The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America 9781138784871, 9781315768120

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction
Part I The Early Republic
1 Race, Slavery, Sectional Conflict, and National Politics, 1770–1820
2 Class, the Market Revolution, and Urbanization
3 “Female Women or Feminine Ladies”: Gender and Women’s Rights
before the Antebellum Movement
4 Religion and Reform in the Early American Republic
5 Borderlands and Cultural Survival: Native Americans in the Early
National Era
Part I Antebellum America
6 International Travel, Intellectual Life, and Global Influences on the
United States
7 Party Politics and the Sectional Crisis: A Twenty-Year Renaissance in the
Study of Antebellum Political History
8 Literature and Culture during the American Renaissance
9 Capitalism and Slavery in the United States
Part III The Civil War Era
10 Secession and the Onset of Civil War
11 Wartime Military Mobilization, Business, and Technology
12 The Confederacy on the Battlefield and Home Front
13 Politics and Civil Liberties on the Union Home Front
14 Waging War, Conducting Diplomacy: Leadership and the American
Civil War
15 African Americans and Emancipation in the Civil War
16 Law, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution, 1840–1880
Part IV America in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
17 Women’s Rights and Gender Ideology, 1848–1890
18 Race, Crime, and Segregation
19 The Paradox of the Business and Political Economy of the
New South
20 American Literary and Cultural History in the Post-Civil War Era
21 Industrial Empire: The American Conquest of the West, 1845–1900
22 Crisis, Protest, and Reform in Industrializing America
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America provides an important overview of the main themes within the study of the long nineteenth century. The book explores major currents of research over the past few decades to give an up-to-date synthesis of nineteenthcentury history. It shows how the century defined much of our modern world, focusing on themes including: immigration, slavery and racism, women’s rights, literature and culture, and urbanization.This collection reflects the state of the field and will be essential reading for all those interested in the development of the modern United States. Jonathan Daniel Wells is Professor of History in the Departments of History and Afroamerican and African Studies, and Director of the Residential College, at the University of Michigan.

T H E ROU T L E DGE HI STO RI ES

The Routledge Histories is a series of landmark books surveying some of the most important topics and themes in history today. Edited and written by an international team of worldrenowned experts, they are the works against which all future books on their subjects will be judged.

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FOODWAYS Edited by Michael Wise and Jennifer Jensen Wallach THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF RURAL AMERICA Edited by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF DISEASE Edited by Mark Jackson THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF AMERICAN SPORT Edited by Linda J. Borish, David K.Wiggins and Gerald R. Gems THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF EAST CENTRAL EUROPE SINCE 1700 Edited by Irina Livezeanu and Árpád von Klimó THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE Edited by William Caferro THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF MADNESS AND MENTAL HEALTH Edited by Greg Eghigian THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF DISABILITY Edited by Roy Hanes, Ivan Brown and Nancy E. Hansen THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA Edited by Jonathan Daniel Wells THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF ITALIAN AMERICANS Edited by William J. Connell and Stanislao G. Pugliese

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

Edited by Jonathan Daniel Wells

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Jonathan Daniel Wells to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-78487-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-76812-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Keystroke, Neville Lodge, Tettenhall, Wolverhampton

The author wishes to thank Kimberly Guinta, Eve Mayer and Theodore Meyer for their invaluable help in getting this volume to publication

C ONTEN T S

List of Contributors

xi

Introduction

1

JONATHAN DANIEL WELLS

PART I

The Early Republic

9

1 Race, Slavery, Sectional Conflict, and National Politics, 1770–1820

11

JOHN CRAIG HAMMOND

2 Class, the Market Revolution, and Urbanization

33

CHRISTOPHER CLARK

3 “Female Women or Feminine Ladies”: Gender and Women’s Rights before the Antebellum Movement

47

LEIGH FOUGHT

4 Religion and Reform in the Early American Republic

62

JOHN FEA

5 Borderlands and Cultural Survival: Native Americans in the Early National Era

74

DAVID A. NICHOLS

PART II

Antebellum America 6

87

International Travel, Intellectual Life, and Global Influences on the United States

89

DANIEL KILBRIDE

7

Party Politics and the Sectional Crisis: A Twenty-Year Renaissance in the Study of Antebellum Political History FRANK TOWERS

vii

109

C O N T ENT S

8 Literature and Culture during the American Renaissance

131

JOHN ERNEST

9 Capitalism and Slavery in the United States

146

MICHAEL ZAKIM

PART III

The Civil War Era

169

10 Secession and the Onset of Civil War

171

RACHEL A. SHELDEN

11 Wartime Military Mobilization, Business, and Technology

191

MARK R. WILSON

12 The Confederacy on the Battlefield and Home Front

202

PAUL D. ESCOTT

13 Politics and Civil Liberties on the Union Home Front

216

JOEL H. SILBEY

14 Waging War, Conducting Diplomacy: Leadership and the American Civil War

231

BROOKS D. SIMPSON

15 African Americans and Emancipation in the Civil War

241

AARON SHEEHAN-DEAN

16 Law, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution, 1840–1880

253

TIMOTHY S. HUEBNER

PART IV

America in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

273

17 Women’s Rights and Gender Ideology, 1848–1890

275

BONNIE LAUGHLIN-SCHULTZ

18 Race, Crime, and Segregation

292

VIVIEN MILLER

19 The Paradox of the Business and Political Economy of the New South

307

NATALIE J. RING

20 American Literary and Cultural History in the Post-Civil War Era SARAH E. GARDNER

viii

321

C O N T ENT S

21 Industrial Empire: The American Conquest of the West, 1845–1900

333

ANDREW C. ISENBERG

22 Crisis, Protest, and Reform in Industrializing America

346

WILLIAM A. LINK

Index

358

ix

C ONTRIBUTOR S

Christopher Clark is Professor and Head of the History Department at the University of Connecticut. His books include The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (1990); The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (1995); Social Change in America: From the Revolution through the Civil War (2006); and, with Nancy Hewitt, volume 1 of Who Built America? (2000, 2007). He is currently writing a book on agriculture and landownership from the late colonial period to the Cold War. John Ernest is Judge Hugh M. Morris Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Delaware, and the author or editor of twelve books, including Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (2009) and The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative (2014).With Joycelyn K. Moody, he serves as series editor of Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture. Paul D. Escott is Reynolds Professor of History at Wake Forest University. His recent books are The Confederacy: The Slaveholders’ Failed Venture, Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States, and Lincoln’s Dilemma: Blair, Sumner, and the Republican Struggle over Racism and Equality in the Civil War Era. John Fea is Professor of American History and Chair of the Department of History at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He is the author, most recently, of The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society (Oxford University Press, 2016). Leigh Fought is an Associate Professor of History at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She is the author of Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Southern Womanhood and Slavery: A Biography of Louisa S. McCord (University of Missouri Press, 2003), and was an associate editor on The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series Three: Correspondence,Volume 1: 1842–1852 (Yale University Press, 2009). Sarah E. Gardner is Professor of History and Director of the Spencer B. King, Jr. Center for Southern Studies at Mercer University. She is the author of Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937 and Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920–1941. She is currently working on a book that examines reading habits and practices during the American Civil War, titled “‘A New Glass to See All Our Old Things Through’: Reading During Wartime.”

xi

C O N T R I BU TO R S

John Craig Hammond is Associate Professor of History at Penn State, New Kensington. He is the author of numerous books and articles on slavery and politics from the Revolution through the Civil War. His is currently at work on a book-length examination of slavery and politics from the 1760s through the 1830s. Timothy S. Huebner is Sternberg Professor of History at Rhodes College, Memphis. He is the author of Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism (2016), The Taney Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy (2003), and The Southern Judicial Tradition: State Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness, 1790–1890 (1999). He is co-editor (with the late Kermit L. Hall) of Major Problems in American Constitutional History, second edition (2010). Professor Huebner also serves as associate editor of the Journal of Supreme Court History, published three times a year by the Supreme Court Historical Society. Andrew C. Isenberg is Professor of History at Temple University. He is the author of The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mining California: An Ecological History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005); and Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), which was a finalist for the Weber-Clements Prize in Southwestern History. Daniel Kilbride is Professor of History at John Carroll University outside Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of An American Aristocracy: Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia (University of South Carolina Press, 2006) and Being American in Europe, 1750–1860 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). He is researching a book on American engagement with Africa in the middle of the nineteenth century, which has so far resulted in two publications: “What Did Africa Mean to Frederick Douglass?” Slavery & Abolition 36:1 (March 2015), 40–62; and “The Old South Confronts the Dilemma of David Livingstone,” Journal of Southern History 82:4 (November 2016), 789–822. Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States who specializes in American women’s history. Her first book, The Tie That Bound Us:The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism, was published in 2013 and was named a Kansas Notable Book in 2014. She is now working on a project about nineteenthcentury women’s rights reformers and the intersections of their ideology about women’s rights and citizenship with their experiences of motherhood. William A. Link is Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida. He is a historian of the South whose work includes The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930 (1992), Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (2003), Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War’s Aftermath (2013), and Southern Crucible: The Making of an American Region (2015). He is currently writing a study of the life and times of Frank Porter Graham. Vivien Miller is Associate Professor of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Hard Labor and Hard Time: Florida’s “Sunshine Prison” and Chain Gangs (2012) and Crime,Violence and Sexual Clemency: Florida’s Pardon Board and Penal System in the Progressive Era (2000), and co-editor of Transnational Penal Cultures: New Perspectives on Discipline, Punishment and Desistance (2014) and Cross-Cultural Connections in Crime Fictions (2012). She is currently working on the death penalty in the pre-1972 United States. xii

C ON T R I BU TO R S

David A. Nichols is an Associate Professor of History at Indiana State University. He has an AB from Harvard and received his doctorate from the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier (University of Virginia Press, 2008), Engines of Diplomacy: Indian Trading Factories and the Negotiation of American Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), and Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600–1870 (Ohio University Press, 2017, forthcoming). Natalie J. Ring researches and teaches on the History of the American South. Prior to arriving at UT Dallas she taught for two years as a visiting assistant professor at Tulane University. She is the author of The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930. Dr. Ring also is the co-editor of The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South, a collection of essays offering a new look at the history and historiography of Jim Crow. Aaron Sheehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University, where he teaches courses on nineteenth-century U.S. history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Southern History. He is the author of Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia and the Concise Historical Atlas of the U.S. Civil War, and the editor of several books. Rachel A. Shelden is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), and the co-editor, with Gary W. Gallagher, of A Political Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Political History (University of Virginia Press, 2012). Joel H. Silbey is the President White Professor of History Emeritus at Cornell University. He has written extensively on nineteenth-century politics. Among his books are studies of pre-Civil War presidents, and of Congress, including most recently, Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics and an edited study of the antebellum presidents. Brooks D. Simpson is Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University, where he is a member of the faculties of the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts and Barrett, The Honors College. Among his books are Ulysses S. Grant:Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865 (2000); The Civil War in the East: Struggle, Stalemate, and Victory (2011); The Reconstruction Presidents (1998); The Political Education of Henry Adams (1996); and America’s Civil War (1996). Frank Towers is an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary. He co-edited Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War Era (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Jonathan Daniel Wells is Professor of History in the Departments of Afroamerican and African Studies and History, and Director of the Residential College, at the University of Michigan. He is the author or editor of nine books, including The Origins of the Southern Middle Class: 1820–1861 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge University Press, 2011), The Southern xiii

C O N T R I BU TO R S

Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century (LSU Press, 2011), and A House Divided:The Civil War and Nineteenth-Century America (Routledge, second edition, 2017), in addition to articles in academic journals and chapters in books. He is currently working on two book projects related to the Fugitive Slave Crisis in the antebellum North. Mark R. Wilson is a Professor in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He received his Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), and Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Michael Zakim is the author of Ready-Made Democracy, a political history of men’s dress, and of the forthcoming Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made, as well as the editor, together with Gary Kornblith, of Capitalism Takes Command:The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America, all published by the University of Chicago Press. He teaches history at Tel Aviv University.

xiv

INTRODUC T I ON Jonathan Daniel Wells

The historiography of nineteenth-century America, like that of the nation’s history more broadly, has changed in dramatic and profound ways in recent decades, carving out entirely new fields, adding immeasurably to the complexity of our work, and redefining even our most fundamental understandings of the past. This historical awakening, inspired in no small part by the Civil Rights Movement and the succeeding struggles for greater civil and human rights in post-World War II America, has reshaped virtually all fields and subfields by shifting attention away from white male political and military leaders and toward ordinary actors at the grassroots, while also tending to refocus academic lenses onto the local as opposed to the national. Along with such shifts has come the assertion that the experiences of common people can be most readily understood not through analyses of high politics, but rather through the cultural tropes and contours that guided the beliefs and practices of the public.This is not to say that scholars have completely ignored powerful decision-makers in influential centers like Washington and New York, only that the “cultural turn,” as the last few decades of historiography have been labeled, has added incalculably to the breadth and depth of our knowledge of the past. While the cultural turn has reshaped historiography in revolutionary ways, it bears reminding that throughout the twentieth century there were always scholars listening for marginalized voices. Long before the cultural turn, leading voices emerged in African American scholarship; men like W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin, and Benjamin Quarles wrote crucially important histories of the black experience that continue to resonate with modern historians. Women like Louise Fargo Brown and many others offered their own perspectives on the nation’s history, often (though by no means exclusively) uncovering complicated stories of women and gender. And, of course, even white male scholars did not focus exclusively on high politics or the battlefield, as the carefully nuanced work of academics like C. Vann Woodward and Kenneth Stampp attests.1 Yet it remains a truism that until the last half-century, American historiography was largely the bastion of white male scholars, and their interests reflected their own personal histories. Interested primarily in major historical actors like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Abraham Lincoln, academic historians engaged in lively debates about the constituencies of the Whig and Democratic Parties (which together comprised what political scientists termed the Second Party System), the causes of the American Civil War, and whether Reconstruction marked the rise of

