well as to “the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.” A government is “ just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” Madison also recognized that human nature is a compound of equality and inequality. None is naturally endowed with more or less liberty, but all are more and less naturally endowed with ability, and “a distinction of property results from that very protection which a free Government gives to unequal faculties of acquiring.” Things can go wrong when “an excess of power prevails,” such that those with more property control the government and rob the poorer citizens of their liberty and 244

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property, or when poorer citizens become strong, control the government, and rob the richer citizens of their liberty and property.67 This is unjust government. Just government favors neither the rich nor the poor, but equally protects equal liberty and unequal ability. Nevertheless, widespread poverty endangers just government. Following Harrington, Adams believed that the rule “power always follows property” is an “infallible . . . maxim in politics.” Under the conditions of extreme inequality in property, just laws are practically impossible to uphold. Approvingly quoting Aristotle, Adams showed that neither liberty nor property, and sometimes not even life, is safe. Both the rich and the poor “with difficulty obey reason,” due to the “excesses” unique to each. The rich “are not willing to submit to command or law,” and they do not know “how to rule over freemen, or to command others, but despotically.” Deprivation “makes the poor too mean,” and they “are in the habit of being commanded, too often as slaves.” In cities like this, “one party despise, and the other hate,” and “the government must either be in the hands of the meanest rabble, or else a pure oligarchy.” Wealth determines rank; hostility, distrust, and tension among the ranked parts of society are constant; a state of war within political society prevails. Genuine friendship is difficult; what is left of friendship is akin to war comradeship within the ranked part of society in which one is a member. The parts of political society become insular; hostility and violence to outsiders are acceptable; unquestioned loyalty to one’s rank is expected. Sometimes broils and open warfare break out between the few and the many, the former unjustly seeking complete domination, the latter unjustly seeking theft. These, Adams wrote, were among “the wisest sentiments of Aristotle.”68 Adams saw many instructive illustrations of this problem in histories of Europe, especially the chronic contest between patricians and plebeians in the Roman Republic. He observed, “The patricians usurped the lands, and the plebeians demanded agrarian laws.” The conflict destroyed their sense of justice, and they massacred each other. When the civil wars ended, everyone in Rome lost their liberty. Therefore, it is “essential” to consider how to address inequalities “in the institution of a government.” The people will tolerate an inequality of property and will uphold natural justice if most can avoid poverty. Adams mentioned in his diary that in his career, he kept company with many “very rich men,” yet “there is not one of all these who derives more pleasure from his property than I do from mine; my little farm, and stock, and cash afford me as much satisfaction.” Inequality is tolerable if most have modest wealth. The condition to be sought “is to make the acquisition 245

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of land easy to every member of society,” that is, make upward economic mobility possible. If this is achieved, and “the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will have the balance of power, and in that case the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude, in all acts of government.”69 Adams believed that from the earliest settlement of New England, the people “felt, if not understood,” these organizing principles of their society with respect to property. Although they held their lands in the name of the king, they were unwilling “to render homage . . . [to] subordinate lords,” and they “transmitted to their posterity a very general contempt and detestation” of paying rents in acknowledgment of feudal superiors. Massachusetts entirely lacked “artificial inequalities of condition, such as hereditary dignities, titles, magistracies, or legal distinctions,” so that “moral and political equality” overcame the legacy of the Old World.70 The economic history of colonial New England lines up well to his account. The New England settlers recognized that the equal right to accumulate property was God-­g iven and that the protection of God’s unequal bestowal of talent for acquiring property was a more just basis for accumulating property than artificial titles and privileges. Work earned title to property.71 Subsequently, New England successfully resisted attempts to impose feudal land titles in the seventeenth century and moved toward fee-­simple land titles before the mother country did.72 Between 1620 and 1630, New England began land privatization, with the result that property ownership equalized, despite attempts by government to preserve unequal holdings. As government further established property rights, agricultural commerce flourished, so that landowning families conducted most production and consumption. The availability of land and the growth of commerce drove up wages, to the point that in Massachusetts, “it was difficult to distinguish gentlefolk from servants.” By the end of the 1640s, New England had begun to develop a diversified economy. By the mid-­1700s, per capita income in New England was lower or equal to that to that of the southern states, depending upon the metric used, but far more evenly distributed.73 The New England communities transformed the feudal institutions of property. The smaller proprietors or tenants refused to accord honors to the larger landowner that feudalism otherwise entailed, and the large landowner could no longer command his neighbors in consequence of greater wealth.74 Power slipped from the hands of the rich. Political equality became firm, 246

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despite economic inequality; economic rank no longer determined political or social rank; republicanism overcame feudalism. Before national independence, the economic condition of New England already supported republicanism. Virginia entered the Union in a much more unequal economic condition, and after national independence the attempt was made to equalize property ownership. Thomas Jefferson led Virginia’s “first republican legislature which met in 76” to adapt the state’s laws to a “republican form of government.” Jefferson, like Adams, believed in the prudence of measures “lessening the inequality of property,” which would ensure “the equality among our citizens so essential to the maintenance of republican government.” The laws of entail and primogeniture, Jefferson said, had raised up “an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger, than benefit, to society,” and had obstructed the rise of an “aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society, & scattered with equal hand through all it’s conditions.” The abolition of these laws “was deemed essential to a well ordered republic.” He succeeded at this reform, but the effect of the legislation was minimal.75 Although the laws did break up the landed estates, only the dispossessed progeny of the rich felt its benefit.76 The reform helped level inequality in landownership at the top of the economic scale, but did not affect the many Virginians at the bottom of the scale. Jefferson’s draft constitution for Virginia in 1776 included a further remedy, a provision to grant public lands to the landless in lots of fifty acres, but the provision never became law or part of the Constitution.77 Instead, property inequality continued to plague Virginia, and the prime suspect for causing this was slavery. The evidence indicates that the elasticity of property inequality in the South always related to density in slaves. Where slaveholding was low or nonexistent, landownership was diffused more equally, as in New England. Where slavery was most dense, property inequality widened.78 According to the census of 1860, the modal size, or most common size, of a farm was in the range of 20 to 99 acres in 94 percent of all counties in the free states, but the modal farm size exceeded 1,000 acres in 26 percent of all counties in the slave states. The eight states with the highest number of counties with modal farm size of 100 acres or above were slave states. Ten of the eleven states that had no counties with a modal farm size of 100 acres or more were free states. New York, with a total population of 3.9 million free persons, had 246 farms that were 500 acres or larger, while Florida, with a population of 140,424, of whom 44 percent were slaves, had 288 farms 500 acres or larger.79 247

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In Virginia in the 1780s, one scholar estimated that “from one half to three fourths of the adult males, exclusive of town dwellers, were landless. . . . Most of these landless men were very poor. Seven out of ten owned no slaves, and half had not even a cow.” They were either laborers or tenants who paid rent in order to farm the property of large landowners. The highest percentage of landless men, 75 percent, was found in the Northern Neck region, where slavery was the most dense. There, large estates predominated, but only two-­ fifths of all households owned any land. While a great many were poor in Virginia, a very few were land wealthy. One out of 25 men owned 500 acres and 20 slaves. Where slave density decreased, property inequality diminished. In the southwestern part of the state where slaves were few, there were more middle-­size farms and few large estates, and only 10 percent of the men had no property. The proportion of the landless and very wealthy to total population was lower there than in any other region of the state.80 But in the ten counties in Virginia and six counties in Maryland that composed the Tidewater region, “just one in four landowners . . . had fewer than 100 acres.”81 Wealth distribution in South Carolina had been fairly equal until 1710.82 As a wave of new planters settled in the low country, slavery increased. The total population of the low country by 1770 was 88,244, of which approximately 22 percent was white and 78 percent black. In the backcountry, the ratios were the reverse. Of an estimated population of 36,000, 83 percent were white and 17 percent black. The increase in slave density in the low country correlated to growing wealth concentration. Between 1720 and the 1770s, the distribution of all slaves who worked on South Carolina plantations with more than 30 slaves increased from 29 to 64 percent. In one low-­country parish in 1763, 39 percent of landowners possessed fewer than 500 acres of land, while 38 percent possessed more than 1,000 acres of land. By 1793 landowners possessing fewer than 500 acres dropped to 23 percent, and landowners possessing more than 1,000 acres of land increased to 49 percent. By the early 1800s, the average size of a low-­country plantation was 871 acres. One scholar claims that by the end of the colonial period, the low-­country slaveholders were “by far the richest single group in British North America.”83 During the same period, as fewer slaveholders engrossed a larger share of wealth, poverty among whites living in the low country increased.84 In the backcountry, or upcountry, slave ownership remained markedly lower, and landownership remained more diffused than in the low country, throughout the antebellum period.85 248

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A study of the Chesapeake region also shows the engrossment of land by fewer owners over time. In that region, middling yeomen farmers were most plentiful in the seventeenth century. In the 1660s, 70 percent of the free population in the Chesapeake region owned land, but with the increase of slavery, the percentage of the free population owning land decreased. By the American Revolution, 50 percent of the free population owned land. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, landlessness grew from 33 percent in 1660 to 50 percent in 1750, 69 percent in 1800, and 75 percent in 1820. At the same time, large landowners were also engrossing a larger share of the slaves. From 1800 to 1820, the percentage of nonslaveholding landowners and landless slave owners dropped. The pattern then in formation was that middling farmers were becoming fewer, with some becoming large slave-­ owning landowners and others becoming smaller nonslaveholding landowners, tenants, or landless.86 One comparison also demonstrates that these patterns of property ownership strongly correlated to slavery. Property distribution in Georgia during the colonial period more closely resembled the free states of 1860. Land was granted to settlers who worked the land themselves. As late as 1752, fewer than 12 percent of all land grants in Georgia exceeded 50 acres.87 In contrast, the average landholding of a slaveholder in Chester County, Pennsylvania was 222 acres by 1765. At that time, slavery was legal in Pennsylvania, reaching a peak of 6,316 in the countryside by 1780, but was illegal in Georgia.88 These trends began to reverse just before national independence. Georgia began to import slaves legally in the 1750s. From 1750 to 1766, the estimated slave population in Georgia jumped from 500 to 7,800.89 Under opposite influences, Pennsylvania gradually abolished slavery after national independence. In 1750 the prospects for the broader diffusion of wealth were better in Georgia than in Pennsylvania. But from the late colonial period, land-­ distribution patterns dramatically changed as slavery grew in Georgia and disappeared in Pennsylvania. By 1860 the total population of Georgia in 1860 was slightly more than 1 million, of whom 44 percent were slaves. The population of Pennsylvania almost reached 3 million free persons. Yet Georgia farms in excess of 500 acres numbered 3,594; in Pennsylvania there were only 76. The modal size of a farm exceeded 100 acres in 51 of 132 Georgia counties, but in only 6 of 65 Pennsylvania counties.90 Wealth in land and slaves concentrated in the hands of the few everywhere slavery spread and increased, until the Civil War. From 1850 to 1860, the percentage of slaveless Southern farms increased from 40 percent to 50 percent, 249

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while the fraction of Southern families owning slaves decreased from 36 percent in 1830 to 31 percent in 1850 and then to 25 percent in 1860. Of the 25 percent of slaveholding families, 55 percent fell in the lowest category of slave ownership, of 1 to 5 slaves. Twelve percent of slaveholding families owned the great bulk of slaves.91 At the same time that slave ownership was concentrating, the overall slave population increased from just below 2 million slaves in 1830 to just below 4 million by 1860, and the price of slaves was rising. By the end of the cotton boom of the 1850s, the price of slaves had reached its highest level, linked to the expected profitability of their use. By 1860 a substantial but shrinking minority of slaveholders possessed an increasingly large share of increasing aggregate wealth. The average slaveholder was five times wealthier than the average Northerner and ten times wealthier than the average Southern nonslaveholder. Slaveholders possessed 90 to 95 percent of all agricultural wealth in 1850 and 1860, and their share of wealth was rapidly outpacing the growth of Southern nonslaveholders’ wealth.92 The slaveholders substantiated these observations. Speaking about his state in 1855, Senator Clement Clay of Alabama reported: Our small planters . . . are going further west and south in search of other virgin lands. . . . Our wealthier planters . . . are buying out their poorer neighbors, extending their plantations, and adding to their slave force. The wealthy few . . . are thus pushing off the many. . . . Of the twenty millions of dollars annually realized from the cotton crop of Alabama, nearly all . . . is re-­invested in land and negroes. Thus the white population has decreased and the slave increased, almost pari passu in several counties of our State. In 1825, Madison County cast about 3,000 votes; now she cannot give more than 2,300. In traversing that county, one will discover numerous farm-­houses, once the abode of industrious and intelligent freemen, now occupied by slaves, or tenantless, deserted, and dilapidated.93

Gavin Wright explained how slavery caused the results that Clay described. The profits from slaveholding biased reinvestment toward more slaves and land and away from alternative investments. The growth of plantations was limited only by their purchasing power, which was funded by slave labor, and the availability of more land and more slaves. Those with no slaves or fewer slaves could not form capital for reinvestment in slave agriculture as quickly as those who had more slaves and more land. In the free states, the purchasing power of wages enabled free laborers to buy land more easily than to hire 250

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labor. Consequently, many owned farms, but the growth of the farms was constrained by the availability of family workers. Northern reinvestments were biased away from agricultural activities and toward labor-­saving technology.94 The logic of this explanation suggests that the absence of slavery and universality of family farming in the North increased the scarcity and wages of labor and that in the South slavery depressed the wages of nonslaveholders, which inhibited them from outbidding the slaveholders for slaves and good land. Some scholars have found that antebellum wages were high in the South, suggesting that slavery did not cause widespread poverty and instead produced general upward mobility.95 Another way to test the purchasing power of wages and upward mobility in the antebellum South relative to the North is to find proof of capital formation rather than to depend on finding reliable wage data. It is evident that Northern free labor could work, save, and accumulate sufficient capital to purchase farms, as free-­labor advocates claimed. One scholar studying midwestern capital formation in the nineteenth century concluded, “To one acquainted only with a sophisticated industrial and commercial system, the proportion of farm capital formation created by farm labor, and so in a sense self-­fi nanced, is truly astonishing.” If Southern free-­ labor wages were competitive with Northern wages, we would expect to find evidence that the 75 percent of families who did not own slaves could also work and accumulate sufficient capital from wages to invest in either slaves, land, or nonagricultural economic activities in order to raise their standard of living. But that is not the case. Southern nonslaveholders did not develop nonagricultural economic sectors comparable to the North, nor did more nonslaveholders become slaveholders. The evidence shows that fewer became slaveholders at the same time that aggregate wealth from slaveholding in the South increased. This suggests either that the nonslaveholding families frivolously spent their allegedly higher wages or that they were neither wage wealthy nor asset wealthy and tended to be poor. Wright himself admitted that the prices of slaves were rising beyond the means of more Southerners to purchase them.96 If the slave economy produced high wages, those higher wages would have attracted nonslaveholders to the black belt and induced them to stay, but case studies of different regions at different periods yield evidence that the impoverishment of nonslaveholders was highest where slave density was highest. A study of middle Tennessee found that in 1860, “Virtually all rich families (95 percent) were slaveholders, and virtually all the poor (98 percent) were 251

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nonslaveholders.”97 Rather than migrating to the black belt, nonslaveholders fled. In the 1850s the migratory patterns of nonslaveholders were from areas that were more dense to less dense in slaves.98 Another study concludes that rising costs in the black belt induced small farmers to vacate and resettle elsewhere.99 Apart from leaving the slave South, the only apparent alternative left to the nonslaveholder was to head upcountry. The Georgia upcountry was an isolated world of self-­sufficient households and farmers who were not prosperous but not groveling poor, either. Unlike Northern farming communities, they cut themselves off from general society and traded with each other, often using barter rather than money.100 But even in the upcountry, where the economic prospects of the nonslaveholder might have been better, broad impoverishment has been found in the late-­antebellum period. It is estimated that between 12 and 20 percent of all farm operators in the South Carolina upcountry were landless tenants.101 A general estimate of landless whites for the whole slave South is between 30 and 50 percent of the white Southern population.102 New Northern industrialists were becoming wealthy, in addition to the Southern slaveholders. Noting this, one economic historian collapsed the difference between the two sections, commenting, “In the North the top one percent of the wealth holders were mainly urban merchants and manufacturers whose businesses were based on wage labor, while in the South the top one percent were mainly rural planters whose businesses were based on slave labor.”103 On this basis, it was claimed that the North and South were both “plutocracies.” Setting aside the fact that this statement passes over wealth mobility, sector diversification, and other metrics of general economic benefit to the citizenry, sovereign rule of the few and concentrated wealth at the top of the scale are not the same. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they do not. In a model republican society, political and social equality prevails despite property inequality. But in a plutocracy or oligarchy, wealth is the distinctive ruling principle. In an oligarchy wealth determines rank; those unequal in property are absolutely unequal.104 Therefore, even if the same quantitative pattern of wealth distribution prevails in republican and oligarchic society, those patterns produce very different results, because the political standing of wealth is qualitatively different. Evidence of this qualitative difference between North and South appears early in the early national period. Statesmen from the free states noticed that 252

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slavery both widened property inequality and created a ranked political society. After the South Carolina Legislature reopened the slave trade, the U.S. House of Representatives considered taxing slave importations into that state in 1804. In his argument on the House floor, Representative John Lucas of Pennsylvania first spoke of economic harm, stating that by importing more slaves, “you virtually reduce the value of the labor of the whites.” Second, the social and political standing of the free white would decline. He explained, “The rich part of the community will not employ a white man who feels the spirit of a freeman, and who will not submit to be subservient to the caprices of his employer, so long as they can employ a slave whom they can control as they please.”105 Because “the poor white man . . . is entirely dependent on his labor for the support of himself and family,” he will face a choice: be subservient or starve himself and his family. Lucas wanted the tax, because once slaves were imported in South Carolina, they would “soon find their way into the others where slavery is allowed,” and the poor white man’s “relative importance in society will be as nothing.”106 In the Missouri debates of 1819–20, free-­state congressmen advanced the same arguments. Speaker of the House John Taylor of New York argued that if Missouri were admitted as a slave state, the only whites who would emigrate would be those who were willing to “take rank with negro slaves,” which was their fate in slave society. He objected to the low esteem in which the slaveholders held all laborers. This banishment of common laborers to a subordinate political station, regardless of their character, education, or talent, was the inevitable consequence of slavery and had no place “in a country like this, where the people are sovereign, and every citizen is entitled to equal rights.”107 In the Senate, Jonathan Roberts of Pennsylvania described the political relationship between labor and employer in the free Northern societies in contrast to the same relationship in the South. In the North, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which he quoted just previously, governed that relationship. The white laborer is always a free man, generally an honest man; often an intelligent and informed man. He knows his rights, and understands his duties. Free laborers, who are housekeepers, are seldom without their newspapers and means of information. These channels of intelligence are everywhere 253

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established with us. . . . The relation between laborer and employer, where the latter is a freeman, is that of equals. Each looks to the other for the fulfillment of the covenant between them. They often stand in the relation of friends. Their intercourse is almost always respectful and courteous. I have been forcibly struck with how equal a share of happiness, to say the least, was enjoyed by the man of opulence and the cottager in the Northern States.108

An employer and an employee are political and social equals, despite unequal wealth. They are equally free agents contracting with each other. Intelligence, education, and integrity in the discharge of contractual duties command mutual respect, regardless of unequal wealth or the character of their business relationship. Roberts saw a sharp difference between the condescension of his slaveholding colleagues in Congress toward laborers and the equality between employers and employees in his section. He was a credible witness to this relationship in the North because he had risen from poverty. When he was sixteen, he had been an apprentice for three years, and it was a harsh experience. Such a story of upward mobility by a nonslaveholder in the South was unknown by this time. Taylor asked, “When have we seen a Representative on this floor, from that section of our Union, who was not a slaveholder? Who but slaveholders are elected to their State Legislatures? Who but they are appointed to fill their executive and judicial offices?”109 All of these statesmen saw that slavery and republicanism were mutually hostile in one important respect. They argued that slavery blocked the upward mobility of free labor and, worse, that within the domain of slavery, economic standing determined social and political rank, destroying republican equality. These were the same arguments advanced thirty years later by Republicans. Some scholars detached these later arguments from their longer tradition, grouped and misinterpreted them, claiming that “Free labor” was a distinct ideology conjured by the Republican Party in the 1850s to counter Southern statesmen’s praise of slavery and critiques of nascent modern industrial capitalism in the North.110 On the contrary, American critics of slavery always recognized that the presence of slavery precluded the possibility of genuine republican citizenship, informed by the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Economic inequalities determined ranks in Southern political society because republican equality was unstable in the South, and this fact was also recognized in the early national period. In 1785 Jefferson considered the 254

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difference between northern and southern character. His list of specific contrasts hit upon one that illustrated the general difference between a ranked and an equal society and showed that the foundations of oligarchic and republican political societies were already entrenched in the North and South, respectively. He wrote that southerners were “zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others,” whereas northerners were “jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others.”111 In this contrast, Jefferson revealed his preference for northern character, if we use the Declaration as his critical standard. Northerners respected the dominion that nature’s God had allotted in equal measure to each person and were protective of the dominion allotted to each one of themselves. Jefferson’s approval of “jealousy” is implicit in the Declaration, in which he wrote that it is the right and duty of a people to rebel against encroachments upon their personal dominion of liberty. Jealousy protects what belongs to you by natural right, and justice respects what belongs to others by natural right. A political society of such individuals is a coequal republican people, despite their inequalities in other respects, including inequality in wealth. Jefferson’s disapproval of “zeal” is also implicit in the Declaration. Zeal is passionately seeking things that you do not possess, that is, things that are in excess of what is already assigned to you by natural right. To acquire those things, Jefferson wrote, southerners trampled on others. In southern society, liberty was not fixed, but floating, and the southern man expected himself and his neighbors to act upon this knowledge. In this short strip of text, Jefferson laid one hand on the beating heart of republican society and the other on the beating heart of oligarchy. The principles found in the Declaration could be abstracted from northern conduct but not from southern conduct. The implication in this evidence is that Jefferson knew that southern society needed reform in order to become republican. Reformation was unsuccessful. In 1830 a North Carolina abolitionist echoed Jefferson, observing that southern society had become careless toward and covetous of the rights of others. He attributed the origin of that carelessness and covetousness to the effect of slaveholding on those with more “wealth and affluence.” The result was that “the same contempt which they cherish for the negro they . . . cherish towards the white peasantry.” Anyone “who will oppress and abuse his own slaves, will also . . . oppress his indigent neighbour, or any one else over whom he may have gained an advantage.” This effect of slavery was not restricted to the slaveholders. Everyone who had some advantage over another used it to oppress whom they could. 255

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He added that this tendency was “common among the wealthy, and by far too common with the middle classes of our citizens,” striking “at the root of our republican institutions, and if suffered to become sufficiently strong, would overturn even our liberty itself.”112 He recognized the development of a haughty ruling class, and much more. He saw that oppression of the stronger over the weaker was becoming general throughout slave society. Eventually, the law formally established ranks of the stronger over the weaker, determined by wealth. A study of local legal records in North Carolina and South Carolina has found evidence that economic standing determined political standing in law.113 Between the 1820s and 1840s, slave-­state law recombined elements drawn from the liberal conception of rights and possessions and created a new doctrine. The new legal order entitled those with a larger share of possessions to a larger share of rights. This change meant that the law transformed the right to liberty into an alienable possession. In contrast, the founding idea of American republicanism is that one’s rights are fixed by nature and fixed in equal measure for each person. By then, the political development of the South was heading in a direction opposite to republicanism. Around this same time when Southern law was undergoing change, Southern statesmen, led by John C. Calhoun, began to praise slavery, which destabilized republican equality, and to denounce the standard of justice in the Declaration by which Jefferson had criticized Southern political character. Calhoun corrected their Southern forebears, who had said that slavery was “a moral and political evil.” Those old beliefs were “folly and delusion.” Instead, he attacked the basis of their antislavery and republican convictions, saying that the principle “all men are born free and equal” was “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.”114 That principle was dangerous only to oligarchy and slavery, but not to republicanism. The new legal standing of wealth and the decline of natural equality correlated. By making relative wealth the basis of rights, the slave South made rights alienable and reintroduced domination as a lawful principle of civilized government. The law promised to reward the covetousness of the rich for the liberty of the many. Superior success and power conferred the right of one to dominate the other. The weak were contemptible objects of paternal care, not equals in liberty. This new ruling principle in the antebellum South transformed economic classes into political ranks and governed their relations, up and down the economic scale. Historical evidence shows that poor whites and slaves exhibited affinities characteristic of shared rank. In the Georgia low country, 256

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where planters predominated and nonslaveholding whites probably constituted more than half the white population and were very poor, slaves, free blacks, and the poor whites socially mixed.115 The poorest were ranked to such an inferior degree that they forfeited their possessory title to their own liberty. In the North Carolina Piedmont, the law degraded impoverished white women and treated their liberty as a revocable privilege and not a natural right. Poor white women sometimes sexually mingled with black men, casually or through prostitution, and sometimes they established families together. The state’s response was to punish them vigorously and to use the apprentice laws to seize children from these unions. The law saw little separation between these women and the slaves and meted out a kind of justice to them fit for slaves.116 Apprentice laws in the South became a means by which the rich could forcibly enslave poor whites. In 1858 the U.S. Senate debated a harsh apprentice law in Kansas passed by the proslavery legislature. The law determined that an apprentice was property, to which Northerners strenuously objected. In support of the law, Senator James Mason referred to laws in his own state, requiring that “men who wander about society without having any visible means of support, shall be arrested and sold.”117 That same year, Representative Philemon Bliss of Ohio brought forward his own shocking experience with the decline of liberty in the South. Bliss claimed that poor white women were forced into sexual slavery. On the House floor, Bliss said he knew this to be true because, he said, “I have, since a member here, contributed to purchase for redemption white Virginians, and to prevent their forced denizenship of the brothel.” His point was that the oligarchy practiced equal-­opportunity supremacy. Continuing, Bliss read extracts from Southern newspapers to demonstrate that “the more honest advocates of slavery have already repudiated the idea that it should be the sole condition of any race.”118 Clearly marked intermediate ranks emerged. The economic class of yeoman farmers in the South, or slaveholders with fewer than ten slaves, belonged to the political rank of minor nobility. In the low-­country parishes of South Carolina in 1860, planters owned more than 90 percent of improved acreage and slaves, although they constituted a small numerical percentage of farmers. The yeomen owned a small share of total improved acreage and slaves, though constituting a disproportionately larger share of the farmer population. The planters accepted the independence of the yeomen’s households on account of their having achieved mastery over dependents. To put this in Jefferson’s terms, their liberty was achieved by having successfully 257

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trampled on the liberties of others. In conflicts with the planters over such things as common land use and slave discipline, the planters prevailed over the yeomen, which demonstrated the political legitimacy of the same logic.119 The planters’ greater liberty was achieved by trampling on and acquiring the liberties of the lower nobility. The relative amount of landed wealth owned determined the extent of the possessor’s liberty—­yeomen over poor whites and slaves, planters over them all. The hierarchical relationships between these ranks revived the medieval relationship between lords, vassals, and serfs, which goes far to explaining why, in the middle of America in the nineteenth century, wealthy Southerners actually staged medieval fairs and jousting tournaments, emphasizing chivalry, courtliness, martial virtue, crownings, and maids of honor.120 Evidently, they felt an instinctive affinity for the dominating lords of the bygone era and sought to imitate them and re-­create their way of life as they developed their revolutionary regime. Liberty was dependent upon acquiring wealth and could be won only by devouring the liberty of others. In contrast, a model republican society protects the liberty of all against all oppression, despite inequality of wealth. Economic competition is mild, defused of the fear of oppression and the appetite for domination. Prosperity and poverty can neither elevate nor depress the individual’s equal standing as a citizen. The most that greed can acquire is wealth, simply, and so the appetites are restrained. Because oligarchic society jettisoned the principle of natural equality, its character resembled that of many nations prior to the revolutionary American founding. The antebellum South was a Nietzschean, agonistic society pitting the mass of the people against each other. It was self-­servingly argued by antebellum Southern leaders that the aim of their political society was not dividing people and envenoming them against each other, but the harmonious integration of ranks, over which they were the self-­appointed rulers, and this was a very old idea. When rule by the few achieves this, the regime may be denominated an aristocracy, which rules for the common good. But the mainspring of their political society encouraged strife, and everyone had to strive to be an oppressor or to accept submission and subordination. Greed and the fear of being consumed by greed pervaded political society. Because wealth and rank correlated, economic competition was simultaneously political struggle. Mutual jealousy, distrust, and violent tendencies were the logical by-­products, which explains why historical research has found that antebellum Southerners viewed the world as violent and contentious.121 In a place where rights were uncertain and the prey of other 258

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individuals, left unprotected by government, the individual had to vindicate his rights, if he was to have any. This necessity explains a historical finding that comports with popular recollections of the South, that Southerners were sensitive about their honor and rights and resorted to extralegal violence to settle disputes.122 A researcher of American homicides over four hundred years concluded that political stability and declining murder rates correlated. He recognized an uptick in the murder rate in the antebellum South, while the homicide rates declined in all other areas of the United States. Higher homicide rates correlated with the black belt, the centers of the oligarchic regime. The exception to the Southern pattern was the Ozarks and highlands of the South, where nonslaveholding whites had escaped, the number of slaves was low, and, contrary to the stereotype of feuding poor whites, the homicide rates were low, equal to the Midwest. The researcher attributed the cause of the high murder rate in the black belts to the abolitionist movement, for creating political instability in the South. A better explanation is that the revolutionary oligarchy was consolidating and destroying public confidence in Southern government’s commitment to protect equal liberty, leaving men to fend for themselves. One Southerner is reported to have said, “The worst fate that could befall a man in the South was to be afraid of another man, because fear made a man a slave.” Timidity did not merely expose a man to a cowardly reputation, but exposed him to actual domination. After recounting the murder of one man, stabbed through the heart with a Bowie knife, the author of the study comments, “The South swarmed with men who prided themselves on giving in to such violent impulses.”123 These were not all deeds done by poor, desperate men. A Colonel McClung was reported to have killed more than a dozen men in his life. The rules of society required that an ambitious man had to be unscrupulous and manage his estate as if he were an independent nation in a dangerous world, in order to advance above his subordinate rank. The bifurcated career of William Lowndes Yancey demonstrated this. Yancey began life as the reformers of northern education did, losing his father when he was very young. His family’s means were modest, but due to his stepfather’s relocation, he gained an education in the North. Returning to the South, Yancey settled in the South Carolina upcountry, away from the black belt. In 1834 he became editor of the Greenville Mountaineer and attacked Calhoun, nullification, and disunion, disputing the nullifiers’ claim that South Carolina’s sovereignty rose above the supremacy of the United States. His future patron, Governor 259

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Benjamin Perry of South Carolina, admiringly recalled that Yancey “wielded a fierce and terrible pen.”124 Yancey caricatured Calhoun as an aristocrat under false republican concealment, “the Duke of Pendleton, Ruler in and over the said State of South Carolina.” A bill came up for consideration by the legislature that included in the definition of treason, to merely organized popular assemblies for the purpose of establishing “any form of government in South Carolina,” except that form of government prescribed by the legislature controlled by the oligarchy. In response, Yancey defended fundamental America rights.125 He attacked the typical Calhoun supporter as misguided and “perfectly prepared to be made a slave by the very man whom he thinks almost a god, or to be made a tool of, in his hands, to enslave his fellow citizen!” Calhoun’s theories were “the loathsome offspring of foiled Ambition.” He compared Calhoun to Aaron Burr; they were “two fallen archangels.”126 Around the age of twenty-­one, however, Yancey changed, after simultaneously resigning from the Mountaineer and marrying a planter’s daughter, who brought him a “dowry of thirty-­five slaves” that “instantly elevated him to the planter class.” The ruling class co-­opted him. He set out for cotton country in Alabama to build his fortune.127 The talented young man then switched sides and became a partisan of the theories and a protégé of the man he had once attacked, Calhoun.128 Yancey’s reversal from oppressed upcountry republican, clamoring for liberty, to low-­country oligarch was complete. In the Alabama secession convention, some delegates urged that the convention submit the question of secession to the people, since the convention delegates represented a minority in the state.129 Nicholas Davis of Huntsville, in North Alabama, the low-­ slaveholding unionist section of the state, insisted that the people of North Alabama would never submit to secession if the convention denied them the right to vote on it. Yancey rose and berated them, calling them “tories, traitors and rebels,” and threatened force on North Alabama. Davis replied, “We will meet him at the foot of our mountains, and there with his own selected weapons, hand to hand, face to face, settle the question of the sovereignty of the people.”130 The position of Davis, in Davis versus Yancey, was Yancey’s position in Yancey versus Calhoun, twenty-­five years prior. Before and after Yancey changed ranks and joined the ruling class, he always was an oligarchic man in the sense that his character, like the character of all rich and poor men in his political society, was imbued with its oligarchic principle. The zeal for liberty inflamed resentment and envy of classes above one’s rank and domination and contempt below. The early Yancey 260

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resentfully attacked the interests of the wealthy and clamored for liberty as long as he was without wealth and power and under the domination of others. After he became a member of the planter class and acquired dominion over others, he scorned those who occupied his own former rank. The mind of the master class was thoroughly convinced that their political society in the South, and possibly even the nation, belonged to them as a rightful possession. The address by Governor George McDuffie of South Carolina to his state legislature in 1835 provided a comprehensive and candid picture of what their idea of good government was. He claimed that it was an empirical fact that “servitude, in some form,” was “one of the essential constituents” in “all political communities.” The picture that Roberts drew of the relation between employer and employee in the North, who were political equals despite inequality of wealth, was simply inconceivable to McDuffie, but he did not doubt that Northerners believed the delusion that they were equal and that employees were not a kind of slaves in fact. Due to this delusion, Northern slaves were allowed to control their governments: “hence the alarming tendency to violate the rights of property by agrarian legislation, which is beginning to be manifest in the older States, where universal suffrage prevails without domestic slavery.”131 But McDuffie was not sounding the alarm that the Northern people were poised to redistribute the planter class’s land and money. That was not his concern. He was offended by the presumption of commoners to possess any rights at all, since the rights of property that belonged to the rich extended without limit. The rich were entitled to the person and liberty of others, compassing rights that were among the dearest, according to James Madison: “his opinions and the free communication of them” and “the safety and liberty of his person.” To McDuffie, the right to others’ person and liberties belonged to the rich in principle, because “the capacity to enjoy freedom is . . . an endowment of God, and one of the rarest. . . . It is conferred as the reward of merit, and only upon those who are qualified to enjoy it.” God had ordained that men should be ranked, and both reason and revelation confirmed this truth.132 Since this was the case, all legislation that failed to conform to the right of the rich to dispose of society as they chose was agrarian in character. The occasion of McDuffie’s address proved all of this. He was addressing the legislature to recommend that they enact a law punishing the crime of promoting abolition, a crime “of the very highest grade known to human 261

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laws,” and fix the penalty of “death without benefit of clergy.” The rich possessed others’ right to free speech, so that, in fact, free speech was a revocable privilege, or a right enjoyed only by the permission of the rich. That right of the rich to others’ free speech was not limited to South Carolina, but extended to other parts of the Union also. The refusal of another state’s government to act as the proxy for the ruling rich and punish abolitionism, in obedience to the right of the rich to control others’ speech, he said, “furnishes a just cause of war.”133 McDuffie observed that all political societies must choose how much freedom to give to the ranks below the rich. Because domestic slavery in the South recognized that mankind was unequal by nature, their system was “the most perfect system of social and political happiness that ever has existed.” All were happiest in their ranks assigned by God, including the slaves, who were “cheerful, contented and happy.” But the deluded rich in the North had permitted too much freedom to their slaves. Old governments solved the problem of how to keep the agitations of the majority at bay by establishing “political orders” and “artificial barriers,” and McDuffie said that “it will be fortunate for the non-­slaveholding States” if they did not have to do the same in twenty-­five years. Eventually, rich Northerners would realize the necessity of having to create some kind of institution to serve the purpose that titled nobilities served in feudal Europe. The South, on the other hand, had already found that the “institution of domestic slavery supersedes the necessity of an order of nobility, and all the other appendages of a hereditary system of government.” The slaveholders were not simply lords over slaves; ownership of slaves made them lords over political society. Slavery achieved a result that the Constitution’s Article I, Section 10, was intended to suppress: “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States.”134 McDuffie mentioned nonslaveholding whites only once in his address, noting that successful abolition would impoverish them.135 He did not need to say more. The place of nonslaveholding whites in McDuffie’s idea of a good society was clear enough. Their rank was generally above chattel slavery, but individually they were vulnerable to sinking to the level of slaves. They were part of the political society owned by the rich, but subordinate because they were not rich themselves. Hence, their economic rationale for vacating the black belt was also political. When confronted by the oligarchic suggestion that they would be happy in the rank assigned to them, they fled. Scholars have found that the “plain folk” of the South who congregated in the uplands of the South were determined to be economically self-­sufficient.136 This 262

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is because dependence meant sure subjugation. Economic interdependence with the planters was risky. The more self-­sufficient these communities were, the more insulated and the less vulnerable they were to the domination of the planters. The retreat of the plain folk, as Garfield said, “to the mountains, where liberty always loves to dwell, and to the swamps and by-­places of the South” was how they preserved their American freedom.137 By living apart from the social and political order of the planters, they could resist the imputation that they were unequal subjects of the rich. They were fugitives from civilization, uneducated, and poor, but they were free. Market-­oriented economic activity was difficult for them because state government policy usually favored the planters’ interests. If nonslaveholders could find fertile land for a good price outside the black belt, and could successfully cultivate staple crops for market, they would have difficulty transporting those crops to market.138 In Alabama the railroad lines from the port city of Mobile extended northward to the black belt and stopped there, leaving the northern section of the state, where the density in slaves was low, without means of efficiently transporting commercial crops to market. Politicians talked, but nothing was done. In July 1865, a northern Alabama newspaper editorial called for the railroad’s extension, decrying South Alabama’s historical domination of the state. There had “never been a community of interest nor an identity of feeling and sentiment in Alabama, owing to the geographical division of the state,” but rather “an antagonism of interests, of feeling and sentiment.” In antebellum times, South Alabama, where the planters resided, “grasped the lion share of state honors, offices, benefits, etc., and rather imposed an undue portion of the public burthens upon the weaker and less wealthy section, north Alabama,” even though the white population of North Alabama exceeded that of South Alabama.139 In antebellum Georgia, the story was the same. The railroad lines connecting the black belt were privately funded. Then, led by black-­belt politicians, the state legislature used the public revenues to fund new railroad lines connecting the private railroad lines to market ports. The western and southern parts of the state, away from the planters, opposed the initiative.140 In national councils, Southern statesmen had protested against the national tariff and other public burdens that were alleged to favor unequally one section of the country over theirs. These were the crimes committed by the popular majority in the nation against the South that Calhoun enumerated in his “Exposition” of 1828, to justify nullification of federal law.141 But while Southern statesmen rallied to Calhoun’s sectional defense of the South 263

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against allegedly unequal laws, they enacted unequal laws that preferred the sections of their states where the planter class resided over the sections where most nonslaveholding whites resided. The conduct of the Georgia planters showed that they did not object to internal improvements and taxes in principle, as they claimed in national councils. They just objected to internal improvements and taxes that did not exclusively benefit themselves. Another case reveals the same inconsistency between Southern statesmen’s principled claims in national councils and their conduct within their own states. In antebellum Virginia nonslaveholders carried the burden of taxes that funded slave catching. The slaveholders in the eastern counties of the state controlled the legislature, which determined to appropriate large sums of public money to guard against slave insurrection and flight. But the property taxes that funded this appropriation fell upon the whole state, including the western counties where slaves constituted less than 5 percent of the population. More than 86 percent of the slaves in Virginia resided in the eastern counties. To compound the injury, slaves under twelve years old were exempted from taxation, amounting to taxable property worth seventy million dollars. This meant that the free, nonslaveholding western Virginians were disproportionately paying for the slave-­keeping practice of eastern Virginia.142 According to oligarchic principle, these policies were just and served the common good. In exchange for obtaining possessory title to society, the rich reciprocated by committing themselves to the paternal care of all in that society. When the rich hoarded all of the advantages life offered in their society, their divinely ordained place in society was strengthened and they could better accomplish God’s work and serve all. This rationale justified radical selfishness disguised as piety and civic virtue. The slaveholders’ dilemma was what to do about nonslaveholding whites. The number of slaveholders was declining in the 1850s, and the nonslaveholders were restive. This was a reprise of a very old dilemma. In colonial Virginia the rich had oppressed poor white laborers, who rebelled. The solution then was to use African slaves for their labor instead.143 In the antebellum South, the moral defense of slavery and the revolutionary transformation of the South portended the ultimate subjugation of whites by the slaveholders, but the poor whites might not submit meekly as they felt the yoke tightening around their necks. Unsurprisingly, “[t]he back-country farmers seemed politically dangerous to the aristocracy of the Black Belt,” a scholar concluded.144 The rich put themselves on a collision course with those whites. The much-­d iscussed antebellum sectionalism within the slave states between the 264

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planters and these other whites gave rise to the chronic outbreaks of collisions between rulers and the ruled that are visible in colonial Virginia. The nonslaveholding whites were a problem precisely because the antebellum South was not a white democracy. To strengthen themselves, the oligarchy considered a measure that ruling nobilities in the past sometimes considered when their numbers were dwindling and they faced the prospect of rebellion. The measure that they contemplated was to expand their ruling class, or, in other words, to co-­opt inferior whites, more men like Yancey, into the ranks of the nobility. The oligarchy understood that to achieve this, they needed to lower the price of slaves, making them affordable to more free whites, and to fill the “mudsill” rank with more Africans. In the 1850s they reached for the solution that Virginia aristocrats did before the American Revolution—­slave importations from abroad. Francis Lieber recognized that the problem of poor whites was the cause of renewed interest in the slave trade. Southern government needed to maintain “a numerous and independent yeomanry . . . a large class of fairly schooled, intelligent, and respectable freeholders of moderate yet sufficient estate.” But the aristocracy was absorbing the yeomen’s land, not because a “feudal law promotes the land-­devouring tendency with us, but the institution of slavery takes its place.” Due to the displacement of the yeomanry, “a dangerous class of men without direct interest in slavery, was springing up.” Therefore, Governor James Adams of South Carolina recommended that the state legislature reopen the slave trade in 1856, despite the federal ban in 1808.145 Government The slaveholders controlled government in the antebellum South. The aggregate number of large slaveholders, or holders of ten or more slaves, was 98,517 out of a total free population of 5.6 million in the eleven seceding states. Those 98,517 held 77.4 percent of the total number of slaves.146 Table 2 shows that these large slaveholders were disproportionately represented in the legislatures of the seceding states on the eve of the Civil War. On average, the percentage of state legislators holding ten or more slaves was three to four times greater than the ratio of all large slaveholders to the general population of free adult males, yet this small minority ruled over 9 million people, free and slave inclusive. One cannot always find evidence in the state constitutions of the antebellum South to explain how the slaveholding minority controlled the state governments. Blueprints for government have a relationship to the actual form of 265

PART II TABLE 2.

THE TEST AND IMPLICATIONS

Holders of ten or more slaves, per state, 1860 As percentages of all free adult males

Percentages of state legislators

>20 years old

>30 years old

State representatives

State senators

Alabama

10

17

51

61

Arkansas

4

7

20

28

Florida

9

16

26

37

Georgia

10

17

47

48

Louisiana

7

11

37

42

Mississippi

14

23

51

67

North Carolina

7

11

51

68

South Carolina

15

24

60

90

Tennessee

4

7

35

32

Texas

5

9

32

30

Virginia

6

9

36

44

Seceded State

Source: Information from U.S. Census Office, “Slaveholders and Slaves,” in Agriculture of the United States in 1860, 223–45; U.S. Census Office, “Table No. 1—­Population by Age and Sex,” “White,” and “Free Colored,” in Population of the United States in 1860, 2–4 (Alabama), 12–15 (Arkansas), 50–53 (Florida), 58–65 (Georgia), 188–91 (Louisiana), 264–67 (Mississippi), 348–53 (North Carolina), 448–49 (South Carolina), 456–61 (Tennessee), 472–78 (Texas), and 500–509 (Virginia); Ralph Wooster, The People in Power: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Lower South, 1850–1860, 125–53; Ralph Wooster, Politicians, Planters, and Plain Folk: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Upper South, 1850–1860, 163–72.

government, but they are not the same thing. The case of Alabama illustrates the difference. The constitutions of the southwestern slave states, especially that of Alabama, appear to lay a foundation for a democratic republic. One study of Alabama constitutional development concludes that the Alabama Constitution of 1819 was more democratic than those of other states on account of the frontier influence. Its distinguishing democratic features included the rejection of the federal ratio for representation in favor of enumerating whites only; “no property, tax-­paying or militia qualifications for voting or for office holding”; the authority of the legislature to override the governor’s 266

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veto with simple majority; and the governor’s election by popular vote rather than by both legislative houses.147 These features of the constitution do look democratic and seem to lodge all power in the people. However, in the 1866 Reconstruction Committee hearings, Alabama lawyer Mailton J. Safford testified to the contrary. Safford was a credible witness. He was born in Dallas County and resided in the capital, Montgomery, in the middle of the black belt. He professed to be well acquainted with prominent men in the state and admitted that the northern population of the state had “for a long time felt that the free institutions of the north were more calculated to advance their interests than the slave institutions of the south. A great many of them showed their adhesion to the United States government during the war.” The people there “might have been called a non-­slaveholding population, a poor white population.” He also noted that “there has always been a certain degree of antagonism between them and the planters occupying the rich interior counties of the State.” The planters, the disloyal men, had “heretofore controlled the reins of the government.”148 The numbers of large slaveholders in the Alabama Legislature confirm Safford’s testimony. In 1860 Alabama was one of only four seceding states in which the majority that controlled both houses of the legislature were large slaveholders. How did the Alabama slaveholders gain power over the state, despite a democratic constitution? Although a firm answer to that question has eluded this study, intelligent Southerners who reached adulthood before the war and opposed the oligarchy are probably our best sources of clues. Reviling “the demagogical manoeuverings of the oligarchy” by which they maintained their power, Hinton Helper claimed that “their intrigues and tricks of legerdemain are as familiar to us as household words.”149 He claimed to know how the ruling class operated, but did not specify the institutional mechanisms that they used, which might help us better understand a case like Alabama. Others who fitted Helper’s profile might have revealed more. It is at least clear that large slaveholders generally controlled most wealth and tended to hoard education to themselves, and these advantages alone might have sufficed for the Alabama slaveholders. Evidence has been uncovered that shows the slaveholders controlled the political parties in Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia.150 It seems likely that whether provisions in the state constitutions gave the slaveholders power over state government or not, they could nevertheless maintain their control by restricting the rolls of candidates and by using their wealth and superior education to defeat candidates representing nonslaveholding interests in electoral competition. One might also 267

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consider how the slaveholders could use their control of one administration, including patronage, to preserve their control in future administrations and their use of extralegal violence and intimidation to prevent the rise of nonslaveholding political interests. Other state constitutions gave direct control to the slaveholders. The South Carolina Constitution in force at secession was framed in 1790 and amended in 1808. Political power was annexed to slave ownership. Like other constitutions of the seceding states, the South Carolina Constitution bowed to republicanism. Article IX, Section 1, maintained, “All power is originally vested in the people; and all free governments are founded on their authority.”151 This statement is misleading. The people were not sovereign in South Carolina. The property qualifications for representative, for senator, and for governor were quite high,152 ensuring that citizens of modest means could not stand for those offices.153 Members of the legislature’s lower house, the popular branch, had to own five hundred acres of land or ten slaves, and twice those property qualifications were required for members of the upper house. Voters outside cities had to own at least fifty acres of land, but even if the freeman could meet the property requirement, voting power diminished outside of areas where slavery was dense. This was because the apportionment of the lower house’s districts was determined by a ratio of white population and wealth, and in weighing wealth the constitution gave greater representation to areas dense with slaves.154 Through this provision, the slaveholders maintained control of the lower house. The apportionment of the upper house’s districts was fixed and followed the density of slaves. The senate “remained a stronghold of the rotten borough low country parishes.”155 This malapportioned legislature, which drew its members from the minority of slaveholders, chose the governor and selected members of all state and local offices, and it also appointed electors for president of the United States.156 One efficient and direct way for the slaveholding minority to rule a slave state was by enumerating slaves when apportioning representation. Statesmen from the free states often denounced the effect of enumerating slaves by three-­ fifths, as required by Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution, in apportioning representation in the House of Representatives, because these enumerations granted more power to slaveholding states in proportion to their slave populations. This effect was more pronounced in favor of slaveholders in proportion to the uneven concentration of slave populations. Those concentrated areas where slave numbers were highest enjoyed more voting power in government. Because the slave populations were most concentrated in sections 268

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within the slaveholding states, even a partial enumeration of slaves in their state constitutions placed power over these states directly in the hands of the slaveholders. The effect of enumerating slaves at three-­fifths, which statesmen from the free states deplored, was far worse in Southern state government, because the numbers of slaves in concentrated areas within the slave states were much higher in relation to the low-­slaveholding areas of a slave state. Therefore, the question of enumerating slaves “remained a provocative issue in southern constitutional politics throughout the antebellum period.”157 If states apportioned legislative representation on the “white basis,” that is, by enumerating only free persons (whites), the slaveholders would have to preserve their power over the states by using other methods. In the contest over the “white” basis or “black” basis, the slaveholders sometimes acknowledged that ruled whites knew the source of the oligarchy’s power and that they might harm the slaveholders’ interests if they acquired more influence in government. In 1851, a state representative from the heart of Alabama’s black belt introduced a bill for enumerating slaves in apportioning representation in Alabama. The bill’s supporters quoted John C. Calhoun in saying that the white basis was “the entering wedge of abolitionism.”158 They and Calhoun rightly suspected that Alabama’s use of the white basis might eventually lead to the abolition of slavery. What Calhoun understood and feared, American founder Benjamin Rush understood and welcomed. Rush preferred legislative apportionment by free population because it would “have one excellent effect, that of inducing the colonies to discourage slavery & to encourage the increase of their free inhabitants.”159 Rush assumed, as Calhoun did, that nonslaveholders resented slavery. Antebellum Southerners John Jacobus Flournoy and Hinton Helper did support abolition on behalf of nonslaveholders, because they maintained that slavery had brought about the subjugation of the white majority. Of the state constitutions of the eleven seceding states, five constitutions in force at the time of secession enumerated slaves when apportioning legislative representation. Florida enumerated slaves by the “federal ratio,” or by counting slaves as three-­fi fths of a person. In the Florida Constitution of 1838, Article IX, Sections 1 and 2, enumerated free persons plus three-­fi fths of slaves in apportioning representation to both the lower and the upper house of the state legislature. According to the 1860 census, Florida’s slave population was 61,745, and the free population stood at 78,679. Of Florida’s thirty-­six counties, seven (Leon, Jefferson, Marion, Gadsden, Madison, Alachua, and 269

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Jackson) counted 39,795 slaves and 26,518 free persons, for a total population of 66,313. Seventeen counties (Lafayette, Franklin, Clay, Volusia, Levy, Santa Rosa, Washington, Bradford, Hillsborough, Hernando/Benton, Orange/ Mosquito, Monroe, Walton, Taylor, Brevard/St. Lucie, Holmes, and Dade) counted 7,031 slaves and 27,199 free persons. Thus, although the first group of seven counties contained 26,518 free persons, they possessed 62 percent more representation than the second group of seventeen counties with 27,199 free persons and few slaves.160 The Georgia Constitution, as amended in 1843 (Article I, Sections 3 and 7), also enumerated free persons plus three-­fi fths of slaves for apportioning representation to the lower house, but assigned one senator to two contiguous counties. However, the counties greatly varied in slave and free populations. According to the 1860 census, the twenty counties with the lowest slave population (9,347 slaves) contained 93,167 free persons. But the twenty counties with the highest slave population (134,978 slaves) contained 60,371 free persons.161 The free population in the latter counties would receive equal senatorial representation and 70 percent more representation in the lower house of the legislature, despite having one-­third less free population. By the 1835 amendment to the North Carolina Constitution (Article I, Sections 1 & 2), the state employed the federal ratio when apportioning representation in the lower house of the legislature, which again gave slaveholders power over the lower house. However, the state apportioned representation to the upper house according to taxes paid, or, in other words, according to wealth. The dominant source of wealth would be expected to be in land and slaves, directly placing the senate in the control of the slaveholders.162 Louisiana enumerated total population, including slaves. In the Louisiana Constitution of 1852, Articles VIII and XV enumerated total population for apportioning representation in the lower and upper houses of the state legislature. According to the 1860 census, Louisiana’s slave population was 331,726, and the free population was 376,276. Of Louisiana’s forty-­seven parish counties, eleven (Concordia, Tensas, Madison, West Feliciana, St. Charles, St. Mary, Carroll, West Baton Rouge, Iberville, Pointe Coupee, and East Feliciana) contained 28,794 free persons and 119,845 slaves, for a total population of 148,639. Those 28,794 free persons had more than three times the representation than fourteen parishes (Claiborne, Lafourche, Bienville, Jackson, Caldwell, Union, Washington, St. Tammany, Jefferson, Vermillion, Livingston, Sabine, Calcasieu, and Winn) with 73,575 free persons and 44,547 slaves, amounting to a total population of 118,122.163 270

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The Virginia Constitution of 1850 used a fixed formula accounting for both slaves and free persons in apportioning representation.164 Although western Virginia exceeded slave-­heavy eastern Virginia in free population, the East received thirty state senators to the West’s twenty, while the West received eighty-­t wo state representatives to the East’s sixty-­eight state representatives. This was deemed a major change to eastern Virginia’s domination of the state, even though the constitution preserved the slaveholding section’s direct control of the state senate.165 Another method by which the slaveholders could retain power was by requiring the people to vote viva voce, which meant that electors cast their vote by live voice. Four seceding states’ constitutions in force in 1860 prescribed viva voting in popular elections: Article IV, Section 8, of the 1836 Arkansas Constitution; Article IV, Section 2, of the 1798 Georgia Constitution; Article I, Section 4, of the North Carolina Constitution; and Article III, Section 4, of the 1850 Virginia Constitution.166 In his memoir, The End of an Era, John Sergeant Wise, son of Virginia governor and Confederate general Henry Wise, recalled witnessing viva voce voting when he was a boy and his father was candidate for governor: Father being absent, the young cousin above referred to represented him at the polling-­place, and took me with him. In those days, voting was done openly, or viva voce, as it was called, and not by ballot. The election judges, who were magistrates, sat upon a bench with their clerks before them. Where practicable, it was customary for the candidate to be present in person, and to occupy a seat at the side of the judges. As the voter appeared, his name was called out in a loud voice. The judges inquired, “John Jones (or Bill Smith), for whom do you vote?”—­for governor, or for whatever was the office to be filled. He replied by proclaiming the name of his favorite. Then the clerks enrolled the vote, and the judges announced it as enrolled. The representative of the candidate for whom he voted arose, bowed, and thanked him aloud; and his partisans often applauded.167

This method of voting exposed the elector to the candidate’s control by means of bribery, pressure, or intimidation. In addition, it could reverse the effect of the central reform of the Jacksonian democracy movement—­the elimination of property qualifications for voting. If the elector was landless or a tenant but had to express his choice by voice vote at the polls, the individual’s fear of the landlord or employer could more easily induce him to vote as 271

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the landlord wished, increasing the landlord’s control of election outcomes. Madison expressed this concern in the Federal Convention of 1787, when he predicted that if the propertyless obtained suffrage, they would become the “tools of opulence and ambition.” His intention was not to limit the republican liberty of the people; rather, he intended the opposite. In the same context, he said, “The right of suffrage is certainly one of the fundamental articles of republican government” and that a “gradual abridgment of this right has been the mode in which aristocracies have been built on the ruins of popular forms.”168 The apparently democratic reform of giving suffrage to the propertyless would actually augment the ruling power of oligarchy, not restrict it, and Madison wished to check that result. Viva voce voting assisted the oligarchy, under democratic guise. The secret ballot solved this problem. The case of antebellum New York illustrates the efficacy of this solution and demonstrates the impact of voting method on the form of government. New York substituted the secret ballot for viva voce voting early in the state’s history. Article VI of its 1777 constitution ordered an experiment of the secret ballot at popular elections, due to the opinion of “the good people of this State that voting at elections by ballot would tend more to preserve the liberty and equal freedom of the people than voting viva voce.”169 The experiment was done and deemed successful in two elections, and by 1799 the state instituted a canvassing system to protect the integrity of the ballots and their accounting.170 By Article II, Section 4, of its next constitution, framed in 1821, voting by ballot in “all elections by the citizens” became a fixture in New York government.171 During the early national period, New York resembled the Southern slave states. According to the 1790 census, New York had the sixth-­h ighest number of slaves in the nation, behind Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Maryland, and Georgia. New York had 21,193 slaves and Georgia 29,264. Well after the enactment of gradual emancipation in 1799, New York landholding patterns still resembled the great plantations of the South. The landlords lived like nobility in large manor homes, presiding over massive estates. In 1785 Stephen Van Rensselaer reputedly owned 750,000 acres in Albany and Rensselaer Counties, which were home to around 1,000 tenants. Annually, they visited the manor to pay their respects and their rent. The royal government had granted title to these lands before the Revolution, and between independence and the 1820s large estates encompassed millions of acres and thousands of tenants.172 Relations between the tenants and land barons were semifeudal, obeisance on the one side, paternalism on the other. 272

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This system was permanently altered through electoral politics. For their part, the tenants claimed their natural right to acquire civil title in the soil. The landlords employed lawyers and dispensed political favors to check the political agitations. They also attempted to sway the tenants’ votes.173 But the power of the tenants’ votes advanced their cause, despite the landlords’ efforts to forestall them. Eventually, the tenants won sufficient influence to bring about relief. The New York parties had to respect the votes of the antirent movement in the 1840s or suffer electoral consequences. Had the New York state government not adopted the secret ballot in 1777 and readopted it in its 1821 constitution, these many thousands of tenants would have had to risk their subsistence by voting their conscience in full view of their baronical landlords. Undoubtedly, the secret ballot assisted them in expressing their conscience. As a result, the constitutional development of New York and Georgia strikingly differed. Both began from a common original point in 1776. Their slave populations were nearly equivalent, and their land-­d istribution patterns were similar. But New York abolished slavery and viva voce voting, whereas Georgia did not abolish either. By 1860 Georgia had 902 farms exceeding 999 acres, and New York had only 21.174 Early critics of Virginia government blamed viva voce voting and malapportionment for preventing majority rule. In 1797 the Aurora General Advertiser of Pennsylvania printed a letter by a militia battalion from Lexington, in Rockbridge County, Virginia, addressed to its state legislature, demanding a state constitutional convention and insisting on secret-­ballot elections. The letter declared that “unequal representation is a grievance . . . for as slaves and citizens are so distant characters . . . , it is utterly repugnant to democratical or republican principles, that any number of citizens in a commonwealth, should have more voices in the legislative body, than another equal number.” The militiamen complained that Virginia’s legislature granted slaveholders additional power in the government. In their demand for a convention to correct this, they anticipated the oligarchy’s mode of preserving its power: “And, considering the evils which arise from the present mode of election, viva voce, especially when men offer to serve, we with [sic] you to insist that the election of the members of the convention shall be by ballot.” Virginia preserved viva voce voting until after the Civil War, but when republican western Virginia seceded from oligarchic Virginia during the war, it framed a constitution for the new state of West Virginia that instituted the ballot and abolished viva voce voting.175 273

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In 1790 the Gazette of the United States editorialized, “Wealth, where elections are free, if not attended with some degree of ability, is no recommendation to a candidate; but where the viva voce method is adopted, it is the great, sometimes the only requisite.” The editorialist named secret-­ballot elections “free” and contrasted them with viva voce elections, in which wealth could dominate the outcome. By 1860 only one free-­state constitution prescribed viva voce voting in elections by the people; many specifically prescribed the ballot in elections, while at the same time prescribing viva voce voting by legislators. The one free state was the new state of Oregon, but that prescription was supplemented by an escape clause. Article II, Section 15, of Oregon’s 1857 constitution required viva voce voting “in all elections by the people, until the legislative assembly shall otherwise direct.”176 Scholars have frequently remarked that the Constitution of the Confederate States of America is almost identical to the Constitution of the United States.177 One scholar noted the prominent role of Alexander Stephens in “making the Confederate Constitution a close replica of the Federal document” but does not pause to ponder the incongruity between his claim and Stephens’s own claims about the constitution he had just drafted. In Savannah, weeks after completing his work, Stephens said that the Confederacy’s “new constitution, or form of government” was “decidedly better” than the form of government or Constitution of the United States, that the new constitution included “numerous changes for the better,” and that the most important change was its new foundation. With respect to the old foundation, “the prevailing ideas” of “most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution” were “fundamentally wrong.”178 Parsimonious changes in wording can make a world of difference and did in the case of the Confederate Constitution. Madison had said to the delegates to the Federal Convention that he “thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”179 The delegates concurred with him and kept the word slavery out of the Constitution. Stephens and his coadjutors inserted the words slave or slavery ten times. The rejection of natural equality and the adoption of natural inequality underwrote the small but powerful change in word choices and laid the foundation for legislation and policy that treated all unequally. Far from quietly tolerating preexistent slavery, as did the Constitution of the United States, the Confederate Constitution created slavery in law as a national institution. That constitution positively affirmed the right of property in slaves in all present and future territories in that nation.180 No territorial 274

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government could ever abolish slavery. In the highly unlikely event that a slave territory graduating to statehood or an established slave state ever tried to abolish slavery, it is possible, though not certain, that they might be within their constitutional rights to do so. The attempt was foredoomed to failure. The Confederate Constitution guaranteed the right of other citizens to sojourn in any state with their slaves, the laws of other states notwithstanding.181 A slavery prohibition in any state would, therefore, have no effect. The permanence of slavery secured the permanence of oligarchic rule. Under the U.S. government, roughly half of the state legislatures that chose senators were controlled by the people; the other half came from slave states where an oligarchy of slaveholders controlled the state legislatures. Under Confederate government, the same provision for selecting senators generated different results. All Confederate senators would be chosen by ruling oligarchies in the respective states. The Confederate Senate became a direct appendage of the ruling minority, whereas the U.S. Senate mixed representation from states in which the people ruled and from states in which an oligarchy ruled. The retention of the three-­fi fths formula for enumerating slaves in the Confederate Constitution created a new pattern of apportioning House districts because the free-­to-­slave-­population ratio in the Confederacy markedly differed from the ratio in the United States. Before secession the free population in the United States was 27,197,315 in the 1860 census. The total slave population in the nation was 3,950,531, or an adjusted population of 2,370,319 after applying the three-­fi fths rule. That adjusted number represented 8.7 percent of the free American population, or 8.7 percent additional voting power, adhering to the slaveholders.182 In the eleven states of the Confederacy, the free population was 5,562,192. The aggregate number of slaves was 3,521,110, or an adjusted population of 2,112,666 after applying the three-­fi fths rule. Hence, the new adjusted number represented 38 percent of the free population, or 38 percent additional voting power, enough to give the minority of slaveholders in the slaveholding regions additional representation and control over the high-­ Confederate House of Representatives as well as the Confederate Senate. The eleven states that are usually recognized as having seceded (not counting Missouri and Kentucky) accounted for eighty-­five congressional districts in the Confederate government. A majority of the free white population was concentrated in a minority of districts. The ten districts with the highest white population totaled 871,407 free whites; the ten lowest had 382,227. Yet 275

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each district was equal in the Confederate House of Representatives due to the greater number of slaves in some districts than others.183 At the extreme ends of the scale, represented in table 3, the variation in free white population approaches a magnitude of three. The founding fathers of the Confederate States of America malapportioned the entire national legislature in favor of slaveholders, just as they had done in many of their state governments. The conduct of the Confederate government belies a longstanding neo-Confederate panegyric, that Calhoun and the secessionists were heroes for limited government and liberty and fought a losing battle against the consolidation of government and the centralization of authority.184 An alternative interpretation is that they were not principled defenders of limited government, but used arguments for limited government in order to blunt the constitutionally warranted power of the federal government when their interests were threatened. The deeds of the Southern statesmen support the second interpretation. They certainly did not practice limited government within their states as strictly as they demanded it in national government. Likewise, the administration of the Confederacy never practiced limited government. In its short life, the Confederate government was more centralized and energetic than the government of the Union during the war, or “quasisocialist,” one study has concluded. But, the author of the study notes, Southern statesmen “did, in fact, oppose expansion of the central state both before and after the Civil War,” when they were part of the United States.185 They deployed their theory when their rule was obstructed by a powerful republican people within the Union and was dropped when they were independent of that impediment. Their inconsistency is explained by the panoptic, overarching conflict between oligarchy and republicanism. Their constitutional theory was a strategy with a motive, not born from republican principles. As the war marched onward, libertarian dissenters like Governor Zebulon Vance of North Carolina and Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia did oppose the centralized state activism led by Jefferson Davis.186 But they were in the minority, and their opposition failed. A majority of Confederate governors supported or tolerated centralization. The most plausible interpretation of the conduct of Vance and Brown is that they unwittingly accepted the constitutional arguments of antebellum Southerners and never discerned that the arguments were merely strategic. It has been alleged that the Confederacy’s founders aimed for a more perfect form of republicanism, purged of “conventions, election oratory, editorial 276

CHAPTER SIX TABLE 3.