1

I N T RO DUCT I O N

meddlesome and corrupt northern carpetbaggers or a badly needed head start on a “New South.” Military historians charted the back and forth of generals and armies on battlefields; the War of 1812, the US-Mexican War, and of course the Civil War offered academic and popular audiences seemingly endless material on which to base books and articles. The opening of the West in the mid-nineteenth century and the conflicts between cowboys and Indians also garnered tremendous attention, reflected in the popular mind by John Wayne, the Lone Ranger, and Davey Crockett. Yet the historian transported from 1957 to 2017 would hardly recognize the field. Beginning with studies of the African American experience in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars have reshaped debates over antebellum slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, and all three fields have benefited from a wider scope of analysis. The study of antebellum slavery has been reconfigured dramatically as historians began in the 1960s to consider enslaved people as significant historical actors in their own right, rather than mere pawns of national politicians in the sectional crisis. One landmark study that established beyond question the importance of examining the African American experience was John Blassingame’s The Slave Community (1972). Utilizing long-ignored slave narratives, Blassingame helped to reignite interest in the southern plantation and the people of color who lived there. Soon Eugene Genovese’s Roll Jordan, Roll (1974), Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family (1976), and other works helped to reinforce the notion that race and racism were fundamental to understanding American history. The cultural turn, and specifically the historiographical redirection toward the history of race, was in full motion.2 More recently, the history of slavery and capitalism has been enjoined once again, as Michael Zakim’s essay in the present volume shows. Works by Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist, Calvin Schermerhorn and others have investigated the role of cotton in creating a world-wide system of trade, a business on which capitalism was heavily dependent, so much so that as Baptist demonstrates terrible violence was inflicted on the enslaved to increase production.3 While the renewed interest in the entwined history of slavery and capitalism continues, the great conflict to emerge from the sectional crisis also remains of great relevance to both scholars and the reading public. New studies of individual battles and campaigns by Anne Sarah Rubin, Elizabeth Varon, Allen Guelzo, and others have been published in recent years, adding nuance to our understanding of Sherman’s March to the Sea, Appomattox, and even well-studied clashes like the Battle of Gettysburg.4 Yet scholars have also increasingly turned toward the home front and to less studied subjects, including Union soldiers of color, the role of women, and the importance of the international dimensions of wartime diplomacy. In common with other work after the cultural turn, recent academic studies of America in the 1860s have tended to highlight the roles played by ordinary people, in contrast to popular perceptions that Lincoln and a handful of Washington leaders like Representative Thaddeus Stevens were primarily responsible for emancipation, a perception reified by director Steven Spielberg’s highly successful film Lincoln. Given the academy’s current emphasis on ordinary historical actors as drivers of change, it should not surprise us that the Reconstruction era and the late nineteenth century have witnessed a similarly noteworthy shift toward race, gender, racism, and culture. This 2

I N T RO DUCT I O N

authorial stance contrasts sharply with the work of previous generations of historians, such as the Dunning School of the late nineteenth century, as well as with the work of prominent professors like Ulrich B. Phillips in the early decades of the twentieth century. Dunning and his adherents, modern observers have remarked, were more interested in depicting Reconstruction as a corrupt era of carpetbaggers who kept white southerners under martial rule, while Phillips was intensely interested in the southern plantation but not at all intrigued by the enslaved people who toiled on them.5 Leading historians like Thavolia Glymph, Crystal Feimster, Eric Foner, Talitha LeFlouria, and others have added rich detail to our knowledge of the brutality of the postwar era.6 The revolution in nineteenth-century American historiography on race and racism has been dramatic indeed, but one could easily point to seismic shifts in other fields and subfields like the history of women and gender, Native Americans, LGBTQ Americans, and the new and growing areas of transnational and global studies. Many of these fresh and exciting subfields are discussed at length in the present volume, illuminating formerly marginalized groups in valuable ways that will no doubt continue unabated over the next decades. Historians remain interested in political culture, as the fine work of Rachel Shelden, Michael Landis, and many others attests.7 But the cultural turn has proven not to be a temporary detour but rather an enduring new road that has led us to a much fuller and broader appreciation of the nation’s past. Some scholars, it should be noted, do not share this optimistic prediction of a rosy future for academic history. As this volume heads to publication, the humanities are under fire as undergraduates and their families, laden with the heavy burden of college debt, search for paths to well-paid careers upon graduation. Academics themselves, some scholars have argued, have exacerbated this uneasiness by fostering the fracturing of the many fields and subfields into ever smaller (and perhaps ever more esoteric) circles of experts. According to this view, the cultural turn has damaged the profession more generally, making it increasingly difficult for historians even within the same fields of inquiry to speak to one another, not to mention the expansion of the wide gulf separating academic historians from the literate public.8 Indeed, in 1945, Arthur Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson appeared prominently on best-seller lists just as it garnered awards from the historical profession. Books widely acclaimed by academics today often earn no broader readership than being assigned in undergraduate university lecture courses. There is no doubt that the cultural turn, even as it has greatly enriched and fundamentally reshaped the study of history, has kept turning past the notice or interest of the reading public, surrendering the best-seller lists largely to the likes of former Fox television personality Bill O’Reilly. The cultural turn, one might also argue, has obscured earlier important analyses of class and economic inequality. The once-vibrant field of nineteenth-century labor history, at one time a field no self-respecting history department would do without, has waned considerably in recent decades, though optimistic modern labor historians might point to promising renewed attempts to consider once again the importance of union and worker history. And whether the recent surprising success of the presidential campaign of Democratic Socialist and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders presages a rekindling of interest in the history of class consciousness, class conflict, and social inequality remains to be seen. Whether or not social class reemerges as a topic of consistent and widespread 3

I N T RO DUCT I O N

interest in the humanities, the historiographical shifts of the past half century have populated our understanding of the past with people and topics once marginalized. The nearly two dozen essays in this volume, a mix of history and historiography, provide tangible proof that history remains a vital discipline. *** Until recently, volumes such as the one you are reading now were largely unnecessary; graduate students studying for qualifying exams or scholars in other fields seeking to understand recent trends on a given subject could turn to historiographical essays in periodicals. Such works were common in the immediate postwar era and the later twentieth century, appearing regularly in the foremost journals and often penned by leading scholars, and both graduate students and other scholars read them eagerly and referred to them often. The twists and turns of scholarship on the Second Party System, for example, were enough to spin the heads of even the most attentive students. The consensus historiography of the mid-twentieth century gave way in the 1960s to an ethnocultural approach to understanding the partisan allegiance of Whigs and Democrats, which in turn rendered political history more quantitatively driven in the 1970s and 1980s. The literature was vast and daunting. The same might be said about scholarly explanations for the causes of the Civil War. In the aftermath of World War II and in the wake of the Cold War, the Civil War seemed to reflect broader fights for human rights. By the 1990s, the ground shifted again; the conflict began to appear as the cumulative result of contingencies rather than any great clash between slavery and freedom. The historiographies of intensely researched topics like politics and the Civil War would have taken months to master, but every so often, a prominent historian of political culture or the sectional crisis like Edward Pessen or Ronald Formisano would publish a historiographical essay that walked readers through recent trends, “catching up” those who remained primarily interested in other fields.9 It does appear that historiographical essays are a lost or at least dying art, though many academic journals have published longer reviews that allow for expanded historiographical context, or even occasional blogs online that are less constrained by the costs (and therefore length requirements) of the printed page. In the meantime, volumes such as the present one will seek to fill the remaining gaps, and in the process provide a greater understanding of that great century or so between the American Revolution and World War I, a period often called “the Long Nineteenth Century.” The nineteenth century is of interest to many of us for the rich array of topics to analyze, study, and puzzle over. Change seemed to come at an unprecedented pace. A woman born in rural New York in 1810 would have witnessed a remarkable array of startling changes if she lived to be eighty. Likely born on a small farm, she would have witnessed revolutionary shifts in virtually every aspect of her life. The emotionally intense conversion experience of evangelical religion would have changed the way that she and her family worshipped. Rather than take several days or even weeks to travel to visit family, as her parents had endured, she would grow up in a nation more connected by railroads, canals, a postal system, and eventually as she grew older, the telegraph and telephone. News in her parents’ generation took weeks to cross the Atlantic; the laying of the transatlantic cable in mid-century provided almost instant news from Europe. 4

I N T RO DUCT I O N

Even as a northerner born in the early 1800s, she might have seen slaves firsthand without ever travelling to the South, since many northern states had only provided for the gradual end of bondage. Her sons might have marched off to the Civil War, and their sacrifices might have been mitigated by the Union’s victory and the end of slavery. Even after seeing so much change, she would never earn the right to vote, a privilege that would only be enjoyed by her grandchildren. But she would have witnessed the expansion of the suffrage to nearly all white men, as well as a public debate about whether such a right should be granted to those who just a few years prior had been property under the law. The woman who lived throughout most of the nineteenth century would have experienced many changes indeed, and this is why so many historians remain fascinated by the 1800s. That century witnessed, for example, stunning literary and artistic creativity, as antebellum Americans eagerly read James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and Ralph Waldo Emerson boldly stood in front of the conservative Harvard faculty and called for a new kind of American scholar. Emily Dickinson, safe in her own chamber of her family’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts, mere miles from where Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne penned their own contributions to the “American Renaissance,” wrote poem after poem that in a few lines relayed more emotion and experience than some entire novels. Even while reading the latest productions from Hawthorne in The Democratic Review, a monthly partisan magazine matched only by the Whigs’ American Review, Americans would have lined up largely as they do today: behind one of two major political parties. The Jeffersonians and the Federalists would give way to the Second Party System, and for the first time campaigns would champion the virtues of the common man, reflecting the broadening of white male suffrage in the early part of the century. Yet as potent as these two parties were in the 1830s and 1840s, they would both collapse under the weight of the sectional crisis. Though the Democrats would limp on during and after the Civil War, they would have to contend with a new and powerful Republican Party. African Americans like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman pushed Republican leaders like Lincoln to go further and faster in the remaking of America. Douglass’s own Narrative (1845) was an indictment of the country’s claim to be a shining city upon a hill, a nation based ostensibly on the notion that all men were created equal. As in any age, those who could stand apart from their own societies and recognize the injustice surrounding them, those who called for greater rights for women as well as an end to slavery and discrimination, were but a few. And yet, in large part because of the tireless work of agitators like Douglass and Tubman, as well as that of thousands of lesser known reformers, the North and South would come to blows in 1861 in a war that abolished slavery. The Civil War stands, of course, right in the middle of the long nineteenth century, a seemingly impassable divide that separated the American experience into two worlds: one of slavery, states’ rights, abolitionism, fugitive slaves, border wars, and King Cotton, the other of joyful emancipation tempered by Jim Crow and Ku Klux Klan violence, federal preeminence, Republican administrations, industrialization, union activism, and the emergence of a supposedly New South. The war really did render an entirely new nation. 5

I N T RO DUCT I O N

Yet even as it answered old, thorny questions surrounding slavery and states’ rights, the war and the Reconstruction era that followed generated new concerns. The Thirteenth Amendment declared slavery illegal, but how would the four million freedpeople be integrated into society? Would black men be able to vote? Would black and white Americans be able to work, worship, and live together in the same communities? Violent paramilitary groups like the KKK and the White League, in concert with oneparty Democratic control over politics, tried to keep the Civil War from marking a watershed in race relations: codes seeking to control the behavior of southern African Americans replaced antebellum slave codes. Yet, in time, southerners of color in places like Birmingham, Alabama, Atlanta, Georgia, and Greensboro, North Carolina would rise up and stage a second reconstruction known as the Civil Rights Movement. And this brings us back to the cultural turn. It is not that historians are presentist, judging the past by the standards of the here and now, nor do historians always seek to draw direct connections between past and present to justify our corner of the browbeaten humanities. We are intrigued by the past, and indeed many of us have dedicated our professional lives to understanding it, but our experiences in the present shape what we are interested in studying, the questions we ask as we head to the archives, and the historical problems we pose to our students in the classroom. In this crucially important way, the study of history is alive and ever-changing.

Notes 1 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1903); John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (New York: Knopf, 1947); Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston: Little Brown, 1953); C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1951); Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956). Louise Fargo Brown of Vassar College and Louise Ropes Loomis began the famous Berkshire meeting for women historians in 1930. Southern women historians were also active: Lillian Adele Kibler, for example, wrote a widely admired biography of a southern Unionist: Benjamin F. Perry: South Carolina Unionist (Durham: Duke University Press, 1946). 2 John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976). 3 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2014); Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 4 Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (New York: Knopf, 2013); Anne Sarah Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Elizabeth R. Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 5 On the Dunning School, see John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, eds., The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2013).

6

I N T RO DUCT I O N

6 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2015). 7 Rachel A. Shelden, Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2013); Michael Todd Landis, Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). 8 For an excellent analysis of this view see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 9 Edward Pessen, “How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South?” American Historical Review 85 (December 1980); Ronald P. Formisano, “The Invention of the Ethnocultural Interpretation,” American Historical Review 99 (April 1994).

7

Part I THE EARLY REPUBLIC

1 RAC E , SLAVERY, S EC T I O N A L CONFLIC T, AND N AT I O N A L POLITIC S, 1 7 7 0 – 1 8 2 0 John Craig Hammond

Slavery, sectional differences, and the conflicts they engendered proved manifest less than a month after the thirteen colonies declared their independence.While devising means to pay for war, the Continental Congress debated whether slaves should be taxed as persons or property. Anticipating eight decades of threats that lay in the future, South Carolinian Thomas Lynch, Jr. warned that “If it is debated, whether their Slaves are their Property, there is an End of the Confederation. Our Slaves being our Property, why should they be taxed more than the Land, Sheep, Cattle, Horses, &c.” To this early threat of disunion, Benjamin Franklin sardonically replied that “Slaves rather weaken than strengthen the State, and there is therefore some difference between them and Sheep. Sheep will never make any Insurrections.”1 Similar conflicts, debates, and threats would carry through the War for Independence and the Confederation years.The Continental and Confederation Congresses divided over matters such as the use of black soldiers in the Continental Army, British compensation for wartime losses of slaves, the levying of taxes on slaves, and foreign commerce, including both the importation of slaves and the exportation of slave-produced cash crops. The Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia in 1787 was deeply divided by sectional matters, with northern and southern delegates promising rejection in their respective home states unless certain sectional demands were met. Sectional issues continued through the ratification debates. Supporters and opponents of ratification parsed the document, keeping tabs on the advantages gained by one section and lost by another. In states where ratification was contested, Federalists and Anti-Federalists marshalled forth constitutional clauses and claims demonstrating that their section had scored a divisive victory, faced impending doom, or had struck a fine balance between sectional interests. Sectional disputes hardly ended with ratification. The first several federal Congresses wrestled with numerous issues surrounding slavery that the Constitution left open to interpretation and implementation. With Quakers, free blacks, and their political allies determined to force Congress to take action against slavery, and with southern politicians equally intent on protecting slaveholders’ interests, sectional conflicts and clashes over slavery became an inescapable part of national politics. In one form or another, and in varying degrees of duration, significance, and severity, disputes over slavery struck every Congress that met between 1789 and 1820. More broadly, slavery and sectional conflict were persistent features of local, state, national, and international politics from the 1770s through 1820. 11