THE EVIDENCE

Population in select congressional districts, Confederate States of America

Congressional district Arkansas–1 Virginia–16 Virginia–15 Tennessee–1 Tennessee–2 Tennessee–4 Virginia–14 South Carolina–6 Louisiana–6 Mississippi–5 Virginia–5 Louisiana–4 Mississippi–4

Free whites

Slaves

90,933 90,422 90,099 85,090 84,613 81,959 80,400 47,946 43,210 41,449 40,387 38,308 31,829

7,654 390 1779 6,950 8,723 9,503 4,323 80,480 89,416 68,688 64,947 76,124 85,602

Note: For the establishment and boundaries of congressional districts in the Confederate House of Representatives within each of the states, see Alabama Convention, Ordinances and Constitution of the State of Alabama: With the Constitution of the Provisional Government and the Confederate States of America, 45–46; Arkansas Convention, Journal of Both Sessions of the Convention of the State of Arkansas, 454; Florida Convention, Constitution or Form of Government for the People of Florida, 28; Georgia Convention of the People, Journal of the Public and Secret Proceedings of the Convention of the People of Georgia, 392–93; Louisiana Constitutional Convention, Official Journal of the Proceedings of the Convention of the State of Louisiana, 283, 285; Mississippi Legislature, Laws of the State of Mississippi: Passed at a Called Session of the Mississippi Legislature Held in the City of Jackson, July 1861, 57–58; North Carolina General Assembly, Public Laws of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly, at Its Second Extra Session of 1861, 4–5; Tennessee General Assembly, Public Acts of the State of Tennessee, Passed at the First Session of the Thirty-­Fourth General Assembly, for the Years 1861–62, 8–9; Texas, General Laws of the Eighth Legislature of the State of Texas, Extra Session, 35–36; Virginia Convention, Journal of the Acts and Proceedings of a General Convention of the State of Virginia, 167–69. South Carolina used the same six congressional districts that were allotted to them by the U.S. government. See “Proclamation, State of South Carolina, Executive Department,” Yorkville (SC) Enquirer, December 12, 1861. For the populations of the respective districts, encompassing county or parish populations, see U.S. Census Office, “Table No. 2—­Population by Color and Condition,” in Population of the United States in 1860: 8 (Alabama), 18 (Arkansas), 54 (Florida), 72–73 (Georgia), 270 (Mississippi), 358–59 (North Carolina), 452 (South Carolina), 466–67 (Tennessee), 484–86 (Texas), and 516–18 (Virginia). Louisiana divided the municipal districts of New Orleans into separate congressional districts; therefore, the population of the New Orleans wards must be consulted to account for the free and slave populations of all congressional districts in Louisiana. See ibid. and “Table No. 3—­Population of Cities and Towns,” in ibid., 194–95. 277

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feuds, and partisan wrangling.” They are deemed the faithful heirs of the American founding fathers, who also disliked parties.187 But the antipartyism of the Confederate founders crucially differed from the antipartyism of the American founders. Close in time to the ratification of the Constitution, the American founders do seem opposed to the formation of parties, but the parties they have in mind are not the sort that eventually formed in America. Like the Confederate founders, they denounced the spirit of party and associated parties with unjust factions. In his Farewell Address in 1796, Washington warned, “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge,” was “natural to party dissension” and had produced “horrid enormities.” This party activity was “itself a frightful despotism” or oppression that could lead to “a more formal and permanent despotism.” But Washington drew his lesson from “different ages and countries,” when parties were demonstrably factious and unjustly oppressed each other. Similarly, in Federalist 10 Madison observed that the factious impulse, inseparable from human nature, had forever “divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-­operate for their common good.”188 The reason to fear the formation of parties in America was their factious character and crimes against the natural rights of others since time immemorial. Restrained from injuring the rights of others, parties were not dreaded. In fact, organizations that promoted political platforms and candidates and united popular support under their heads were unprecedented and proved to be a useful discovery by the founding generation after the formation of the government under the Constitution. These “parties” differed from past parties by shedding their factious, despotic character. As long as they operated within a republican consensus and respected the rights of others, parties could be advantageous to republican government, even necessary. In 1823 Madison reflected on their experience and acknowledged, “There has been in fact a deep distinction between the two parties.” But experience had taught them that “in all free Countries somewhat of this distinction must be looked for; but it can never be dangerous in a well informed Community and a well constructed Govt. both of which I trust will be found to be the happy lot of the U.S.”189 The American founders had tamed parties into useful instruments of popular government. The Confederacy turned against these tame forms of party organization because their “revolution against politics” was a revolution against republican 278

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politics and republican government, and the evidence is heaped high. Newspaper editors argued for “no more deification of popular ignorance,” for eliminating “caucuses, conventions, and campaigning.” Some suggested “dispensing with elections altogether.” Another editor doubted that “the masses were capable of self-­government” and “argued for a government run by the planting interest.” Since the “planting interests” already ran Southern governments, the editor’s call suggested that the founding of the Confederacy was the beginning, and not end, of the consolidation of oligarchic government. J. L. M. Curry, a Confederate congressman from Alabama, attacked frequent elections, which made representatives “sycophants who seek popularity.” Curry’s position was the reverse of John Adams’s in “Thoughts on Government,” which he had written in 1776 at the request of Curry’s republican fathers in the South. Adams wrote, “And these and all other elections, especially of representatives and counsellors, should be annual, there not being in the whole circle of the sciences a maxim more infallible than this, ‘where annual elections end, there slavery begins.’”190 The secessionists are said to have rejected “a model of politics based on competition and compromise” and instead “hoped to construct a commonwealth resting on social harmony, political consensus, and unquestionable legitimacy.”191 However, their contemptuous references to the people and popular institutions suggest that their idea of good government was outside the genus of republicanism. A political society that suppresses peaceful party competition and compromise to achieve political consensus is not free. The structure of Confederate government already diminished popular participation, and they were not finished. They did not seek the consent of the people to achieve social “harmony” and “consensus.” They sought consensus only within their ruling class. With this consensus they could easily command the silence of the people and exact their obedience. The peace and harmony of oligarchic political society was achieved when popular liberty was laid low in the grave. By remaining unified as a ruling class, they, and not the ruled majority, would choose the terms of social harmony. They alone were competent to speak on behalf of all. Oligarchies, Aristotle taught, do not trust the multitude.192 They are jealous of their power and reluctant to share any affairs of the state with the people, unless pressed by necessity. This explains why Confederates further sought to restrict popular participation in government and why the Confederate Congress conducted “so much of its business in closed sessions” and “aroused public suspicion.”193 In conducting themselves this way, the 279

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Confederates broke from the republican tradition in America and resurrected the old British parliamentary tradition under the monarchy. Long prior to the American Revolution, the British Parliament had customarily conducted its proceedings in secret, and only its members could read the journals. Breaches of secrecy were punished with great severity, sometimes by imprisonment in the Tower of London and permanent expulsion. Colonial legislatures in America emulated the secrecy of Parliament until 1766, when the General Court of republican Massachusetts became the first legislature in modern history to open its proceedings formally to the public, on the motion of James Otis.194 After the formation of the national government under the Constitution, the House of Representatives kept its doors open to the public, but the Senate regularly met behind closed doors and published only its journal, not its proceedings. The drawn-­out battle that led to the opening of the Senate completed the consecration of that chamber to republicanism. Almost immediately after the Senate first met, Senators Richard Henry Lee and James Monroe from Virginia led the campaign to force the doors open, but their respective motions were defeated in 1790 and 1791.195 The secrecy of the Senate irritated the American public.196 The newspapers mocked the Senate. One critic denominated senators “the PEERS of America” who disdained “to be seen by vulgar eyes.” Another offered the monitory reflection that “it augurs an unfriendly disposition in a public body. . . . Upright intentions, and upright conduct are not afraid or ashamed of publicity.”197 Responding to popular pressure and pressure from state legislatures, Senator Alexander Martin of North Carolina made a motion in 1794 to open the Senate doors. His resolutions explained that the senators were “responsible for their conduct to their constituents,” and while their debates were “withheld from public view, responsibility is destroyed, which, on the publicity of their deliberations, would be restored.” By opening the Senate doors, “abuse of power, maladministration of office” would be “more easily detected and corrected; jealousies, rising in the public mind from secret legislation” would be “prevented.” The people would place “greater confidence . . . in the National Government.”198 While the Senate hesitated, one newspaper thundered, “This practice is borrowed FROM KINGS and their MINISTERS, and seems to imply a disposition to assimilate our government, if not in theory, at least in practice, to monarchy.”199 Finally, galleries were built, and the Senate began to receive the public and allow its debates to be published in December 1795.200 280

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In America the republican legislative tradition of publicity, to prevent popular suspicions, restore popular confidence in the government, and expose the conduct of legislators to public inspection, was begun by Massachusetts and advanced in the Senate by Virginians and a North Carolina member. The sons of those Southern republicans who ruled the Confederacy overturned this republican achievement. The Confederate Congress habitually conducted “many, if not most of its most important deliberations . . . in secret session.” Although the Union was fighting the same war, the American Congress almost never conducted its proceedings in secret.201 The Confederate custom of conducting secret deliberations derived from the character of the oligarchic regime native to its region. Before the war in 1853, Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio attempted to complete one reform left undone by the Senate in 1795. Senate executive sessions were still held in secret. Chase offered a resolution to amend the Senate rules so that “all sessions and all proceedings of the Senate shall be public and open, except when matters communicated in confidence by the President shall be received and considered.” The explanation presented in 1853 by Chase, the Northerner, mirrored the explanation of Senator Martin of North Carolina, the Southerner, in 1794. Chase said, “The people have a right to know the character of our discussions and the reason for our votes. Our institutions are based on the principle of publicity and responsibility,” and, therefore, “exceptions should be confined within the narrowest practicable limits.” Shedding some light on the reason for later Confederate secrecy, Senator Andrew Pickens Butler of South Carolina replied, “This is not a pure democracy.”202 With due respect to fair criticism of pure democracy, the transparent administration of the government, apart from the management of national security, is an institutional practice suited to any system of government in which the people are sovereign. The diffusion of information about the administration of government is necessary if the administration is directly or indirectly accountable to the people on policy matters. Quickly after its formation, the Confederate Congress was marked by “petty quarrels, ideological rigidity, and plain stubbornness.”203 Contending individual alliances spread throughout the Confederate government. This conflict was different in kind and in danger from shifting political alliances within a republic. Whereas harmony is the essential preservative of oligarchy, its opposite, rivalry, is the bane of oligarchy. According to Aristotle, when harmony breaks down among ruling oligarchs, the ruling class narrows, as one man or one clique within the ruling class becomes more powerful than 281

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others.204 This explains the remarkable spectacle of serious calls within the Confederacy for dictatorship.205 Among domineering men, disagreement could be settled only by superior domination. They were bred to rule and never to voluntarily submit. A dictator was a fit choice to restore order once disorder broke out within the Confederate oligarchy. Monarchy was the next step in the development of their political regime. Instead, the regime that might have changed American and world history died violently, ushered to its demise in part by ordinary Americans, black and white, who arose from the bowels of the Confederacy and with their arms faced down all the insulting moral presumptions of Southern government. For our part, we can know the ruling class only through books, and very imperfectly, but poor white Americans and enslaved black Americans personally felt the burden of its disdain for their common humanity. It is not surprising that when the Civil War began, these Southern Americans took up arms against the Confederacy and looked northward for assistance. We now know much more about Southern unionism during the war. Newton Knight, a conscripted Confederate soldier, deserted and led an anti-­Confederate militia within the rebellious state of Mississippi, the legendary “Free State of Jones.” Unionist resistance was extensive in Alabama and North Carolina.206 As many as 450,000 black and white Southerners fought for the Union, amounting to fully half of all the men who served in the Confederate army.207 Their fight against the Confederate rebellion was an American uprising against an un-­A merican political regime that developed in the antebellum South. For their resistance to the Confederacy, the ruled classes often paid a terrible price.208 The suffering they endured fills a forgotten chapter in the long history of American sacrifices for liberty.

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The Burial of the New Birth of Freedom The Lost Key As the Civil War drew to a close in the spring of 1865, news reports about the Confederate government, then not long for this world, prompted an anonymous writer for the New York Times to reflect on the nature and ultimate cause of the war. The Confederate Congress was in secret session—again. Its recent conduct, the writer said, “exhibits more clearly the rapid progress which that body has made toward pure oligarchy.” Prior to the war, Southern leaders had masked their oligarchy in pretended republicanism, but since the establishment of the Confederacy, they had dropped the mask: Of their dislike to a broad Democracy like ours, we have been long aware. But the recent proceedings of their Congress prove that even a Government of freeholders was not what they aimed at, but a Government of wealthy men, large landed proprietors—­what in short, Aristotle calls an oligarchy, without any responsibility, or any show of responsibility, to the rest of the community. . . . Much of the practical interest of this matter is of course destroyed by the probability that the present Confederate Congress is the last that will ever meet. But it will, nevertheless, always possess considerable importance for the philosopher and historian, as a very suggestive indication of the course that the Confederacy would have run, had it succeeded—­of the secret aims of its leading managers, and in fact as a key to many of the most singular problems of “this strange eventful history.”1

As Northern readers of the New York Times knew, many Northern abolitionists and political leaders had been using Southern oligarchy as the key 283

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to decoding their “strange eventful history” as it unfolded, and the last gasps of Confederate government heaped up more evidence that they were right to have done so. For decades after the war, the prediction of the editorialist held, and the antebellum rise of the oligarchic regime in the South continued to “possess considerable importance for the philosopher and historian” who studied and wrote about the events of their age. These authors constituted the first school of literature on the antebellum conflict over slavery, the war, and postbellum American politics. This body of literature is best designated the Republican School, and its defining attribute is recognition of Southern oligarchy as the key to understanding American political development in the nineteenth century. Many Republicans who had served in the national government wrote memoirs, penned histories, and published their collected speeches on their epic struggle. The accounts of some of them who served in the Thirty-­Eighth, Thirty-­Ninth, or Fortieth Congress are sources for chapters 1–5 of this book. They contributed to the Republican School along with many others, before and after the war. Union combat veteran Albion Tourgee wrote a historical novel exclusively focusing on Reconstruction that belongs to the Republican School. His book A Fool’s Errand (1879) was based on his personal experience in postbellum North Carolina and was popular in the North. For him, the residuum of antebellum Southern oligarchy remained the key to the difficulties of Reconstruction. He wrote that the South “was a republic in name, but an oligarchy in fact. Its laws were framed and construed to this end.” The attempt to change the regime was a “herculean” task, perhaps even impossible in his view, as the title hints.2 Other authors expanded and extended the analysis of the Republican School, arguing that the antebellum oligarchy had reconstituted and was still menacing American government as well as black Americans. One of these authors is Green Berry Raum, who won the Congressional Medal of Honor fighting for the Union in the Civil War, later became a U.S. representative from Illinois, and wrote The Existing Conflict between Republican Government and Southern Oligarchy (1884). Others were Henry Edwin Tremain, also a Union combat veteran and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor and author of Sectionalism Unmasked (1907), and William Henry Smith, author of A Political History of Slavery (1903), who served Ohio as secretary of state during the war. The Republican School should include “the author of America,” William Cullen Bryant. In the fourth volume of his work A Popular History of the United States (1876–81), he declared “the central fact of 284

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the history of the United States to be, from the beginning of the century to the beginning of the slaveholders’ rebellion, a determination of a class to get possession of the Government for its own purposes.” The men in that class believed that “the best and truest government was an oligarchy” and that the logic of the regime required that “the many, who labor with their hands, should be, without regard to color or to race, in the absolute ownership of the few.”3 Native-­born Southerners who accepted the premise of the Republican School were George Washington Cable, author of The Negro Question (1898); Joseph C. Manning, author of the political pamphlet The Rise and Reign of the Bourbon Oligarchy (1904); and William Skaggs, author of The Southern Oligarchy: An Appeal in Behalf of the Silent Masses of Our Country against the Despotic Rule of the Few (1924). For these Southern authors, the persisting rule of the antebellum Southern oligarchy after the war was personal. Like antebellum Southerners Hinton Helper and John Jacobus Flournoy, these postbellum Southerners criticized Southern oligarchy from inside its domain.4 The Republican School has a European wing of authors, among them J. Arthur Partridge, British author of The Making of the American Nation; or, The Rise and Fall of Oligarchy in the West (1866). This and the author’s companion volume, On Democracy (1866), were noticed by the North American Review in 1867 and, despite some defects, judged to be “contributions of value to political science.”5 Essays on America by fellow Briton John Stuart Mill and The Slave Power (1862) by Irishman John Elliot Cairnes both prominently featured Southern oligarchy in their analyses of the war and Reconstruction.6 For German scholar Hermann von Holst, Southern oligarchy was the primary impediment to the progress and development of American republicanism in his eight-­volume study, The Constitutional and Political History of the United States (1876–92). The literary dominance of the Republican School began to weaken after Redemption, the gradual return of Southern government to the dominant party in the South in the 1870s. National Republicans retreated, and their frail Republican allies in the South were left to fend for themselves. Failure exposed their interpretation of events to criticism and counterclaims. Looking back at their work in the Reconstruction Congress, Republicans conceded defeat but remained hopeful that their goal would be realized over the long term. Reflecting on Reconstruction in an 1886 speech, John Sherman admitted that although they had tried to reshape Southern political society, “I am afraid it did not turn out very well.” Final reunion of the 285

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American people, he believed, could not be accomplished until every part of the nation supported, “without respect to race or color or condition, the equality of rights and privileges.” That principle “is now ingrafted upon our constitution” and “can never be erased.” Though men might flout the amendments to the Constitution in the interim, eventually, he predicted, the republican principle that the Reconstruction amendments embodied “will be recognized by every man and woman and child in this broad land, white or black, north or south.” In 1913 George Edmunds denied that the measures of the Reconstruction Congress were “measures of cruelty or tyranny, but of justice and hopefulness.” He acknowledged that “the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution has, so far, almost entirely failed to accomplish its purpose,” but “it stands as an indestructible monument of liberty and equality.” 7 Over the short term, the Republican retreat from Reconstruction shifted power in two ways. First, control of political development in the South would be decided by those who emerged victorious from the struggle for power within the Southern people. Second, the victorious power would thereafter become part of the national government, altering national political development. In the immediate aftermath of Redemption, the Republicans recognized that these consequences had hobbled their attempt to establish republicanism in the South and to refound a purer Republic. In 1879 Senator Zachariah Chandler had resumed his service in Congress and reported back to a Chicago audience that in twenty years, there was “not a particle of difference” in Southern statesmen. They “are just as much Rebels now, as they were,” he informed them. Because the constitutional formula for apportioning representation had applied to changed conditions, from counting three-­fi fths of four million slaves to a full accounting of four million former slaves, whose votes were suppressed with “fraud and violence,” the relative voting power of white Southerners in Congress had kept pace with the North. With that power, “they dare to dictate terms to the loyal men of these United States.” Upon his reentry into the Senate, Chandler found “precisely what I did twenty years ago,” that the “Rebel States . . . absolutely control all the legislation in this Government.” From Boston Nathaniel Banks observed the situation in Congress, exclaiming, “And this is the substantial result of a perpetual conflict of half a century to preserve the government of the Republic!”8 Though retired from Congress by 1880, George Boutwell lamented the brazen attack on free elections and civil rights in the South. He urged the 286

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Republican Party to be “determined, bold, aggressive” in demanding “a full, free vote and an honest count.” In almost “half of the States of the Union, . . . the bayonet must be employed to protect the ballot or republican institutions must disappear.” Boutwell invoked the guarantee clause, requiring intervention. The Constitution forbade state governments from robbing “the people of every right appertaining to a republican system.” But parchment protections of republican equal rights were unavailing. Senator George Edmunds was still serving in 1881 when he published a review essay refuting new literary works absolving the Confederacy, defending state sovereignty, and decrying the centralization of power due to the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The amendments, it was charged, threatened the liberty of the people. Edmunds countered that they “gave liberty to millions” and were intended to secure “equality of rights and equality of protection under the laws.”9 In 1902 Judge Emory Speer of Georgia explained to a Northern audience that “the swift bestowal by the reconstruction acts of unlimited manhood suffrage upon members of the African race” had created instant unity of Southern whites against the national government. In other words, the immediate effect of the attempted imposition of black suffrage on the South by national Republicans was that they had lost the initiative in directing Southern political development from the nation’s capital. But the unity among Southern whites against the national government concealed unsettled differences between the formerly ruled whites and ruling whites in the South. In 1890 Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman was a rising star and a populist gubernatorial candidate in South Carolina. Although he sharply broke from Republicans on the policy of enfranchising black Americans, he validated their analysis of the South. In reply to his local critics, Tillman said, “Tillmanism had its origin 100 years ago. Before the war South Carolina was a pure aristocracy. We have never had a republican form of government in South Carolina.” Their “old Constitution” gave power to the planters on the coast, and “the people were oppressed. . . . There was continual warfare between the upcountry and the lowcountry. . . . That same warfare has sprung up under the new name of Tillmanism.”10 These claims were precisely what the Republicans had alleged for decades, but Tillman was one of the most inveterate opponents of black Americans in American history. An alliance between men like him and Reconstruction Republicans had been impossible. The ruling and ruled whites in the South would have to work out their differences themselves. 287

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The future of regime change in the South was no longer in the hands of Republicans. Despite Tillman’s validation of the long-­standing premise of the Republican cause and of the Republican School, Redemption drained national prestige from both. Step by step, the Republican School declined, and the American “philosopher and historian” lost the key to our “strange eventful history.” Former Confederates first cleared space for competing interpretations. The causes and significance of the Civil War were “being rapidly clouded over by the contributions of men who were on the wrong side,” wrote Rossiter Johnson in his blistering review of The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881), by former president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis. Postbellum leniency toward the defeated rebels permitted them to hatch a “literary conspiracy . . . to change the apparent motive of the war.” Davis had rested the Confederacy’s case on state-­sovereignty doctrine, which, he had claimed, served “the cause of liberty.” This argument, Johnson argued, was illusory and spawned factitious history. President Lincoln had “officially declared his purpose not to interfere with the constitutional rights of the South.” Southern members of Congress “had only to sit still in their seats,” and slavery in the states where it existed “could have received no harm from the Government.” The move by most seceding states to bypass popular votes for secession belied the claimed devotion of Davis to popular liberty. The deeds of Davis showed that he cared nothing for “the sovereignty that resided in the people.” He and his coadjutors had sought “to convert the great slave republic into a virtual aristocracy; the slave-­holders, of course, being the ruling class.”11 Although Johnson’s review was compelling, Davis was politically shrewd to rest the Confederacy’s case on state-­sovereignty doctrine. The old oligarchy had invented state-­sovereignty doctrine to shield its rule over the southern majority from the guarantee clause and national republicanism before the war. After the war, ruled and ruling whites in the South both opposed black suffrage. They could unite behind state-­sovereignty doctrine, because it had successfully blunted the arm of the national government in the past and, in the future, could shield the suppression of black American citizenship from national government interference. Despite their oligarchic origins, state sovereignty and the Confederacy could enjoy popular revival among the white majority. Postbellum politics prepared the ground in which reappraisals of the past were planted. New literary works that vindicated state sovereignty were welcome, even if those works told “factitious” versions of Southern and 288

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national political history, vaunting the Confederacy’s devotion to popular liberty and burying the story of “warfare” between the ruling and ruled classes. In this way, Redemption of the Southern states strengthened the prestige of the new historical accounts authored by Confederates and diminished the prestige of the Republican School. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the “literary conspiracy” against the Republican School became systematic. A new group of scholars threatened to displace the Republican School and submerge its key premise. The Dunning School, led by Professor William Archibald Dunning of Columbia University, was composed of scholars who served as apologists for the oligarchy.12 One of these scholars himself acknowledged that they had rewritten the history of the period, to contest “the literary dominance of New England, where for years most of the histories were written.” Before the rise of the Dunning School, “‘the New England point of view’” came “to permeate the thinking of the greater part of the country. . . . The Southern cause was very much on the defensive in this battle of interpretations.” But the Dunning School led a new Southern offensive, with “revolutionary consequences upon the interpretation of the whole nineteenth century in America.”13 The unexpected rise of the Dunning School prompted replies from John Lynch, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Mississippi. Lynch was a Republican and a member of the first class of black Americans to serve in Congress. He wrote The Facts of Reconstruction (1913) and Some Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes (1922) to gainsay the emerging Dunning School scholars, whom contemporary scholars erroneously regard as the first school of writers on Civil War–era history. It is more fitting to regard them as the first school of revisionists. Lynch knew that he was fighting a rearguard action against their advance and was defending the older Republican literature and the Republican cause. Like the Republican School authors who came before him, Lynch identified Southern oligarchy as the central problem of the age. He might be said to have been the last of the great authors in the Republican School, and his contribution was invaluable. Because he wrote at a later date, he was able to consider Reconstruction long after its end, from the Republican School perspective, and he could contrast his portrait of Reconstruction to the portrait painted by the Dunning School. In The Facts of Reconstruction, Lynch recognized that equal citizenship had obviously been denied to black Americans, but had also eluded the white majority in the South. He connected the forces opposing equal citizenship 289

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to the old Southern oligarchy, which was central to understanding prior political history and political development thereafter. He wrote that the antebellum oligarchic regime threatened republicanism in the nation and finally had called the Republican Party to life in the 1850s. At that time, “the slave oligarchy of the South” controlled the Democratic Party, and because “the Whig party had not the courage of its convictions,” the “Republican party came to the front with a determination to secure, if possible, freedom for the slave, liberty for the oppressed, and justice and fair play for all classes and races of our population.” He understood that both black slaves and whites constituted the ruled element in Southern political society beneath “the slave oligarchy of the South.” In his discussion of Reconstruction, he said the Republican plan was both “serious and radical” because it proposed to break up “the established order of things” in the South: “It meant not only the physical emancipation of the blacks but the political emancipation of the poor whites, as well. It meant the destruction in a large measure of the social, political, and industrial distinctions that had been maintained among the whites under the old order of things.”14 Reconstruction meant wholesale regime change, as profound as if the United States had occupied a foreign nation ruled by a privileged class to the exclusion of all others and then had attempted to establish free government there. The prospective incorporation of the former slaves into the citizenry would have qualified as a modification of the political regime, but not a revolution in the form of government, if genuinely republican governments had previously existed in the South. But that was not the case. The difficulty for Lynch and the Republicans was that long before the war, the oligarchic political regime had been consolidating and, therefore, was more durable and resistant to externally imposed change. Just as the project to establish republicanism in the South failed to overcome resistance, Lynch’s project failed to stem the rising tide of Dunning School revisionism. Both republican projects succumbed to revivified elements of the oligarchic regime. The key to America’s “strange eventful history” was buried and has remained buried for more than one hundred years. The reason that the key has never since been recovered and seriously applied to studies of the progress and outcome of Reconstruction was because, subsequently, scholars became consumed by the most salient moral question that remained after Reconstruction and ignored the central political problem to which the moral problem was connected. The scholars became engaged in 290

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the battles of civil rights and injected themselves into unfolding political history, while retelling past history in terms of the fundamental moral question with which they were engaged. The Civil Rights Struggle among the Historians The view of Reconstruction that prevails today is best captured by W. E. B. DuBois: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. . . . A new slavery arose.” When DuBois published Black Reconstruction in America in 1935, his was the minority view. By then, the Dunning School had triumphed. In their account, the freed slave was not a man who had briefly enjoyed the sunlight of freedom, but rather, in the words of Woodrow Wilson, he was one of a “host of dusky children untimely put out of school.”15 The question and answer prompted by such a statement are obvious. What does one do with children “untimely put out of school”? You declare the end of recess and put them back in, or at least as far as one can. The scholarship of the Dunning School could and did justify legal segregation, extralegal terror, and general oppression, the elements of the “new slavery” referred to by DuBois.16 But another new wave of revisionist scholarship attacked the moral basis of the Dunning School and substituted that of DuBois. The normative position of the revisionists favored the equal rights of the emancipated slave, and they began retelling the history of Reconstruction as the history of the black American struggle for citizenship. The rise of this revisionism corresponded with the rise of the modern civil rights movement.17 Functionally, the new histories of Reconstruction served the cause that led to the legal enforcement of equal civil rights in America, much in the same way that the stories of the Christian martyrs served the cause that led to the legal enforcement of toleration in the Roman Empire.18 The perseverance of the oppressed was highlighted; the tyranny of oppression was exposed. Reflecting on the history of Reconstruction scholarship, Michael Les Benedict claimed that the work of revisionist historians John Hope Franklin, Kenneth Stampp, and John Cox and Lawanda Cox all “restored the question of racial accommodation to its central place in the conflict—­‘the issue of Reconstruction.’”19 But this statement is imprecise, and its imprecision is badly misleading. The question of racial accommodation was always central to the Dunning School, too. What separated the groups of scholars were their contrasting normative views of racial accommodation. 291

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Adherents on both sides adopted clear and sometimes strident moral positions on the question, and both often condemned Reconstruction Republicans, either for supporting black citizenship or for not supporting black citizenship. A Dunningite lamented that “savage political leaders” like Senator Charles Sumner (“whose chief regret had been that his skin was not black”) gave the ballot to “three millions of former slaves, some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations removed from cannibalism.”20 Scholars on the other side of the issue blamed Republicans for allowing “counter-­revolution in the South after Reconstruction,” which “was as dramatic as it was ugly,” ending in “constitutional disfranchisement, state-­ sponsored segregation, widespread spectacle lynching and black rural poverty.”21 And the scholars attacked each other’s positions on the central question that divided them. A contemporary Dunningite praised the “excellent scholarship” of Claude Bowers, averred that “Dunning and his disciples provided accurate descriptions of ex-­slaves,” and attacked the “Marxist revisionists” for being outraged by those descriptions.22 A critic of the Dunning School imputes to them the view that “blacks were inferior beings . . . little better than beasts.”23 For more than one hundred years, Reconstruction scholarship has been shaped by moral warfare of this kind. The phases of this war determine the divisions in Reconstruction historiography reviewed by Eric Foner in the preface to Reconstruction.24 He divided Reconstruction into the Dunning, revisionist, and postrevisionist schools. But although the breaks between them are ostensibly marked by time, even more so the contrasting moral positions that have changed with time distinguish those breaks. The Dunning School deplored the Reconstruction Congress for imposing black citizenship on beleaguered Southern whites. The revisionists of the second phase vindicated the Reconstruction Congress for attempting to affirm the citizenship of black Americans and lauded the efforts of the emancipated to live as free citizens. The postrevisionists of the third phase deplored the Reconstruction Congress for not doing enough to defend or advance black citizenship. Twenty-­five years later, the fundamental structure of Foner’s historiography is still generally accepted, and the names Dunning School, revisionist, and postrevisionist are still standard currency in Reconstruction scholarship. Foner organized the historiography in Reconstruction in 1988 so that the scholarly schools he defined corresponded to political positions. So did Dunning School historian Charles Ramsdell fifty years earlier.25 Another way to reframe the same body of literature, a way that more explicitly recognizes the 292

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organizing principles of the respective groupings, is to dispense with time altogether and to divide all of the scholars into one of the two camps into which they consciously settled: an equalitarian camp for black citizenship and a white-­supremacist camp against black citizenship. The difference between the so-­called revisionists and postrevisionists is really between equalitarians and uncompromising equalitarians, reflecting the difference between more and less demanding standards by which they judge prior conduct. The Dunning School also divides into moderates and extremists, a difference not captured by Foner’s historiography. One moderate Dunningite, for example, acknowledged “the successful employment of negro soldiers” by the Union and noted that “it became evident,” during Reconstruction in Mississippi, that “the admission of the negro to the witness stand and the jury box would not be accompanied by the terrible results predicted.” But another Dunningite claimed that slave revolts were not common, because “the negro lacked the capacity for organization” and that “freedom . . . was something that he did not exactly understand.”26 Scholars in both camps have always recognized that their work necessarily drew them into their contemporaneous battles over civil rights, because their work has had real political consequences in assisting respective movements for and against equal citizenship. The lines between scholarship and political activism have always been blurred, down to the present day. In a Columbia Law Review article, Eric Foner is critical of “the legal profession and the courts [for having] been slow to embrace the revolution in Reconstruction historiography” and served as an expert witness in one of the University of Michigan affirmative-­action cases in 2000 that was eventually decided by the Supreme Court. Because scholarship has played a role in the battles for civil rights, it has been difficult to maintain philosophical distance. This has occurred despite the urging of Howard K. Beale to maintain that distance in his 1940 essay, “On Rewriting Reconstruction History,” which began, “For many years both Northerners and Southerners who wrote on Reconstruction were dominated by sectional feelings still embittered by the Civil War.” As a result, Beale noted, our “understanding of the bewildering complexity of conflicting interests and social phenomena of the day has been lost in the midst of historians’ proud or unconscious partisanship.”27 The long duel between the equalitarian and white-­supremacist camps has influenced how scholars, the American public, and the government have thought about Reconstruction ever since. But the cost of sacrificing philosophical distance to meet the demands of contemporaneous political battles has been blindness. 293