J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

From the 1960s through the early 2000s, the historiography on slavery, politics, and sectionalism in the early American republic was strongly shaped by assumptions grounded in American exceptionalism and nationalism.2 Slavery was clearly antithetical to the values and principles of the American Revolution. As such, historians assumed that there existed a revolutionary moment when the founders could have placed slavery on the road to abolition, leading historians to frame their analyses around the question of “why did the founding generation fail to abolish slavery?” Led by this question, historians have long taken the American nation-state and elite political actors as their main subject of analysis. David Brion Davis and Winthrop Jordan, whose magisterial works nearly founded the subject of slavery and politics in Revolutionary America, were modest in their criticisms of revolutionary inaction against slavery, even if their findings were less than flattering to the founders, the Constitution, the American political process, voters and politicians, and institutions such as Congress and the presidency.3 The dark realities of slavery and racism in the early republic uncovered by historians in the 1960s and 1970s led historians in the 1980s to reverse the meanings of American exceptionalism without abandoning their use of the concept. Led by Paul Finkelman and Gary Nash, these historians tended towards nationalism in that their analyses focused on elite political actors and the institutions of the nation-state. They tended towards exceptionalism in assuming that the United States, as a nation conceived in liberty, should have somehow been immune to historical processes found elsewhere in the Americas and the Atlantic world. The exceptionalism and nationalism that informed much of the literature on slavery and politics in the early republic found expression in something like a standard narrative that became generally accepted by historians in the 1990s. Expressed most forcefully in works by Paul Finkelman,William Freehling, and Don Fehrenbacher, that standard narrative held that Revolutionary challenges to bondage resulted in gradual abolition laws in the North, a brief surge of manumissions in the Upper South, and the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. From this high-point of antislavery fervor, northern and southern founders allowed racism, hypocrisy, and narrow self-interest to undermine efforts to rein in slavery’s growth and to place it on the road to peaceful abolition. Southern slaveholders forged a pro-slavery constitution while facing minimal opposition from self-interested and hypocritical northerners. In the first two decades of the republic, the Democratic Republican Party served as a vehicle for southern slaveholders to gain northern support for pro-slavery laws and measures. Free from criticism and serious challenges, southern politicians quietly fashioned the United States into a slaveholders’ republic, while slavery grew in both absolute numbers and territorial extent as a result of an informal policy of silent sanction.4 This narrative would continue to shape scholarship into the early 2000s. By then, scholarship on slavery and the founding became even more nationalistic and exceptionalist in both its positive and negative forms, as historians turned to evaluating the roles of various founders in creating or opposing a pro-slavery constitution and a slaveholders’ republic. In practice, this scholarship often resorts to anachronistic moralizing where historians contrast the antislavery merits of founding fathers such as John Adams and Timothy Pickering against the hypocritical, pro-slavery demerits of founders such as Thomas Jefferson. In other cases, historians ruminate on how political victories by New England Federalists might have altered the course of slavery in the United States, or 12

RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

castigate the founding generation for sacrificing the principles of the revolution on the altar of self-interest and racism. When these works move beyond the confines of the United States, they typically do so to provide contrasts between functionally pro-slavery founders in the United States and antislavery advocates and revolutionaries in places such as Britain and Haiti. Recent works by Douglas Egerton and Gary Nash exemplify much of the recent literature on slavery and politics in the early republic in that both treat free and enslaved blacks as political actors who shaped conflicts over slavery and abolition. Both works, however, confine their analysis of politics mainly to the actions of a small group of founders. More broadly, recent founders-centered literature assumes that had certain founders – particularly Jefferson – acted in a certain way, at certain key moments, slavery could have somehow been placed peacefully on the road to abolition.5 Interpretations which hold that the founding generation should have abolished slavery still hold considerable sway in the historiography. Over the past fifteen years, however, they have been joined by a group of historians who have revised this understanding of slavery and American politics in significant ways.6 While much previous scholarship placed the founders at the center of the politics of slavery, recent scholarship instead shows that political elites found themselves reacting to events and actors that forced slavery into local, state, regional, and national politics far more frequently than they initiated and directed them. Political icons such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington remain prominent in this literature, as do important national-level institutions such as Congress and the presidency. However, they have been joined by an expansive cast of groups, individuals, and institutions that includes free and enslaved blacks, northern and southern farmers, eastern and western planters, early antislavery activists, minor Federalist and Republican politicians, urban mechanics and newspaper editors, free black churches and self-help societies, and Quaker-led antislavery societies. More than just a means of placating calls for more inclusive history, historians have shown how these various groups repeatedly forced slavery into local, state, regional, national, and international politics, and then shaped the outcome of events and conflicts, for better or for worse. In place of moralizing about the failures of the founders, historians now favor analysis of the interests of various groups, sections, nation-states, and empires: the motives and conditions that drove them to act; the actions they undertook to protect their interests; and the institutions they created to further them. Rather than asking why an amorphous group of founding fathers failed to abolish slavery, and rather than assuming that slavery should have been abolished, historians now ask how and why some groups defended slavery; why other groups remained indifferent about it; why some well-meaning whites strove for its eradication; and how free and enslaved black people sought to gain freedom for themselves and others. And rather than positing a period of unbridled slaveholder victories, this group of historians has constructed a narrative of nearly continuous conflict, compromise, and accommodation that pitted slaveholders against a shifting amalgamation of slaves, free blacks, antislavery groups, and rival partisan, sectional, and imperial powers. Taken collectively, these works point towards a narrative of the politics of slavery in the early republic that focuses on the workings of a nation-state where slaveholders wielded a tremendous amount of economic, social, political, and cultural power. In other slave societies in the Atlantic world, planter elites found themselves subordinate to imperial authorities and prerogatives. In the United States, slaveholders reigned as the most powerful 13

J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

political class, and they did so within a single nation-state with imperial ambitions. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, slaveholders in the United States wielded a tremendous amount of political influence both in their states and in the confederal and then federal governments. Recent literature thus treats the founders and a broader class of slaveholding politicians not as moral monsters or as hypocrites, nor as villains or heroes, even if many were certainly capable of acting in all of these roles. It instead treats slaveholders as an extremely powerful class, loath to relinquish their power and always hungry for more, whether that was power over slaves and lesser whites, power over their local communities and states, or power over the federal government. Slaveholders exploited powerful incentives to expand slavery; they confronted a shifting array of challenges to slavery; and they fought strenuously to maintain their sovereignty over slavery as an institution and their claims of mastery over black people as individuals and as slaves. Much of the recent literature on slavery and politics in the early republic focuses on understanding these struggles and confrontations, along with their outcomes. Sidestepping the negative expressions of American exceptionalism that pervade so much of the past three decades of scholarship on slavery and politics, this group of historians finds it utterly unexceptional that an elite class of slaveholders who helped lead a movement for independence and oversaw a revolution in government, then insisted on protecting their interests and the base of their power. Historians’ understandings of the conflicts over slavery in the early republic have also been aided by situating slavery in the United States in broader Atlantic, continental, and hemispheric frameworks. In doing so, historians have placed what once appeared to be the exceptionally harsh forms of slavery and racism in the United States in a larger context: the ubiquity of state-driven exploitation, racial hierarchies, and unfree labor in the Americas from the early 1500s through the late 1800s.There was nothing peculiar about slavery in the early American republic. Furthermore, slavery in the Atlantic world and the broader Americas was not an institution in decline in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, between 1770 and the 1810s, in what historians increasingly label a period of “second slavery,” the transatlantic trade in slaves and slave-produced commodities underwent its greatest period of growth, while the territorial reach of the institution expanded greatly. This period might have been an Age of Revolutions that birthed the rise of liberal and antislavery values, but it was also an age of slavery and imperial expansion.The principles of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions might have favored abolition, but the interests of emerging nation-states, empires, merchants, planters, and consumers in the Atlantic world favored expanding empires using state power to force more slaves to produce more cash crops, in areas that were marginal to the eighteenth-century Atlantic plantation slave complex. Slaveholders in the United States – like slaveholders elsewhere – used state power to exploit these developments for their own benefit.7 As the most recent literature demonstrates, there was nothing exceptional about the growth and expansion of slavery in the United States between 1770 and 1820. The enormous growth and territorial expansion of slavery in the United States mirrored broader trends in the Americas and the Atlantic world. Only in two places in the Americas – Haiti and the northern United States – did slavery contract and shrink during this period; only in Haiti and northern New England was it fully and more or less immediately abolished. What was exceptional in the early American republic was not slavery’s growth and expansion, but its 14

RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

gradual abolition in the North and its prohibition from the Northwest. That created deep sectional differences within an expanding imperial nation-state; those differences gave rise to continuous conflicts over slavery.

Accentuating Sectional Differences: War, Independence, Revolution, and Slavery in the States, 1770–1820 Even before the Imperial Crisis, the northern and southern colonies of British North America differed in significant ways. The Imperial Crisis, the War for Independence, and the process of forging new republican institutions wrought changes that magnified existing cultural, economic, and political differences between the two sections. Slavery existed in all of the northern colonies, but the 50,000 slaves there in 1770 accounted for less than 5 percent of the overall population. The northern colonies were societies with slaves rather than slave societies, and only in the Hudson Valley did the population of slaves near 20 percent. Politically, ordinary white men in the northern colonies had fashioned a form of politics that was perhaps the most democratic in the Atlantic world, even if urban elites and rural potentates still wielded considerable power and influence. The American and then French Revolution, along with the migration of British radicals to northern port cities, amplified these lived democratic realities. From the 1770s through the first decade of the 1800s, ordinary people and sympathetic elites in the North seized the principles that underwrote the case for independence and fashioned a decidedly egalitarian ideology that elevated equality, personal and family independence, and democratic self-government as the highest ideals of republican government and society. Middling whites and sympathetic elites used these egalitarian ideologies to chip away at hierarchy and privilege in the North in principle if not always in practice. In doing so, they opened crucial spaces that slaves, free blacks, and antislavery whites used to claim natural rights for enslaved blacks, and to begin the process of state-level abolition. Across the North, state-level abolition was ideologically grounded in free and enslaved black claims to the natural rights claimed by whites. In general, even when northern whites denied black claims to citizenship and equality, they accepted the legitimacy of black claims to freedom.8 Natural rights principles and egalitarian ideologies did little to change the basic social, political, and economic hierarchies that had dominated southern life since the 1750s. For southern politicians, the purpose of government, whether in 1750 or in 1820, was to empower the gentry, who then governed those beneath them according to their race, gender, and rank. In the South, elites met popular challenges to their rule and authority – from both black slaves and non-gentry whites – in various ways. Southern slaveholders used the Revolution’s emphasis on property rights to blunt popular attacks on slavery and gentry political power. They emphasized white supremacy and insisted that free blacks and whites could never live together peacefully in the United States.When pressed by lesser whites for democratic reforms, southern planters created an imagined gentry of all white men, emphasized the authority and mastery that all white men were to exercise over all black people, and wrote protections for themselves as a class into state constitutions and laws. By the early 1800s, antislavery voices and emancipation societies in places such as Virginia had been publicly silenced. As one Virginia legislator noted in an 1806 debate over tightening Virginia’s manumission laws, the principles of the Revolution 15

J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

meant little in Virginia, for “Those principles have been annihilated by the existence of slavery among us.” Hierarchy and racial subordination remained as vital in the South of 1820 as in the 1750s, even if the particulars of how they operated changed in their details.9 The dominant ideologies circulating in each section possessed some adherents in the other section: northern conservatives shared southern slaveholder concerns about the excesses of democracy; some southern radicals and enlightened gentlemen espoused the rights of man and equality, providing at least rhetorical support for democracy. Nonetheless, the Revolution produced significantly different effects in the two sections. The American Revolution in the North unleashed egalitarian ideologies and an emphasis on individual rights that allowed for state-level emancipation and the flourishing of antislavery principles and politics. The American Revolution in the South produced an ideology that slaveholders used to justify gentry rule, white male supremacy, black slavery, and the sanctity of slaveowner property rights. The American Revolution strengthened slavery in the South, and it accelerated abolition in the North. The disruptions caused by independence, war, revolution, state building, and expansion also magnified the differences that marked slavery in the two sections. Slavery declined in both numbers and in its significance in the North. There were perhaps 50,000 slaves in the North in 1770; by 1820 slavery had been eliminated or nearly eliminated in every northern state except for New Jersey and New York, where the institution limped on in ever-declining numbers. In the North, free blacks and well-meaning whites could facilitate emancipation because the opposition they faced was weak and scattered, confined mostly to the comparatively small class of slaveholders in the North. Most northern whites, however, were at most indifferent about black efforts to gain freedom, and put up little resistance to free and enslaved black efforts to pass state-level emancipation laws. Free blacks, enslaved blacks, and sympathetic whites blazed a clear if nonetheless difficult and prolonged path to state-level abolition. During the War for Independence, slaves used the chaos and disruptions of war, along with military demands for manpower, to free themselves from slavery. For most northern whites, winning the war and securing independence ranked as far higher priorities than maintaining the property rights of the section’s comparatively small number of slaveholders. By war’s end, perhaps 5,000 former slaves had gained their freedom through military service in both Patriot and British forces. Another 5,000 slaves fled their owners, mostly to the anonymity of cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. By war’s end, perhaps 10,000 northern slaves had effectively freed themselves from slavery in one way or another. Even before the war ended, these free men and women joined with sympathetic whites and Quaker-led antislavery societies to work for the full abolition of slavery in the North. Due to the combined efforts of these groups, by 1784 six northern states had taken legislative or judicial action providing for the immediate or gradual abolition of slavery. New York and New Jersey proved exceptions, as powerful slaveholders from the Hudson Valley still dominated state politics. Slaveholders in those states fought off early efforts at gradual emancipation, but blacks and whites committed to ending slavery in those states drove relentlessly for abolition. In 1799 and 1804, when expanded and more democratic legislatures diluted the political power of slaveholders in those states, gradual abolition legislation passed. 16

RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

Emancipation proved to be both a quick and a long process in the North. A significant number of slaves managed to gain freedom within a decade of passage of gradual abolition laws, either through flight, negotiation, or lawsuits, the latter two almost always facilitated by Quaker-led antislavery societies. Other slaves, however, remained trapped in bondage, and slavery continued to linger on, particularly in the countryside, until the 1820s and 1830s in places such as New Jersey. With emancipation, northern whites sought to exclude blacks from public and civic life, and forced them out of all but a few menial trades and services. Unlike in the South, however, northern whites stopped short of seeking direct control over the private and laboring lives of black people. In turn, by the 1820s the nascent free black communities of the 1770s had won a large degree of autonomy and the right to self-government within black institutions and communities, even if black individuals, communities, and institutions were severely constrained by the denial of economic opportunities and civil rights to free black northerners.10 In the South, the effects of independence, war, revolution, and state-making on slavery were far more limited. While some slaves struck blows for their own freedom during the war, southern whites always fought the war with one eye towards minimizing the damage it might inflict on slavery and white control of black lives. For example, South Carolina rejected Congress’s proposal to fund the emancipation and arming of 3,000 South Carolinian slaves, even as British forces stood poised to reconquer the Low Country. And though Virginians emancipated some slaves for military service, they far more frequently dangled a promise of emancipation at some time in the future to prevent flight, or used violence and terror to keep blacks in slavery. With the war’s end in 1781, southern whites fought to regain white control of black lives, reconstructing their slave societies and the routines of terror that kept black people enslaved. By the late 1780s, southern whites had met and bested slaves’ efforts to disrupt and dismantle the slave societies of the South. In the Upper South, economic and political changes seemed most likely to result in some kind of long-term program of gradual emancipation or abolition. Beginning in the 1760s, the economy of the Upper South shifted away from a singular focus on tobacco towards the production of grains and mixed farming, while commerce and small-scale manufacturing appeared in the towns and cities that sprouted up across the Chesapeake and Piedmont. These economic changes lessened the region’s theoretical dependence on slave labor – crops like wheat did not require year-round, unfree labor as tobacco did. Nonetheless, slaveholders readily forced their enslaved workforce to adapt to these economic changes.The work and lives of slaves changed dramatically in the Upper South between 1770 and 1820: by then, slaves were as likely to work as cartmen, day laborers in cities, boatmen, skilled craftsmen, or grain harvesters as they were to labor on tobacco plantations.While these economic changes produced significant differences in the lives of slaves, they did little to alter the importance of slavery in the region, especially in the lower Chesapeake and the Piedmont. The significance of slavery in the Upper South also increased due to the great expansion of slavery into the interior Lower South and the trans-Appalachian West. Chesapeake planters and their sons used their slaves to pursue new opportunities in the cotton fields of upcountry South Carolina, and in the tobacco and hemp fields of Kentucky. The expansion of slavery into the interior of the Lower South also led to the creation of the “Georgia trade,” a burgeoning interstate slave trade that resulted in the sale of tens of thousands of Chesapeake slaves southward to Georgia 17