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Our eyes have lost sight of the all-­encompassing background of the prior drama, the clash between the two regimes in the nineteenth century. When the struggle for equal citizenship began, the freed slave was the protagonist in the foreground of the drama. Later, the Dunning School scholars took to the stage and joined the antagonists of the freed slave. Then came the revisionists, who joined the supporting cast of the protagonist. While the parties of the protagonists and antagonists fixed the attention of the audience on the foreground of the stage where the scholarly duel took place, the background receded from view. By the time we reach Foner’s review of Reconstruction scholarship in 1988, Southern oligarchy had dropped out as a factor of any kind, a sideshow to the unrelated issue of equal citizenship. The old oligarchy is a kind of historical curiosity, and its existence is given no significant role in the shape and form of the nation. Regime change and black citizenship are decoupled. Today, the question of black citizenship from the nineteenth century forward is mostly regarded as a moral problem isolated from the problem of Southern oligarchy, rather than bound together with the regime, if the regime is recognized at all. This common view that prevails today corresponds to another one, namely, that America was always a democracy since its birth, though an imperfect democracy, and that the American democracy has gradually cast off its imperfections and become more expansive and inclusive. The central issue of Reconstruction scholarship is framed as the prospective expansion of American democracy, from white democracy to “biracial” or “interracial” democracy. That would be true if those who were excluded from the sovereignty constituted a minority. A regime so constituted is, from the perspective of the Declaration of Independence, a morally flawed republic, but a true republic nevertheless. In that case, the exclusion of some from citizenship would have been a moral problem, as the equalitarian and racist camps treat it. That may be a proper way to frame Reconstruction in some places within the free states, like Illinois or Oregon, where black Americans had been legally excluded, but it is not how to frame Reconstruction in its primary theater, the South.28 By diminishing the visibility of the Southern oligarchy, the long scholarly duel has hamstrung our ability to understand the regime and to see its profound impact not only on equal citizenship for black Americans, but also on the general political development of the United States. The longer that time passes since the height of the vitality of the oligarchy, the harder it will be to restore it to its influential place in American history and political 294

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development. Its power was indisputable. It nearly destroyed the regime from which it broke away, before expiring in a great war. Strength such as this suggests that the regime was once capable of extending its influence, penetrating even into the free states and national government, and stamping its character on new and repurposed institutions, customs, laws, and constitutional interpretation, some of which are still with us. We are susceptible to the error of imputing evidence of oligarchic institutions, customs, laws, and constitutional interpretation in the American past to republicanism rather than more properly recognizing that they were deviations from republicanism caused by oligarchic influence. If we do not analyze the United States in the nineteenth century within this two-­regime framework, we run the risk of massive misattribution, conflation, and misinterpretation. It is a mischaracterization of the whole to define it by indisputable evidence found in one of its two halves. All America was neither completely republican nor completely oligarchic, but divided. The influences of each regime over the whole Union waxed and waned. In short, it seems advisable to group political phenomena by the two contending regimes that struggled for ascendancy against each other for many years in peace and in war within the same Union. Seen in that context, the struggle for equal citizenship for black Americans is part of interregime struggle. Oligarchy ranks all members of its political society according to the principle of inequality and cannot tolerate the doctrine of “equality before the law” that distinguishes republican society. Historically, the rise of the antebellum oligarchy in the South preceded the emergence of second-­class citizenship for black Americans, and the sequential order suggests a causal link. Scholars have not examined this link because, paradoxically, the civil rights struggle among the scholars over the past one hundred years has diminished our understanding and even our recognition of the oligarchy. This has precluded us from looking to the oligarchy in explaining questions to which contemporary historians and Americans most want answers, questions about race and equal citizenship. What follows is a brief explanation of black inequality and discrimination that emerged from Reconstruction, showing that the primary causal factor was the oligarchy. The Failure of Regime Change in the South One prominent scholar addressed the failure of Reconstruction by reminding us of what the standards of the time were and then argued that according to that standard, it was not a failure at all. He saluted the anemic progress of 295

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Reconstruction. The benchmark, he maintained, for evaluating the partial investiture of the emancipated with equal rights was the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which had declared black Americans “neither citizen nor alien but rather a kind of subject national without any rights.” Measured against that low standard, the small steps taken during Reconstruction toward equality represented “an abrupt change.”29 He would have been right to use the opinion of Roger B. Taney in the Dred Scott decision as a good benchmark for measuring the gains of Reconstruction if it had been generally true in the nation that black Americans were “neither citizen nor alien . . . without any rights.” But the opinion does not accurately reflect the universal legal status of black Americans before the short period, from 1857 to 1868, when the decision had legal standing. Taney’s opinion attempted to nationalize a distinct view of black American status that had originated in the southernmost end of the Union and that had finally infected the opinion of the national Court. According to James Ashley, the antebellum oligarchy, led by Calhoun, found a way to control appointments to the federal judiciary for years, and Taney’s opinion that nationalized their standard was the result. His opinion was the product of an infinite number of attempts of the antebellum oligarchy to convert the whole of the United States gradually into an oligarchic political regime when the Union was torn by interregime political conflict. If we use Taney’s opinion to characterize the national legal status of black Americans, we are mischaracterizing the whole by a standard that originated in the oligarchic part of the American Union. Equally true, if we use the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to characterize the national legal status of black Americans, we would be mischaracterizing the whole by a standard that originated in the republican part of the American Union. Both the amendments and the decision of the Taney Court met resistance by one part of the Union where contrary principles prevailed. The reaction of Massachusetts to the Dred Scott decision shows that the oligarchic standard of black status in Taney’s opinion was not universal. Upon receiving news of the decision, and realizing that, by way of the Supreme Court of the United States, the ancient South Carolina standard of black status was about to be imposed on them, the Massachusetts Legislature immediately took up the matter. One representative deemed the Court’s decision “a great calamity,” for it “deprives 10,000 of our citizens of their rights. It outlaws and exiles them. . . . It is our duty to yield nothing to the general government, and to place ourselves, if necessary, in antagonism to it.” 296

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Another denied that the decision proceeded from “the people of the country, but of men who had been seared in their feelings of justice.” A report from the Committee on Federal Relations denied that Massachusetts had ever “delegated to the Supreme Court of the United States, nor to any other power upon earth, the right to make color a test of citizenship within her borders.” Ever since statehood, the report continued, “people of color equally with whites, have been heretofore admitted to all the privileges and franchise of citizenship in Massachusetts.” Finally, the legislature enacted resolves that directly countermanded the Court’s decision, affirming that “all negroes, not aliens, domiciled within her limits, are citizens of Massachusetts” and were also, therefore, “citizens of the United States.”30 That was Massachusetts, one might say. Indeed, but in the early national period, most of America was busily modeling itself after Massachusetts before the rise of the Southern oligarchy. In 1865 Representative James Garfield gave a speech on Reconstruction in which he showed his Ohio constituents that the history upon which Taney had based his opinion was simply false. Suffrage for free and freed black Americans was not revolutionary at all, and, in fact, the denial of the right to vote for free black Americans departed from a national standard that was nearly universal and much older than the Dred Scott decision. Rather, he said, “to grant suffrage to the black man in this country is not innovation, but restoration. It is a return to the ancient principles and practices of the fathers.”31 Garfield pointed out that all but one state (South Carolina) during the years of the American Revolution had accepted free black suffrage. He might also have added that ten of the thirteen original states accepted free-­black votes in the year that the Constitution was ratified, but he did mention that of the ten federal laws enacted before 1812 to establish new territories, none inserted color as a test for suffrage. In 1812 South Carolina again was in the vanguard of the movement to proscribe the rights of free blacks and was finally successful. Congress inserted a color line for the first time in legislation establishing the territory of Missouri. Then, Garfield noted, “One by one the Slave States, and many of the free States, gave way before the crusade of slavery against negro citizenship.” The capitulation of the free states to restrictions on free-­black citizenship in this period should be viewed as the result of interregime penetration, the influence of the emerging oligarchy on republican states. Nevertheless, free blacks could still vote in some slave states, in North Carolina until 1835, and in Tennessee until 1834. Measured against the principles and policies of the America’s deeper past, opposition 297

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to black suffrage was, in Garfield’s words, “apostasy,” and restoration of the right of suffrage for black Americans was a sacred trust that the Declaration of Independence demanded and that “God has committed to us.”32 The explicit ambition of the Republican Party after the war was to achieve exactly what Taney tried to achieve with his decision: to nationalize their own view of the proper legal status for black Americans. But the Republican standard was the opposite of Taney’s, had been more prevalent during the early Republic, and still prevailed in Massachusetts. In 1868 Senator Oliver Morton, Republican of Indiana, said that his party’s postwar policy was to reconstruct the Republic on the “right basis” in “every part of this Union.” The right basis, he said, was “the broad platform of the Declaration of Independence.”33 The Republican Party’s 1868 national platform, the first framed since the end of the war, embodied Morton’s sentiment. The platform affirmed “the great principles laid down in the immortal Declaration of Independence” and hailed “with gladness every effort toward making these principles a living reality on every inch of American soil.”34 The party’s next national platform in 1872 equated the suppression of the rebellion, the emancipation of four million slaves, the security of equal citizenship for all, and universal suffrage with the “solemn duties of the time.” The second article maintained that the recently ratified Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments “to the national Constitution should be cordially sustained because they are right, not merely tolerated because they are law, and should be carried out according to their spirit by appropriate legislation, the enforcement of which can safely be trusted only to the party that secured those amendments.” The third article carried the party’s moral imperative further, saying, “Complete liberty and exact equality in the enjoyment of all civil, political and public rights should be established, and effectually maintained throughout the Union, by efficient and appropriate State and Federal legislation. Neither the law nor the Administration should admit of any discrimination in respect of citizens by reason of race, creed, color, or previous condition of servitude.”35 Such were the aims of the Republicans, and they seemed to have sufficient means to achieve them. By the close of the war in 1865, the Republicans had accumulated awesome powers, and the South seemed defenseless. The national government commanded a large, battle-­tested, and victorious army, and Republicans, strengthened by the absence of representation from the insurrectionary states, controlled the national government. Numerically, at least, they remained in control for most of the remaining years of the 298

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nineteenth century. Despite President Andrew Johnson’s four years of obstruction from 1865 to 1869, six of the next seven presidents were Republicans and veteran officers of the Union army, beginning with Ulysses S. Grant, the general in chief. Between the end of the Civil War and 1900, Republicans held the Senate for twenty-­n ine years and the House for nineteen of those thirty-­five years. Because the Republicans possessed control of the national government and clearly expressed their mission, their standard is the appropriate one by which to judge the outcome of Reconstruction. We should ask: Why were not the civil rights achievements of the 1960s achieved in the 1860s? This question may seem naive to our modern sensibility that is conditioned to accept racism as an uncaused primary cause and as a universally acceptable explanation for many phenomena. But if we lazily stop with racism as the explanation, we elide the correct premises that the question lays bare, that the intention of the Republicans was to achieve aims similar to those that the 1960s achieved, and that they seemed to have had sufficient power to achieve what they intended. Instead, their genuine attempt to transform the political regime of the slave South from oligarchic to republican produced a new kind of oppression for black Americans. Regime change is unpredictable and often produces deformed progeny rather than the perfect offspring prayed for. Undoubtedly, few today would agree that oligarchy is a superior regime to a republican regime founded on natural right. Nevertheless, even the destruction of the worst regime and the attempt to substitute a better regime can release unanticipated new evils into society that had been held in abeyance by the old regime. Recently, America learned anew that a clear intention to change a terrible regime and possession of vastly superior power are not sureties that regime change will succeed. American arms were sent to destroy a tyranny in the Middle East and plant a democracy over its ashes, but underneath the tyranny were deep mutual hatreds among the people that were unseen by the American government. When the tyranny fell and the day of liberation and democracy was announced, the people fell upon each other. A new terror and mass dislocation were the result. The new regime did not create the new terror, but the attempt to transform the tyranny politically into a republican form of government did inadvertently precipitate the violence. America withdrew. Similarly, regime change in the South after the Civil War precipitated appalling violence upon black Americans. The prior oligarchic regime created 299

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the hatreds and rivalries, but while the oligarchy ruled, it restrained mass violence. When the armies of the North brought republican government to the South, they not only liberated the people, but also unchained those latent hatreds. Before regime change had achieved success, the American government withdrew then, too. The South was not a wax tablet, ready and willing to receive an impression in the likeness of the political society of the occupier. When the leaders of the outside power attempted to inscribe their likeness into the South, the South showed that it still possessed the resources to contest their aims. After formal conflict ended, white Southerners continued to maneuver and resist, and the violence sometimes verged on a renewal of formal, organized warfare.36 The murdered included the president of the United States, a sitting member of Congress, delegates to Southern state constitutional conventions, Southern state legislators, transplanted Northerners, Southern-­born white Republicans or scalawags, black Republicans, and, worst of all, ordinary freedmen minding their own business. An afternoon spent randomly flipping through the multivolume account of the Ku Klux Klan Hearings, published in 1872, yields case after case of brutalized innocent people.37 The freedmen passed through the portal of emancipation to find themselves in a dark Hobbesian world wherein they were the targets of insult, arson, beatings, torture, rape, and murder, undeterred by age or condition. The inescapable conclusion is that at some point previous to Reconstruction, the core idea upon which America was founded, the idea that each one of their stories matters, ceased to guide political society in a great part of the nation where slavery had obtained. Although atrocities throng the thirteen volumes of the Ku Klux Klan report, the investigating subcommittees were ad hoc and received testimony in only one narrow slice in time, from a limited sample of the former slave states. Twenty-­one members from the House and Senate presided over the Ku Klux Klan Hearings for six months in 1871, but most of their work was delegated to a subcommittee of eight, which received testimony in Washington, D.C. That subcommittee further divided into one subcommittee of three and two subcommittees of five that were organized to travel to seven of the fifteen formerly slaveholding states and receive testimony, but records exist of hearings convened in just five states for a total of eighty days. On average, each subcommittee sat for sixteen days in one area, sometimes at just one location, within each of the five investigated states, and so witnesses had 300

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to brave the dangers and distance of travel to give testimony.38 Yet the committee produced 8,166 pages, including testimony, indices, and the majority and minority reports. With recently available computer-­based tools, it is now possible to run analytics against the digitized text of this report. The results reveal an astounding intensity of violence: On those 8,166 pages, the word shot appears 4,021 times and the words kill and its variants killed and killing appear 9,476 times. Besides this one systematic effort by Congress, the military and the Freedmen’s Bureau also attempted to quantify the violence, but officials sometimes remarked that the depredations outstripped their ability to prevent or record them. A greater number of depredations than recorded can be inferred from the circumstances of the reports. In 1868 General J. J. Reynolds reported that in Texas, “The murder of negroes is so common as to render it impossible to keep accurate account of them.” Freedmen Bureau commissioner General Oliver Howard added, “The civil authorities have been overawed, and in many cases, even the bureau and military forces have been powerless to prevent the commission of these crimes.”39 In Louisiana the case was the same. Howard reported that perpetrators of “outrage and crimes of every description” against the freedmen avoided apprehension and punishment due to the complicity of the “local magistracy,” or they had “overawed the civil authorities.” Louisiana and Texas were two of nine former slave states not investigated by the Ku Klux Klan Hearings. Those uninvestigated states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, and Maryland) contained nearly half of the total population of former slaves.40 Indications of epic violence were reported in most of them. For example, in 1868 Howard accounted for “outrages reported as committed by whites upon colored people in the State of Kentucky during the year” amounting to “murders, 26; rapes, 3; shootings, 30; otherwise maltreated, 265; total, 327.” These numbers doubtfully reflect the reality. Two paragraphs later, he reviewed the mode of procedure to prosecute perpetrators, but admitted that they could rarely punish offenders due to the inability to make arrests, which was difficult “in some parts of the state, and in others, impossible. The people of the locality where the outrages occur warn, conceal, and protect the evil-­doers.” Howard gives an example of a man who murdered “David Coulter, an inoffensive colored preacher, in cold blood.” The known murderer rode openly around the country, with armed companions. If the 301

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authorities could not apprehend criminals, why would witnesses or victims report the crimes and risk the probability of unapprehended criminal retaliation? Howard provided a clue to the scope of violence with a singular unexplained and undocumented sentence: “The outrages perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan have caused a great exodus into other States.” A quick analysis of Kentucky census data confirms this assessment. In the 1860 census Kentucky contained 236,167 slaves and free blacks, inclusive. By 1870 the noncolored Kentucky population increased by 19 percent, or 179,208, and the colored population decreased by 6 percent, or 13,957, over the prior decade.41 One haunting story that is representative of the mass of stories in the report was told by Charlotte Fowler to the investigating congressional subcommittee in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She and her husband, Wallace, and their three grandchildren lived on a subsistence farm, three miles from Glen Springs. One night, while Charlotte lay ill in bed, masked men loudly forced their way into their home. The intruders shot Wallace in the head in full view of the young children, who cried out to Charlotte that the men had killed their grandfather. But the shot did not immediately kill him. Roused by the noise and shouted threats, Charlotte arose from her bed to find her husband mortally wounded on the floor. Every time Wallace breathed, his brains and blood leaked over his eyes. With a gun in her face, Charlotte was compelled to participate in the gruesome work while the children watched. Seeing that Wallace was not dead, the masked invaders forced her to give them a flame, which they used to build a fire on his prostrate chest. Wallace Fowler died slowly, succumbing the next day. The record shows that during her testimony, Charlotte interjected, “My old man is dead and I am left alone.” She began to weep, and the interview soon ended. The chief murderer was the white father of a boy whom Wallace had caught stealing his watermelons.42 No prosecution is mentioned in the transcript. In North Carolina freedman Essic Harris parenthetically remarked during his testimony that during slavery, nobody could have knocked his door down and escaped the punishment of his master. Following up, a surprised senator asked, “Are the colored people in a worse condition now than when in slavery?” Harris replied, “Of course.” Too often, emancipation did not afford, as Lincoln imagined, “an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race for life,” but instead meant exposure and vulnerability to a hostile world that could not let go of the past.43 Events in the South showed that the aims of Reconstruction measures touched a deeper nerve in Southern political society than the war ever did. 302

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During the war, resistance to the Union was directed by the officers of the Confederate government and required conscription. Resistance to Reconstruction sprang up from the people, and participation was voluntary, entailing great risk. Many examples can show that the spirit of resistance emerged from the primal substance of their way of life. One example suffices: a Southern woman dedicated her hagiography of the original Klansmen to her mother and other Southern women, who “Designed and Manufactured with Their Own Fingers the Regalia for the Ku Klux Klansmen and the Trappings for Their Horses.”44 To defeat the aims of Reconstruction and defend their own aims, they were willing to go so far as to adopt the tool of cruelty at the cost of sacrificing their own humanity. They knew that their occupier had the means to annihilate them, yet they pressed forward anyway. The circumstances of the Colfax Massacre illustrate their audacity. Between 1870 and 1871, Congress passed three enforcement acts that criminalized private and state-­sponsored assaults upon the civil and political rights of black Americans.45 Grant, the general who had subdued the Confederacy’s military, presided over the branch of the federal government responsible for executing those laws. In 1871 Grant announced that he was willing to use that power. He declared martial law in nine South Carolina counties, suspended habeas corpus, and sent in the army and federal prosecutors, who rounded up hundreds of terrorists and put them on trial.46 In his second inaugural address, in March 1873, Grant announced his intention to sustain the rights of the emancipated. The freed slave, he said, “is not possessed of the civil rights which citizenship should carry with it.This is wrong, and should be corrected. To this correction I stand committed, so far as Executive influence can avail.” Between that inaugural address and the Colfax Massacre, the New York Times republished an address in the Atlanta Press by former Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, in which he encouraged “all ex-­Confederates of every grade and class to cling closer to the glorious principle of self-­government for which they had contended in the day of fratricidal strife.” This was populist revisionism. The Confederacy had contended against republican self-­government. Stephens recast the war as a struggle to remove outside interference in Southern government, which suited the popular political goal to suppress black American citizenship, imposed from outside. Stephens was using his standing in the South to rally and hearten the Southern people, telling them that their war, as he reinterpreted it, was not over and could still be won. He promised that “the day is not distant, when their ‘leaders’ in the late ‘rebellion,’ so called in the language of Andy Johnson, will no longer be ‘branded’ 303

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with the dishonoring name of traitors, but denoted in history in the rank of self-­sacrificing patriots.”47 In saying this, Stephens was lending his reinterpreted version of past events and his role in those events to the new popular cause, so that opposition to black citizenship could rehabilitate his reputation and the reputations of Davis and other failed leaders of the Confederacy. Stephens’s “glorious principle of self-­government” won the day. Despite Grant’s power and reputation as conqueror of the Confederacy, white Southerners slaughtered at least sixty-­two black Americans attempting to protect the integrity of the vote in Colfax, Louisiana, only one month after Grant’s address.48 When all other means fail, the Republicans knew, and we know, how to deal effectively with this kind of desperate rebellion: one can meet and overmatch cruelty with greater ruthlessness and use spectacular killings to overawe incipient resistance. But among a people who live by the Declaration’s anti-­Machiavellian principles, few have the stomach for the Machiavellian prescription, the bloody arts that Cesare Borgia practiced upon the occupied people of the Romagna who resisted him and then practiced upon his betrayed henchman, Remirro de Orco.49 It is one thing to engage in “speculative audacity” and to conduct “armchair bloodbaths” from a safe distance; it is quite another to be there and to put the noose around the necks of men, even guilty men, especially if their names are Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens.50 The softer course adopted by the Northern people and their representatives during Reconstruction raises the questions again that Lincoln invoked at the outset of the war, whether there is “in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness?” And “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” To endure and to preserve justice, modern republics must find a mean between these two excesses. They must respect liberty but toleration cannot be unlimited. They must meet oppression with firmness. If republics tolerate corrigible oppression within or without their borders on the mistaken idea that our principles of justice require this kind of toleration, they embolden weak threats and permit them to gather strength and become formidable. They invite greater injustice and their own overthrow. In sum, they allow the enemies of liberty to exploit liberty in order to defeat liberty.51 In their short history since 1776, modern republics have repeatedly erred in this way. As a result, they have sometimes expired or nearly expired at a great and avoidable cost. Their toleration of oppression has earned them blame, not praise, from future generations, and exposed them to doubts in their fidelity to principle. 304

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After the war the Republicans and the Northern people lacked neither principle nor power. Their resolve was outlasted by the foes of regime change in the South, who were far weaker in material strength. For this deficiency of will, the Republicans exposed themselves to reproach. One American scholar blames them for lacking the “will to use available power” against the Ku Klux Klan. Apart from one Republican governor, none showed “stern resolution to act against the terrorists.”52 Another scholar, as coauthor, refers to Republican acquiescence to ending Reconstruction and the resumption of normal state-­federal relations as “the abandonment of the freed slaves to the prejudices of their former owners.”53 Both of these scholars wrote publicly about the continued American occupation of Iraq during the administration of George W. Bush. Setting aside that administration’s merits and demerits and primed by their writings on Reconstruction, we would expect their policy reflections to have centered, above all, on the lives, liberty, and property of the Iraqi people, for surely they valued Iraqis no less than the freedmen of Reconstruction. We would expect the one to have urged the U.S. government to show “stern resolution to act against the terrorists” and the other to have discouraged the abandonment of the Iraqis “to the prejudices” of terrorists and tyrants. We would expect them to have praised or blamed the administration according to the same standard, fidelity to the rights of humanity. In fact, both favored American withdrawal and harshly censured the occupation, one deriding “regime change.” The insecurity of the liberty and lives of the Iraqi people did not even receive their sympathetic comment.54 Their language is strikingly similar to Northern arguments for putting an end to Reconstruction, which those scholars had criticized. The point here is not to hold these scholars to account, but to use their published writings to hold all of us to account who profess the same principles that they evidently do. How many of us, who are not on record, lament the retreat from Reconstruction in our past but have held back from firmly supporting the rights of humanity in our present? Repeatedly, modern republics have struggled to hold together strong political coalitions that back the tough but necessary measures to check advances against liberty. This is the deeper problem with modern republics that Lincoln diagnosed. The deeper cause of this problem that the American example shows, is that when our own liberty is safe, we do not easily see that our commitment to the liberty of all is not only a duty but also is compassed by our self-­interest properly understood. 305

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For decades before the war, the North was divided and opposition to the oligarchy was weak. Although a majority of New Englanders undoubtedly shared Garrison’s antislavery and republican principles, they dragged him through the streets of Boston with a rope around his neck because he refused to tolerate oppression. Due to the Northern policy of toleration and appeasement, the oligarchy grew bolder. Only when their own liberty was in danger did Northerners discover their will to confront the threat. After the war, their liberty was safe once again, but liberty in the South was insecure. Narrow self-­interest no longer reinforced Northern resolve to check oppression and achieve the aim of Reconstruction. Many intelligent Northerners did mock and demand an end to regime change in the South, sapping Northern will and resulting in retreat. Poor Whites, the Swing Votes of Reconstruction From the point of view of Republicans in Washington, D.C., the power that opposed and outlasted them did not come from the expected source. It is not clear how many former members of the ruling class initially resisted and how many accepted the Republican program in the South. Some changed their political principles, became Republicans, and favored equal civil and political rights for the emancipated. John Lynch listed an impressive roll call of repentant aristocrats and suggested that even aristocratic Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and P. G. T. Beauregard acquired Republican sympathies.55 Some scholars attribute authorship of postbellum violence against blacks to unreconstructed members of the old ruling class.56 Studies of the Klan have found that these violent movements were equal-­opportunity employers and that all classes of whites participated, though the old oligarchy usually led them.57 Yet no matter how many of the former rulers resisted or accepted the Republican program, their conduct was not decisive. They were, by definition, a minority. The outcome of regime change depended on the conduct of the white majority. The Republican attempt to weaken and destroy the oligarchic regime in the interest of establishing republicanism loosened the restraints that held back the multitude. They could finally use the power of their numbers to sway events as they wished. Poor whites controlled the balance of power, and their conduct determined the destiny of the South. The swing votes of Reconstruction were in their hands. The white majority had a strong political incentive to befriend the emancipated and make common cause for color-­blind equal citizenship. They needed each other. Advancing under the republican banner together, they 306

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could have prevented the reestablishment of the old oligarchy, which had ruled them both before the war, and erased its traces from a new South. The oligarchy had deprived the poor whites, too, of their right to be free and equal republican citizens. Northern statesmen were well aware of the old and deep animosity between the ruled and ruling whites and were well aware of their antebellum intrastate broils. The frequent, bitter attacks on the ruling class before the war by Southern representatives of the poor whites, men like Andrew Johnson, Francis Blair, and Hinton Helper, seemed to offer evidence that the white majority in the South would vote Republican at the nearest opportunity and pull up the old oligarchy by the roots. With a Republican Congress at their backs, ruled whites and the emancipated slaves could join their political fortunes, just as many did when they both fought with the Union army. Had the white majority joined with the emancipated as a unit and sustained their mutual claims to equal citizenship and liberty, it is hard to imagine that the weakened oligarchy could have prevailed against them, backed by the Northern people and the national government. Instead, the white majority turned against the emancipated. While some formidable white-­black coalitions formed in many states during congressional Reconstruction, the scalawags were a minority, and while they mostly did brave terrorism to support black citizenship, their support was generally weak or equivocal.58 The path of the white majority ended where the career of onetime civil rights crusader Thomas Watson ended, in supporting black oppression.59 The results of the war emboldened the white majority, and the old oligarchy could not control them. Their iron rule slackened. Events confirmed the impotency of the former rulers, while revolution swept the South. In a revealing public letter in 1874 written by Representative Charles Hays of Alabama, the South was the picture of chaos. Hays had been the largest slave owner of Alabama and an officer in the Confederate army. Since the end of the war, he had joined the ranks of former slaveholders who had abandoned their former views and become Republicans. His letter documents shootings, drownings, hangings, and mutilations visited upon blacks and white Republicans in multiple Alabama counties. Hays attributed the violence to a “spirit of rebellion against the laws and Government of the United States.” The “riots, murders, assassinations and torturings” were all one-­sided, against the friends of the national government, and were “more common than they have ever been at any hour since Lee surrendered to Grant.” The bewildered Hays wrote, “I thought I knew the feelings and passions of our people.”60 307

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Revolutionary chaos shone a bright light on the former ruler’s naïveté. By necessity, ruled people quietly conceal their disaffection, but revolution tears away the mask. Hays admitted that he was sadly incorrect to have believed that the people “would quietly accept that destiny, which the fiat of disastrous war had so emphatically placed upon them.” He had previously thought that by 1874, they would “be a free, united and happy people.” But the aristocrat could not command the whirlwind, tossing the broken parts of the oligarchic regime in a violent swirl. He looked for “the strong arm of Federal power” to restore order. Before the war, an appeal for assistance such as this by a prominent slaveholder from the proud ruling class would have been incredible. Now his former slaves were returning to him, begging his protection for “themselves and their little ones from murder and destruction.” But he could not “save them from the reign of the drunken desperado and the midnight marauder.” The former ruler admitted, “I am powerless to help them,” and, in fact, he admitted that his life was in danger also.61 Even leaders who opposed the Republican program of regime change seem to have lost the power to command the multitude, and such was the case of widely respected Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. His biographers relate the story that Forrest’s intention in joining the Ku Klux Klan was to keep blacks “in their place.”62 When he said this, it was evident that he meant a subordinate place for blacks, informed by prior custom. If not in slavery, then he quite possibly meant a place not too distant from slavery. His intention was stasis, insofar as possible. Forrest seems to have believed that the purpose of the Klan was the preservation of the status quo ante, and this intention directly opposed the Republican project, which aimed at the highest order of change. By joining and becoming the national leader of the Klan, Forrest intended to preserve the old order. Contemporaries remembered that the “best men” of the South organized the Klan.63 But soon, these “best men” were confronted by unexpectedly violent conduct by the rank and file of their organization. One of Forrest’s coadjutants in the Klan, former Confederate general George Gordon, issued an astonishing public message that dissociated the Klan from outrages committed in the Klan’s name. He claimed that the Klan was a protective organization, the friend of good whites and blacks, and that blacks had nothing to fear “as long as they behave themselves.” Then he singled out other Klansmen and concentrated his dark threats on them. He directly addressed the perpetrators of the atrocities, ominously warning these “imposters” that if the Klan found 308

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them, their fate at the Klan’s hands would discourage other men from the same conduct.64 Gordon’s message indicated that ruled whites were not obeying, and the old oligarchy was prepared to brandish the sword against them, clandestinely if necessary, to bring them into line. Forrest also reacted strongly to the violence of the rank and file and issued an order to the Klan to disband.65 But the rank and file ignored orders and threats and continued to perpetuate violence.66 When called to testify before the investigating congressional committee, Forrest insisted that the original aims of the organization had nothing to do with the subsequent terror and that he had done all he could to stop and suppress outrages.67 Later, he offered his services to Governor John C. Brown of Tennessee, another ex-­K lansman and his former subordinate general officer, proposing to apprehend and “exterminate the white marauders who disgrace their race by this cowardly murder of Negroes.”68 At any other time, a determination such as this from the feared General Forrest might have caused men to shudder, but revolutions are uncommon times. One of Forrest’s biographers concluded that his opinions about race “developed more in the direction of liberal enlightenment, than those of most other Americans in the nation’s history.” This seems to be an overstatement, a misinterpretation of the old slave trader who joined the Klan to keep blacks in their place. Just because the violence disgusted Forrest does not mean that he acquired Republican convictions. Forrest and the “best men” of the South organized the Klan to preserve the oligarchy, and the insubordination of the rank and file just as well impeded a successful restoration of the regime as did the Republican policy in Congress. But the reviewers of Forrest’s biographies also seem to misjudge Forrest. They did not see anything significant in his repudiation of the Klan and rather doubt his sincerity when the organization turned to wanton violence. One reviewer argued that financial self-­interest explains his repudiation. Another dismissed the idea that Forrest was “repulsed by the racial terrorism of the organization,” but offered no argument to counter Forrest’s public protestations and his offer to the governor of Tennessee to exterminate the perpetrators of terror.69 What both biographers and reviewers seem to miss about the case of Forrest and the Klan is that it demonstrated that ruled whites were shaking off their former rulers. The insubordination of rank-­and-­fi le Klansmen and the threats of Gordon and Forrest against them indicated that a civil war had broken out afresh within the ranks of the Klan, just as civil strife had occasionally broken out between ruled and ruling whites in times past. This 309

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time, and unlike antebellum times, the “best men” of the South who sought to preserve the old order could not easily regain control of the rank-­and-­fi le whites. The aim of these defenders of the old order did not seem to have been to murder and terrorize the emancipated, but to control and rule them along with everyone else, and restore the oligarchy. Antebellum history substantiates the sincerity of the disgust of the “best men” for wanton assaults on and murder of blacks. Although the prewar Southern oligarchy was built on the principle of inequality, they nevertheless criminalized the abuse and murder of slaves. In the decades before the war, the conviction rate for murders of slaves even in South Carolina did not lag far behind the overall murder conviction rate, 32 to 46.7 percent. Appellate courts in the antebellum South more often than not upheld convictions for slave murders.70 This practice of the old regime contrasted with the conduct of rank-­and-­fi le whites during Reconstruction.71 These whites created the terror and disregarded the command to cease even by the feared General Nathan Bedford Forrest. But why did they turn against the emancipated? In light of the noisy, vituperative, and pathetic demands for republican liberty in antebellum times by ruled Southern whites and their representatives, it is surprising, almost incomprehensible, that they refrained from unifying with the freedmen, at the price of risking the loss of their own liberty for which they had so long clamored. By forgoing a durable political coalition with blacks, the ruled whites ensured political division, and division between ruled whites and blacks gave the surviving ruling class an opportunity to reclaim as much of their prior superiority over all of them as they could. Eventually, the ruling class saw and seized this opportunity. Prior to the rise of the Republican Party, the ruling Southern minority had skillfully divided the North and used this division in order to rule the nation. Now they were using this wedge strategy again, but this time in their own section to preserve their local political mastery. Southern rulers learned to foment and exploit the division between poor whites and blacks. The poor whites played right into the oligarchy’s hands. Their hostility and violence drove blacks back into an uneasy coalition with the oligarchic class. Upper-­class whites afforded protection for blacks in exchange for black votes, which were used to overcome the Southern white majority.72 This exchange between the white oligarchs and the blacks was the same as in antebellum times, protection in exchange for submission, but with a difference. Black Americans were no longer slaves, and at least they could choose, but their alternatives were between great and greater evils. The animus of the poor whites against blacks guaranteed these gloomy alternatives. When put 310

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to the test, the poor whites seemed to hate black liberty more than they loved their own liberty. In order to drown black hopes, they drowned their own hopes. They ensured the incompleteness of regime change. In his reflections on the division between poor whites and blacks, William Julius Wilson argues that competition between poor white labor and black labor caused racial hostility. Because the ruling class owned scarce capital assets, the Southern laboring classes depended on the rulers for employment and were more easily divided against each other.73 This explanation seems plausible, but it does not go far enough into root causes. Does postwar economic scarcity and competition necessarily divide laborers and drive some to murder others? Surely, other postwar reconstructions did not produce violence among laborers, and many cases come to mind in which laborers unified and quickly rebuilt their nations. Somehow, great political meanings fused to nominal biological differences. Black skin became hateful, so much so that the value of a black life shrank to insignificance and his murder became desirable. The prior oligarchy is the factor that explains why the white majority in the South violently turned against the freedmen, rather than unite with them and quickly establish republicanism during Reconstruction. Each master-­slave dyad on a private estate had been a seminal building block of an oligarchic political regime, and this incipient germ of public despotism adversely affected everyone who was neither a slave nor a master in its vicinity. From the perspective of poor Southern whites during Reconstruction, slavery had been the foundation of the political regime that robbed them of their liberty. The origin of the persistent disdain and hatred of poor whites for blacks, the origin of the construction of profound categorical difference from nominal biological differences, began with oligarchic rule in the South, which arose from entrenched domestic slavery. Oligarchy magnified the perception of black inferiority that infected the nation through interregime penetration, which probably led to theories of racial classification generally. By injuring poor whites, oligarchy produced the hatred of poor whites for blacks in the South, where violence and discrimination against nonwhites were worst. The Perception of Black Inferiority Since Ronald Takaki’s influential Iron Cages (1979), scholars who study race have reached a general conclusion that race is a human-­made concept. This view does not deny nominal biological difference among racial categories, but does advance the view that the major differences ascribed to race are 311

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determined by society and politics. Several thoughtful Americans during the early Republic presented accounts of the formation of racial categories that are in harmony with these contemporary scholars. These early Americans observed how the perception of black inferiority developed within the structure of oligarchy. By tracing the logic of this development, it is easier to understand why the perception of black inferiority and its logical adjunct, contempt, were stronger among poor whites of the antebellum South than in any other part of America. When St. George Tucker pressed for Virginia to abolish slavery in 1796, he demonstrated a keen understanding of its antirepublican effects. On the title page of the first edition of A Dissertation on Slavery (1796), he quoted Montesquieu: “Slavery not only violates the Laws of Nature, and of civil Society, it also wounds the best Forms of Government: in a Democracy, where all Men are equal, Slavery is contrary to the Spirit of the Constitution.” In his initial note to his reader past the title page, he writes that “the Abolition of Slavery” is “an object of the first importance, not only to our moral character and domestic peace, but even to our political salvation.” The reason the perpetuation of slavery might doom their republican political aspirations was that with respect to slaves and masters, bondage “unfit the former for freedom, and the latter for equality.” 74 The premise of his analysis was that all human beings are created with a capacity for equal liberty to which they are entitled by natural right, the basis of American republicanism, but the agency of slavery ruined their character. Slavery conditioned some for subservience and others for dominance. Habitual domination at home shaped slaveholders’ expectation to rule in all things. Leaving the plantation and entering political society, they could not adjust well to republican equality. Subservience at home halted the slaves’ development of their faculties for personal self-­government. Leaving the plantation and entering political society, they could not adjust well to republican liberty. Neither a man with the character of a master nor one with that of a slave was fit for republican citizenship, upon which the growth, strength, and preservation of the young Republic depended. Tucker opposed immediate abolition on the grounds of prudence. Both masters and slaves needed a reeducation to prepare them for republican citizenship, because “the mind of man must in some measure be formed for his future condition.” The idea that the inferior condition of slaves was due to slavery and not biological difference was strong in the founding era.75 In 1789 Benjamin Franklin wrote that “the unhappy man” “who has long been treated as a 312

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brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties. . . . Accustomed to move like a mere machine, by the will of a master, reflection is suspended; he has not the power of choice; and reason and conscience have but little influence over his conduct.” That is, nature and nature’s God created all members of the human family equal, but the experience of slavery took “half the man away.” 76 The degrading effect on the enslaved was compounded by another problem, the specific type of slavery that the founders inherited from the British monarchy. Tucker contrasted American slavery to other types of slavery that had existed in the Roman Empire and to villeinage in feudal England. The key difference was that in the other systems, slaves were not marked by heritable, physical traits.77 In Rome and in England, a freed slave shared the same physical traits as the rest of the population. Other subjects or citizens would not be able to identify former slaves or the descendants of slaves, except by their conduct. If a former slave could acquire the habits and bearing of a freeman, he could expect social acceptance, because his former enslavement could remain unknown to strangers. It made no difference that a stranger might be inclined to unfairly discriminate against a former slave if the freedman’s former enslavement were not known. Because the stranger could not distinguish a freedman with good character from someone born free, discrimination against former slaves was nearly impossible. Former slaves and the descendants of slaves could more easily assimilate into the main body of subjects or citizens. In America the memory of enslavement followed all former slaves and even their children and their children’s children, who were never slaves, in perpetuity. The only sure preventative of unfair discrimination was that successive generations might blend through immigration or intermarriage. In America former slaves and their descendants had to overcome not only the debilitating effects of slavery itself, but also political society’s easy association of them with slavery. Even a slave society that used the ugliest imaginable mark for slaves, a brand scarring the face, was in a better position to be free of discrimination than slave society in America. A brand might expose the former slave to discrimination after emancipation, but a brand dies with its owner. The children who had never been slaves would not suffer from the same discrimination. James Madison also recognized that the association of color with slavery made life far more difficult for the emancipated. He noticed that some states 313

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were erecting a color line among free persons, and he pinpointed the cause: “All these perplexities develope [sic] more & more the dreadful fruitfulness of the original sin of the African trade.” 78 His specific mention of “the African trade” is important. Had the slave trade originally been European and not African, the result of emancipation in America would have been similar to emancipations in Rome or England. When the slaves were freed, they would have had the same appearance as free persons, and nobody would have known who had and had not been enslaved. This salutary ignorance could also have been achieved if whites and blacks had both been slaves and had both been free citizens in relatively equal proportions. Such was probably the actual case in the early colonial period in Virginia. At that time and place, slaves were indentured servants and were both white and black. Only later did indentured servitude transform into Africanized chattel slavery.79 Evidence drawn from those earlier times showed that “Virginians during these years were ready to think of Negroes as members or potential members of the community on the same terms as other men and to demand of them the same standards of behavior. Black men and white serving the same master worked, ate, and slept together, and together shared in escapades, escapes, and punishments.”80 Had slavery and freedom remained biracial institutions, the goal of the republicans in the founding and Reconstruction eras would have been easier to attain. Tucker recognized that a republican people needed and prized virtue to perpetuate the republican political institutions. They rightly rejected both slavish and domineering character in principle. Examples of this moral concern are found in the early national period when Tucker was thinking about the problem of American slavery. In the debates from December 1794 to January 1795 in the U.S. House of Representatives, leading to the Naturalization Act of 1795, nobody assigned higher or lower capacities for citizenship to race. Nobody expressed a need to preserve “whiteness” as some sort of national goal. The entire debate turned on how to test for character compatible with republicanism and what culturally defined classes of people exhibited that character and what cultural classes did not. One member proposed that immigrants swear attachment “to a Republican form of Government.” Others worried that immigrants would assume a European meaning and not the improved American meaning of “republican.” Many agreed that immigrants should renounce hereditary titles if they held them in their native countries. One representative argued that on the same reasoning, the laws should prohibit Catholics from entering because 314

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they had been habituated to obey an aristocracy of priests. Another proposed to add these words: “And also, in case any such alien shall hold any person in slavery, he shall renounce it, and declare that he holds all men free and equal.” Notably, Representative James Madison from Virginia announced that he was inclined to vote for the proposal to exclude immigrants bringing slaves. In the course of the lengthy debate, only one representative suggested limiting immigration on the basis of origin. The place of origin he proscribed was Europe—­the likely origin of all the members of the House. The people, from that “quarter of the world so full of disorder and corruption, . . . might contaminate the purity and simplicity of the American character.” He preferred admitting none to admitting that corruption into America.81 A letter from John W. Gurley, the attorney general of the Orleans Territory in 1804, offers further proof of the strength of their generation’s determination to protect the nation’s republican character and that racial characteristics did not determine fitness for republican citizenship. Congress had recently organized the Orleans Territory from lands gained by the Louisiana Purchase. Like most American citizens in the existing states, the French inhabitants of the Orleans Territory were European in origin. This kindred relation did not stop Gurley from writing a devastating assessment of their unreadiness for republican self-­government, for which reason he urged against admitting them as citizens. “A large majority of ye population” were “ignorant of ye first principles of republicanism and very generally attached from habit and prejudice to ye forms of their antient government.” They were accustomed not to self-­government but rather “to rule as well as to obey.” They were “at ye same time servile & proud.”82 The monarchy (“their antient government”) had created ranks, and within those ranks, subordinates were “servile” and superiors were “proud,” or, to borrow Tucker’s language, monarchy had “unfit the former for freedom, and the latter for equality” in the Orleans Territory. But in America, an incidental physical appearance was widely associated with slavish character and collided with this moral aim to protect the character of republicanism. Contact with former slaves and their descendants tempted the prejudice of American citizens in a way that the prejudice of other societies could not be tempted. Those societies had to judge former slaves by the content of their character, because there was no easy way they could identify them as former slaves. In America, prejudice heightened discrimination against freed slaves and their descendants, and Tucker recounts the many “civil incapacities” that followed the freed slave “and his posterity, 315

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of the same complexion with himself.”83 The stigma of slavish character that had been attached to the changeable condition of bondage transferred to unchangeable biology. Republican political society especially aggravated prejudice and discrimination because in that society all were cosovereign and the survival, strength, and prudent governance of the free whole depended on the republican character of each. Every citizen depended on the republican character of every other citizen to maintain the integrity of the whole, their common possession. They rightly deplored bad character, but they unjustly ascribed bad character to color. In the debates over the Missouri Constitution presented to Congress for acceptance in 1820, Representative John Sergeant of Pennsylvania recognized the unique problem for the emancipated that American slavery created when he objected to a clause discriminatory to free persons of color. Black Americans were naturally equal and not inferior to whites, he argued, but because slavery was associated with skin color, the stigma of slavery survived their emancipation. Addressing the slaveholding members of the House, he lamented, “Nature has placed upon them an unalterable physical mark, and you have associated with it an inseparable moral degradation, either of which opposes a barrier not to be passed, to their coalescing with the society that surrounds them. They are, and forever must remain, distinct.”84 Representative Louis McLane of Delaware agreed with Sergeant on the cause of discrimination against blacks, and its injustice, but nevertheless supported the discriminatory clause. He had read “Judge Tucker” and approved of his analysis but argued that there was no other solution to the problem.85 Among the Romans the bondman wore the same color with the free population, and was no otherwise distinguishable from the rest of the community than by his subjection to his master; when his shackles were loosened, he readily mixed with his fellow men like a drop added to the stream, and floated on with the mass of the community to a common destiny. But very different is the unhappy African race within the United States. Their servitude is not their only distinguishable feature; they never can mingle or assimilate with the white population, more than oil with water.86

Because slaveholders had drawn a color line separating slavery from freedom, white Americans saw unrepublican slavishness when they saw black Americans, whether they were actually enslaved or free. McLane understood that this was a great misfortune, and to him it apparently seemed that 316

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the association of color with slavishness was unjust. Nevertheless, the white populations’ perceptions were a fact, and a fact that would persist, until all citizens “shall be compelled to yield to the law of force.”87 Until force compelled men to adjust to a biracial republican society, McLane said, he could not consent to equalizing citizenship between whites and blacks but had to yield to facts. Even though McLane showed that he perfectly understood the problem for the emancipated created by racialized slavery, he believed that “civil incapacities” were a necessary measure, which further compounded the problem. Social and political discrimination invited by skin color doubtlessly impeded former slaves from acquiring the expected republican character and further hindered their adjustment from slavery to freedom. Franklin and Tucker understood that any human being leaving slavery needed assistance to become fit for citizenship. But because former slaves could not shed the badge of their former enslavement, they encountered discrimination from other citizens rather than assistance. From the perspective of free whites, the perceived inability of the emancipated to develop republican character justified more “civil incapacities,” which further harmed the development of the republican character of this portion of the citizenry. White discrimination became self-­justifying. The outcome of this vicious cycle supported the growth of the opinion that blacks were naturally inferior, which collided with the fundamental principles of the republican regime. Reinforcing the vicious cycle, the revolutionary oligarchy in the antebellum South rejected those fundamental principles altogether and was the primary agent in the spread and growth of racialized slavery, which deepened the problem. They unapologetically expanded slavery while touting the principle of inequality. The degradation of their slaves and the difficulty of the emancipated to acquire republican character, which was made more difficult by their prejudice, could be used to support their self-­serving argument about natural incapacity of black Americans based on a nominal biological difference. Surprisingly, it was the author of the Declaration of Independence who became the first prominent American statesman after 1776 to question natural equality between blacks and whites. After advancing many startling speculations about their biological differences in the Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson concludes, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks . . . are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and 317

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mind.”88 Nevertheless, his speculations were fodder for more speculations. From the weed of his suspicion grew a great tree of conviction in America that blacks were inferior. In the antebellum South, the conditions in which these perceptions of black inferiority developed were far more pronounced than in the North, because racialized slavery was concentrated there. Everywhere poor whites could see that their rulers had chosen blacks for their slaves, and their rulers’ choice implied a rationale: those who expected to master others chose others best suited to be mastered. In 1894 Theodore Roosevelt explained this logic that was bound up with the oligarchic regime. He wrote, “The presence of the negro in our Southern States is a legacy from the time when we were ruled by a trans-­oceanic aristocracy.”89 Stolen from their homes, transported across a vast sea, and settled in bondage in a strange land, Africans had nowhere to go and few ways to conceal themselves within the white population, even if they escaped. Circumstances in America favored slavery marked by color. Their marked difference in color more easily facilitated the permanency of their enslaved condition, which degraded their human character, and as a result, their degradation was attributed to color and not to condition. From the point of view of poor whites, their rulers’ choice reinforced the perception that blacks were biologically inferior and incapable of republican citizenship. Poor Whites’ Hatred toward Blacks Due to their remoteness from slavery, Northerners did not experience its bitter fruit, the development of oligarchy in their midst. Northerners could develop the perception of black inferiority, but their republicanism was untouched. The political effects of slavery did inflict a grievous injury on poor whites in the South, who lost their liberty. Poor white hatred and violence against blacks were the result and are, therefore, political in origin. John Adams provided an early clue to the origin and development of nonslaveholders’ hatred for slaves. Reflecting on his life in republican Massachusetts, in 1795 Adams wrote, “I never knew a jury, by a verdict, to determine a negro to be a slave.” As disinterested members of a jury, the people judged slavery to be unjust to the slave. Yet had Massachusetts gentlemen “been permitted by law to hold slaves, the common white people would have put the negroes to death, and their masters too, perhaps.” As interested members of political society, the people would defend themselves, Adams supposed, with 318

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savagery. He explained that the real cause of slavery’s demise in Massachusetts was “the multiplication of labouring white people, who would no longer suffer the rich to employ these sable rivals so much to their injury.”90 Adams strongly hints that the common people knew that slavery destroyed republicanism and raised up untitled lords over them. Stripped of their republican liberty, the common people of the South viewed slaves and their ruling masters as coordinate parts of the machinery that humiliatingly crushed them. From their point of view, the perceived natural inferiority of blacks was the cause of black slavery, and black slavery was the cause of the oligarchy that ruined them. Their hatred for black Americans was not a hatred borne in spite of blacks’ cruel enslavement; they hated blacks because of it. Their rage focused on both the ruling class and anyone who bore the mark of the slave. Their resentment of the injury done to them, and their anger toward slaves, who had displaced them from their rightful social and political position, was apparent before the war. When Representative Francis Blair of Missouri undertook to defend poor whites on the House floor in 1858, he repeatedly emphasized that the ruling oligarchy loved their slaves more than citizens of the Republic. Blair’s speech shows that he knew that poor whites despised the allegedly affectionate, symbiotic relations between master and slave that the ruling oligarchy celebrated. In a report published that same year, the South Carolina Legislature exulted, “One of the charms of plantation life consists in the pleasant intercourse between master and slave; characterized, as it generally is, by kindness of feeling on both sides.”91 Those same sentiments had just been elaborated in the Senate by James Hammond of South Carolina, before Blair answered him in the House. While praising the affectionate relations between master and slave, Hammond had heaped contempt on poor, laboring citizens, demeaning both the poor whites of the South and Northern “mudsills.” Blair claimed to speak on behalf of all crushed poor whites in the South who lacked a political voice and targeted “the oligarchy which rests upon this servile institution.” Then he dramatically read Hammond’s galling remarks into the record, railing: It is very clear that the Senator from South Carolina does not prefer the citizens of the Republic to his slaves. He has, in his recent speech, shown that he was the mouthpiece of the privileged classes—­the Cicero of this new oligarchy, and not a tribune of the people. . . . 319

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Sir, he prefers his slaves to the citizens of the Republic, and would have the latter deprived of the right of elective franchise, as his negro slaves are. He denounces the man who lives by daily labor, and the whole class of manual laborers and operatives, as slaves. He characterizes our foreign population as a horde of semi-­barbarous emigrants, and he would deny them a share of the public lands upon which to build their homes, and educate their children. . . . Here is a colossal aggregation of wealth invested in negroes, which undertakes to seize this Government to pervert it to its own purpose, and to prevent the freemen of the country from entering the Territories except in competition with slave labor; and the Democratic party, instead of standing where it used to stand, in opposition to these anti-­Democratic measures, is as servile a tool of the oligarchy as are the negro slaves themselves. . . . If there is one class of people on this continent more interested than another in putting a stop to this extension of slavery into the Territories, it is the free white laborers of the South. They have infinitely more interest in the matter than any other class of the people, because they have felt the pressure of the institution. They have been shut out from all ownership in the soil, and driven out of all employment in the States where slavery now exists.92

Straining at the restraints of parliamentary decorum, Blair’s seething rage at the effrontery, insolence, and injustice of the oligarchy spilled over the floor of the House. He would sweep America clean of both slaves and masters. In “Why Free Workingmen Hate the Slaves,” Charles Nordhoff explained to a Northern audience the same rationale that Blair did: “They hate the slaves because slavery oppresses them. Turn where he will, the southern free mechanic and laborer finds the negro slave preferred before him.” Nordhoff recounted example after example of slave owners’ preferment of their slaves and the abject, wageless, and unemployed condition of Southern freemen. In one case quoted by Nordhoff, a boat’s mate on a ship transport was asked why the Irish and not the slaves were assigned the more dangerous job of loading cotton bales. He replied, “The niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything.”93 The violence of the poor whites during Reconstruction showed that they felt this contempt, and they vented their rage on the ones whom the poor whites perceived to be their coddled antagonists. Like Blair, Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee also came from a border-­ slave state and also presumed to speak for the crushed poor whites in the South. He, too, railed against the “pampered, bloated, corrupted aristocracy.” 320

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He had once argued that prohibiting slavery in the territories permitted the poor white to leave his dependent condition in the slaveholding states and finally build a free middle-­class existence.94 However, Johnson later vetoed the Reconstruction enactments that confirmed the equality of freedmen, showing that he was not particularly interested in helping the freedman leave his dependent condition and finally build a free middle-­class existence. When Frederick Douglass visited the White House, President Johnson explained his positions against slavery and against equal citizenship for black Americans. He said that he opposed slavery on principle and also because it enabled “those who controlled it and owned it to constitute an aristocracy, enabling the few to derive great profits and rule the many with an iron rod.” The example of his home state of Tennessee showed that there were “twenty-­seven non-­slaveholders to one slaveholder, and yet the slave power controlled the State.” Smarting under this oppression, “the poor white man” in the South opposed both “the slave and his master” because they, “combined, kept him in slavery.” The oligarchy, supported by the slaves, had cheated the non-­ slaveholder of his rights. But “government was derived from him,” the white non-­slaveholder. Repeatedly, Johnson expressed the feelings of poor whites from their perspective. The slaves had been obsequious and respectful toward their oligarchic masters and had looked down on the poor whites; hence the “enmity” and “hate” by the poor whites towards the emancipated slave. From the point of view of poor whites, the class of slaves was an element foreign to American republicanism that had participated in the destruction of poor whites’ liberty. Professing to be “a friend of the colored man,” he warned that the investiture of the emancipated slave with equal citizenship meant bloodshed, and he suggested emigration to another land where the former slaves could better secure their liberty. To Johnson, the best outcome of the Civil War was to destroy slavery and the oligarchy and to restore white popular sovereignty.95 In The Impending Crisis in the South, Hinton Helper railed against the “villainous oligarchy,” the “treacherous, slave-­d riving legislators,” on behalf of the oppressed multitudes of the South. Slavery was the means of establishing an oligarchy of slaveholders that controlled the slave-­state governments and kept down the poor whites. He urged slavery’s complete abolition on that account. He contended that “the free States are the only members of this confederacy that have established republican forms of government based upon the theories of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry, and other eminent statesmen of Virginia.” However, he hated blacks as much as he hated slavery. 321

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One scholar labored to make sense of Helper’s antislavery position and his racism, which seemed oddly paired, and claimed that it was not easy to understand “the nature of the intelligence” of the man.96 On the contrary, the logical coherence of Helper’s racism and antislavery positions is easily understood if we see the South and the enslaved from the point of view of ruled whites. Slaves and masters had caused the poor whites’ oppression. His book expressed the furious, wounded pride of a ruled class yearning to be an enfranchised, self-­ governing republican people. As a self-appointed representative of the entire rank of poor whites, Helper, like Johnson, hated both slavishness and domination, but misattributed slavishness to biology, not condition; hence, his mind was closed to the alternative path leading to an alliance and a common citizenship with former slaves. The animosity of the white majority in the South toward slavery and blacks went hand in hand with their hatred of the ruling minority. When poor Southern whites fled the South and settled in the old Northwest, their influence ensured that the laws were simultaneously antislavery and antiblack.97 Many of these settlers understandably decamped and escaped the domain of slavery and oligarchy to secure liberty, self-­government, and prosperity, concomitants of the republican way of life.98 Unless the Southern emigrant believed that he might acquire the means to develop slave and landownership himself, he was only serving his interest in opposing slavery in his new home. To be slaveless and landless in close proximity with slaveholders meant he would be poor and ruled. Southern emigrants, therefore, prevented the potent elements of oligarchic society from following them into their new life, promised to them by the American founding but denied to them by the oligarchy. Perceiving blacks as natural inferiors due to seeing them as social and political inferiors in the oligarchic system, emigrant Southern whites left their antiblack stamp on the laws of these territories and states to keep blacks out or to restrict them from becoming full members of political society. These causes propelled poor Southern whites to join in the spontaneous grassroots explosions of violence all over the South against blacks as soon as the Reconstruction enactments required that the insurrectionary states respect black equality. The perceived inferiority of blacks meant that their lives were cheap. The old oligarchy had primed Southern society for the postbellum violence. Although the white majority was excluded from the ruling class, they were still all oligarchic men, imbued with the first principle of that political 322

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society. Personal liberty was an uncertain and alienable possession and was won and lost through individual struggle, sometimes violent struggle. Their regime taught loyalty to rank and to distrust outsiders. The white majority deemed slaves marked by color to be outside their rank and made by nature to be unworthy of their rank. These structural conditions explain why individual violence quickly transmuted into group violence perpetrated by the white majority against emancipated and newly enfranchised slaves when the results of the war disrupted the order of oligarchic society. In any political regime that is not governed by the recognition of natural equality and its first law, the Lex majoris partis, superiority or sovereignty can only be a right justified and sustained by the zealous and successful exercise of might. Instability in those regimes weakens the cords that hold back the bellum omnium contra omnes and tempts extreme violence in anyone who might gain by it. The struggle of the white majority was for the ultimate prize, sovereignty, which had been denied to them but at that moment was up for grabs. Their desperate violence aimed at sustaining their claim to sovereignty and shares the same character as the extraordinary violence seen in many political regimes shaped by inequality, when sovereignty is in question. The vicious punishments reserved for the crime of treason under monarchies were theatrical precisely because they demonstrate might to justify the right to superiority and sovereignty.99 From the point of view of poor whites, the prospect of being forced to share their sovereignty with a mass of people whom they perceived to be born to serve was a new form of an old denial of their American birthright, as seen through their oligarchic lenses. The same causes impelled the white majority to turn against their competitors in the same unnatural and cruel fashion that impelled an aspirant to the Ottoman sultanate to turn against his brothers. The memory of ruling white domination and poor white vassalage died more easily than the memory of slavery, since ruled and ruling whites could not be physically distinguished. Similar skin color concealed the former ruling class and their hereditary line from easy identification. As a result, the parts of the old oligarchy that were more susceptible to a transformation were the ruled and ruling white ranks. Blending together, the white majority and the former ruling class turned their attentions to preventing the class of persons perceived to be naturally inferior from realizing political or social equality. Retribution for the crimes of the oligarchy was visited upon these innocents, who were easily identified as once having been part of the old oligarchy’s machinery of oppression. 323

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From an antebellum oligarchy of few whites over many whites and blacks, the South first moved toward establishing white equality and black subordination after the war. Despite the effort to change the political regime from oligarchic to republican in the South, oligarchic supremacy survived in a reconstituted form. The supremacy of the slaveholders was gradually transformed into white supremacy, or white democracy, which is not democracy at all, according to the standard of the American founders or the Republicans. Last would come the flattening of all former oligarchic ranks into full political and social equality, incorporating black Americans. The civil rights movement of the twentieth century continued that process of flattening oligarchic ranks, which was subsumed by the great task of Reconstruction as the Republicans conceived it. Racial equality was not the sole aim of that task, but rather was one important aim as well as a means to a broader end, which was to establish the republicanism of the American founding in the South and to remove its moral flaws in the whole. The Exhumation and Resurrection The South’s deviation from the path established by the American founders required that task. The Constitution had failed to restrain the South from pursuing its deviant course, despite the precautions of its framers. They created a constitutional structure to preserve republicanism based on human rights, but it was a very novel structure; hence, it was untested, and its theory was not and is not easy to understand. In hindsight, the framers might have prevented the progress of the revolution in the South had they more clearly defined the sovereignty of the states and nation in the Constitution. They might have drawn the line separating the authority of the general and state governments more clearly, leaving its interpretation beyond a doubt. This would have precluded future enemies of republicanism in either the states or the national government from conjuring self-­serving misinterpretations of the Constitution, justifying their encroachment of that line from either direction, and enabling the quiet overthrow of republicanism. They might also have defined a republican form of government with greater specificity, as Adams wished they had done, restraining the enemies of republicanism from reinterpreting its meaning and inserting the aberrant political regimes that they might patronize in its new definition. These omissions were exploited by Southern oligarchs as their antebellum revolution spread from one state to the next, unimpeded by, but in violation of, the republican Constitution. 324

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We are justified in insisting that the American founders should have corrected these flaws if we are justified in expecting men to be gods. Flaws in law are inevitable because flawless law depends on the flawless foresight of the lawgiver, and only divinity can foresee every future exigency. Madison himself lamented this human disability. When combating Calhoun’s new constitutional doctrines, he wished he had left behind “a few words with a prophetic gift” that “might have prevented much error in the glosses.” For this reason, Aristotle explained that the rule of law, which is essential to republicanism and requires both foresight and virtue, is sometimes inferior to the rule of good men, which requires only virtue.100 But good men die and good laws are immortal. The strength of the Constitution was and is its model of republican government. The test of time satisfied Madison that the system worked, as long as its provisions were faithfully observed. The weakness of the Constitution that the oligarchic revolution exposed was its inability to require the enemies of republicanism to observe its provisions and submit to its republican system. It failed to stop them from breaking constitutional restraints. Plausible but false readings of the Constitution, backed by political pressure and force, created space within the Union for the oligarchic revolution to consolidate. Nevertheless, the revolution failed because events revealed that the Constitution had created a means to defend itself that the oligarchy did not foresee. One of the key premises of the Constitution was that might would follow the protection of natural right. After the ratification of the Constitution, James Wilson predicted that the protection of the natural right to liberty in our highest law would generate unparalleled, broadly diffused prosperity and a new, stronger form of patriotism that would bind the citizen to government.101 In the parts of the Union that followed the Constitution and faithfully protected personal liberty, these elements of power quietly grew, but because the slave South flouted the Constitution and the oligarchy was an affront to personal liberty, the growth of Southern power, on balance, could not keep pace with the North. Moreover, new immigrants to the United States mostly avoided the slave South and settled in the parts of the Union where the protection of their liberty was ensured. All of these elements of power—­prosperity, patriotism, and population—­favored the North because they faithfully observed the Constitution. The oligarchic revolution succeeded as far as it went but eventually called the friends of republicanism to action, and they answered the call, conscious of the historic importance of their mission. Commemorating the Union dead 325

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at Arlington National Cemetery in 1868, James Garfield recalled that before the Civil War, they had been “the most unwarlike nation of the earth.” They enjoyed “peace, liberty and personal security,” and those blessings derived from one source: “the old American principle that all owe due submission and obedience to the lawfully expressed will of the majority.” This principle, he said, was not merely a doctrine to them; “it is the system itself. It is our political firmament, in which all other truths are set, as stars in heaven.” These were the people whom the proud oligarchy underestimated. “Against this principle the whole weight of the rebellion was thrown,” and then “In a moment the fire was lighted in twenty million hearts. In a moment we were the most warlike nation on the earth. In a moment we were not merely a people with an army—­we were a people in arms.”102 Garfield’s testimony and the progress and outcome of our war vindicated Wilson’s theory. The American citizenry is fortunate that their first statesmen left behind laws founded in magnanimity, informed by broad learning and careful study, and animated by intellectual, moral, and physical courage. Thanks to this achievement, the duty of “the philosopher and historian” in our nation and in free nations today is an easier one than in earlier ages but serves a vital need, nonetheless. Their duty need not be to imagine new models of government in light of failed models in the past, but to understand and explain an unusually good model of government already imagined, devised, and framed in our highest laws. A strong and just republicanism or its overthrow in the modern age hinges on the discharge of or dereliction in the performance of this serious and perennially needed duty. An event during the war illustrated just how important popular knowledge of free government is to the perpetuity of free government. Mere intellectual ignorance of constitutionalism among our friends abroad who professed our principles cost us and perhaps almost doomed American republicanism and the cause of republican liberty in general. Despite the passage of almost one hundred years since the creation of the United States, influential European liberals who were sympathetic to the North and still struggling for stable republican government themselves could not fathom why the survival of American republicanism depended not only upon winning the war, but also upon the survival of the Union. Writing from Spain, Carl Schurz informed Secretary of State Seward that it was “exceedingly difficult to make Europeans understand” why the North needed to wage war to keep the “imperious and troublesome slave states” in the Union and why the South did not have an indefeasible right to establish their own independent nation. 326

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The philosophically gifted Schurz admitted that “all my Constitutional arguments failed to convince them.” The enemies of republicanism then could, and now can, advance antirepublican projects disguised as republican ones by exploiting the lack of education in republican constitutionalism. Schurz explained that “agents of the South” were present in Europe and were confounding European liberals “with great adroitness.” The Southerners directly appealed to liberal sentiment in Europe, claiming that the Confederacy stood for “free-­trade” and “the right of self-­government.” They pointed to the American government’s “suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, arbitrary imprisonment, the confiscation of newspapers [and] the use of armed force” to impute an illiberal character to the republican North. Schurz lamented that “opinions like these could gain ground among our natural friends,” whose assistance the American government badly needed to prevent European aid from flowing to the Confederacy. Taking things as they were, Schurz recommended tailoring the Union’s argument to accommodate simpler minds in order to win over European liberals. He urged that American statesmen submerge the Union’s constitutional case to which their case against oligarchy and slavery was connected and that they present the war simply as an antislavery war.103 However true, however correct in moral intention, and however necessary to win the war, this justification of the Union cause should not have been forced from us by the ignorance of the friends of free government. The whole of the Union cause always included the antislavery element but much more. Every generation in the free world needs an education in the history and principles of free government. A better-­educated public then and now would appreciate and defend republican institutions, union, and federalism, properly understood, and would easily repel the kinds of sophistries that Southern agents were propounding in Europe in 1861. They would be inoculated from error and deception. The stability of our institutions and the transformation of the merely legal union of citizens into an affectionate union are the natural fruits of instruction in the first principles of our government. Those principles teach us that none may be exalted above another or debased beneath another with justice, and they prepare us to fly to the defense of each other’s rights when any of us are threatened. They teach us also that mankind ought to enjoy the rights that we enjoy and that we ought to do what we can, when we can, to help them secure their rights. The American people deserve to know that their government was handed down to them by predecessors who were true to those principles when only 327

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courage could save them. When our forebears passed that government to us, still resting upon the claim of natural equality, they annihilated descent by blood and bone as a condition for membership in our common family of citizens, and they annihilated descent by blood and bone as a condition for claiming them as our common fathers. The American people deserve to know these facts in their history, which tell them who they really are. With this knowledge they will be able to see each other in a more proper light and tigten their bonds of affection with each other, and thus united, reinstate their government’s obedience to their republican Declaration and Constitution, regain their moral confidence in themselves and in their nation, and reclaim their rightful mission in the world. Real national power, as Wilson explained, is derived from moral causes. Recovery of our history and republican mission will annex a new and greater power to our existing stores of power, which can serve the good of humanity, reaping new garlands for our people. To achieve these ends, we must know our history and the principles of our government better. The duty of “the philosopher and historian” is to rise to this challenge and meet this need. They can and should complete the great task begun by the fathers of the Republic and continued by the Republicans of Reconstruction by teaching our people their good works, which aimed, above all, to dedicate and rededicate the American nation to the cause of liberty.