J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

and South Carolina from the 1790s into the 1810s.While some Upper South slaves clung to the possibility that circumstances might allow them to somehow gain their freedom, far more found themselves sold into the “Georgia trade,” followed by a life of labor on Georgian or Carolinian cotton plantations. If slavery appeared to be on the decline in the Upper South after 1770, slaveholders nonetheless had every intention of controlling that decline, and they fully intended to profit from it while exercising control over the laboring lives of blacks, whether in freedom or in slavery.11 Political changes and the disruptions of war and revolution likewise offered hope that slavery might yet be placed on the road to abolition in the Chesapeake. But as had happened with economic changes, slaves, free blacks, and antislavery whites who sought gradual emancipation proved no match for ordinary whites heavily invested in racial subordination, or for the South’s ruling class, planters whose wealth and place in society were grounded in slavery. Upwards of 10,000 slaves managed to gain their freedom during the war, mainly by flight and military service. In 1782,Virginia passed a manumission law that eased the process of individual emancipations, largely due to the pleas of conscientious Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists. The law and the manumissions it produced faced immediate backlash from whites, who in 1784 and 1785 inundated the Virginia legislature with petitions calling for repeal of the 1782 manumission law. After the first wave of emancipations by Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists in the 1780s, emancipation became far less frequent by the 1790s. From then on, emancipation became attainable only with particularly guilt-wracked owners, with slaves deemed particularly meritorious, or when slaves could convince owners that slave self-purchase was somehow advantageous to a slaveowner. In Virginia, the absolute number of slaveholders grew between the 1770s and the 1780s, despite the cessation of the international slave trade, the surge in the free black population, and the developing interstate slave trade. Proposals for state-level gradual emancipation made little headway in the 1780s and 1790s. White southerners fiercely fought any suggestions that their individual states should enact some type of gradual abolition plan, even when those plans originated from Virginians themselves, as luminaries such as Thomas Jefferson and St. George Tucker quickly learned. Slavery in the Chesapeake emerged from independence, war, and revolution no weaker and perhaps even stronger than it was in the 1760s. From the 1780s through the 1810s, white migrants from the Chesapeake expanded the basic political and economic institutions of the Chesapeake into the Piedmont, Kentucky, Tennessee, the interior of South Carolina and Georgia, and after 1815 into Mississippi and Alabama.12 While Upper South slaveholders frequently lamented the existence of slavery and promised its eventual abolition, these professions were almost always deployed in defense of the honor of southern politicians to foreign and northern luminaries, or as part of a deliberate effort to defeat northern efforts to take some kind of action to rein in slavery’s growth and expansion. Frequently lamenting about the troubles of slavery and slaveholding, Upper South slaveholders deceived generations of historians, antislavery advocates, and perhaps themselves into believing that there existed, or that circumstances would someday produce, a protean moment where abolition would become a reality. That moment never came to pass; Upper South slaveholders worked as hard as anyone to ensure it never would. Slaveholders proved unwilling to relinquish voluntarily their power over blacks and the base of their power over lesser whites. Slaveholders and southern white men more 18

RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

generally would never willingly give up their sovereignty over slavery as an institution, or their claims to mastery over all black people.13 In the Lower South, wartime disruptions allowed some slaves to strike for their freedom, but whites had no doubt that their states were and would be anything other than slave societies. In Georgia, perhaps 5,000 of the enslaved population of 15,000 escaped in the midst of war. In neighboring South Carolina, as many as 15,000 of the state’s 75,000 enslaved persons fled their owners. Though slave flight hurt slaveowners, it did nothing to advance the cause of emancipation in the Deep South. Slaves who fled to Spanish Florida, low country swamps, or interior Native American nations faced an incredibly difficult existence. Slaves who fled to British-occupied Charleston and Savannah fell to diseases such as malaria by the thousands; the unlucky survivors who fled with British forces after the war faced an uncertain future: some found a difficult freedom in British Canada, others were sold as slaves in the British Caribbean. With the war’s end in 1781, southern whites fought to regain fuller white control of black lives and to reconstruct their slave societies. At the same time, Lower South planters exploited growing transatlantic demand for slave-produced commodities, and harnessed the powers of the nation-state to defeat Native Americans and then oversee slavery’s great expansion into the interior. In the 1760s, South Carolina and Georgia were coastal slave societies that barely reached inland; by the 1810s slavery extended deep into the interiors as a result of the first cotton boom. Fed by both the international slave trade and the “Georgia trade,” the 90,000 slaves laboring in the Lower South in 1770 had grown to 200,000 by 1800, and to 400,000 by 1820. Slavery’s greatest growth and expansion in the Americas between 1770 and 1820 occurred in Georgia and South Carolina, laying the groundwork for the cotton regime’s later expansion into Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.14 Independence, war, revolution, and state building posed a multitude of threats to the slave societies of the South in the 1770s and the early 1780s. By the late 1780s, southern whites had met all of those challenges, and slavery began its great growth and expansion in the United States. Between 1770 and 1790, the enslaved population of the southern states grew from 400,000 to perhaps 650,000. By 1820, there were 1.5 million slaves in the United States, and slavery stretched from the Chesapeake to Georgia, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi Valley, from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico.15 Southern whites would never abolish slavery on their own, and they would do everything within their power to resist outside efforts to do the same. It is difficult to dispute historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s conclusion that “the problem of American slavery could only have been solved in the way that it ultimately was solved: through bloody conflict and strife.” Only a massive and prolonged foreign invasion of the kind that happened during the U.S. Civil War could allow slaves and their white antislavery allies to destroy such an invidious institution.16

The National Politics of Slavery and Sectionalism, 1770–1820 Growing sectional differences meant sectional conflict, which was a persistent feature of politics in the early American republic. Sectional politics and the politics of slavery from the 1770s through 1820 took on certain characteristics, was marked by a large degree of continuity, and conformed to a general set of patterns. Conflict stemmed not only from 19

J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

the differences between the North and the South, but from the difficulties inherent in creating and governing an immense, diverse, and expanding continental union.To create, govern, and preserve a continental union required various groups to confront slavery in various ways, whether those groups were New England farmers opposing ratification of a constitution they deemed overly generous to slaveholders, Philadelphia free blacks petitioning Congress in the 1790s, or Tidewater planters fighting off widespread slave flight to the British during the War of 1812. Slavery was an immense and important institution in the United States, commanding a significant share of the nation’s population, wealth, economic activity, and political power. As such, it generated conflicts from multiple sources in multiple ways. In the period between 1770 and 1820, war, revolution, and state building posed challenges to slavery. At the same time, growing Atlantic world demand for slave-produced commodities offered slaveholders a host of new opportunities. Slavery frequently entered into all matters of governance at the local, state, regional, national, and international levels. Sometimes it did so in unforeseen ways as an adjunct to other issues; sometimes because free blacks, slaves, and their northern political allies forced the issue; sometimes because southern planters anticipated threats and challenges; and sometimes because planters sought to use state power to advance their interests. In any case, to govern the United States was to govern slavery; and governing slavery always entailed political conflict.17 Whether in 1776 or 1820, free and enslaved blacks – much like northern and southern whites – acted in predictable ways when slavery entered politics. Free and enslaved blacks were as responsible as any party for forcing slavery into local, state, national, and international politics between 1770 and 1820. Slaves and free blacks refused to acquiesce to enslavement, seeking greater freedoms within slavery, and freedom from slavery. Much of the legislation and action demanded by southern politicians reflected their understanding that state power was indispensable in keeping black people in slavery: slaves sought whatever freedoms presented themselves whenever even the slightest crack appeared in the fortress of state-power erected by slaveholders. In war and peace, slaves sought freedom through flight whenever circumstances permitted it. By the 1790s, a small but growing stream of Upper South slaves had learned how to make their way to the North, prompting passage of a fugitive slave law in 1793. Slave flight across the Ohio River from the 1790s into the 1810s continuously informed local, state, and national politics in the old Northwest’s first state. The stream of fugitives increased between the 1790s and the 1810s, and slaveholders demanded but failed to gain more stringent federal fugitive slave laws in 1800 and again in 1818. Slave flight to Spanish Florida and to Native American controlled areas in the west fed southern calls for war with Native Americans and their British patrons, leading to the War of 1812 and provoking Andrew Jackson’s invasions of Spanish Florida. The British invasion of the Chesapeake in 1813 offered a new avenue for flight. The first group of former Chesapeake slaves who took up service in the British Marines in 1813 made it a point to free their families and friends when they returned to the Chesapeake with the British Navy in 1814. Over the next five years, federal officials expended copious amounts of diplomatic time and energy seeking the return of their former slaves or compensation from the British. In the North, free and enslaved blacks could count on assistance in securing their freedom from black churches and organizations, along with Quaker-led antislavery 20

RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

societies. Slaves and free blacks immediately recognized the potential of natural rights ideology and the Revolution’s emphasis on liberty, equality, and independence. Assisted by antislavery white groups such as the Quakers and state-level abolition societies, free and enslaved blacks incessantly petitioned state legislatures to pass emancipation legislation. When this was accomplished, they sought laws accelerating the emancipation process, laws protecting against kidnapping, and laws to prevent the out-of-state sale of “term-slaves,” slaves and their children who were legally entitled to freedom at a future date according to gradual emancipation legislation. When the federal Congress took up residency in Philadelphia and then New York, free blacks stood as one of that body’s most persistent petitioners. Free and enslaved blacks incited lengthy and cantankerous congressional debates about the place of slavery in the United States when they asked Congress to place regulations on the domestic and international slave trades, to protect the rights of free blacks and northern “term-slaves,” and to expand federal power to regulate and restrict slavery. Whether in freedom, slavery, or in the netherworld between the two, African Americans repeatedly forced the problem of governing slaves and slavery into local, state, national, and international politics.18 Northern white opinion on race, slavery, and political action ranged widely. At one extreme, committed abolitionists worked to promote abolition, to end the transatlantic slave trade, to halt slavery’s expansion in the west, and to secure black freedom in the northern states. Other whites held that blacks were unfit for freedom and could remain in the United States only as slaves. Depending on the issue, the positions of most whites could shift anywhere on a spectrum ranging from indifference to support for gradual emancipation, with or without removal. And while many northern whites would have gladly accepted the abolition of slavery in the United States, they also recognized that they had no real power to compel southern whites to do so. Though prevalent, northern white racism and occasional indifference towards slavery did not preclude the development of a meaningful form of antislavery politics. In general, many white northerners accepted the legitimacy of black claims to freedom and agreed that blacks enjoyed a natural right to freedom, even if they denied black claims to equality and citizenship. Furthermore, most northern whites held that slavery was a plague on the South, a stain on the national character, and detrimental to national interests, republic society, and economic development.They expected their representatives to take meaningful action against slavery when circumstances permitted, whether in drafting a new Constitution for the Union, in closing the international slave trade, or by limiting slavery’s expansion. After 1815, northern voters and politicians began to take a more explicit stand against what they perceived to be the excessive and illegitimate demands made by slaveholders, along with slaveholder control of the Democratic Republican Party. By then, a growing chorus of northern voters and politicians contended that over the previous decade, the federal government had come under the sway of slaveholders and that southern interests had been promoted at the expense of the North. As slaveholders placed a growing number of demands on the North, including in 1818 a call for a new fugitive slave law, northern politicians began to identify a distinct northern interest that had to be defended against the machinations of slaveholders.19 In the South, a few conscientious whites took seriously the Revolution’s challenge to slavery; for most southern voters and politicians, however, protection of white supremacy 21

J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

and the rights and interests of slaveholders was axiomatic and sacrosanct. Southern politicians and voters insisted that blacks and whites could never live together in peace, that slavery was necessary to keep blacks in their place, and that whatever evils inhered in slavery, it was a necessary institution in the southern states because abolition promised calamities far worse than black slavery. Politically, southern states were slaveholders’ republics which either directly or indirectly granted slaveholders a host of protections and legislative advantages. As the governing elites in those states understood matters, the purpose of government, whether at the state or the federal level, was to empower the governing gentry, who then governed their subordinates, white and black. Government was also tasked with promoting the rights and interests of slaveholders by recognizing and protecting their property in slaves. Working from these assumptions, slaveholders insisted that any terms of union had to acknowledge southern state and slaveholder sovereignty over slavery as an institution, and a de facto veto over any unfavorable legislation, which would be realized with the three-fifths clause.20 In national politics, southern politicians defended the rights of slaveholders in sectional, political, legal, constitutional, and extra-constitutional terms. They also used theories of natural law and republican government to develop a wide-ranging defense of property rights. Southern politicians could be counted on to use any and all of these positions whenever they sought to protect or advance their interests. Thus, southern slaveholders could insist on extra representation in the House of Representatives as a necessary means for the slave states to protect their interests, and further ground these demands in republican theories about representation of wealth. Conversely, they also maintained that slavery was protected from normal democratic and constitutional processes by insisting that the Constitution was a sectional compact, and by claiming that as a southern institution, southern politicians alone had the right to make decisions regarding it. Slaveholders also warned that with or without a certain piece of legislation, the South would be immediately visited by slave rebellion, racial civil war, and all of the horrors of Saint-Domingue. More broadly still, southern politicians refused to consent to any action or legislation unless they could gain guarantees that their interests would be protected and that southern slavery would be free from northern interference. When northern politicians continued to push for antislavery action, southern politicians always stood ready to play the disunion card. All of these strategies belied the underlying political and ideological defensiveness that southern slaveholding politicians felt in this period. They may have won political battles most of the time, but they were constantly haunted by the idea that they could lose at any moment. Thus, when challenged or when seeking to promote their interests, slaveholders acted as a powerful, determined, and self-righteous lot. They fought ruthlessly to retain their sovereignty over slavery as an institution and their mastery over slaves as persons, even if they frequently squabbled among themselves over the best way to preserve their sovereignty and mastery.21 Northern politicians frequently fell short of their own expectations and the expectations of their constituents, as slaveholders employed a host of tactics to defeat antislavery measures. Nonetheless, the period between 1770 and 1820 should not be characterized as a period of unbridled slaveholders’ triumphs. Instead, the period was one of continuous conflict, accommodation, and compromise between the two sections. That being said, while slaveholders rarely had all of their demands met by northern politicians, they almost 22

RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

always came out ahead: they defeated any antislavery legislation they opposed as a section; and they frequently managed to dictate the terms and implementation of any antislavery legislation that did pass.22 The processes of conflict, accommodation, and compromise weighted in favor of slaveholders are exemplified by the Constitution. The Constitution created a union that included five states where slavery was the single most important economic, social, and political institution. Those five states would ratify a constitution and enter into union only with certain guarantees, protections, advantages, and privileges. As a result, the Constitution created a republic and a union that acknowledged the existence of slavery as a powerful state and sectional interest, albeit using euphemistic language. Northern delegates made it clear that the words “slave,” “slavery,” or “negro” could not appear in the Constitution if it was to have any hope of being ratified in the northern states. Southern delegates agreed to this concession, but won many more of their own.The fugitive slave clause gave slaveholders national guarantees for their property in slaves. The three-fifths clause granted the southern states a de facto sectional veto that could be used whenever the South acted in unison. Despite these advantages and privileges, southern Anti-Federalists identified significant deficiencies in the Constitution. The three-fifths clause provided political rather than constitutional protections for slavery in the states. Southern Anti-Federalists also recognized that the advantages conferred by the three-fifths clause would prove effective only so long as the South maintained parity in Congress and the electoral college. Indeed, as southern Anti-Federalists repeatedly pointed out, the Constitution failed to define slaves as property and to cast the institution in explicitly racial terms, leaving the door open for future challenges to slavery. Whether or not the Philadelphia convention produced a proslavery constitution that created a proslavery nation-state has become an irreducible matter of teleology and terminology centering on how one defines “proslavery.” It also engages in a form of essentialism that ignores the conflicting positions that went into the construction of both the Constitution and the clauses regarding slavery and slave state political power. The clauses addressing slavery were the product of too many clashing interests, too much conflict and compromise, to bear the weight of any singular intent, purpose, or effect. These clauses were also suggestive rather than definitive, and they left their implementation to normal political processes in Congress. These clauses would prove limited enough, vague enough, and imprecise enough to allow for multiple positions on what actions were permissible under the Constitution, as seven decades of sectional politics, culminating in civil war, would demonstrate. Finally, these clauses were ambiguous enough to allow for endorsement and quick ratification of the Constitution in places such as Pennsylvania and South Carolina, states that possessed wildly divergent interests and positions on the place of slavery in the federal union. Nonetheless, what remains clear when the Constitution is situated in the larger period between 1770 and 1820 is that its slavery and sectional clauses were the product of conflict, accommodation, and compromise. As with just about every sectional conflict in this period, the slave states gave up a little and received much in return. The little that they did give up, however, allowed for a multitude of challenges to slavery. In the end, the Constitution maintained the status quo of an expanding continental union, half-slave and half-free. It also put off – albeit temporarily – irreconcilable 23

J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

disagreements about the place of slavery under a republican government and in a union with continental ambitions.23 The ability of the slave states to come out ahead in national politics was due to several factors: the South always acted in unity whenever they perceived a real and tangible threat to slavery; they made concessions on issues unrelated to slavery to gain northern votes in support of southern interests; they expertly exploited partisan ties, gaining needed Federalist or Republican votes to defeat legislation the South opposed. When all else failed, they threatened disunion and promised that whatever calamities followed from disunion would rest in the hands of northerners who issued unreasonable demands that no southern slaveholder could accept. Southern politicians used threats of disunion even before independence was declared. In 1774 South Carolina threatened to forego signing on to a non-export agreement unless they received exemptions for rice; in 1776, the same group of planters refused to sign on to the Declaration of Independence unless the Continental Congress excised Jefferson’s famous antislave trade clause. During the Confederation years, Lower South planters threatened disunion whenever Congress considered levying taxes on slaves. South Carolina and Georgia insisted that neither state would sign on to the Philadelphia Constitution without protections for the international slave trade. More broadly, southern delegates to the Philadelphia convention promised that the Constitution stood no chance of ratification in the South unless something like the three-fifths clause granted slaveholders sufficient weight in the federal legislature to protect southern interests. Threats of disunion were commonplace in Congress during the 1790s, prompted by free black and Quaker antislavery petitions. Disunion threats subsided once the Democratic-Republicans gained control of the presidency and Congress and the capital moved South, but those threats of disunion came back with a vengeance after 1815, culminating in the Missouri Crisis. By then, the disunion card had become the favored tool of Virginia planters who feared that their influence in Virginia and over the federal government was waning.24 Threats of disunion proved effective against even the most committed northern abolitionists who believed that perpetual union was more important than immediate action against slavery. For them, republican self-government and natural rights could only be realized in union; if disunion transpired, then all hopes of abolition went with it. Thus, while Philadelphia Quakers and their allies such as Benjamin Rush lamented the concessions made to slaveholders in the Constitution, they accepted them as the necessary price of union, which they hoped would be the mechanism by which they could nudge the nation towards gradual emancipation. Likewise, northern Anti-Federalists condemned constitutional concessions to slaveholders from every conceivable angle. But like Abraham Lincoln, they preferred to “nobly save” rather than “meanly lose the last best hope of earth”: union, the only means by which republican government and the values of the Revolution could be maintained and then more perfectly realized. Southern slaveholders always stood ready to cynically exploit northerners’ pragmatic and increasingly sentimental devotion to union.25 Southern politicians had other methods of protecting their interests. They proved masterful at gaining sufficient northern votes by agreeing to concessions on issues unrelated to slavery. Examples of this kind of sectional horse-trading abound. New England delegates to the Constitutional Convention supported the three-fifths clause in exchange 24

RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

for granting Congress authority to make commercial regulations with a simple majority. The first federal Congress agreed to cease debating Quaker petitions on slavery in exchange for southern support for federal funding and assumption of state debts. That same body dropped a Virginia-led effort to impose a $10 tax in the international slave trade after Deep South representatives struck a bargain with New Englanders to lower the import tax on molasses. When the legislative advantages gained under the three-fifths clause diminished after 1810, slaveholders used parity in the Senate to protect their interests, for example, by blocking the house-passed Tallmadge Amendments which set off the Missouri Controversy in 1819. Southern politicians prevailed frequently in national politics – not because they were superior parliamentarians – but because they acted as a class when their interests were threatened; because they enjoyed institutional advantages thanks to the three-fifths clause; because they were willing to make trade-offs for northern support; and because they always proved willing to threaten disunion.26 Despite southern successes in protecting slavery and in using state power to promote slavery’s expansion, real and tangible antislavery gains were made from the 1780s to the Missouri Crisis. That being said, whenever antislavery actions were undertaken by the federal government, they were always done with the consent of at least some southern politicians, on southern terms, and with the expectation that southern states would receive important concessions in return. Thus, the Confederation Congress and then the first federal Congress passed and repassed the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery in the Northwest territories. In exchange for this measure, southern politicians gained a fugitive slave clause in the Constitution, and passage of the Southwest Ordinance of 1790, which exempted the territories south of Kentucky from the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery. Likewise, the terms by which Congress closed and patrolled the international slave trade were largely dictated by southern politicians. Despite vociferous northern objections, the 1807 law prohibiting the international slave trade provided light penalties for violators, and allowed states themselves to dispose of seized slaves as they saw fit, which in practice meant that state officials auctioned off any Africans seized from violators. Congress and northwestern farmers beat back efforts to legalize slavery in Indiana and Illinois, but western planters and farmers defeated congressional efforts to prohibit slavery’s further growth in Mississippi in 1798 and in Louisiana and Missouri in 1804. When emancipation and colonization gained institutional expression in the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1816, southern slaveholders insisted that they alone would determine how the Society would be used. In the Missouri Crisis, northern politicians managed to ban slavery from the regions north of the 36° 30' line, but they did so by abandoning their quest to end slavery’s expansion in all future territories, and accepting that Congress could not impose conditions on incoming states.27 *** The antislavery legislation and actions from the period between 1770 and 1820 can be understandably taken as so many half-hearted measures, repeatedly compromised by racism if not outright hypocrisy from a people who professed liberty while maintaining slavery. At the same time, however, they represent very real antislavery accomplishments in the face of a nation-state where slaveholders constituted the single most powerful economic and political interest. If slavery persisted and then grew and expanded in the United States, it was 25

J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

in no small part because slaveholders in the United States – unlike slaveholders elsewhere – did not have to answer to a powerful imperial metropole. Instead, they were the metropole, and more than any other group, they controlled the levers of state and imperial power. Above all else, they used the powers of the imperial state to protect and promote slavery, and to defeat efforts to undermine it.

Notes I acknowledge the generous and jovial assistance of Nic Wood, Wendy Wong, Paul Polgar, Jennie Goloboy, Matt Mason, and Paddy Riley in providing valuable comments on various drafts of this chapter. 1 Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 2:246. 2 For the ways in which nationalism and exceptionalism have structured much of the historiography of the early republic in both their older celebratory and newer critical forms, see Rosemarie Zagarri, “The Significance of the ‘Global Turn’ for the Early American Republic: Globalization in the Age of Nation-Building,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Spring 2011), 1–37. Though she does not write specifically about slavery, Zagarri is especially helpful in distinguishing between the old and new forms of nationalist and exceptionalist historiography.As Zagarri notes,“whether celebratory or negative, however, both forms of exceptionalism result from the same basic premise: an approach that emphasizes the country’s separateness and distinctiveness as a nationstate rather than its connections to and similarities with the rest of the world” (quote at 6). For critical analyses of nationalist and exceptionalist histories of the United States, in both their celebratory and negative forms, see Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (NewYork: Hill and Wang, 2006), 3–14; Johan N. Neem,“American Exceptionalism in a Global Age,” History and Theory 50 (Feb. 2011), 41–70. 3 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes towards the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967); Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971);William W. Freehling,“The Founding Fathers and Slavery,” American Historical Review 77 (Feb. 1972), 81–93; Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History 59 (June 1972), 5–29; Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race, and the American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); William Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); Don Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Howard A. Ohline,“Slavery, Economics, and Congressional Politics, 1790,” Journal of Southern History 46 (August 1980), 335–360. The most critical work of this first great wave of scholarship was Staughton Lynd, Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967). 4 Building on and expanding Lynd’s analysis, in the 1980s and 1990s the literature took a decidedly critical turn, led by Paul Finkelman, “Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity,” Journal of the Early Republic 6 (Winter 1986), 343–370; Paul Finkelman, “Slavery and the Constitutional Convention: Making a Covenant with Death,” in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, eds. Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 188–225; Paul Finkelman,“Evading the Ordinance:The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” Journal of the Early Republic 9 (Spring 1989), 21–51; Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, WI:

26

RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

Madison House, 1990); William W. Freehling, Road to Disunion, Volume I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); William W. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers and Conditional Antislavery,” in The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Paul Finkelman, “Jefferson and Slavery: Treason against the Hopes of the World,” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 181–221; Paul Finkelman, “The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Federalism,” in The Federalists Reconsidered, eds. Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara Oberg (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 135–156. Most of Finkelman’s articles from the 1980s and 1990s were collected in Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), and expanded in subsequent editions. Don Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), challenged many of the critical works on slavery and the founders, but did so without challenging the nationalism and exceptionalism that informed so much of the literature. 5 For founders-centered works on slavery in the early republic, see Freehling, Road to Disunion, and “Founding Fathers and Conditional Antislavery”; Nash, Race and Revolution; Douglass R. Egerton, “The Empire for Liberty Reconsidered,” in The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic, eds. James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Paul Finkelman, Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, 2nd ed. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001). Debates over the proslavery and antislavery positions of the “founding fathers” featured considerable cross-over between academic and popular history. See, for example, Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, and the Louisiana Purchase (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Garry Wills, “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston: Harcourt, 2003); Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Koåciuszko, and Agrippa Hull: A Tale of Three Patriots,Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012); Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). For a critical analysis of this assumption that a select founder or group of founders could have placed slavery on the road to abolition, see Matthew Mason, “A Missed Opportunity? The Founding, Postcolonial Realities, and the Abolition of Slavery,” Slavery and Abolition 35 (June 2014), 199–213. 6 The first wave of newer scholarship that looked beyond the founders drew on the new political history of the early republic, exemplified in Jeffrey L. Pasley, David Waldstreicher, and Andrew Robertson, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). For a listing of the influential works on the new political history of slavery in the early republic that were published before 2010, see John Craig and Matthew Mason, “Slavery, Sectionalism, and Politics in the Early American Republic,” in Contesting Slavery:The Politics of Freedom and Bondage in the New American Nation, eds. John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 1–8. More recent examples of this new work include George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Suzanne Cooper Guasco, “‘To Put into Complete Practice Those Hallowed Principles’: Edward Coles and the Crafting of Antislavery Nationalism in Early Nineteenth-Century America,” American Nineteenth Century History 11 (March 2010), 17–45; David F. Ericson, Slavery and the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011); Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, “Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 68 (October 2011), 597–630; John Craig Hammond, “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the