328

Notes

Preface 1. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 2:489. 2. Dedication of the Monument on Boston Common Erected to the Memory of the Men of Boston Who Died in the Civil War, 126, 127, 133. 3. Ibid., 128, 135, 134, 136. 4. Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913, 39–41. 5. Richard N. Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy. The book documents the organization of white Union regiments raised from Confederate states. On Georgia and South Carolina specifically, see pages 5, 217. For Confederate regiments and battalions organized by state, of which none hail from Northern states, see Claud Estes, List of Field Officers, Regiments and Battalions in the Confederate States Army, 1861–1865. 6. Mark A. Weitz, More Damning than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate Army. 7. Steven E. Woodworth, This Great Struggle: America’s Civil War, 312. 8. For example, in his Reminiscences, Union general and statesman Carl Schurz reflected on his encounter with droves of poor white Southern deserters during the Chattanooga campaign: “They had but a very dim conception, if any conception at all, of what all this fighting and bloodshed was about. They had been induced, or had been forced, to join the army by those whom they had been accustomed to look upon as their superiors. They had only an indistinct feeling that on the part of the South the war had not been undertaken and was not carried on for their benefit. There was a ‘winged word’ current among the poor people of the South, which strikingly portrayed the situation, as they conceived it to be, in a single sentence: ‘It is the rich man’s war and the poor man’s fight.’ This was so true that the poor whites of the South could hardly be expected to be sentimentally loyal to the ‘Southern cause.’” Carl Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3:70–71. 9. Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis in the South, 32–33, 42, 94–95, 152–53. 329

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10. William T. Auman, Civil War in the North Carolina Quaker Belt: The Confederate Campaign against Peace Agitators, Deserters and Draft Dodgers; Michael K. Honey, “The War within the Confederacy: White Unionists of North Carolina.” 11. George M. Frederickson, “Antislavery Racist: Hinton Rowan Helper.” 12. Henry Watterson, “The ‘Solid South’”; Hilary A. Herbert, “How We Redeemed Alabama.” 13. Catherine W. Bishir, “Landmarks of Power: Building a Southern Past, 1885– 1915,” 10. 14. Colonel Alfred M. Waddell, Address at the Unveiling of the Confederate Monument at Raleigh, North Carolina, May 20th, 1895; Fred A. Bailey, “The Textbooks of the ‘Lost Cause’: Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories.” 15. Herbert, “How We Redeemed Alabama,” 862. 16. R. D. W. Connor, ed., North Carolina Manual, 219–20. 17. Raleigh News and Observer, February 5, 1928. 18. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History; David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. 19. Goldwin Smith, “England and America,” 754. 20. Charles D. Drake, Union and Anti-­slavery Speeches Delivered during the Rebellion, 137; (Senator Lot Morrill) Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1077 (1862); Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. 21. Don Harrison Doyle, Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War; Louise L. Stevenson, Lincoln in the Atlantic World, 1–2, 29, 207; Wayne H. Bowen, Spain and the American Civil War, 78–79; Howard Jones, Blue & Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations, 55, 280; Dean B. Mahin, One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War, 197–98; Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, 2:242. 22. William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, 217. 23. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1844 (1864).

Introduction 1. Aristotle, Politics, 3.6.1278b5–14, 4.11.1295a35–40. In this and all subsequent citations of the Politics, the locations of passages are identified using the standard numbering system of August Immanuel Bekker, in the following form: [book].[chapter]. [Bekker locator]. The author has relied on the translation into English by Carnes Lord. 2. Ibid., 3.1.1274b35–38, 7.4.1325b41–44. 3. Ibid., 1.1.1252a1–6, 4.11.1295a35–40, 7.1.1323a14–23, 7.8.1328b12–14. 4. Ibid., 3.9.1280a31–b40. 5. Ibid., 3.7–8.1279b1–20. 6. Ibid., 3.9.1280a7–25, 5.1.1301a27–37. 7. Carl Degler, Place over Time: The Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness; Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848–1861; John McCardell, The 330

NOTES

Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860; James M. McPherson, “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question.” 8. For many years, some scholars advanced the view that the American founding was a revival of classical republicanism. See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution; Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic; and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Another group of scholars advanced a contrary view, that the American founding established “liberalism,” or government guided and limited by the protection of liberal natural rights. See Joyce Oldham Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination; Jennifer Nedelsky, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism; and Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-­Century England and America. This debate has subsided, most scholars acknowledging the position best stated by Paul Rahe, that “the republicanism of the American founders was in most regards a liberal republicanism.” Paul Rahe, introduction to Machiavelli’s Liberal Republican Legacy, xx. This position, in short, was the position held by Harry Jaffa his entire career. Compare his Equality and Liberty and A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War. 9. Thomas Jefferson, The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 4:29. Jefferson cited Baron von Pufendorf ’s De Officio Hominis et Civis Juxta Legem Naturalem; or, On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to the Natural Law. 10. Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 9:106, 12:68; James Madison, The Writings of James Madison, 9:528. 11. Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 9:195; John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, with a Life of the Author, by His Grandson, Charles Francis Adams, 4:292. 12. Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 3:319, 9:142, 143. 13. Virginia Constitutional Convention, Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention of 1829–1830, 53, 67, 321. 14. Erik Root, All Honor to Jefferson? The Virginia Slavery Debates and the Positive Good Thesis. 15. 8 Cong. Deb. 3280 (1832). 16. Aristotle, Politics, 3.9.1280a31–b40, 5.3.1303b7–17. 17. Ibid., 1.2.1252b25–27. 18. John Bailey Adger, A Review of Reports to the Legislature of SC, on the Revival of the Slave Trade, 3. Regarding the sectional division of the national church organizations before the Civil War, see Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South. 19. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, 271. 20. U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 4, Clause 1. 21. This is also verified by James Iredell in the debates of the ratification convention in North Carolina: “The meaning of the guaranty provided was this: There being thirteen governments confederated upon a republican principle, it was essential 331

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to the existence and harmony of the confederacy that each should be a republican government, and that no state should have a right to establish an aristocracy or monarchy. That clause was therefore inserted to prevent any state from establishing any government but a republican one. Every one must be convinced of the mischief that would ensue, if any state had a right to change its government to a monarchy. If a monarchy was established in any one state, it would endeavor to subvert the freedom of the others, and would, probably, by degrees succeed in it.” Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions of the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 4:195. 22. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers, 75 (quote), 237 (quote), 72, 74, 71–72 (quote). See also Madison, Writings of Madison, 3:104, 5:126, 129, 197. 23. Thomas Jefferson reached the same conclusion: “Perhaps it will be found that to obtain a just republic . . . it must be so extensive as that local egoisms may never reach its greater part; that on every particular question, a majority may be found in its councils free from particular interests, and giving, therefore, an uniform prevalence to the principles of justice.” Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 8:165. 24. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers, 76, 95. 25. “Any state which is ruled by law I call a ‘republic.’ . . . All legitimate government is ‘republican.’ . . . A people, since it is subject to laws, ought to be the author of them.” Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 82–83. A people that submits to “laws made neither by themselves, nor by an authority derived from them, . . . are slaves.” Madison, Writings of Madison, 2:185. Jefferson assumes this rule in his criticism of British government in 1774. If the Parliament, responsible only to “160,000 electors in the island of Great Britain should give law to four millions in the states of America,” in substitution for American legislatures, the American people would discover that “instead of being a free people, as we have hitherto supposed, and mean to continue ourselves, we should suddenly be found the slaves, not of one, but of 160,000 tyrants.” Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 2:73. 26. Madison, Writings of Madison, 9:430–31n. 27. Ibid., 430n. 28. John C. Calhoun, The Works of John C. Calhoun, 6:1–59. 29. Madison, Writings of Madison, 9:462, 521, 526. 30. James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, 2:620, 621–22. 31. Ibid., 654 (emphasis in the original). 32. 9 Reg. Deb., 774 (1833), 1855–58 (1833). Blair referred to his class as a minority, but in the context it is clear that he means a constitutional minority (those who are enfranchised but lack numbers to control the administration of government). His class was a constitutional minority but a popular majority (a greater share of free persons). In oligarchic government, a popular majority is by definition a constitutional minority. See Madison, Writings of Madison, 9:527–28. 33. Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson, 3:35, 38, 41. 34. Richardson, Compilation of the Presidents, 2:631. 332

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35. John Marshall, The Life of John Marshall, 4:556–57, 559, 576, 574. See also 569–70, 575–78. 36. Barron v. City of Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243 (1833); Brendan J. Doherty, “Interpreting the Bill of Rights and the Nature of Federalism: Barron v. City of Baltimore.” In a chapter titled “The Supreme Court’s Destruction of the Constitutional Limitations on State Authority,” William Crosskey concluded that Marshall’s opinion in Barron v. Baltimore “appears to have been a sham. And the decision of the Court, and the doctrine for which it stands, constitute, in fact, one of the most extensive and indefensible of all the various failures of the Court to enforce the Constitution against the states as the document is written.” William W. Crosskey, Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States, 2:1081. More charitably, in sacrificing the republican liberty of Southern majorities, Marshall subordinated his jurisprudence to a high political concern, the survival of the Union upon which the survival of republican liberty for all depended. 37. Madison, Writings of Madison, 9:473, 5:23. 38. Fourteenth Amendment scholars who come closest to supporting this general view are Garrett Epps, Randy E. Barnett, Daniel S. Korobkin, and Michael Kent Curtis. See Garrett Epps, “The Antebellum Political Background of the Fourteenth Amendment” and Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post–Civil War America; Randy E. Barnett, “Whence Comes Section One? The Abolitionist Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment”; Daniel S. Korobkin, “Republicanism on the Outside: A New Reading of the Reconstruction Congress,” 494; and Michael Kent Curtis, No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights. 39. See Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights, and the Nullification Crisis; and Paul Finkelman, “States’ Rights North and South in Antebellum America.” 40. In President Lincoln’s message to Congress in special session, July 4, 1861. See Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 4:440. 41. Ibid., 426 (emphasis in the original). 42. James F. Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-­Bryan Campaign of 1896, 1:345. 43. Walter L. Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, 5. 44. Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization: The Industrial Era. See also W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America; James S. Allen, Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy. 45. John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War, 101, 219; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. 46. Fletcher Green, Constitutional Development in the South Atlantic States, 1776– 1860: A Study in the Evolution of Democracy and “Democracy in the Old South”; Frank Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South; Ralph Wooster, The People in Power: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Lower South, 1850–1860 and Politicians, Planters, and Plain Folk: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Upper South, 1850–1860; George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-­American Character and 333

NOTES

Destiny, 1817–1914; J. Mills Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860. 47. Roger W. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana: A Social History of White Farmers and Laborers during Slavery and after, 1840–1875; Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890; Charles C. Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi; Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy & Society of the Slave South, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation, and The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Conservative Southern Thought, 1820–1860. 48. Aristotle, Politics, 1.1.1252a1–6, 3.6.1278b5–14, 3.7.1279a22–25, 4.1.1288b10 –1289a25. 49. One notable exception is Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, vol. 3. 50. Ulrich Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Régime; Genovese, Political Economy of Slavery; Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. 51. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America; Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery; Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, “Capitalists without Capital: The Burden of Slavery and the Impact of Emancipation”; James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders; Edward Pessen, “How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South?” 52. Forrest A. Nabors, “How the Antislavery Constitution Won the Civil War.” 53. David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style; Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s; William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856. 54. Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina. 55. Root, All Honor to Jefferson? 56. William W. Freehling, Road to Disunion, vols. 1–2. 57. Donald E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery. 58. Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860. 59. Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War. 60. Epps, Democracy Reborn; Mark W. Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion. 61. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, 3:226. 62. Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-­Douglas Debates and New Birth of Freedom. 63. Charles O. Lerche, “The Guarantee of a Republican Form of Government and the Admission of New States,” 580, 583. 64. In Federalist 14 and 39, Madison criticizes inaccurate usages of the term republican. In Federalist 39, he defines it. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers, 95, 236–37. In 1794, when a member of the House of Representatives said that the 334

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word was “hackneyed” and indistinct, another member “felt himself extremely surprised to hear it asserted on the floor of Congress, that the words ‘Republican form of Government’ meant anything or nothing.” He then read the guarantee clause and maintained that “the words were well enough understood from one end of the continent to the other.” Madison then entered the discussion and averred that “the word [republican] was well enough understood” and repeated his definition given in Federalist 39. 4 Annals of Cong. 1022 (1794). In his influential book on the guarantee clause, constitutional historian William Wiecek obscures the founders’ American definition of republicanism, claiming that the meaning of the word republican is unclear and was unclear to the founders. William Wiecek, The Guarantee Clause of the US Constitution, 3–4, 12, 13. His quotes of Adams used to support his thesis are misrepresented and taken out of context. Adams was quite sure he knew what republican meant; criticized others’ inaccurate use of the term, as Madison did; and wished for greater specificity within the broad genus of republican, to clarify the meaning intended. Adams, Works of Adams, 10:377–78; John Adams, “The Correspondence between John Adams and Mercy Warren Relating to the ‘History of the American Revolution,’ July–August, 1807,” 352–53. If Wiecek is correct that Adams truly did not know what the word republican meant, it is bizarre that Adams accepted the commission of the Massachusetts convention, charging him and twenty-­n ine others to draft a new constitution for—­in the language of the convention—­“a FREE REPUBLIC.” Adams, Works of Adams, 4:215 (emphasis in the original). 65. Gaillard Hunt, The Life of James Madison, 75. This was a private note found with Madison’s papers after his death. It is readily conceded that Madison appears to contradict himself in his public writings, namely, Federalist 43, in which he says that all of the preexisting state constitutions are republican in form. But his language is careful; he is talking about the forms of the written constitutions or, in terms of this quotation from his private writing, governments that are “democratic in name” and not the forms of the actual governments, which are “aristocratic in fact” and become so when a republican constitution is combined with a high density of slaves. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers, 271–72. 66. Aristotle claimed that some specific institutions alter the character of the regime because they tend to strengthen or weaken the participation of one part of political society in the regime. Aristotle, Politics, 2.9.1271a27–37, 4.9.1294a37–39. The effect of some institutions is so powerful that they revolutionize the character of a regime. See ibid., 2.12.1273b34–1274a11. The American founders (and the Republicans) recognized that the institution of domestic slavery reached this magnitude of potency. 67. Hunt, Life of Madison, 75.

Chapter 1. What Were They Reconstructing? 1. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 5 (1865). 2. Ibid., 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 2 (1865); S. 5, 39th Cong. (1865). 3. S. 7, 39th Cong. (1865). 335

NOTES

4. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 2 (1865). 5. U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, xiii, xiv, ix. 6. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 727 (1866). 7. Ibid., 739 (1866). 8. Ibid., 1304 (1866). 9. Ibid., appendix 105 (1866). 10. Ibid., 1280 (1866). 11. Ibid., 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 66 (1856). 12. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 571 (1860). 13. Ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 172 (1858). 14. Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 2:673. 15. James M. Ashley, Duplicate Copy of the Souvenir from the Afro-­American League of Tennessee, 46, 167, 490. 16. Isaac Newton Arnold, The History of Abraham Lincoln, and the Overthrow of Slavery, 41. 17. James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress: From Lincoln to Garfield, 1:257. 18. John Sherman, John Sherman’s Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet, 2:949. 19. George W. Julian, Speeches on Political Questions, 67, 68. 20. Ashley, Duplicate Copy, 45–47. 21. Ibid., 47 (emphasis in the original). 22. Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 197 (1862). 23. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 299 (1864). 24. Ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 172 (1858). 25. Ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 1281–82 (1858). 26. Ibid., 1283. 27. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1230 (1864). 28. Henry Winter Davis, Speeches and Addresses Delivered in the Congress of the United States and on Several Public Occasions, 315, 313; Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1230 (1864). 29. Thaddeus Stevens, An Address Delivered on the Fourth of July, 1835, at an Anti-­ Masonic Celebration, 7 (emphasis in the original). 30. Cong. Globe, 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 1093 (1858). 31. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 2594 (1860). 32. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2979 (1864). 33. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1032 (1860). 34. Ibid., 1031. 35. Ibid., 1031–32. 36. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 36 (1861). 37. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 3269 (1862) (emphasis in the original). 38. Ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. 585 (1861). 39. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 389–90 (1860). 40. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1077, 1075 (1862). 41. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 507 (1864). 336

NOTES

42. Ibid., 2115. 43. James Abram Garfield, The Works of James Abram Garfield, 1:129. 44. Ibid., 142. 45. Cong. Globe, 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 66 (1856). 46. Ibid., 67. 47. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 594, 595–96 (1860). 48. Arnold, History of Abraham Lincoln, 39. 49. Ibid., 41. 50. Cong. Globe, 35th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 197 (1859). 51. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1031 (1860). 52. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 295 (1860). 53. Ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 261 (1861). 54. Ibid., 261–62. 55. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 258 (1860). 56. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 80 (1861). 57. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 374 (1860). 58. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 227 (1860). 59. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 329 (1862). 60. Ibid., 330. 61. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 3269 (1862). 62. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1230 (1864). 63. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 329–30 (1862). 64. Ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 71 (1858). 65. Ibid., 40th Cong., 1st Sess. 102 (1867). 66. Ibid., 99 (1867). 67. George W. Julian, Political Recollections, 1840–1872, 296–97. 68. Julian, Speeches on Political Questions, 49, 68, 137, 152, 165, 207, 221, 224, 269, 409. 69. Ibid., 51. 70. Ibid., 51–52. 71. Ibid., 52 (emphasis in the original). 72. Ibid., 53, 54. 73. Ibid., 54–55. 74. Ibid., 55. 75. Ibid., 55–56. 76. Ibid., 56. 77. Ibid., 57. 78. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 3018 (1860). 79. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 506 (1864). 80. Ibid., 507. 81. Ibid., 2115. 82. Julian, Speeches on Political Questions, 221. 83. Ibid., 224–25. 84. Ibid., 152. 85. Ibid., 225. 337

NOTES

Chapter 2. The Relationship of Slavery to Southern Oligarchy 1. Ashley, Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 1315 (1866); Higby, ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2944 (1864); Davis, ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 154 (1865); Drake, Union and Anti-­slavery Speeches, 104. 2. 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 114–15 (1864). 3. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857). 4. George Boutwell, Speeches and Papers Relating to the Rebellion and the Overthrow of Slavery, 132. 5. Ibid., 133, 169–70. 6. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2104 (1864). 7. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 440 (1862). 8. Ibid., 439 (emphasis in the original). 9. Ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 1349 (1858) (emphasis in the original). 10. Ibid., 1349, 1350. 11. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 2590, 2595 (1860). 12. Ibid., 2597–98. 13. James W. Patterson, 89th Anniversary of the National Independence, July 4, 1865, at Dover, N.H., 25. 14. Ibid., 24–25. 15. Cong. Globe, 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 1282–83 (1858). 16. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 932 (1864). 17. Ibid., 1233. 18. Ibid., 2976, 568. 19. Ibid., 31st Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 767 (1850). 20. Ibid., 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 68 (1857); ibid., 40th Cong., 2nd Sess. 2929 (1868). 21. Ibid., 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 180 (1866). 22. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1301 (1862). 23. Ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix, 172 (1858). 24. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2109, 2948 (1864). 25. Ibid., 404. 26. Charles Sumner, The Works of Charles Sumner, 4:257–342. 27. Ibid., 5:8, 10, 9, 16. 28. Ibid., 8. 29. Ibid., 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 15. 30. Ibid., 15. 31. Ibid., 17, 18, 23–25, 26. 32. Ibid., 28. 33. Ibid., 28–29. 34. Ibid., 50–51. 35. Ibid., 51–52, 53, 54, 55, 56. 36. Ibid., 57, 58, 59, 61, 62. 37. Ibid., 64–65, 66. 338

NOTES

38. Ibid., 66, 67, 68–84, 68. 39. Ibid., 84. 40. Ibid., 85–86. 41. Ibid., 97, 87. 42. Ibid., 95. 43. Ibid., 96. 44. Ibid., 87. 45. Ibid., 88–89. 46. Ibid., 89, 97–98. 47. Ibid., 90, 96, 91–92. 48. Ibid., 98, 92. 49. Ibid., 99, 100. 50. Ibid., 7, 101, 99, 101–2. 51. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 1012 (1866). 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 373 (1860). 54. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 773 (1864). 55. Ibid., 1369. 56. Ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 752 (1858). 57. For example, see Daniel Gooch, May 3, 1864, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2070 (1864); Isaac N. Arnold, February 20, 1865, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 68 (1865). 58. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 859 (1862). 59. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 326 (1862); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 422 (1860). 60. Ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 576 (1858); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 2310 (1860). 61. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 2246 (1862); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 559, 685, 949 (1864). 62. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 593 (1860). 63. Ibid.; ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess., 858 (1862). 64. Ibid., 33rd Cong., 1st Sess. 282 (1854). 65. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2014 (1864) (emphasis in the original). 66. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 186 (1862).

Chapter 3. The Origin of Southern Oligarchy 1. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 1074 (1866). 2. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 182, 184 (1862). 3. Sumner, Works of Sumner, 10:138. 4. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 2:200. 5. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 707 (1866). 6. Ibid., 707, appendix 94. 7. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 2:200; Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 705, appendix 94 (1866). 8. Sumner, Works of Sumner, 10:139 (emphasis in the original). 339

NOTES

9. Ibid., 140, 141–42 (emphasis in the original). 10. Ibid., 143, 146. 11. Ibid., 153–54. 12. Ibid., 154–55. 13. Ibid., 172, 173. 14. Ibid., 174–75 (emphasis in the original). 15. Ibid., 176. 16. Ibid., 176–88. 17. Ibid., 188–96. 18. Ibid., 196. 19. Ibid., 196, 188. 20. Ibid., 176–77, 179, 182 (emphasis in the original). 21. Ibid., 208–11. 22. Ibid., 193, 234–35. 23. Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. 553 (1861); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2949 (1864); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 557 (1860). 24. Ibid., 34th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 750 (1854). 25. Jehu Baker, Abridged Speech of Jehu Baker, Delivered at Alton, October 2, 1858, 4; Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 226 (1860). 26. Cong. Globe, 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 341, 343 (1858). 27. Ibid., 343–44. 28. Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 569–71 (1860); Fenton, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 822–24 (1860); Van Wyck, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1028 (1860); Doolittle, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 104 (1860); Eliot, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 257–58 (1860); C. C. Washburn, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 267– 68 (1860); Alley, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1886 (1860); Ashley, ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 102 (1862); Willey, ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1232–33 (1864). 29. Quotations of the Notes on the State of Virginia by Jefferson: Senator John Hale, ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 344 (1858); Representative Owen Lovejoy, ibid., 35th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 197 (1859), ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 207 (1860), and ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1816 (1862); Representative John Bingham, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 436 (1860); Senator Henry Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 569 (1860); Representative Reuben Fenton, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 823 (1860); Representative Charles Van Wyck, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1028 (1860); Representative John Alley, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1886 (1860); Representative Cadwallader Washburn, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 267 (1860); Senator Timothy Howe (of Wisconsin), ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 112 (1864); Senator Waitman Willey, ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1232 (1864); and Senator Thomas Tipton (of Nebraska), ibid., 40th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1080 (1868). Quotations of the letter by Washington to Robert Morris in 1786 on the legislative abolition of slavery: Senator John Hale, ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 343 (1858); Senator Henry Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess., 570 (1860); Representative John Alley, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1886 (1860); Senator James Doolittle, ibid., 36th 340

NOTES

Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 104 (1860); Representative Cadwallader Washburn, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 267 (1860); Representative John Farnsworth, ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 119 (1860); Representative James Ashley, ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 102 (1862); and Senator Waitman Willey, ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1232 (1864). Quotations of Mason in the Federal Convention on the “pernicious” effect of slavery: Senator John Hale, ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 343 (1858); Senator Henry Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess., 570 (1860); Representative Cadwallader Washburn, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 267 (1860); and Senator Waitman Willey, ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1232 (1864). Quotations of Madison in the Federal Convention on preventing the acknowledgment of slavery in the Constitution: Senator Henry Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 570 (1860); Representative Reuben Fenton, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 823 (1860); Representative Cadwallader Washburn, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 268 (1860); Representative Owen Lovejoy, ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1295 (1862); Senator John Henderson (of Missouri), ibid., 37th Cong., 3rd Sess. 353 (1863); Senator Waitman Willey, ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1232 (1864); Representative John Creswell (of Maryland), ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Session 123 (1865); Representative John Kasson (of Iowa), ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 190 (1865); and Representative George Julian, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 57 (1866). Quotations of the letter by Patrick Henry to Robert Pleasants in 1773: Senator John Hale, ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 344 (1858); Senator Henry Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 569 (1860); Representative Reuben Fenton, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 823 (1860); Representative John Alley, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1886 (1860); Representative Cadwallader Washburn, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 267 (1860); Senator Henry Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1090 (1861); Representative Owen Lovejoy, ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1816 (1862); Representative James Ashley, ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 102 (1862); and Senator Waitman Willey, ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1232 (1864). 30. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 733 (1860); ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1640 (1862); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1320 (1864); ibid., 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 1012 (1866). 31. Ibid., 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. 60 (1856). 32. Shanks, ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 198 (1862); Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 571 (1860); Fenton, ibid., 823 (1860); Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1090 (1861); Lovejoy, ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1816 (1862); Willey, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1233 (1864). 33. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 823 (1860). 34. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1753 (1864); ibid., 39th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 98 (1866). 35. Brown, ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1753 (1864); Rice, ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 206 (1862); Bingham, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 436 (1860); Fenton, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 823 (1860); Doolittle, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 104 (1860); C. C. Washburn, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess., appendix 267 (1860); 341

NOTES

Ashley, ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 102 (1862); Willey, ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1232–33 (1864). 36. Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess., special sess. 569 (1860) (emphasis in the original); Collamer, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1055–6 (1860). 37. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 143 (1859); ibid., 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 1012 (1866). 38. Ibid., 34th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 750 (1856); Baker, Abridged Speech of Baker, 4 (emphasis in the original). 39. Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 257 (1860). 40. For example, Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 569 (1860). 41. Quoted by Hale, ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 343 (1858); Willey, ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1233 (1864). 42. Ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 343 (1858). 43. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 823 (1860). 44. Ibid., 1028. 45. Ibid., 597, 1886, 2271; ibid., 37th Cong., 3rd Sess. 788 (1863); H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 1:22. 46. Arnold, History of Abraham Lincoln, 29; Hale, Cong. Globe, 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 344 (1858); Rollins, ibid., 37th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 145–46 (1863). 47. Hale, ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 344–45 (1858); Eliot, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 257 (1860). 48. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 823 (1860). 49. Hale, ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 344 (1858); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 732 (1860) (emphasis in the original). 50. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1055 (1860). 51. Ibid., 2073; ibid., 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 1065 (1866). 52. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1753, 2978 (1864). 53. Ibid., 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 138 (1857). 54. Ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 199 (1865); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 2073 (1860) 55. Ibid., 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. 30 (1856); ibid., appendix 64 (1856); ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. 197 (1860). 56. Ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 199 (1865). 57. Arnold, ibid., appendix 68; Hale, ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 343 (1858); Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 570 (1860); Alley, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1886 (1860); Doolittle, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 104 (1860); C. C. Washburn, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 267 (1860); Farnsworth, ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 119 (1861); Ashley, ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 102 (1862); Willey, ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1232 (1864). 58. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1640 (1862). 59. Ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 344–45 (1858); Baker, Abridged Speech of Baker, 4–5. 60. Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 100 (1860); ibid., 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 138 (1857) (emphasis in the original). 61. Bingham, ibid., 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 137 (1857); Eliot, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 258 (1860). 62. Ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. 583 (1861). 342

NOTES

63. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 2073 (1860). 64. Ibid., appendix 267; ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 173 (1865); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2949 (1864). 65. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 570 (1860); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 104 (1860); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1233 (1864); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 267 (1860); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1232 (1864); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 823 (1860); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 104 (1860); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 267 (1860). 66. Hale, ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 344 (1858); Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 570 (1860); Fenton, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 823 (1860); Alley, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1886 (1860); C. C. Washburn, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 267 (1860); Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1090 (1861); Lovejoy, ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1816 (1862); Ashley, ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 102 (1862); Willey, ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1232 (1864). 67. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2978 (1864) (emphasis in the original); ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 68 (1865); ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 173, 138 (1865) (emphasis in the original); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2614 (1864); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1368 (1864). 68. Ibid., 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 1230 (1866); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1368 (1864); ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 466 (1862). 69. C. C. Washburn, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 267 (1860); Doolittle, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1629 (1860); Wilson, ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 2207 (1860); Henderson, ibid., 37th Cong., 3rd Sess. 353 (1863). 70. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 570 (1860). 71. Ibid., 1033; ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 325 (1862); ibid., 37th Cong., 3rd Sess. 1068 (1863); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 403 (1864). 72. Ibid., 33rd Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 1014 (1854). 73. Ibid., 34th Cong., 1st Sess. 1404 (1856); ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 172 (1858); ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 36 (1862). 74. Garfield, Works of Garfield, 1:88–89; Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 283 (1865). 75. Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 3rd Sess. 353 (1863). 76. See H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 1:86–88. 77. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 100, 1181 (1866); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1971 (1864); ibid., 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 1225 (1866); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2614 (1864). 78. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1368 (1864). 79. Ibid., 1971. 80. Ibid., 1369; Arnold, History of Abraham Lincoln, 28. 81. Ibid., 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 51 (1856); ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 906 (1858); ibid., 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 137 (1857). 82. H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 1:35-37; Cong. Globe, 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 51 (1856). 343

NOTES

83. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 284 (1865). 84. H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 1:35–37; Cong. Globe, 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 51 (1856). 85. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 302 (1860); ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. 196 (1861). 86. H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 1:36. 87. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2979 (1864); ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 216–17 (1865). 88. Henry Deming, A Speech for the Useful Arts: Delivered at New Haven, January 2d, 1856, 20. 89. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 117 (1864). 90. Arnold, History of Abraham Lincoln, 30. 91. Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 142 (1850). 92. Arnold, History of Abraham Lincoln, 30; H.Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 1:118. 93. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:20. 94. Cong. Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st Sess. 337 (1854). 95. Cong. Globe, 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. 63 (1856); Morton quoted in William Dudley Foulke, Life of Oliver P. Morton, 1:368. 96. Cong. Globe, 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. 63 (1856). 97. Ibid., 33rd Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 264–66 (1854). 98. Ibid., 264. 99. Ibid., 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 135–36 (1857). 100. Ibid., 33rd Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 264–65 (1854). 101. Ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 217 (1865). 102. Ibid., 34th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 1162 (1856) (emphasis in the original). 103. Ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 68 (1865) (emphasis in original); Arnold, History of Abraham Lincoln, 33–34. 104. George Edmunds, Addresses Delivered before the Vermont Historical Society, in the Representatives’ Hall, Montpelier, October 16, 1866, 10.