27

J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

North American Continent, 1770–1820,” Journal of the Early Republic 32 (Summer 2012), 175– 206; Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: Norton, 2013); Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Martin Öhman, “A Convergence of Crises: The Expansion of Slavery, Geopolitical Realignment, and Economic Depression in the PostNapoleonic World,” Diplomatic History 37 (June 2013), 419–445; Paul J. Polgar “‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation’: Early National Abolitionism, Gradual Emancipation, and the Promise of African American Citizenship,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Summer 2011), 229–258; Paul J. Polgar, “‘Whenever They Judge It Expedient’: The Politics of Partisanship and Free Black Voting Rights in Early National New York,” American Nineteenth Century History 12 (March 2011), 1–23; Paul J. Polgar, A Well Grounded Hope: Abolishing Slavery and Racial Inequality in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming); Nicholas P. Wood, “The Missouri Crisis and the ‘Changed Object’ of the American Colonization Society,” in Reconsiderations and Redirections in the Study of African Colonization, eds. Beverly C. Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016); Nicholas P. Wood, “Antislavery Activism Before and After the ‘Proslavery’ Constitution,” in The Critical Period, eds. Douglas Bradburn and Brian Murphy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016); Nicholas P. Wood, Before Garrison: Antislavery and Politics in the New Nation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming); Matthew Mason, “Keeping up Appearances: The International Politics of Slave Trade Abolition in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 67 (Oct. 2009), 809–832; Matthew Mason, “Federalists, Abolitionists, and the Problem of Influence,” American Nineteenth Century History 10 (March 2009), 1–27; Matthew Mason, “The Maine and Missouri Crisis: Competing Priorities and Northern Slavery Politics in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 33 (Winter 2013), 675–700; James Alexander (Alec) Dun, “Atlantic Antislavery, American Abolition: The Problem of Slavery in the United States in an Age of Disruption, 1770–1808,” in The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, ed.Andrew Shankman (New York: Routledge, 2014), 218–245; Christa Dierksheide, Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014); Padraig Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); James J. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Patrick Rael, Eighty-Eight Years:The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015). 7 The term “second slavery” was coined by sociologist Dale W. Tomich in a series of articles reprinted as Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). For recent works that analyze slavery in wider imperial, Atlantic, and continental contexts, see Trevor Burnard, “Freedom, Migration, and the American Revolution,” in The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, eds. Eliga Gould and Peter S. Onuf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 295–314; Robin Blackburn, “Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 63 (Oct. 2006), 643–674; David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage:The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Laird W. Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); David Eltis,“Was Abolition of the U.S. and British Slave Trade Significant in the Broader Atlantic Context?” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 66 (Oct. 2009), 717–736; Anthony Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75 (August 2009), 627–650; David Geggus, “The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution,” in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840, eds. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 83–100; Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation

28

RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011); Hammond, “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire”; John Craig Hammond, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and Empires: North American Borderlands and the American Civil War, 1660–1860,” Journal of the Civil War Era (June 2014), 264–298; David Head, “Slave Smuggling by Foreign Privateers:The Illegal Slave Trade and the Geopolitics of the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 33 (Fall 2013), 433–462; Christopher Leslie Brown, “The Problems of Slavery,” in Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, eds. Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 427–446; Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Rael, Eighty-Eight Years. Recent work on race and slavery in Native American nations has also been instructive in pointing historians towards the ubiquity of racial subordination and slavery in the broader Americas rather than the peculiarity of slavery in the United States. See, for example, Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country:The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 8 Population figures from Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), Table I, 369–371. For politics and democracy in the revolutionary north, and the transatlantic dimensions of northern political democracy and radicalism, see Alfred F. Young, Gary Nash, and Ray Raphael, eds., Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation (New York: Knopf, 2011); Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); Alfred F. Young and Gregory H. Nobles, Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Matthew Mason, “Necessary But Not Sufficient: Revolutionary Ideology and Antislavery Action in the Early Republic,” in Hammond and Mason, Contesting Slavery, 11–31; Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Cheese and the Words: Popular Political Culture and Participatory Democracy in the Early American Republic,” in Pasley et al., Beyond the Founders, 31–56; Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Rosemarie Zagarri, “The American Revolution and a New National Politics,” in Gray and Kamensky, Handbook of the American Revolution; Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. For the ways in which black and white northerners drew on natural rights ideology, see Dun, “Atlantic Antislavery, American Abolition”; Polgar, “‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation’”; Polgar, “‘Whenever They Judge It Expedient’”; Polgar, A Well Grounded Hope; Wood,“Antislavery Activism Before and After the ‘Proslavery’ Constitution”;Wood, Before Garrison; Rael, Eighty-Eight Years. 9 Virginia Argus, January 17, 1806 (quote). For the American Revolution in the southern slave states, see Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Lacy K. Ford, “Deliver Us from Evil”:The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Trevor Bernard, “Slavery and the Causes of the American Revolution in Plantation British America,” in Shankman, World of the Revolutionary American Republic, 27–53; Peter S. Onuf, “The Empire of Liberty: Land of the Free and Home of the Slave,” in Shankman, World of the Revolutionary American Republic, 195–217; Taylor, Internal Enemy; Wood, Before Garrison. For the ways in which planters met cultural and social challenges to slavery and gentry authority from black and white Baptists, Methodists, and other religious groups, see Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross:The Beginning of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997); Monica Najar, “‘Meddling with Emancipation’: Baptists, Authority, and the Rift over Slavery in the Upper South,” Journal of the Early Republic 25 (Spring 2005), 157–186. 10 Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008); David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

29

J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

11

12

13

14

15

University Press, 2006); John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Richard Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Gary Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Egerton, Death or Liberty; Polgar “‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation’”; Polgar, A Well Grounded Hope; Wood, “Antislavery Activism Before and After the ‘Proslavery’ Constitution”; Wood, Before Garrison; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Mason, “Necessary But Not Sufficient”; Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union; Gigantino, Ragged Road to Abolition; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion. For the ways in which economic changes in the Chesapeake allowed some slaves to gain freedom, see Jennifer Hull Dorsey, Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); T. Stephen Whitman, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775–1865 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2006); Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Holton, Forced Founders. Annette Gordon-Reed,“Thomas Jefferson and St. George Tucker:The Making of Revolutionary Slaveholders,” in Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson: The American Dilemma of Race and Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 15–33; Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007); Holton, Forced Founders; McDonnell, Politics of War; Ford, Deliver Us from Evil; Egerton, Death or Liberty; Taylor, Internal Enemy; Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation; Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union; Wood, Before Garrison; Berlin, Generations of Captivity. See Stuart Leibiger, “Thomas Jefferson and the Missouri Crisis: An Alternative Interpretation,” Journal of the Early Republic 17 (Spring 1997), 121–130; Brown, “Problems of Slavery”; Wood, Before Garrison. For the best, most recent analysis of the ways in which Upper South slaveholders deceived themselves and others, see Taylor, Internal Enemy. Kathleen DuVal, “Independence for Whom? Expansion and Conflict in the South and Southwest,” in The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, ed. Andrew Shankman (New York: Routledge, 2014), 97–115; Watson W. Jennison, Cultivating Race:The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750–1860 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012); Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the United States Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); James A. McMillin, The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004); Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Ford, Deliver Us from Evil; Egerton, Death or Liberty; Cassandra Pybus,“Jefferson’s Faulty Math:The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 62 (April 2005), 243–264. For slavery’s growth and expansion into the Georgia and South Carolina interior, the transAppalachian West, and the lower Mississippi Valley, see John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Hammond, “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire”; John Craig Hammond, “‘Uncontrollable Necessity’: The Local Politics, Geo-Politics, and Sectional Politics of Slavery Expansion,” in Hammond and Mason, Contesting Slavery, 138–160; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Ford, Deliver Us from Evil.

30

RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

16 Gordon-Reed, “Jefferson and Tucker,” 16. 17 Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union; Hammond and Mason, Contesting Slavery; Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience; Wood, Before Garrison; Ford, Deliver Us from Evil. For the insight that governing the United States required the governing of slavery, see David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009). 18 Matthew J. Clavin, Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Richard S. Newman, “Freedom’s Grand Lab: Abolition, Race, and Black Freedom Struggles in Recent Pennsylvania Historiography,” Pennsylvania History 82 (Summer 2015), 357–372; John Craig Hammond, “‘The Most Free of the Free States’: Politics, Slavery, Race, and Regional Identity in Early Ohio,” Ohio History (2014), 35–57; Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Egerton, Death or Liberty; Taylor, Internal Enemy; Wood, Before Garrison; Polgar, Well Grounded Hope; Hammond, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and Empires”; Newman, Transformation of American Abolitionism; Newman, Freedom’s Prophet; Gellman, Emancipating New York. 19 Donald J. Ratcliffe, “The Decline of Antislavery Politics,” in Hammond and Mason, Contesting Slavery, 267–290; James Oakes, “Conflict vs. Consensus in the History of Antislavery Politics,” in Hammond and Mason, Contesting Slavery, 291–303; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion; Mason, Slavery and Politics; Wood, Beyond Garrison; Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience; Polgar “‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation’”; Polgar, “‘Whenever They Judge It Expedient’”; Polgar, A Well Grounded Hope; Wood, “Antislavery Activism Before and After the ‘Proslavery’ Constitution”; Wood, Before Garrison; Mason, Slavery and Politics. 20 Ford, Deliver Us from Evil; Mason, Slavery and Politics; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion; Onuf, “Land of the Free, Home of the Slave”; Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery; Holton, Forced Founders; McDonnell, Politics of War; Taylor, Internal Enemy; Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience; Rothman, Slave Country;Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union. 21 Ford, Deliver Us from Evil; Mason, Slavery and Politics; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion; Onuf, “Land of the Free, Home of the Slave”; Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery; Holton, Forced Founders; McDonnell, Politics of War; Taylor, Internal Enemy; Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience; Rothman, Slave Country. 22 The best one-volume study of the politics of slavery in the early republic remains Mason, Slavery and Politics, but it should be joined by Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience; Wood, Before Garrison; Polgar, A Well Grounded Hope. Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) remains a useful if not indispensable guide to political debates about slavery. 23 My interpretation of the Constitution is heavily influenced by five works, though my interpretation differs from all of them. See Matthew Mason,“Slavery and the Founding,” History Compass 4 (2006); Earl M. Maltz, “The Idea of a Proslavery Constitution,” Journal of the Early Republic 17 (Winter 1997), 37–60; Fehrenbacher, Slaveholders’ Republic; Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union; Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution. 24 Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience; Don Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Wood, Before Garrison; Mason, Slavery and Politics; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion; John Craig Hammond, “Mastery over Slaves, Sovereignty over Slavery: James Monroe,Virginia, and the Missouri Crisis,” in Revolutionary Prophecies: The Founders on America’s Future, eds. Peter Onuf and Robert M. S. McDonald (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017). 25 Elizabeth Varon, Disunion: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Ford, Deliver Us from Evil; Mason, Slavery and Politics; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion;Taylor, Internal Enemy; Riley, Slavery and the Democratic

31

J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

Conscience; Wood, Before Garrison. For the colonial origins and long-term effectiveness of Carolinian threats of disunion see Jonathan Mercantini, “‘Most Contemptible in the Union’: South Carolina, Slavery, and the Constitution,” in Ambiguous Anniversary: The Bicentennial of the International Slave Trade Bans, eds. David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012), 35–51. 26 Varon, Disunion; Ford, Deliver Us from Evil; Mason, Slavery and Politics; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion; Taylor, Internal Enemy; Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience; Wood, Before Garrison; Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution. 27 Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion; Hammond, “Mastery over Slaves, Sovereignty over Slavery”; Mason, Slavery and Politics.

32

2 CLA S S, THE MARKE T R EVOL UT I ON, AND URBANI Z AT I ON Christopher Clark

Arguing for a protective tariff in 1843, Abraham Lincoln reflected on the goods of all kinds imported from domestic and foreign sources that were available to the inhabitants of Illinois. In 1851, the minister Horace Bushnell spoke of the rapidity of economic change and “the complete revolution of domestic life and social manners” that accompanied the “transition from mother and daughter power to water and steam-power.”1 They were addressing profound changes that had occurred in the preceding decades: the nation’s demographic and territorial expansion; the growth of commerce and business institutions; the development of new systems of production and transportation; and the expansion of towns and cities. The United States between Independence and 1840 experienced not only rapid population growth and the spread of European settlement, but also a significant reorientation of production and wealth creation. In 1774, mean income per capita was highest in the South and lowest in New England. By 1840 the regions’ relative position had been reversed.2 Until recently, historians’ explanations of these changes focused on their most “modern” characteristics: the pace of urbanization; the technical and organizational developments that fostered an industrial revolution; and the role of new communications technologies. For more than two decades from the mid-twentieth century an overarching interpretation of the period as a “transportation revolution” gave prominence to the connections between new technologies and progress.3 The emergence of capitalist industry and growing cities in what had so recently been a predominantly rural society also fostered new class relationships. Historians also tended to treat the other aspects of American economy and society as comparatively backward or inert. Northern agriculture expanded, to be sure, but before mechanization seemed not to be a cause of significant progress. Agriculture in the South, by contrast, though it grew extensively and furnished America’s most valuable exports, seemed wedded to the past, heavily reliant as it was on the bound labor of chattel slaves and on a system of racial hierarchy. Settlement patterns, economic activity, and class appeared sufficiently different between North and South as to explain the origins of the sectional conflicts that would flare in the 1820s and 1830s and subsequently lead to civil war.4 Important reinterpretations of these patterns of explanation have, however, been underway since the late 1970s, as technology-led causation gave place to a wider array of demographic, economic, legal, and institutional developments. The emergence of a focus on the Atlantic world, particularly in the eighteenth century, placed the economic circumstances faced by the American republic in a new international context.5 On the other 33

C HR I S TOP HER C L A R K

hand, emphasis on the opening up of European settlement in the interior also led scholars to address what could be called a “continental turn” in American economic activity. Though U.S. transatlantic trade grew strongly in the first half of the nineteenth century, the per capita value of overseas trade collapsed with Jefferson’s Embargo of 1807 and, though it rose after 1815, did not regain its previous level before the Civil War. Social and economic historians have therefore paid significant attention to the internal sources of economic growth. The depiction of change between the 1790s and the 1840s as a “market revolution” came about in this context. *** Two conceptual shifts assisted this development. Historians had regarded nineteenthcentury economic changes largely as continuous with those of the colonial period. Now, some suggested, the Revolution unleashed new conditions that led to the subsequent rapid growth; for a period so-called “social” and “market” historians sparred over whether the early nineteenth century experienced a transition to capitalism that set American development on a new course.6 Focusing on rural regions or the links between town and countryside, this debate fostered a new emphasis on rural societies as sources of innovation and change, rather than merely passive receptors of “progress” imposed from urban centers or overseas.Town and country together experienced profound and far-reaching consequences from the growth and adaptation to new levels of production and exchange. Beginning with Sean Wilentz and Charles Sellers in the early 1990s, historians started to label this experience as a “market revolution.” For Sellers, in particular, this could explain the political and religious developments that characterized Jacksonian America, but for other historians the concept also opened up possibilities for exploring a wide array of social and cultural developments.7 These early arguments for a market revolution soon met with skepticism. Religious historians criticized Sellers’s overly formulaic “culture war” between mainstream and conservative or charismatic churches. Others argued that the market revolution concept overlooked continuities from the colonial period in which some historians had discerned a “consumer revolution,” or that the reorganization of labor and class relations, rather than market activities as such, was what transformed the early republic’s economy.8 Daniel Feller suggested that “market revolution” might describe any phase of historical change, while Daniel Walker Howe argued that the period’s economic development was attributable to a “communications revolution,” embracing trade, travel, transport, and print culture.9 The weight of criticism might have banished the market revolution from scholarly discourse had it not been for the enthusiasm with which a younger generation of historians seized on the concept as a framework for examining the rich cultural ramifications of a period of rapid change.10 To previous emphases on rural society these scholars have added various dimensions that present the market revolution as a set of widely felt experiences. These include attention to commoditization, to developments in finance as well as in production, to the marginal or criminal undersides to economic change, and to the ways in which legal changes and cultural activities in the public sphere worked over time to modify revolutionary-era concepts of the common good. The “market revolution” came to fit neatly with the emergence of a new “history of American capitalism” that is less concerned with capitalism’s antecedents and challengers than with exploring its spread to seemingly 34