Chapter 4. The Oligarchy Rises 1. Drake, Union and Anti-­slavery Speeches, 104–5. 2. Ibid., 106, 97, 106. 3. Ibid., 106, 137. 4. John Wentworth, Congressional Reminiscences, 24–25; Sumner, Works of Sumner, 5:193, 195. 5. Cong. Globe, 40th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 223 (1868). 6. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2070 (1864). 7. Ibid., 37th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 151 (1863). 8. Ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 266 (1865). 9. Ibid., 37th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 151 (1863); ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 266 (1865). 10. Ibid., 40th Cong., 2nd Sess. 3096 (1868); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 949 (1864). 344

NOTES

11. Ibid., 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 3064 (1866). 12. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2002 (1864); ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 792 (1865). 13. Ibid., 38th Cong., 2nd Sess. 266 (1865); ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. 224 (1861). 14. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 951 (1864). 15. Ibid., 951 (emphasis in the original), 950. 16. Ibid. (emphasis in the original). 17. Julian, Political Recollections, 1840–1872, 87; Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 3243 (1866); ibid., 40th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 456 (1868); ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1719 (1862). 18. Wentworth, Congressional Reminiscences, 20. 19. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2070 (1864); Garfield, Works of Garfield, 2:557; Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 151 (1863). 20. Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 141 (1862); 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2070 (1864). 21. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 36 (1862); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1230, 2314 (1864). 22. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 366 (1860). 23. Ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. 551 (1861). 24. H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 1:chap. 14, 189, 194. 25. Ibid., 1:chap. 14, 202, 206. 26. Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 98 (1860). 27. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 141 (1862). 28. Ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1089 (1861). 29. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 300 (1860); ibid., 36th Cong., 2nd Sess. 551 (1861). 30. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 300, 822–23 (1860); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1233, 442 (1864). 31. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 421 (1860) (emphasis in the original). 32. Ibid., 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 66 (1856); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 143 (1859), appendix 264 (1860). 33. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 98–99 (1860). 34. Ibid., 1030. 35. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. 1633 (1862). 36. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1048 (1860). Collamer misattributes Calhoun’s remarks to his 1837 “positive good” speech. The correct date is January 10, 1838. See Cong. Globe, 25th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 60, 61–62. 37. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1483 (1864); Baker, Abridged Speech of Baker, 6 (emphasis in the original). 38. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1459 (1864); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 2598 (1860). 39. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1770 (1864); ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 1092 (1858); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 365 (1860). 40. Ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 1350 (1858). 345

NOTES

41. Ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1199 (1864). 42. Ibid., 2979. 43. Julian, Political Recollections, 1840–1872, 22–23. 44. Arnold, History of Abraham Lincoln, 41; Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 365 (1860). 45. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2003 (1864). 46. Ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 141 (1862); ibid., 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 2949 (1864). 47. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:46–48, 53. 48. Cong. Globe, 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 53 (1856); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 2311 (1860). 49. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:28–29, 50. 50. Ibid., 31–33. 51. Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 2311 (1860). 52. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:43. 53. George S. Boutwell, Why I Am a Republican, 14, 16, 18. 54. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:73–74. 55. Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 2311 (1860). 56. Ibid., appendix 98. 57. Ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 170 (1858); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 98 (1860). 58. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 100, 98 (1860); ibid., 37th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 141 (1862); ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 153 (1860). 59. Ibid., 36th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 366, 367 (1860). 60. Ibid., 367. 61. Ibid., 368, 370, 368, 371, 374. 62. Rufus P. Spalding, Oration on American Independence, Delivered at Akron, Ohio, July 3, 1847, 12–13. 63. Cong. Globe, 29th Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 335 (1847); ibid., 31st Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 142 (1850). 64. Julian, Political Recollections, 1840–1872, 47–48. 65. Ibid., 51. 66. Ibid., 24, 43. 67. Ibid., 58, 64–66. 68. Ibid., 66, 68. 69. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:86–89. 70. Ibid., 90–93; H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:252–58, 274–76. 71. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:92ff; H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:242ff. 72. H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:288; Boutwell, Why I Am a Republican, 16–17. 73. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:92–93, 99. 74. Boutwell, Why I Am a Republican, 18–19; Arnold, History of Abraham Lincoln, 47. 346

NOTES

75. Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, Men and Events of Forty Years, 59; Wentworth, Congressional Reminiscences, 23–24, 50. 76. Cong. Globe, 35th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 170 (1858).

Chapter 5. American Republicanism Regroups 1. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:110; Sherman, Sherman’s Recollections, 1:94– 96; H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:378. 2. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:46, 110–11. 3. H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:62, 240; Boutwell, Why I Am a Republican, 17; H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:240; Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 3rd Sess. 1064 (1863). 4. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:120, 121. 5. Ibid., 120, 121. 6. Ibid., 120, 119, 120. 7. Ibid., 113. 8. Ibid., 114; George W. Julian, The Life of Joshua Giddings, 311; Sherman, Sherman’s Recollections, 1:99–101. 9. H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:381. 10. Julian, Life of Joshua Giddings, 311. 11. Cong. Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st Sess. 281–82 (1854). 12. Ibid., 282. 13. Cong. Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st Sess. 339 (1854). 14. Ibid., 340. 15. Sumner, Works of Sumner, 3:333; Julian, Political Recollections, 1840–1872, 135; Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:114; Henry J. Raymond, History of the Administration of Abraham Lincoln, 28. 16. H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:378–79. 17. Ibid., 463. 18. Cong. Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 310 (1854). 19. Ibid., 311, 310. 20. Ibid., 311. 21. Ibid., 312. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 319, 321, 322, 323. 25. Ibid., 462, 463. 26. Ibid., 784, 785. 27. Ibid., 785, 786. 28. Boutwell, Why I Am a Republican, 22. 29. George W. Julian, “The Death-­Struggle of the Republican Party,” 266. 30. Ibid.; Julian, Political Recollections, 1840–1872, 305. 31. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1026 (1864).

347

NOTES

32. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:152; Cong. Globe, 34th Cong., 3rd Sess. 98 (1856); George H. Williams, Reconstruction: Speech of Hon. Geo. H. Williams, Delivered at Portland, Oregon, September 23d, 1867, 3; Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1027–28, 2319 (1860). 33. H. Davis, Speeches and Addresses, 220. 34. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:117; H. Davis, Speeches and Addresses, 220 (emphasis in the original). 35. Sherman, Sherman’s Recollections, 1:101; Cong. Globe, 33rd Cong., 2nd Sess. appendix 248 (1855). 36. Wentworth, Congressional Reminiscences, 52n (corroborated by Wilson); H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:410–11. 37. William Stocking, ed., Under the Oaks: Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Republican Party, 40. 38. Ibid., 45. 39. Ibid., 46–49 (emphasis in the original). 40. Ibid., 44–45. 41. H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 3:436; Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 2:127n. 42. U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Committee, xiii. 43. Joseph Patterson Smith, ed., History of the Republican Party in Ohio, 2:11; William Lawrence, introduction to Reminiscences of the War, by Abraham R. Howbert, 25–26; J. P. Smith, History of the Republican Party in Ohio, 1:13, 18. 44. Ibid., 19. 45. Ibid., 2:11. 46. Ibid., 1:10, 12, 16, 17, 20–22, 24–25, 41, 2:11, 430–31. 47. Alexander McDonald Thomson, A Political History of Wisconsin, 112. 48. Ibid., 114. 49. Ibid., 132; David Atwood, “Sketch of the Life and Character of Cadwallader C. Washburn,” 10. 50. William H. Russell, “Timothy O. Howe, Stalwart Republican,” 92–93. 51. William F. Doolittle, comp., The Doolittle Family in America, 659–60. 52. Stephen Merrill Allen, Origin and Early Progress of the Republican Party in the United States, Together with the History of Its Formation in Massachusetts, 16, 18. 53. Ibid., 17–18, 19–20. 54. Sumner, Works of Sumner, 3:354 (emphasis in the original), 455, 458, 462, 358, 463 (emphasis in the original), 5:227. 55. Julian, Political Recollections, 1840–1872, 144; J. M. H. Frederick, comp., National Party Platforms of the United States, 28. 56. Julian, “Death-­Struggle of the Republican Party,” 265. 57. Nathaniel Banks, The Great Questions of National and State Politics: Speech of Hon. Nathaniel Banks of Waltham, Delivered at Worcester, before the Young Men’s Ratification Convention, September 8th, 3. 58. Julian, “Death-­Struggle of the Republican Party,” 265. 348

NOTES

59. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:140; H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:566–67. 60. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:171; Julian, “Death-­Struggle of the Republican Party,” 265. 61. John A. Logan, The Great Conspiracy: Its Origin and History, 264. 62. Benjamin Franklin Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences, 86, 138, 134–48, 136. 63. Logan, Great Conspiracy, 244, 241–42. 64. Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 3rd Sess. 659 (1864). 65. Logan, Great Conspiracy, 240. 66. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:45. 67. Boutwell, Why I Am a Republican, 14–15, 17; Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:44–45. 68. Boutwell, Why I Am a Republican, 15, 19. 69. Cong. Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 462 (1854). 70. Ibid., 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 1349 (1858). 71. Sherman, Sherman’s Recollections, 1:110. 72. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:121; Sherman, Sherman’s Recollections, 1:142; Wentworth, Congressional Reminiscences, 24. 73. Wentworth, Congressional Reminiscences, 24–25. 74. H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:464. 75. Boutwell, Why I Am a Republican, 20. 76. H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:464–69. 77. Sherman, Sherman’s Recollections, 1:113. 78. Ibid., 114, 118–24. 79. H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:470–71, 473. 80. Sherman, Sherman’s Recollections, 1:133, 138. 81. H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:482. 82. Sumner, Works of Sumner, 4:257, 265–66, 269–70. 83. Cong. Globe, 34th Cong., 1st Sess. 1279 (1854). 84. Sumner, Works of Sumner, 4:137–256. 85. Ibid., 139, 140, 145, 155, 145, 146 (emphases in the original). 86. Ibid., 241, 245. 87. Ibid., 261, 269; H. Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall, 2:483–84. 88. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, 1:125, 128–30; Sherman, Sherman’s Recollections, 1:137–38, 140, 142.

Part II. The Test and Implications 1. Aristotle, Politics, 4.3.1289b26–30. 2. Ibid., 5.3.1302b34–1303a13, 5.4.1304a39–1304b4. 3. Ibid., 8.1.1337a10–21. 4. Ibid., 3.9.1280a7–25, 5.1.1301a27–37. 5. Ibid., 4.1290a37–1290b27. 349

NOTES

Chapter 6. The Evidence 1. Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States, 77, 102, 250–51; Edgar Wallace Knight, Public Education in the South, v–vi, 195–96; Charles W. Dabney, Universal Education in the South, 1:viii, 29–31; Frederick M. Binder, The Age of the Common School, 1830–1865, 140–41; David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 83–85; Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, xi, 4, 24, 62, chap. 8; William Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind,” 43. 2. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 195. 3. Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1031 (1860). 4. James H. Madison, Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana, 61–63. 5. Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1031 (1860). 6. Adams, Works of Adams, 6:198, 417; Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 2:414–15; Adams, Works of Adams, 5:457; Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 4:64. 7. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 13; Knight, Public Education, 76. 8. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 4; Knight, Public Education, 43; Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West, 4–5. 9. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 27. 10. Knight, Public Education, 119. 11. Ibid., 124–26; Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 8–9; Dabney, Universal Education, 1:3–19. 12. Charles L. Coon, ed., The Beginnings of Public Education in North Carolina: A Documentary History, 1790–1840, 1:43, 80. 13. Knight, Public Education, 130. 14. Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 1:76. 15. Knight, Public Education, 127. 16. Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 1:76. 17. Knight, Public Education, 131–32. 18. Archie V. Huff, Greenville: The History of the City and County in the South Carolina Piedmont, 94. 19. Knight, Public Education, 128–29. 20. Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 12:170–71; Tyler quoted in Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 199. 21. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 199–201; Knight, Public Education, 200–201, 206. 22. Knight, Public Education, 145–54, 136; “Copy of a late Address on Manual Labor Schools,” Southern Banner, September 14, 1833, 3. 23. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 24, 62. 24. Ibid., 10–12. 25. Ibid., 30–61. 26. Ibid., 36. 27. Bernard C. Steiner, Life of Henry Barnard, 7–8; Burke Aaron Hinsdale, Horace Mann and the Common School Revival in the United States, 75–78; Henry Barnard, ed., 350

NOTES

Educational Biography: Memoirs of Teachers, Educators, and Promoters and Benefactors of Education, 344; Charles O. Hoyt and Richard C. Ford, John D. Pierce, Founder of the Michigan School System: A Study of Education in the Northwest, 56–60. 28. Calvin Stowe, Report on Elementary Instruction in Europe Made to the Thirty-­Sixth General Assembly of the State of Ohio, December 19, 1837, 9; John Pierce, “Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, December 31, 1838,” 191; U.S. Bureau of Education, Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Condition and Improvement of Public Schools in the District of Columbia, Submitted to the Senate June 1868, and to the House with Additions June 13, 1870, 142; Horace Mann, Annual Reports on Education, 531. 29. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 103–35; Knight, Public Education, 197, 266. 30. Colyer Meriwether, History of Higher Education in South Carolina: With a Sketch of the Free School System, 153n3; Thomas Cooper, “Agrarian and Education Systems,” 8, 10–11, 13, 20, 17, 22. 31. Ibid., 25. 32. Dabney, Universal Education, 1:35–36. 33. Knight, Public Education, 200–201, 206; Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 199–201. 34. Knight, Public Education, 210, 211. 35. Ibid., 145–54, 233–38; Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 210–12. 36. Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton, Party Politics in North Carolina, 1835– 1860, 9–13. 37. Knight, Public Education, 94–96, 242–43. 38. Judith Kelleher Schafer, “The Political Development of Antebellum Louisiana,” 138–39. 39. Robert J. Kerr, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of Louisiana: Which Assembled at New Orleans, January 14, 1844, 316–19. 40. Knight, Public Education, 243–45; Schafer, “Political Development of Antebellum Louisiana,” 141. 41. See Articles VIII and XV in Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States and Territories Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, 3:1412, 1413. 42. Raleigh A. Suarez, “Chronicle of a Failure: Public Education in Antebellum Louisiana,” 117–18. 43. Knight, Public Education, 245. 44. Ibid., 217–24, 129–30, 224. 45. Charles S. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 1819–1848, 62. 46. South Carolina Legislature, The South Carolina Legislative Times: Being the Debates and Proceedings in the Carolina Legislature, 23. 47. Ibid., 178 (quote), 35. 48. Joseph W. Newman, “Antebellum School Reforms in the Port Cities of the Deep South”; Edgar Wallace Knight, A Documentary History of Education in the South before 1860, 5:336–37, 317–81, 374–75. 49. Knight, Documentary History, 5:344, 373–74; Edward Ingle, Southern Sidelights: A Picture of Social and Economic Life in the South a Generation before the War, 174; Henry D. Capers, The Life and Times of C. G. Memminger, 110–13. 351

NOTES

50. Frederick Adolphus Porcher, “Instruction in Schools and Colleges,” 466, 467, 468. 51. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 212. 52. Harry L. Watson, “The Man with the Dirty Black Beard: Race, Class, and Schools in the Antebellum South,” 14, 22. 53. Knight, Documentary History, 5:334. 54. Mann, Annual Reports on Education, 531. 55. Mann, Slavery: Letters and Speeches, 238; Cong. Globe, 30th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 836 (1848). 56. Ibid., 837. 57. Ibid., 838; Cong. Globe, 35th Cong., 2nd Sess. 718 (1859). 58. Charles Dabney, The Problem in the South, 4–5. 59. Gustavus J. Orr, “The Needs of Education in the South,” 46, 48. 60. Ibid., 49, 50 (emphasis in the original). 61. Ibid., 50, 53. 62. John W. Abercrombie, “Education in the Old and New South,” 267–68, 269, 270, 271. 63. Joseph W. Folk, “Education in a Democracy,” 20; Isaac W. Hill, “Report from Alabama,” 47. 64. Celestia S. Parrish, “Problems and Progress of Universal Education in the South,” 49, 50, 48. 65. Adams, Works of Adams, 6:458, 469, 3:456, 6:8–9, 4:225. 66. Aristotle, Politics, 3.9.1280a7–24, 5.1.1301a27–37; Adams, Works of Adams, 6:285–86, 4:397. 67. Madison, Writings of Madison, 6:101, 102 (emphasis in the original), 5:29. 68. Adams, Works of Adams, 9:376, 5:458–59. 69. Ibid., 6:530, 4:397, 2:296–97, 9:376–77. 70. Ibid., 9:377, 3:455, 4:392. 71. William B. Scott, Pursuit of Happiness: American Conceptions of Property from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, 9–13, 16. 72. Margaret Ellen Newell, From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England, 36–39; Beverley W. Bond Jr., “The Quit-­Rent System in the American Colonies,” 498. 73. Newell, From Dependency to Independence, 39–44, 46–47, 55–71, 244; Margaret Ellen Newell, “The Birth of New England in the Atlantic Economy,” 55. 74. Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-­Century Spring field. 75. Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 1:62, 66–67, 8:196, 12:447, 1:58–59, 68–69. 76. Holly Brewer, “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia: ‘Ancient Feudal Restraints’ and Revolutionary Reform,” 341. 77. Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 2:178. 78. Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, “Conflicting Visions: The American Civil War as a Revolutionary Event,” 270–71; James L. Huston, The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer, 129–59. 352

NOTES

79. Information from U.S. Census Office, “Recapitulation—­1860: Farms Containing Three Acres or More,” in Agriculture of the United States in 1860, Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, 221; and U.S. Census Office, “Population of the States and Territories by Color and Condition,” in Population of the United States in 1860, Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, 598–99. 80. Jackson Turner Main, “The Distribution of Property in Post-­revolutionary Virginia,” 243, 244, 249, 255. 81. Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, 132. 82. Richard Waterhouse, A New World Gentry: The Making of a Merchant and Planter Class in South Carolina, 1670–1770, 65. 83. Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920, 68, 98, 69–70, 7. 84. Tim Lockley, “Rural Poor Relief in Colonial South Carolina,” 958, 960, 963. 85. Waterhouse, New World Gentry, 65–66; Lacy Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860, 44–51. 86. Steven Sarson, “Yeoman Farmers in a Planter’s Republic,” 64, 70–71, 75, 81–84. 87. James Oakes, “Slavery as an American Problem,” 86–87. 88. Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath, 36, 32. 89. Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775, 126. 90. Information from U.S. Census Office, “Farms Containing Three Acres or More,” in Agriculture of the United States in 1860, 196, 213; and U.S. Census Office, “Population of the States and Territories,” in Population of the United States in 1860, 598–99. 91. Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century, 34; James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War, 36. 92. Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South, 139–41, 35. 93. “Address of Hon C. C. Clay Jr.,” Debow’s Review 19 (December 1855): 727. 94. Wright, Political Economy of the Cotton South, 44–55, 114–17. 95. Robert A. Margo, Wages and Labor Markets in the United States, 1820–1860 and “The North-­South Wage Gap, before and after the Civil War”; Carville Earle and Ronald Hoffman, “The Foundation of the Modern Economy: Agriculture and the Costs of Labor in the United States and England, 1800–60,” 1066–67; Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 88. 96. William N. Parker, “The Finance of Capital Formation in Midwestern Development, 1800–1910,” 171; Wright, Political Economy of the Cotton South, 42, 141. 97. Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860–1870: War and Peace in the Upper South, 45. 98. Donald F. Schaefer, “Locational Choice in the Antebellum South.” 99. Jacqueline Jones, A Social History of the Labouring Classes: From Colonial Times to the Present, 64. 100. Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism. 353

NOTES

101. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 85. 102. Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South, 5. 103. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 83–84. 104. Aristotle, Politics, 4.8.1294a8–14, 5.1.1301a31–34. 105. 13 Annals of Cong. 1009–10 (1804). 106. Ibid., 1009–10. 107. 33 Annals of Cong. 1176, 1177 (1819). 108. 35 Annals of Cong. 343–44 (1820). 109. Jonathan Roberts, “Memoirs of a Senator from Pennsylvania: Jonathan Roberts, 1771–1854”; 33 Annals of Cong. 1177 (1819). 110. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; Huston, The British Gentry, 3–28, 185–207. 111. Thomas Jefferson, Writings, 827. 112. Manumission Society of North Carolina, An Address to the People of North Carolina, on the Evils of Slavery: By the Friends of Liberty and Equality, 49–50. 113. Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-­revolutionary South. 114. Calhoun, Works of Calhoun, 3:180, 4:507. 115. Timothy Lockley, Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750–1860, 28. 116. Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. 117. Cong. Globe, 35th Cong., 1st Sess. appendix 79–80 (1858). 118. Ibid., 399. 119. Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country, 94–95, 116–17. 120. Elizabeth Fox-­Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders, 356–57. 121. Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South. 122. Bertram Wyatt-­Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. 123. Randolph Roth, American Homicide, 210 (quote), 215 (quote), 18, 180–83, 202. 124. Eric Walther, William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War, 30. 125. John W. Dubose, The Life and Times of William Lowndes Yancey, 67. 126. Walther, William Lowndes Yancey, 30–31 (emphasis in the original). 127. Ibid., 32, 38. 128. Ibid., 87, 123–24. 129. “Alabama,” 1:10; Dubose, Life and Times, 556–57. 130. Quoted in Malcolm C. McMillan, Constitutional Development in Alabama, 1798–1901: A Study in Politics, the Negro, and Sectionalism, 80n18. 131. Oliver Joseph Thatcher, ed., The Library of Original Sources, 9:83–94 (quotes on 90). 354

NOTES

132. Madison, Writings of Madison, 6:101; Thatcher, Library of Original Sources, 9:87 (quote), 86. 133. Thatcher, Library of Original Sources, 9:85, 93. 134. Ibid., 9:88, 89, 90–91. 135. Ibid., 9:94. 136. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism; Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism; Charles C. Bolton, “Planters, Plain Folk, and Poor Whites in the Old South.” 137. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 404 (1864). 138. Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865–1881, 5. See also Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South, 19. 139. Huntsville (AL) Advocate, July 12, 1865. 140. Anthony G. Carey, Parties, Slavery, and the Union in Antebellum Georgia, 135–37. 141. Calhoun, Works of Calhoun, 6:4–30. 142. “The Irrepressible Conflict at the South,” New York Times, August 20, 1860, 4. 143. Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” 22–25. 144. Genovese, Political Economy of Slavery, 25. 145. Francis Lieber, Slavery, Plantations and the Yeomanry, 3, 5 (emphasis in the original), 6. 146. Information from U.S. Census Office, “Recapitulation—­1860: Slaveholders and Slaves,” in Agriculture of the United States in 1860, 247; and U.S. Census Office, “Population of the States and Territories,” in Population of the United States in 1860, 598–99. 147. McMillan, Constitutional Development in Alabama, 44–46. 148. U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, pt. 3, 59, 61. 149. Helper, Impending Crisis in the South, 42. 150. Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier before the Civil War, 161; Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South, 117–18; Donald A. DeBats, Elites and Masses: Political Structure, Communication, and Behavior in Ante-­ bellum Georgia, 425; Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860, 133. 151. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 6:3264. 152. Ibid., Article I, Sections 6, 8; Article II, Section 2. 153. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 6:3259, 3262. 154. Ibid., 3266. 155. Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 13. 156. Donald E. Fehrenbacher, Constitutions and Constitutionalism in the Slaveholding South, 11. 157. Ibid., 12. 158. Lewy Dorman, Party Politics in Alabama from 1850 through 1860, 97. 159. Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 1:54–55. 160. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 2:676; U.S. Census Office, “State of Florida: Table No. 2—­Population by Color and Condition,” in Population of the United States in 1860, 54. 355

NOTES

161. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 2:808; U.S. Census Office, “State of Georgia: Table No. 2—­Population by Color and Condition,” in Population of the United States in 1860, 72–73. 162. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 5:2794–95. 163. Ibid., 3:1412, 1413; U.S. Census Office, “State of Louisiana: Table No. 2—­Population by Color and Condition,” in Population of the United States in 1860, 194. 164. Green, Constitutional Development, 292, 294; Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 7:3833–35. 165. Green, Constitutional Development, 292. 166. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 1:272, 800, 5:2797, 7:3833. 167. John S. Wise, The End of an Era, 55–56. 168. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 2:204, 203. 169. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 5:2630. 170. Franklin Benjamin Hough, American Constitutions, 2:64. 171. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 5:2643. 172. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Statistics of Slaves, Table 60,” in A Century of Population Growth, from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790–1900, 133; Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York, 3, 11, 13–14. 173. Ibid., 32. 174. Information from U.S. Census Office, “Farms Containing Three Acres or More,” in Agriculture of the United States in 1860, 196, 209. 175. Aurora (PA) General Advertiser, September 11, 1797; Phillip B. Scott, “The Right of Revolution: The Development of the People’s Right to Reform Government,” 290. 176. Gazette of the United States, November 27, 1790, 655; Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, 5:3002. 177. Mark Neely, Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War, 238; Degler, Place over Time, 99; James A. Gardner, “Southern Character, Confederate Nationalism, and the Interpretation of State Constitutions: A Case Study in Constitutional Argument,” 1261; Emory M. Thomas, The American War and Peace, 1860–1877, 59. 178. Clement Eaton, History of the Southern Confederacy, 51; Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens, in Public and Private: With Letters and Speeches, 718, 721. 179. Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention, 2:417. 180. James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy, 1:37–54. 181. Ibid., 50. viz., “The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.” (Conf. Const. of 1861, Article IV, Section 2, Clause 1). 356

NOTES

182. U.S. Census Office, “Population of the States and Territories,” in Population of the United States in 1860, 598–99. 183. The findings that are presented here in part differ moderately from those presented by Martis. Kenneth C. Martis, The Historical Atlas of the Congresses of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1865, 23. For the establishment and boundaries of congressional districts in the Confederate House of Representatives within each of the states, see Alabama Convention, Ordinances and Constitution of the State of Alabama: With the Constitution of the Provisional Government and the Confederate States of America, 45–46; Arkansas Convention, Journal of Both Sessions of the Convention of the State of Arkansas, 454; Florida Convention, Constitution or Form of Government for the People of Florida, 43–44; Georgia Convention of the People, Journal of the Public and Secret Proceedings of the Convention of the People of Georgia, 392–93; Louisiana Constitutional Convention, Official Journal of the Proceedings of the Convention of the State of Louisiana, 283, 285; Mississippi Legislature, Laws of the State of Mississippi: Passed at a Called Session of the Mississippi Legislature Held in the City of Jackson, July 1861, 57–58; North Carolina General Assembly, Public Laws of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly, at Its Second Extra Session of 1861, 4–5; Tennessee General Assembly, Public Acts of the State of Tennessee, Passed at the First Session of the Thirty-­Fourth General Assembly, for the Years 1861–62, 8–9; Texas, General Laws of the Eighth Legislature of the State of Texas, Extra Session, 35–36, 44; Virginia Convention, Ordinances Adopted by the Virginia Convention in Secret Session in April and May, 1861, 44, Ordinances Adopted by the Virginia Convention at the Adjourned Session in November and December, 1861, 59. South Carolina used the same six congressional districts that were allotted to them by the U.S. government. See “Proclamation, State of South Carolina, Executive Department,” Yorkville (SC) Enquirer, December 12, 1861. For the populations of the respective districts, encompassing county or parish populations, see U.S. Census Office, “Table No. 2—­Population by Color and Condition,” in Population of the United States in 1860: 8 (Alabama), 18 (Arkansas), 54 (Florida), 72–73 (Georgia), 270 (Mississippi), 358–59 (North Carolina), 452 (South Carolina), 466–67 (Tennessee), 484–86 (Texas), and 516–18 (Virginia). Louisiana divided the municipal districts of New Orleans into separate congressional districts; therefore, the population of the New Orleans wards must be consulted to account for the free and slave populations of all congressional districts in Louisiana. See ibid. and “Table No. 3—­Population of Cities and Towns,” in ibid., 194–95. 184. Marshall DeRosa, The Confederate Constitution of 1861: An Inquiry into American Constitutionalism. 185. Richard F. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877, 188 (quote), 13 (quote), 94–237, 366–415. 186. George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics, 200. 187. Ibid., 5 (quote), 7, 68, 70. 188. George Washington, The Writings of George Washington, 13:303; Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers, 73. 189. Madison, Writings of Madison, 9:136. 357

NOTES

190. Rable, Confederate Republic, 41, 77, 149, 187; Adams, Works of Adams, 4:197. 191. Rable, Confederate Republic, 29. 192. Aristotle, Politics, 5.6.1306a20–32, 5.10.1311a8–14. 193. Rable, Confederate Republic, 125. 194. Robert Luce, The Science of Legislation, 1:330–31, 333–34. 195. Elizabeth G. McPherson, “The Southern States and the Reporting of Senate Debates, 1789–1802,” 228–29, 232. 196. Donald H. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period, 459. 197. Elaine K. Swift, The Making of an American Senate: Reconstitutive Change in Congress, 1787–1841, 58. 198. 4 Annals of Cong. 45 (1794). 199. Stewart, Opposition Press, 193. 200. E. McPherson, “Southern States,” 239. 201. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, 115 (quote), 117–18. 202. Cong. Globe, 32nd Cong., 3rd Sess. appendix 319, 321 (1853). 203. Rable, Confederate Republic, 124. 204. Aristotle, Politics, 5.6.1305b21–27. 205. Rable, Confederate Republic, 209–10, 242–43. 206. Victoria E. Bynum, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War; Margaret M. Story, Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction; Barton Myers, Rebels against the Confederacy: North Carolina’s Unionists. 207. Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists; William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South, xiii. 208. David Williams, Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War.

Chapter 7. The Burial of the New Birth of Freedom 1. “The Rebel Government–Legislation in Secret Session,” New York Times, March 12, 1865, 4. 2. Albion W. Tourgee, A Fool’s Errand: By One of the Fools, 149. 3. William Cullen Bryant and Sidney Howard Gay, A Popular History of the United States, 4:435. 4. Helper, Impending Crisis; J. Jacobus Flournoy, An Essay on the Origin, Habits, etc. of the African Race Incidental to the Propriety of Having Nothing to Do with Negroes. 5. “Critical Notices: Partridge’s Making of the American Nation,” 247. 6. Georgios Varouxakis, “‘Negrophilist’ Crusader: John Stuart Mill on the American Civil War and Reconstruction.” 7. Sherman, Sherman’s Recollections, 2:951–53; George F. Edmunds, “Ex-­Senator Edmunds on Reconstruction and Impeachment,” 863. 8. Zachariah Chandler, Last and Greatest Speech of Zachariah Chandler, Late U.S. Senator from Michigan, Delivered at McCormick Hall, Chicago, Oct. 31, 1879, 21, 22; Nathaniel P. Banks, “Eulogy,” 55. 9. George Boutwell, “The Future of the Republican Party,” 479, 480, 481; George F. Edmunds, “The State and the Nation,” 344 (emphasis in the original). 358

NOTES

10. Emory Speer, The Solid South: Speech by Emory Speer of Georgia, December 19, 1902, 5; “A Bitter Pill to Swallow,” New York Times, July 10, 1890, 1. 11. Rossiter Johnson, “Factitious History,” 314, 308, 309, 303, 311, 304. 12. John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, eds., The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction. 13. Charles W. Ramsdell, “The Changing Interpretation of the Civil War,” 7, 12. 14. John Lynch, The Facts of Reconstruction, 292–93, 101–2. 15. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 30; Woodrow Wilson, “The Reconstruction of the Southern States,” 6. 16. Eric Foner, “The Supreme Court and the History of Reconstruction—­a nd Vice-­Versa,” 1594–96. 17. Michael Fitzgerald, “Reconstruction Politics and the Politics of Reconstruction.” 18. Joyce E. Salisbury, The Blood of Martyrs: Unintended Consequences of Ancient Violence, 17–18. 19. Michael Les Benedict, A Compromise of Principle, 13. 20. Frank Owsley, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” 62. 21. Desmond King and Stephen Tuck, “De-­centring the South: America’s Nationwide White Supremacist Order after Reconstruction,” 216, 241. 22. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, “The Consolidation of State Power via Reconstruction, 1865–1890,” 140, 141n7. 23. J. Michael Martinez, A Long Dark Night: Race in America from Jim Crow to World War II, 121. 24. Foner, Reconstruction, xix–xxviii. 25. Ramsdell, “Changing Interpretation of the Civil War.” 26. James W. Garner, Reconstruction in Mississippi, 28, 135; Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, 211, 271. 27. Foner, “Supreme Court and Reconstruction,” 1585, 1605; Howard K. Beale, “On Rewriting Reconstruction History,” 807, 810. 28. Eugene H. Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery. 29. Herman Belz, Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era, xii. 30. Massachusetts General Court, Debates and Proceedings in the Massachusetts Legislature at the Regular Session Which Was Begun at the State House in Boston on Wednesday, the Seventh Day of January [1857], 155, 171, 190, 192, 184 (quote), 196 (quote), 276, 373 (quote); Massachusetts General Court, Acts and Resolves Passed by the General Court of Massachusetts in the Year 1858, 170. 31. Garfield, Works of Garfield, 1:87–89. 32. Ibid., 87–88, 89 (quote), 86 (quote); Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, 339 (North Carolina), 340 (Tennessee). 33. Cong. Globe, 40th Cong., 2nd Sess. 726, 727 (1868). 34. Frederick, National Party Platforms, 35. 35. Ibid., 40. 36. Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction; Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: 359

NOTES

The Last Battle of the Civil War; Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879; George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction. 37. U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. 38. For a summary of the work of the committee, see ibid., 1:1-­2. The journal of the select committee commences at ibid., 1:589. Although the summary lists Tennessee among the states assigned to one subcommittee of five, and North Carolina among the states assigned to the other, no record exists of a hearing devoted to affairs in Tennessee. Testimony regarding affairs in North Carolina is only taken in Washington, D.C. See ibid., vol. 2. Also, there is no proof that some congressmen appointed to the subcommittees charged with visiting their assigned states and receiving testimony there were always present when hearings were convened. Representative James Robinson of Illinois was appointed to one subcommittee but there is no record of a single interrogatory posed by him to a witness in any of the states that his subcommittee investigated. For his appointment, see ibid., 1:613. Representative James Beck of Kentucky appears in the Alabama hearings but was not appointed to an investigating subcommittee. See ibid. A subcommittee of three (Senator John Scott of Pennsylvania, Republican, chairman; Representatives Job Stevenson of Ohio, Republican; Philadelphia Van Trump of Ohio, Democrat) were present in Columbia, Spartanburg, Union, and York, South Carolina and received testimony for a total of 19 days. See ibid., 1:600, 3:i-­iii. A subcommittee of five (Representatives Horace Maynard of Tennessee, Republican, chairman; Glenni Scofield of Pennsylvania, Republican; William Lansing of New York, Republican; Daniel Voorhees of Indiana, Democrat; Senator Thomas Bayard of Delaware, Democrat) were present in Atlanta, Georgia and received testimony for 14 days. See ibid., 6:350ff and vol. 7. A subcommittee of five (Senators Daniel Pratt of Indiana, Republican, chairman; Francis Blair of Missouri, Democrat; Benjamin Rice of Arkansas, Republican; Representatives James Beck of Kentucky, Democrat; Charles Buckley of Alabama, Republican) were present in Huntsville, Montgomery, Demopolis and Livingston, Alabama and in Columbus, Mississippi and received testimony concerning Alabama for a total of 26 days. See ibid., 8:527ff, vols. 9 and 10. A subcommittee of four (Senators Daniel Pratt of Indiana, Republican, chairman; Francis Blair of Missouri, Democrat; Benjamin Rice of Arkansas, Republican; Representative Charles Buckley of Alabama, Republican) were present in Macon and Columbus, Mississippi and received testimony for a total of 17 days. See ibid., 11:469ff and vol. 12. A subcommittee of four (Representatives Horace Maynard of Tennessee, Republican, chairman; Glenni Scofield of Pennsylvania, Republican; William Lansing of New York, Republican; Senator Thomas Bayard of Delaware, Democrat) were present in Jacksonville, Florida and received testimony for four days. See ibid., 13:54-­310.