C LA S S, T HE MA R K ET R EVO L UTI O N, A ND U R BA NI Z AT I O N

every aspect of American life.11 It has even entailed a reinterpretation of plantation slavery in the early republic. Recent studies have treated American slavery not as backwardlooking and pre-capitalist, but as integral to American capitalist development – perhaps, according to some accounts, the key ingredient in the nation’s rapid economic growth.12 These new avenues of inquiry have also generated new perspectives on urbanization and class relations. The reinterpretation of rural societies, both slave- and non-slavebased, has called into question the assumption that city growth and city building were the principal cutting-edges of the new economy: the “market revolution” helps put urbanization in its place. Class divisions and their evolution look different, too, when the focus widens from the important but traditional concern with male artisans and their transformation into bosses and workers to the more complex patterns of change around unskilled workers, race, and gender. The focus on finance and its ramifications has addressed the fragility of the early American economy, with its vulnerability to booms and slumps, and the personal consequences of success and failure. Above all, in a field that has for long been attentive primarily to social and economic sources of change and development, there is a new focus on the state, and on the shifting roles of government and politics in the economy’s expansion.13 *** Older rural societies in North America faced two complementary circumstances that fostered expansion: population growth and the search for fresh fertile land that could replace regions whose soil had been exhausted by cultivation. Though both operated to some degree throughout the original thirteen states, early republic developments accentuated regional and sectional differences. Population grew rapidly. In the 1780s the rate of growth was one of the fastest of any decade in American history. High fertility rates also ensured that the population included an unusually large proportion of young people, itself a likely generator of further expansion in the future. Settled farming districts in New England and elsewhere experienced pressure on land as children succeeded to subdivided portions of parental farms or sought new farmland in unsettled zones. Demographic pressure was a key impetus behind movement to the frontier and the demand for land in northern New England or west of the Appalachians.14 A further spur to the expansion of settlement was the effect of cultivation on soil fertility. In certain regions, such as eastern New England, the adaptation of English field husbandry techniques had produced a sustainable form of agriculture, but where there was a heavy emphasis on export crops, such as tobacco from the Chesapeake, soil exhaustion was a widespread concern, and this also drove the search for fresh land in previously unsettled regions.15 Meanwhile, the distinction between regions where labor for farming was provided mainly by farm families and neighbors, and those where hired, indentured, or enslaved labor was key to production, also created differences in the ways local economies operated and pressed for new land to expand onto. Attention to these circumstances behind expansion and the search for land has served as an underpinning to the concept of a market revolution. Rural developments were once interpreted as consequences of ideas, practices, and demand penetrating the countryside from seaboard towns or the Atlantic economy.16 Until the 1970s accounts of rural societies in the early republic emphasized continuity with the colonial past and the lack of 35

C HR I S TOP HER C L A R K

any significant turning points in a trajectory that would eventually result in their incorporation into an industrialized, capitalist economy. Recent historians give more emphasis to the ways in which rural regions themselves generated change, and helped actively to shape their dealings with port towns, other regions, or overseas markets.17 A consequence of the adaptation of farming communities to both internal and external pressures was a deepening and enrichment of activities in the countryside. As Steven Stoll and Benjamin Cohen have noted, efforts to improve fertilization and soil quality long predated the findings of Justus Liebig or the international search for phosphates that began in the 1840s. Farmers themselves inspired by necessity and by information circulating through the press and local agricultural societies experimented with new materials or adjusted their husbandry to make better use of livestock manure.18 The market revolution entailed increasing volumes of trade and traffic in the countryside and between rural and urban areas; shifts in the intensity of households’ engagement with wider markets; and new practices and disciplines that such changes subjected them to.19 Recent scholarship reveals the complex nature of rural exchange relations that were embedded in social networks and connections. Farming in many parts of the Northeast was conducted with both market opportunities and local and family necessities in mind. The northern countryside underwent an incremental adaptation to new consumption patterns and to new opportunities for profit from crop or livestock raising.20 These were fitted into household strategies and structural constraints on labor supply. Capital and credit were obtained first from local and neighborhood connections and latterly also from a growing array of outside sources, including merchants and early banks and insurance companies. Studies of indebtedness and court cases suggest that there was no radical break in patterns of neighborliness or local conflict as these changes occurred, except when political crises or economic cycles put exceptional stress on the credit system. Indeed, at times of economic stress, patterns of local exchange and production could help sustain rural communities through crises.21 However, the personal stress that structural conditions and periodic crises imposed on rural life did impel men and women to seek new ways of doing things. Some took up new land and migrated to frontier regions. Some sought occupations outside farming or in towns and cities, or at sea. Others attempted to introduce new farming methods to their own land and neighborhoods. Family and local ties could hinder as well as help: in the Hudson Valley, William Coventry reflected that “my own Realations [i.e. relations, family members] is my worst Enimy in the world.” Those with means could try to disentangle themselves from local credit relationships and obligations by seeking connections with new commercial and financial institutions, establishing new patterns of network and trust from which kinship or other personal connections were excluded or marginalized.22 *** Slave-based economies also developed powerful expansive dynamics.Though the American Revolution initiated emancipation (mostly gradual) in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, and formally excluded slavery from the Old Northwest, its aftermath witnessed a massive expansion of the slave population that embedded slavery and its output ever more deeply into southern culture and national politico-economic calculations. A brief flirtation with slave manumission soon became overtaken by the opportunities for profit that 36

C LA S S, T HE MA R K ET R EVO L UTI O N, A ND U R BA NI Z AT I O N

applying slave labor to newly opened fertile land could afford. This has long been recognized, but recent studies have challenged the conventional interpretation of southern slavery as pre-modern or pre-industrial in character. Far from being an exception to a modernizing national pattern or a throwback, pre-capitalist social formation, slavery evinced sophistication, adaptability, modern business methods, and profound interconnections with the wider development of American capitalism.23 The massive expansion of cotton cultivation, in particular, but also the emergence of new technical and managerial methods in sugar production, and slaveholders’ adoption of sophisticated new financial instruments, all point to the adaptability of the southern economy.24 Plantation regions’ close national and international ties gave them crucial roles in broader capitalist development. Slave-grown cotton fed the textile industries of Western Europe and the American Northeast. Demand for manufactured goods from slaveplantation regions helped develop and sustain northern manufacturing. Commerce, transatlantic shipping, and the financing of slave-grown production tied the plantation zone strongly not only to regional ports and commercial centers such as Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans, but also to New York, which would emerge as the leading facilitator of the cotton business. In addition to these connections, slavery also underwrote the development of business methods and institutions. *** Demographic and social conditions in non-slave regions fostered economic development, outmigration, and “westward expansion.” The combination of soil exhaustion, access to coerced labor, and the lure of profits from plantation crops drove slave societies also to expand into new regions. Joshua Rothman has argued that the Mississippi frontier, the most active region for the extension of cotton cultivation in the 1820s and 1830s, was – far from being a marginal zone – the “leading edge of the market revolution.”25 Since well before the American Revolution the prospect of expanding settler colonialism into and across the Appalachian mountains had generated opportunities for land speculation, fostered European imperial rivalries, and governed – often violently – Native Americans’ encounters with Europeans. Though the revolutionary era altered terms for acquiring land, by making first the Crown and then the federal government sole legitimate purchasers of Indian land, it also opened up the trans-Appalachian west for potential settlement.26 Recent scholarship has emphasized Native Americans’ actions to resist, forestall, or negotiate in light of the massive pressure unleashed against them. The Iroquois, divided in allegiance during the Revolution, negotiated a tenuous hold on some of their territories in western New York and Upper Canada.27 But in the Ohio Country, after four decades of efforts to resist white encroachments, the Shawnee and their allies were forced into a final retreat by defeats in the 1812 War. Encounters between natives and newcomers had always involved trading. As white settlement expanded, Native Americans in various regions adapted to the market relations that grew up with it. But the Cherokee and Choctaw, who adopted new farming or livestock-raising methods on the southwestern frontier, would find their efforts to conform with Euro-American practices little defense against demand for their lands and government-supported 37

C HR I S TOP HER C L A R K

measures to remove them during the 1830s, driven as these were by the fierce expansionism of the cotton-slave economy.28 The resale to settlers and plantation owners of land throughout trans-Appalachia marked the creation of a powerful land market. Though in Kentucky and Tennessee this process often produced overlapping claims and confused rights to ownership, north and west of the Ohio River federal land policy of the 1780s created a survey system based on divisible mile-square sections whose location (and hence ownership) could be precisely defined. *** The survey system’s rigidity could be ill-adapted to environment or topography, but its uniformity made it ideal for fostering land markets, because well-defined parcels and clear chains of title made land easier to value and to convey. This in turn helped make land usable as collateral for mortgages or other loans, so land and the expanding land market would form a basis for the expansion of paper financial instruments whose importance grew in the early nineteenth century. Land was regarded as good security because its development potential and the prospect of demand from demographic expansion tended to raise its market value. The systematic commoditization of territory that had only a short time previously been possessed by Native Americans was one of the key aspects of the market revolution.29 Indeed historians have recently paid particular attention to finance, to the instruments by which business was conducted, and the evolving legal underpinnings to an expanding commercial system.30 The financial system both facilitated capitalist expansion and was a source of instability. Its roots were in rural and urban credit networks, in transatlantic commercial dealings, and in the mechanisms of federal government funding established in the early 1790s. The growth of banking and the circulation of banknotes fostered market development with floods of liquidity; but poor regulation, fraud, mismanagement, and counterfeiting all contributed to failures, uncertainty, and periodic business crises.31 While some regions came to benefit from the imposition of self-regulation such as that established by the Suffolk system in Massachusetts in the 1820s, certain states saw their banks wiped out and legislatures determined to suppress banking altogether.32 For new financial institutions such as insurance companies, investments in land mortgages granted to farmers could be a hedge against insecurity.33 In addition to using the familiar trading devices of bills of exchange and other instruments to obtain credit for their operations, plantation owners raised capital by mortgaging not just their land and fixed property, but their slaves as well; securities based in some degree on property in slaves were widely dispersed throughout the national and international financial system of the 1830s.34 Meanwhile the growing and highly significant internal slave trade in the South marked a dimension of the market revolution not replicated in the North, as planters and traders put their human property up in tens and hundreds of thousands for sale as commodities.35 Even such abstract properties as value and risk were becoming commoditized by the 1830s and 1840s.36 Periodic booms and slumps came to affect wide areas of the economy. Small slumps in the 1790s, the widespread dislocation of the 1807 Embargo and then the War of 1812, a serious panic in 1819, smaller setbacks in the mid-1820s and early 1830s, and the prolonged depression touched off by the Panic of 1837 demonstrated the interdependence 38

C LA S S, T HE MA R K ET R EVO L UTI O N, A ND U R BA NI Z AT I O N

of different regions and economic sectors. Both domestic and international circumstances shaped these crises. They were usually preceded, for example, by booms in purchases of federal land, fed by expectations of speculative gains in the land market that were then undercut by reverses elsewhere. A recent study of the 1837 crisis by Jessica Lepler emphasizes its multivariant character and widespread local and international implications.37 Yet while scholars have understandably sought the causes of instability, they have also reflected on sources of survival and regrowth. In New England, for example, Richard Judd has noted “the complicated array of local exchanges” that characterized rural life and “kept the economy afloat” during hard times.38 Among the links that enabled economic activity to revive in response to transatlantic demand by the mid1840s were those provided through the plantation system, as slave-grown crops generated profits for planters, merchants, and shippers, and as demand for foodstuffs and manufactures flowed back to the North. *** Attention to early industrialization once focused on the technological and capital-intensive developments, particularly in textiles, represented by large-scale factory operations such as those built at Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1820s and 1830s, notable not least for employing young women workers recruited from the New England countryside.39 In their scale, their use of machinery, their use of large numbers of waged workers, and their business methods, the mills of Lowell and similar towns prefigured characteristics of later nineteenth-century American industry.40 But such examples were not typical of manufacturing in the early republic, and historians have also explored the more diverse and geographically dispersed aspects of America’s early manufactures. The exigencies of wartime and the interruption of Atlantic trade during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 were spurs to local manufactures, but so too were the conditions of rural society that we have already noted. Though slave plantations in the South supported home manufactures for their own use or, increasingly, relied on importing their manufactured goods, many rural households elsewhere made manufactures part of their strategies for addressing the constraints that they faced.41 Increasing numbers of rural people took up craft production on a part-time or fulltime basis. Spinning and weaving in households grew in importance into the early nineteenth century, and as factory textile production expanded, household producers at first integrated their activities with these mechanized operations.42 When, by the 1830s, factory-produced cloth finally dislodged domestic output, households took up other tasks instead. Male workers developed older crafts such as blacksmithing, carpentry, millwork, and leatherworking into part- or full-time businesses producing implements, tools, and other wooden or metal goods such as wagons or parts for clocks.Women produced palmleaf hats, buttons, parts for boots and shoes, silk thread, and other goods, often as outworkers for local merchants. Pockets of manufacturing grew up in many rural locations. Supplying urban and distant markets, as well as their localities, craft producers adopted methods of batch production that employed some division of labor; specialisms in particular products often clustered together in towns or small villages.43 The close proximity of farming and manufacturing in rural areas helped to satisfy the different labor demands of both. On Hudson River Valley farms, Martin Bruegel has noted, a “reserve army” of the seasonal 39