39. U.S. Congress. Message of the President of the United States and Accompanying Documents to the Two Houses of Congress at the Commencement of the Third Session of the Fortieth Congress, Report of the Secretary of War, pt. 1, 705, 1052, 1051. 360

NOTES

40. U.S. Census Office, “Population of the States and Territories,” in Population of the United States in 1860, 598–99. 41. U.S. Congress, Message of the President of the United States and Accompanying Documents to the Two Houses of Congress at the Commencement of the Third Session of the Fortieth Congress, Report of the Secretary of War, pt. 1, 1056; U.S. Census Office, The Statistics of the Population of the United States, Embracing the Tables of Race, Nationality, Sex, Selected Ages, and Occupations, Compiled from the Original Returns of the Ninth Census, 4–5. 42. U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, 3:386–92, 388 (quote). 43. Ibid., 2:99; Lincoln, Collected Works, 4:438. 44. Susan Lawrence Davis, Authentic History, Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1877, iii. 45. Everette Swinney, “Enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment, 1870–1877,” 202. 46. Martinez, Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan. 47. Grant quoted in Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction, 7; “What Stephens Thinks of the Compliment to General Gordon,” New York Times, April 5, 1873, 2. 48. Lane, Day Freedom Died, 266. 49. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 13; Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 29–30. 50. C. Vann Woodward, The Future of the Past, 195. 51. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 2. 52. Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery, 13–14. 53. Melvin Urofsky and Paul Finkelman, A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States, 1:480. 54. Herbert Shapiro, “War Darkens Our Future,” Cincinnati Post, May 24, 2006, A13; Herbert Shapiro, “It’s Time for U.S. to Pull Out of Iraq,” Cincinnati Post, July 17, 2007, A9l; Paul Finkelman, “Is Bush the Worst President Ever?” 55. John Lynch, Some Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes, 4. 56. Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860–1885. 57. Rable, But There Was No Peace, 94. 58. Hyman Rubin III, South Carolina Scalawags; James Alex Baggett, The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction; Frank J. Wetta, The Louisiana Scalawags: Politics, Race, and Terrorism during the Civil War and Reconstruction(54-­51), cially pages 311, 329-­3 2003), . 59. C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel. 60. “Temper of the South: Letter from Hon. Charles Hays of Alabama,” New York Times, September 16, 1874. 61. Ibid. 62. Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography, 284; Eddy W. Davison and Daniel Foxx, Nathan Bedford Forrest: In Search of the Enigma, 432. 63. Davison and Foxx, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 440. 64. Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 307. 361

NOTES

65. Ibid., 327; Davison and Foxx, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 457. 66. Davison and Foxx, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 458. 67. Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 340, 343. 68. Davison and Foxx, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 474–75. 69. Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 385; Brian S. Wills, “Review of Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography, by Jack Hurst,” 1321; Court Carney, “Review of Nathan Bedford Forrest: In Search of the Enigma, by Eddy W. Davison and Daniel Foxx,” 764. 70. Ely Aaronson, From Slave Abuse to Hate Crime: The Criminalization of Racial Violence in American History, 38–39. 71. For a broad survey of homicides during Reconstruction, see Roth, American Homicide, chap. 7, esp. 311, 329–30. 72. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913, 218, 254–55. 73. William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race, 54–55. 74. St. George Tucker, A Dissertation on Slavery with a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of It in the State of Virginia, frontispiece, 77 (emphasis in the original). 75. Winthrop Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States, 117. 76. Benjamin Franklin, The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 12:158. 77. Tucker, Dissertation on Slavery, 74–76. 78. Madison, Writings of Madison, 9:37. 79. Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial America, 1619–1776, 8–9. 80. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, 155. 81. 4 Annals of Cong. 1021–23, 1023 (quote), 1026–57 (1794). 82. Clarence Edwin Carter and John Porter Bloom, eds., The Territorial Papers of the United States, 9:264. 83. Tucker, Dissertation on Slavery, 75. 84. 35 Annals of Cong. 1211 (1820). 85. 37 ibid. 623. 86. Ibid., 617. 87. Ibid., 621. 88. Jefferson, Works of Jefferson, 4:58. 89. Theodore Roosevelt, “National Life and Character,” 366. 90. John Adams, “Queries Relating to Slavery in Massachusetts,” 401–2. 91. South Carolina General Assembly, House of Representatives, Special Committee on Slavery and the Slave Trade, Report of the Minority of the Special Committee of Seven: To Whom Was Referred So Much of Gov. Adams’ Message, No. 1, as Relates to Slavery and the Slave Trade, 25. 92. Cong. Globe, 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 1281–84 (1858). 93. Charles Nordhoff, America for Free Working Men!, 10, 8. 94. Cong. Globe, 35th Cong., 1st Sess. 2268 (1858). 95. Andrew Johnson, The Papers of Andrew Johnson, 10:43-­44. 96. Helper, Impending Crisis, 33, 42, 95, 152–53; Frederickson, “Antislavery Racist,” 33, 36–38. 362

NOTES

97. Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws in the Old Northwest: A Documentary History. 98. Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality, 14. 99. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 3–5. 100. Madison, Writings of Madison, 9:514; Aristotle, Politics, 3.16.1287a28–32, 3.16.1287b15–22, 3.18.1288a33–b2. 101. James Wilson, Collected Works of James Wilson, 1:289–90, 445–46, 712, 716. 102. Garfield, Works of Garfield, 1:322–23. 103. Carl Schurz, Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 1:187–90.

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389

Index

Abercrombie, John, 242–243 Adams, James, 265 Adams, John, 6–7, 25, 110, 198, 227, 229, 244–246, 279, 318–319, 324 Adams, John Quincy, 175, 186 Adams, Samuel, 110 Alabama, 142, 147, 266–267 Alien and Sedition Acts, 155, 156 Alley, James, 131 Alley, John B., 49, 115, 123 Allison, William B., 50–51, 68–69, 205 Anne, Queen, 120 “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States,” 102, 190–191 apprentice laws, 257 Aristotle, 5, 8, 25, 26, 223–224, 244, 245, 279, 281, 283, 325 Arkansas Territory, 147 Arnold, Isaac Newton: on abolition of slavery, 123, 140; on censorship, 53; on conservatism, 105; on cotton gin, 144; on Dred Scott, 74; on founders’ views of slavery, 130, 133; on Jay, 145; on Missouri, 149; on oligarchy, 40, 54; on slavery, 100, 102, 185; in unionism, 174 Articles of Confederation, 123–124 Ashley, Delos, 73 Ashley, James Mitchell, 40, 42–43, 57, 97, 115, 133, 164, 172, 174, 179–180, 205, 296

Baker, Edward, 158 Baker, Jehu, 114, 121, 131, 171–172 Baldwin, Abraham, 137 Baldwin, John, 101, 155, 156–157, 158, 160 Banks, Nathaniel, 98, 209–210, 286 Barnard, Henry, 232–233, 239 Barron v. City of Baltimore, 15 Beale, Howard K., 293 Beamen, Fernando C., 203 Beard, Charles, 19 Beard, Mary, 19 Beauregard, P. G. T., 306 Benedict, Michael Les, 291 Benjamin, Judah, 93 Benton, Thomas, 52, 93, 163, 185–186 Bingham, John: on acts prohibiting slavery, 131, 178; Buchanan and, 177; Calhoun and, 156, 176; on Fifth Amendment, 127; on founders’ views of slavery, 118; Ohio and, 205; on slave power, 101, 178; on slavery, 130, 147–148; on Tennessee, 140 Birney, James, 183 black inferiority, perception of, 311–318 Black Reconstruction in America (DuBois), 291 Blaine, James Gillespie: on Buchanan, 222; on Dixon, 189–190; on Douglas, 210; on Kansas, 189; on Kansas–Nebraska Act, 192, 202; Mexican cession and, 177–178, 187; on Missouri, 145–146; Oregon and, 176; on slavery, 175, 183–184; on Southern control of government, 214, 391

INDEX

215, 217; on Southern oligarchy, 40–41; Sumner and, 106, 107; Van Buren and, 200; Webster and, 185 Blaine Amendment, 106 Blair, Austin, 203 Blair, Francis Preston, Jr., 44–45, 80–81, 170, 307, 319–320 Blair, Jacob, 58, 59, 60–61 Blair, James, 14 Bliss, Philemon, 257 Boutwell, George, 74–75, 185, 188, 199, 215, 218–219, 286–287 Bowers, Claude, 292 Breckenridge, John C., 140 Brockman, Thomas Patterson, 238 Brooks, Preston, 86–87, 92, 219–220, 221–222 Broomall, John, 172 Brown, Gratz, 120, 127 Brown, John C., 309 Brown, Joseph, 276 Bryant, William Cullen, 284–285 Buchanan, James, 177, 222 Buckland, Ralph, 153, 205 Burke, Edmund, 84 Bush, George W., 305 Butler, Andrew Pickens, 84, 138, 197, 220–221, 281 Butler, Benjamin F., 211 Cable, George Washington, 285 Cairnes, John Elliot, 285 Calhoun, John C.: Calhoun Revolution and, 172–186; defense of slavery by, 26, 166–167, 170–171, 256; division between parties and, 217–218; Dixon and, 189; guarantee clause and, 13–14, 16–17; influence of, 152–153, 162–163, 200–201; judiciary and, 296; motives of, 153–154; Nullification Crisis and, 163–164; rejection of republicanism by, 113; state sovereignty and, 12–13, 15, 155–163, 176, 178–179; “white basis” formula and, 269; Yancey and, 259–260 California, 184–185, 187, 215 Cameron, Simon, 67

capitation tax, 238 Cass, Lewis, 182, 190 censorship, 52, 53, 57–58, 174 Chandler, Zachariah, 46–47, 172, 203, 286 charity schools, 232 Chase, Salmon P., 281 Chase, Samuel, 124 civil rights movement, 291–295, 324 Clark, Daniel, 99, 123, 133, 138–139, 140 Clarke, Reader, 118, 121, 157 classes: poor whites, 306–331; ruling, 39–41; vassal, 42–46; yeomanry, 182, 257, 265. See also nonslaveholders in slave states Clay, Clement, 250 Clay, Henry, 179, 181, 184, 189–190 Clinton, George, 232 Coles, Edward, 132 Colfax, Schuyler, 33–35, 37 Colfax Massacre, 303–304 Collamer, Jacob, 118, 120, 125–126, 140, 141, 146, 171, 176 Committee on Public Lands, 62 Committee on Territories, 190 Compromise of 1850, 83, 184–185, 196–197 Condorcet, 90 Confederate Constitution, 274–275 Congressional Reminiscences (Wentworth), 203 conservatism, 105 Constitution of Athens (Aristotle), 26 Constitutional and Political History of the United States, The (von Holst), 285 Continental Congress, 3, 121–122 Cooper, Thomas, 234–235, 239 cotton gin, 142–144 Coulter, David, 301–302 Cox, John, 291 Cox, Lawanda, 291 Cragin, Aaron, 148–149 Curry, J. L. M., 279 Dabney, Charles, 241 Dartmouth, Earl of, 121 Davis, Henry Winter, 45, 201, 202 Davis, Jefferson, 89, 93–94, 170, 211, 276, 288 392

INDEX

Davis, Nicholas, 260 Davis, Thomas, 73 Dawes, Henry, 58, 114 Declaration of Independence: Hale and, 115–116; natural equality and, 6, 77, 171; natural right and, 13, 123; Republican Party and, 208, 298; repudiation of, 195; slavery and, 120, 128, 129 DeKalb, Baron, 136 Deming, Henry, 143 Dew, Thomas, 26 Dissertation on Slavery, A (Tucker), 312 Dixon, Archibald, 189–190 Dixon, James, 181–182 Doolittle, James: Calhoun and, 166, 175, 178– 179, 201; disavowal of unconstitutionality of slavery, 129; on founders’ views of slavery, 115, 132–133; Indiana Territory petition and, 131; on Jackson, 163–164; Kansas– Nebraska Act and, 205–206; on slave trade, 134; on slavery in Louisiana Territory, 142; on South’s views of slavery, 166, 167–168, 169 Douglas, Stephen A., 27, 182, 190, 191–192, 196–197, 210–211 Douglass, Frederick, 321 Drake, Charles, 61–62, 73, 151–152 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 74, 114–115, 126, 180, 296–297 DuBois, W. E. B., 291 due process, 52, 53, 56–57 duels, 93–94 Dunning, William Archibald, 289, 292 Dunning School, 289, 290, 291–293, 294 Eckley, Ephraim, 205 Edmunds, George, 150, 286, 287 Edmundson, Henry A., 220 education, 27, 42–43, 46–51, 67, 224, 227–244 Eliot, Thomas Dawes, 56–57, 82, 115, 121, 123, 131 Ellsworth, Oliver, 132, 137 End of an Era, The (Wise), 271 Everett, Edward, 173

Existing Conflict between Republican Government and Southern Oligarchy, The (Raum), 284 Facts of Reconstruction, The (Lynch), 289–290 Farnsworth, John F., 47, 127, 133, 142–143, 173 Federal Convention, 3, 12, 124–125, 157 federalism, 11–13 Federalist 10, 10, 278 Federalist 39, 25 Federalist 43, 8–9, 108 Fenton, Reuben, 81, 115, 119–120, 122, 124, 132–133, 168 Ferry, Orris, 113, 118, 125, 165, 167 Fessenden, William, 39–40, 106, 107, 114, 128, 129, 196–197 Fifteenth Amendment, 286, 287, 296, 298 Fifth Amendment, 127 Flourney, John Jacobus, 269 Folk, Joseph W., 243 Foner, Eric, 20, 292, 293, 294 Fool’s Errand, A (Tourgee), 284 Foote, Henry, 93 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 308–310 Fourteenth Amendment, 16, 22, 36, 106, 204, 287, 296, 298 Fowler, Charlotte, 302 Fowler, Wallace, 302 Franklin, Benjamin, 95, 110, 111, 123, 312–313, 317 Franklin, John Hope, 20, 291 free press, 42–43, 52, 56, 57, 100–101 Free Soil Party, 63, 183 free speech, 42–43, 52, 55–56, 57, 100–101, 262 “Free State of Jones,” 282 Frémont, John C., 53, 222 Fugitive Slave Act, 187, 203 Fugitive Slave Clause, 125–126 Garfield, James, 51, 86, 134, 136–137, 163, 263, 297–298, 326 Garrison, William Lloyd, 173, 306

393

INDEX

Georgia, 113, 133–139, 231, 241–242, 249 Gerry, Elbridge, 157 Giles, William, 142 Gooch, Daniel, 55–56, 126, 128, 131–132, 154–155, 163–164 Gordon, George, 308–309 government: Confederate, 274–276, 278– 282, 283–284; organization of, 58–62; slaveholders’ control of, 265–282; slavery and form of, 25–26; struggle for control of national, 209–222. See also oligarchy Grant, Ulysses S., 299, 303–304 “Grant and the New South” (Sherman), 41 Greene, Nathanael, 135 Grinnell, Josiah, 128, 129, 185–186 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 177 guarantee clause, 9, 12, 13–14, 15–17, 35, 106, 108–109 Gurley, John W., 315 Guthrie, James, 211 habeas corpus, 52, 53 Hale, John, 101, 114–117, 122, 123, 124, 130–131, 200 Hale, Robert, 126 Hamilton, Alexander, 108, 110, 111 Hammond, James Henry, 61, 92, 173, 319–320 Hannegan, Edward, 176 Harrington, 245 Harris, Essic, 302 Harrison, William Henry, 215 Hays, Charles, 307–308 Helper, Hinton, 168, 267, 269, 307, 321–322 Henderson, John, 134, 137, 172 Henry, Patrick, 115, 122, 133, 157 Higby, William, 73 Hill, Isaac W., 243 History of Rome (Hook), 80 homestead law, 63, 67, 68, 70 homicide rates, 259 Howard, Jacob, 162, 203–204 Howard, Oliver, 301–302 Howe, Timothy, 143, 144, 205–206 Howison, Robert Reid, 169

Hubbell, James, 205 Hunter, Robert, 169 ignorance, 46–51, 240. See also education Impending Crisis, The (Helper), 168, 321 injustice, popular, 10–11 Iraq war, 305 Iron Cages (Takaki), 311 Jackson, Andrew, 13–14, 163–164, 215 Jaffa, Harry, 23–24 Jay, John, 145 Jefferson, Thomas: call for abolition by, 123–124; education and, 229–230, 231; on emancipation, 132–133; on majority rule, 6, 164; on northern and southern character, 254–255; Northwest Ordinance and, 131, 178; primogeniture and, 81; property and, 247; on race, 317–318; on slavery, 90, 95, 115, 119, 120, 121; on South’s views of slavery, 7; state sovereignty and, 155–156; Sumner and, 110, 111 Johnson, Andrew, 213–214, 299, 303, 307, 320–321 Johnson, Rossiter, 288 Johnson, Samuel, 90 Johnson, William, 143 Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 36, 203–204 Julian, George W.: 1848 presidential election and, 182–183; Calhoun and, 162; on classes, 42; Kansas–Nebraska Act and, 192; landownership and, 62–66, 69–70; on Republican Party, 199, 207; on slave power, 103–104; on slavery, 188; on Tories, 134; on Turner revolt, 173–174; on Whig Party, 209 justice, injustice versus, 10–11 Kansas, 77, 189, 218–219 Kansas Investigating Committee, 219 Kansas–Nebraska Act, 152, 187, 193–199, 201–203, 204–206, 216 Keitt, Laurence M., 47, 170, 220 394

INDEX

Kelley, William, 98, 136, 141 Kellogg, Francis, 100–101, 134, 168 Kendall, Amos, 174 Kentucky, 140, 142 Kentucky Resolution, 155–157 “King Numbers,” 7–8, 46 Knight, Newton, 282 Knox, Henry, 135 Ku Klux Klan, 300–303, 305, 306, 308–310 Lafayette, 98, 132 land monopoly, 62–71 Lane, Henry, 38 Lawrence, William, 204 Lecompton constitution, 77 Lee, Richard Henry, 122, 280 Lee, Robert E., 306 liberties, suppression of, 51–58 Liberty Party, 183 Lieber, Francis, 265 Lincoln, Abraham, 17, 23–24, 288, 302 literacy rates, 47, 227, 228t, 229 Locke, John, 90 Logan, John, 210–211, 212, 213 Longyear, John, 102–103 Louisiana, 142, 236–237 Louisiana Territory, 142, 177 Lovejoy, Elijah, 173, 174 Lovejoy, Owen, 54, 94, 100, 119 Lucas, John, 253 Lumpkin, J. H., 85 Lynch, John, 289–290, 306 Madison, James: acts prohibiting slavery and, 131; Calhoun and, 13, 14, 15, 158; on color and slavery, 313–314; on errors, 325; on immigrants and slaves, 315; on majority rule, 6; natural right and, 110; on parties, 278; property and, 244–245; on republicanism, 10–12; on rights, 261; slave trade and, 132; on slavery, 25–26, 107–108, 115, 121, 124, 127, 138–139; state sovereignty and, 157–158; on suffrage, 272; on use of “slavery” in Constitution, 274; Virginia Resolution and, 155–156

Making of the American Nation, The (Partridge), 285 Mann, Horace, 232–233, 239–240 Manning, Joseph C., 285 Marion, Francis, 135–136 Marshall, John, 14–15 Martin, Alexander, 280, 281 Martin, Luther, 110, 119 Marxism, 19–20, 21 Maryland, 249 Mason, George, 90, 108, 110, 115, 157 Mason, James, 169, 199, 222, 241, 257 Maynard, Horace, 162, 212–213 McClung, Colonel, 259 McDougall, James, 211–212 McDuffie, George, 7, 53–54, 261–262 McLane, Louis, 316–317 Meade, Richard, 144 Mexican–American War, 177 Middleton, Henry, 230 Mill, John Stuart, 285 Miller, Samuel, 86 Mississippi, 142 Mississippi Territory, 141, 142 Missouri Compromise, 101, 172, 179, 184, 185, 187–188, 189, 190–199, 203, 204–205, 215–216 Missouri Constitution, 316 Missouri controversy, 145–150, 152, 172, 177, 179 Monroe, James, 179, 280 Montesquieu, 90, 312 Morrill, Justin, 49–50, 132, 133 Morrill, Lot, 50 Morris, Daniel, 44, 133, 138 Morris, Gouverneur, 108 Morris, Robert, 130 Morton, Oliver, 84, 146, 298 mudsill class, 61, 265 National Bureau of Education, 51 natural equality, 6, 77, 110, 126, 171, 244 natural inequality, 6, 7, 78–79, 171, 195 natural right, 12, 13, 70, 110–111, 123, 124 Naturalization Act (1795), 313–314 Nebraska Territory, 190 395

INDEX

Negro Question, The (Cable), 285 Nelson, Samuel, 180 nonslaveholders in slave states: censorship and, 57; effects of slavery and, 79–80, 85–86, 146, 182, 253–254; ignorance and, 48–49; inequality and, 42–46, 59–60, 250–251, 262–265. See also poor whites Nordhoff, Charles, 320 North Carolina, 231, 235–236 Northwest Ordinance (1787), 130–131, 132, 140, 141, 178 Notes on the States of Virginia ( Jefferson), 6, 115, 317 Nullification Crisis, 9, 12–15, 16, 163–164, 215 Nye, James, 105 oligarchy: denial of rights and, 51–58; description of, 5–6; land monopoly and, 62–71; organization of government and, 58–62; origin of, 105–150; popular ignorance and, 46–51; relationship of slavery to, 73–104; state sovereignty and, 158–159; suppression of liberties and, 51–58 Olmsted, Frederick, 85, 91 On Democracy (Partridge), 285 “On Rewriting Reconstruction History” (Beale), 293 Orleans Territory, 177, 315 Orr, Gustavus, 241–242 Orth, Godlove, 38–39 Otis, James, 280 Parker, Theodore, 101 Parrish, Celestia, 243 Partridge, J. Arthur, 285 party system, 278–279 Patterson, James, 79–80 Payne, William, 92 Pennsylvania, 249 Perry, Benjamin, 260 Pettit, John, 195 Pierce, Franklin, 219 Pierce, John, 233 Pike, Frederick, 155–156, 157, 163

Pinckney, C. C., 137 Pinckney, Charles, 110, 137, 149 Pinckney, William, 119 Plants, Tobias, 95–96 Plato, 24 Pleasants, Robert, 133 political association, right to, 52, 55 Political History of Slavery, A (Smith), 284 political regime, definition of, 5 Politics (Aristotle), 5, 25 Polk, James, 175, 176, 177 Pomeroy, Samuel, 138, 200 poor whites, 306–331. See also nonslaveholders in slave states Popular History of the United States, A (Bryant), 284–285 poverty, effects of, 245 Price, Dr., 132 Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 126 property arrangements, 224, 244–265 property redistribution, 67–69 protectionism, 67 racial accommodation, 291–292 racism, 29, 318–324 Rahe, Paul, 23, 24 railroad lines, 263 Ramsdell, Charles, 292 Randolph (of Virginia), 124 Randolph, Edmund, 108 Randolph, John, 46, 131, 234 Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, 165 Raum, Green Berry, 284 Raymond, Henry, 162, 192–193 readmittance of rebel states, conditions for, 35–36 Recollections (Sherman), 202 Reconstruction: criticism of, 305; duties of Congress regarding, 33–39; Lynch on, 289–290; resistance to, 303; task of, 18–19 Reconstruction after the Civil War (Franklin), 20 Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (Foner), 20, 292 regime change, failure of, 295–306

396

INDEX

religious opinion, 8, 52 Rensselaer, Stephen Van, 272 representation, apportioning, 58–60, 106, 268–271 Republic (Plato), 24 Republican fathers: constraints on, 133–139; plan of, 105–113; slavery and, 113–133 Republican Party, founding of, 199–208 Republican School, 284, 288, 289 republicanism, definition of, 10–11. See also guarantee clause Republics Ancient and Modern (Rahe), 23 Reynolds, J. J., 301 Rhett, Robert, 93, 160–161 Rice, John, 120 rights, denial of, 51–58 Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, The (Davis), 288 Rise and Reign of the Bourbon Oligarchy, The (Manning), 285 Roberts, Jonathan, 253–254 Rollins, James, 123 Roosevelt, Theodore, 318 Royal African Company, 120, 121 Ruffin, Thomas, 91 ruling class, Southern, 39–41 ruling principle, description of, 5 Rush, Benjamin, 269 Rutledge, Edward, 122, 137 Rutledge, John, 122, 137 Safford, Mailton J., 267 Scammell, Alexander, 168 Schurz, Carl, 326–327 Scofield, Glenni, 84, 138, 140 Seabrook, Whitemarsh, 46–47 secession, impact of, 17 secret ballots, 61–62, 272–274 Sectionalism Unmasked (Tremain), 284 Segar, Joseph, 164 selfishness, 96–97 Sergeant, John, 316 Seward, William, 169, 222, 326 Shanks, John P., 43–44, 119 Shannon, Thomas, 86, 101, 113, 132, 175

Sherman, John, 41, 168, 187, 202, 204–205, 216–217, 219, 222, 285–286 Sherman, Roger, 110, 137 Sixth Amendment, 127 Skaggs, William, 285 slave power (term), 101–104 Slave Power, The (Cairnes), 285 slave-­power thesis, 21–23 slavery: British support for, 120–121; Confederate Constitution and, 274–275; economic effects of, 79–82; effect of on masters, 86–98, 312–313; effect of on slaves and nonslaveholders, 82–86, 312– 313; form of government and, 25–26; illiteracy and, 227, 228t; landownership and, 247–251; legal effects of, 77; moral effects of, 78–79; Northwest Ordinance and, 131; passive expansion of, 140–145; relationship of, to oligarchy, 73–104; Republican fathers and, 113–133; South Carolina and Georgia and, 133–139; state-­level abolition of, 123, 129 Smith, Adam, 90 Smith, Benjamin, 230 Smith, Joseph P., 204 Smith, William Henry, 284 Smithers, Nathaniel, 143, 148 Society of Friends, 198 Some Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes (Lynch), 289 Soulé, Pierre, 184–185 South Carolina: constraints due to, 133– 139; education in, 230–231, 237–238; as origin of rebellion, 112–113; property and, 248; Wilson on, 186. See also Nullification Crisis southern distinctiveness, 6 southern exceptionalism, 6 southern nationalism, 6 Southern Oligarchy, The (Skaggs), 285 Spalding, Rufus, 181, 205 Speer, Emory, 287 Spooner, Lysander, 129 Stampp, Kenneth, 291 state constitutions, 35

397

INDEX

state sovereignty, 155–163, 174, 176, 178–179, 214, 288 Stephens, Alexander, 170, 202, 274, 303–304 Stevens, Thaddeus, 46, 75–76, 82–84, 144, 182 Stewart, Andrew, 8 Stewart, Charles, 153 Story, Joseph, 14 Stowe, Calvin, 232–233 Sumner, Charles: Brooks’s assault on, 219–220, 221–222; on Calhoun, 153, 171; defense of party by, 220–221; Douglas and, 192; on education, 47; on founders’ views of slavery, 133; founding of Republican Party and, 206–207; Kansas–Nebraska Act and, 197–199, 202; legislation proposed by, 35; on Missouri compromise, 146, 147, 148, 172, 190; on oligarchy, 37, 39–40; on slave power, 102; on slavery, 78–79, 82, 86–92, 94–95; on South Carolina, 135, 138; speech of, 106–113; on state sovereignty, 157 Supreme Court, 179–181 Takaki, Ronald, 311 Tallmadge, James, 146–147 Taney, Roger B., 74, 296, 298 tariff law, 9 taxes: education and, 234, 235, 238; inequality and, 60–61; to support keeping of slaves, 264 Taylor, John, 110, 253 Taylor, Zachary, 182–183, 184 Tennessee, 140–141, 142 Texas, 175–178, 184, 185, 187 Thayer, Martin, 157–158, 174 Thirteenth Amendment, 203, 287, 298 “Thoughts on Government” (Adams), 279 three-­fi fths rule, 59, 268–270, 275 Tillman, Benjamin, 287–288 Tocqueville, 90 Toombs, Robert, 52 Tourgee, Albion, 284 treason, 160–161 Tremain, Henry Edwin, 284

Trist, Nicholas, 178 Tucker, St. George, 312–314, 315–316, 317 Tuckerman, Joseph, 232 Turner, James, 230 Turner, Nat, 173–174 Tyler, John, 180, 231 Van Buren, Martin, 174, 177, 183, 200 Van Horn, Burt, 133–134 Van Wyck, Charles, 47–48, 54–55, 115, 122, 134, 170, 201, 227 Vance, Zebulon, 276 violence, racial, 300–304, 307–310 Virginia: defense of slavery in, 165–169; education in, 230, 231; property and, 247–248; slave revolt in, 173–174 Virginia constitutional convention, 7 Virginia Resolution, 155–157 viva voce voting, 61–62, 271–272, 273–274 Voltaire, 90 von Holst, Hermann, 285 voter suppression, 286–287 voting rights, 7, 106–107, 136–137, 237, 286–287, 297–298 voting secrecy, 61–62 vox populi vox Dei, 6 Wade, Benjamin, 114, 121, 146, 148, 169, 179, 191–192, 194–196, 205 wages, rates of, 250 Washburn, Cadwallader, 115, 132–133, 134, 169, 205 Washburne, Elihu, 77, 173, 197, 216 Washington, George, 95, 110, 115, 122, 124, 130, 132, 157, 278 Watson, Thomas, 307 wealth, inequality of, 27–28, 80–81, 247–248, 250–251 Webster, Daniel, 114, 158, 184, 185, 214 Welker, Martin, 37–38 Wentworth, John, 153, 162–163, 186, 203, 218 Whaley, Kellian, 48–49, 59–60 Whig Party, 202, 209 “white basis” formula, 58–59, 269 Whitney, Eli, 142–143 398

INDEX

Whitney, R. M., 92 “Why Free Workingmen Hate the Slaves” (Nordhoff ), 320 Wigfall, Louis, 143 Willey, Waitman T., 45–46, 48, 58, 60, 81–82, 85, 115, 119, 132, 136, 164, 168 Williams, George H., 106–107, 200–201 Wilmot, David, 178 Wilmot Proviso, 178, 182 Wilson, Henry: 1848 presidential election and, 183; on abolition of slavery, 123, 132; on admission of states, 141, 142; on Blair, 44; on Brooks affair, 219–220, 221–222; Calhoun and, 167; on Clay and Webster, 184; on defense of slavery, 168– 169; on Douglas, 210; on emancipation, 128–129; on founders’ views of slavery, 115, 118; founding of Republican Party

and, 206; on free territories, 179; on Kansas, 218; Missouri Compromise and, 187–188, 193; on oligarchy, 40; on rights, 52–53; secret-­ballot law and, 61; on slave power, 101–102, 165–166; on slave trade, 134; on slavery, 84, 85–86, 119, 120, 145; on South Carolina, 135, 186 Wilson, James, 50, 67–68, 108, 173, 325 Wilson, William Julius, 311 Wilson, Woodrow, 291 Windom, William, 101, 103 Wise, Henry, 53, 57 Wise, John Sargeant, 271 Wright, Gavin, 250 Yancey, William Lowndes, 259–261 Yates, Richard, 39, 120, 138, 202–203 yeomanry, 182, 257, 265

399