C HR I S TOP HER C L A R K

workers required at haying or harvest time was often drawn from the artisanal population of the region.44 *** Except in a few cities and manufacturing towns, both North and South retained their heavily rural characters into the 1830s and beyond. Even in the Northeast, the most urbanized region, 73 percent of the population was rural in 1840; everywhere else the average proportion was 90 percent or higher. But the rise of manufacturing in the Northeast, including that rooted in rural communities, altered the employment structure of several states, giving more prominence to industrial and service work than remained the case in the South. Population growth and the intensification of both farming and manufacturing prompted a proliferation of material goods among prosperous and middling rural households and an emphasis on the acquisition of items that could indicate respectability.45 In what David Jaffee has memorably called “the Village Enlightenment,” cultural institutions sought to do for cultural capital and education what workshops and diversified farms were doing for production. Printing shops and newspapers, social libraries, debating societies, the Second Great Awakening’s array of new churches, and the creation of new educational establishments altered the cultural milieu, particularly of northern towns and villages. Schools and cultural institutions sought to disseminate virtuous habits by emulation, but – as J. M. Opal has argued – this could quickly evolve into ambition or competitive individualism. As more career paths outside farming opened up, particularly for young men, rural people took the baggage of their education with them. Nicholas Marshall has argued that this was as powerful a source of a fluid, mobile, individualistic culture and society as any economic development.46 These cultural changes in rural and urban regions also contributed to one of the period’s powerful demographic changes, the “fertility transition” that saw average family sizes fall significantly within a few decades.47 The reevaluation of rural societies in the market revolution has also placed urban developments in new contexts.48 The plantation system generated low urbanization rates in most monocrop zones; up to 1840 the largest southern towns, such as Charleston and New Orleans, lay at the region’s geographical margins where they linked the interior with international markets. Charleston’s slow growth, when compared with New Orleans’s rapid expansion, measured the relative decline of the old Lower South and the striking development of the Mississippi Valley.49 In the Northeast and the emerging Midwest, however, urbanization was more evenly spread across agricultural zones. New “central villages” in New England towns, and the modest-sized market towns of Pennsylvania, Western New York, and Ohio, represented forms of urbanization that emerged in close symbiosis with rural agriculture and manufacturing.50 Meanwhile the connections between trade and finance, and the power of transportation networks to direct trade to locations where markets were large and varied, promoted established ports or the emergence of new large urban centers on the geographical margins of northern regions as well. All the leading port cities of the Northeast seaboard grew significantly, but New York cemented its preeminent position with its location, transport connections, commercial and financial services, and growing manufactures.51 While new urban centers across the Midwest often served as channels facilitating new farming settlements, towns and cities in established agricultural regions owed their relative success to their ability to draw on 40

C LA S S, T HE MA R K ET R EVO L UTI O N, A ND U R BA NI Z AT I O N

produce, labor, and skills from the surrounding countryside and to link these to the needs of growing national and international markets. Urbanization, in large and small centers, has long been prominent in studies of social class and economic inequality.52 Scholars of early industrialization who had focused on the emergence of factory wage-work in the Northeast found a European-style pattern of proletarianization weakened by workers’ continuing connections with the countryside, by the significance of gender in factory systems that relied considerably on women workers, and by the growing number of immigrants from Europe from the 1830s onwards. Bruce Laurie, Sean Wilentz and others, however, traced an important shift over time in the organization of work in manufacturing. Trades, rural and urban, before the nineteenth century had been organized in the households and workshops of skilled artisans, whose apprentices might progress to the status of masters. With market growth and competition this pattern was transformed, as masters with access to capital divided labor, routinized tasks, and enlarged their businesses. Apprenticeship dwindled, and many skilled workers became permanent employees without prospect of advancement. Class, rather than age, skill, or seniority, now marked the distinction between bosses and workers. Particularly in urban areas residential separation also began to mark class experience.53 Recent scholarship has modified this “artisan” model of class development. Marla Miller has shown that artisan skill was not simply a male province, but shared by women too, albeit in trades like tailoring that proved highly vulnerable to wage reductions and impoverishment.54 Peter Way, Seth Rockman, and others have also noted the importance of unskilled labor to antebellum class formation. Class and inequalities evolved not just around the means of production but in patterns of inclusion and exclusion from access to economic means, material goods, and cultural or political power.55 Even though in rural areas class distinctions were unstable and complex, changes such as the institutionalization of poor relief in poor farms or workhouses tended to segregate paupers from the communities that had previously sheltered them.56 The growth of clerkships and other “white collar” occupations has also received attention from historians. Some have stressed the anxiety that male clerks in large towns generated as young men whose living arrangements, dress, and cultural preferences marked them as liminal figures, outside conventional patterns of familial or social control.57 Others have emphasized clerks’ pursuit of middle-class status, and their substitution of values of efficiency and productivity for older aspirations to independence, suggesting that this helped originate the classic American conflation of “middle” and “working” classes that many Europeans regarded as distinct from one another.58 The growth and multiplicity of towns and cities as commercial centers, with accompanying legal, financial, and governmental functions, also fostered the emergence of strong regionally based elites, often similar in character to one another, but each with their distinctive power-bases and networks of cultural and political connections. *** The historiography of class, urbanization, and the market revolution expanded from the “new social history” of the 1970s, a field that was early criticized for its relative inattention to politics.59 Many of the processes reviewed here – demographic changes, market expansion, the imposition of market disciplines, and the role of “bottom-up” or entrepreneurial 41

C HR I S TOP HER C L A R K

efforts to respond to social and economic changes – could indeed to some extent be regarded as self-activating. But much recent scholarship, some of it self-consciously reviving the field of political economy, has addressed the multiple ways in which “private” actions in the realm of economic change could be shaped by the actions of governments or the structures of the state.60 The “consumer revolution” had originated in the colonial period, and did so in the context of British mercantilism. American economic expansion from the late eighteenth century also owed much to state action. Warfare and organization for it secured the clearance of Native Americans from land that would be parceled out to white settlers. The banking system originated in the Confederation government’s efforts to secure its own funding; the reshaping of government finances and the national debt under the Constitution forged powerful links between government, commerce, and land. Revenue from international trade and land sales supported government finance and secured its ties to the elite groups that held the bulk of government debt.61 Taxation policy throughout the antebellum period was calculated to secure the interests of powerful groups, particularly of slaveholders.62 State charters directly formed early business corporations, the main channels for amassing capital for large-scale manufacturing or infrastructure projects, and though by the 1830s various states were moving towards general incorporation laws, the role of government as a passive ring-holder for economic activity did not diminish.63 Representation in state and federal governments came strongly to feature members of the legal profession, whose work in law offices and courthouses profoundly shaped the growth and operation of business practices and the terms of economic activity. Conduct of trade and exchange in the market revolution was increasingly governed by the precepts of contract law; as the Progressive Era economist Richard T. Ely would note in 1914, “the state itself is the source of contract, not the result.”64 But the role of the state was not stable, and its effects could be paradoxical. From the Democratic-Republicans of the 1790s to the Jacksonian Democrats of the 1820s and 1830s, suspicion of government as an instrument of class privilege drove attempts to scale down its power. Yet success at reducing the scope for elite privilege, while weakening the power of governments, increasingly opened governments to pressure from private, powerful interests.65 These included powerful figures and institutions in the commercial, financial, and transportation sectors that were of growing importance to the economy, but also the advocates of policies, such as those relating to tariffs or taxation, that bolstered the growth and significance of plantation slavery. The constitutional compromises that preserved slavery at the end of the Revolution had instituted a tacit political consensus that national policy should not interfere with it. Periodically, this consensus broke down, as in the Missouri and Nullification crises, but it was subsequently restored. As the 1840s began, the political silence that sustained slavery remained largely unbroken; even the immediatist abolitionists who had loudly challenged it in the 1830s were divided and in retreat. To most commentators, as to many present-day historians who stress the congruence between slavery and capitalism and the close economic interdependence between North and South, there seemed little reason to doubt that the consensus would continue. But it was in fact soon to be shattered, over Texas, the Mexican War, and the expansion of settlement in the West.66 The conflicts over those issues would reveal the deep fissures, not between plantation slavery and industrial and financial capitalism, but between the two 42

C LA S S, T HE MA R K ET R EVO L UTI O N, A ND U R BA NI Z AT I O N

rural systems of labor that had emerged in the North and the South and which had projected and sustained the market revolution.

Notes 1 A. Lincoln, “Address to the People of Illinois,” March 4, 1843, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1953), I; Horace Bushnell, “The Age of Homespun,” [1851] in Work and Play (London, 1864), 48. 2 Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “American Incomes Before and After the Revolution,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 17211 (2011). 3 George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York, 1951); Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (New York, 1976). 4 See, for example, John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 1995–2008). 5 David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, UK, 1995). 6 Differing interpretations that nevertheless agreed on the Revolution’s transforming effects included Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984); and Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992). Participants in the “social/market” debate included Michael Merrill, James A. Henretta, and this author, on one hand, and Winifred B. Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago, 1992). See also Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, VA, 1992). 7 Sean Wilentz, “Society, Politics, and the Market Revolution, 1815–1848,” in Eric Foner, ed., The New American History (Philadelphia, 1990); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York, 1991). 8 For critical appraisals of Sellers’s arguments, see Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolution in America: Social, Cultural, and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville, VA, 1996), to which this author contributed. Studies by Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, UK, 1990), Margaret E. Newell, From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England (Ithaca, NY, 1998), and T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, 2004), indicated continuity between the colonial and early national periods. 9 Daniel Feller, “The Market Revolution Ate My Homework,” Reviews in American History 25, no. 3 (1997): 408–415; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2007). 10 See the comments by Cathy Matson, “A House of Many Mansions: Some Thoughts on the Field of Economic History,” in Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions (University Park, PA, 2006), 1–70, and John Lauritz Larson, The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (Cambridge, UK, 2010), summarizing scholarship in the field up to that point. 11 Larson, The Market Revolution in America; see also Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth Century America (Ithaca, NY, 1991); Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA, 2007); and the essays in Brian P. Luskey and Wendy A. Woloson, eds., Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia, 2015). 12 Of various works in this genre, cited below, the most prominent is Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014). 13 Among studies that discuss finance and the state, see the essays in Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2012); and Jeffrey Sklansky, “Labor, Money, and the Financial Turn in the History of Capitalism,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 11, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 23–46.

43

C HR I S TOP HER C L A R K

14 See, for example, David Jaffee, People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630–1860 (Ithaca, NY, 1999); Richard Buel, Jr., ed., The Peopling of New Connecticut: From the Land of Steady Habits to the Western Reserve (Hartford, CT, 2011). 15 Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven, CT, 2004) indicates the sustainability of early New England husbandry; Avery O. Craven, Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606–1860 (1925; reprint ed. with introduction by Louis A. Ferleger, Columbia, SC, 2006) discusses the effects of tobacco cultivation on soils. 16 Richard D. Brown, “The Emergence of Urban Society in Rural Massachusetts, 1760–1820,” Journal of American History 61, no. 1 (June 1974): 29–51. 17 Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY, 1990). 18 Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2002); Benjamin R. Cohen, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside (New Haven, CT, 2009). 19 On trade in the countryside, see Ann Smart Martin, Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore, 2008). 20 On the pursuit of both market objectives and family necessities, see Richard Lyman Bushman, “Markets and Composite Farms in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 55 (1998): 351–374. On local exchange relations, Daniel L. Vickers, “Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 47 (1990): 3–29; Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, ch. 3; Martin Bruegel, “The Social Relations of Farming in the Early American Republic: A Microhistorical Approach,” Journal of the Early Republic 26 (2006): 523–553. 21 Naomi Lamoreaux, “Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast,” Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (September 2003): 437–461; B. Zorina Khan, “‘Justice of the Marketplace’: Legal Disputes and Economic Activity on America’s Northeastern Frontier, 1700–1860,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 39, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 1–35. 22 Coventry quoted in Bruegel, “The Social Relations of Farming,” 530; Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, ch. 3; Christopher Clark, “The Ohio Country in the Political Economy of Nation Building,” in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs, eds., The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early Republic (Athens, OH, 2005), 146–165. 23 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, passim; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013); Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven, CT, 2015). 24 On commodities and the conduct of production in the South, see Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014); Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997); Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1815–1860 (Baton Rouge, 2005). On financial instruments in the slave economy, see Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York, 2014); Bonnie Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property,” Journal of Southern History 76 (2010): 817–866; Richard Holcombe Kilbourne, Jr., Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets: The Bank of the United States in Mississippi, 1831–1852 (London, 2006). 25 Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens, GA, 2012). 26 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, UK, 1991). 27 Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York, 2006). 28 Cynthia Cumfer, Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); Alexandra Harmon, Colleen O’Neill, and Paul C.

44

C LA S S, T HE MA R K ET R EVO L UTI O N, A ND U R BA NI Z AT I O N

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41

42 43 44 45

46

47 48 49 50

Rosier, “Interwoven Economic Histories: American Indians in a Capitalist America,” Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (December 2011): 698–722. Charles E. Brooks, Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution: The Holland Land Purchase (Ithaca, NY, 1996). See Zakim and Kornblith, Capitalism Takes Command. Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York, 2008); Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters. Sklansky, “Labor, Money, and the Financial Turn.” Tamara Plakins Thornton, “‘A Great Machine’ or a ‘Beast of Prey’: A Boston Corporation and Its Rural Debtors in the Age of Capitalist Transformation,” Journal of the Early Republic 27 (2007): 567–597. Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine.” Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA, 1999). Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA, 2012). Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (Cambridge, UK, 2013). Richard W. Judd, review of Béatrice Craig, Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists: The Rise of a Market Culture in Eastern Canada [Toronto, 2009] in Agricultural History 85 (2011): 133. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York, 1979); for the differently-organized Rhode Island or family-system mills, see Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, UK, 1983). Robert F. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA, 1987). A. Glenn Crothers, “Agricultural Improvement and Technological Innovation in a Slave Society: The Case of Early National Northern Virginia,” Agricultural History 75 (2001): 135–167; see also Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1978). Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York, 2001); Adrienne Hood, The Weaver’s Craft: Cloth, Commerce, and Industry in Early Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 2003); Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order. Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism; Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1995). Bruegel, “The Social Relations of Farming,” 542–543. On consumption patterns, see Paul G. E. Clemens, “The Consumer Culture of the Middle Atlantic, 1760–1820,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 (2005): 577–624; David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia, 2010); Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, NC, 2000). David Jaffee, “The Village Enlightenment in New England, 1760–1820,” William and Mary Quarterly 47 (1990): 327–346; J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (Philadelphia, 2008); Nicholas Marshall, “Rural Experience and the Development of the Middle Class: The Power of Culture and Tangible Improvements,” American Nineteenth Century History 8 (2007): 1–25. Alexander James Field, “Economic and Demographic Determinants of Educational Commitment: Massachusetts, 1855,” Journal of Economic History 39 (1979): 439–460. Ed White, The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America (Minneapolis, 2005). The population of New Orleans nearly quadrupled, to over 102,000, between 1820 and 1840 alone. Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840 (New York, 1988); Diane Shaw, City Building on the Eastern Frontier: Sorting the New Nineteenth Century City (Baltimore, 2004); Jay

45

C HR I S TOP HER C L A R K

51 52 53

54 55 56 57

58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion (New Haven, CT, 2009). Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1998). Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2003); Billy G. Smith, ed., Down and Out in Early America (University Park, PA, 2004). Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1989); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984); Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York, 1978). Marla Miller, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (Amherst, MA, 2006); Marla Miller, Betsy Ross and the Making of America (New York, 2010). Peter Way, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, UK, 1993); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009). Gabriel J. Loiacono, “Economy and Isolation in Rhode Island Poorhouses, 1820–1850,” Rhode Island History 65, no. 2 (September 2007): 30–47. Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in NineteenthCentury New York (New York, 1998); Michael Zakim, “The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary; Or, a Labor History of the Nonproducing Classes,” Journal of the Early Republic 26 (2006): 563–603. Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2003); Brian P. Luskey, On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in NineteenthCentury America (New York, 2011). On an emerging middle class in southern towns, see Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005); and Frank J. Byrne, Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 (Lexington, KY, 2006). See Tony Judt, “A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians,” History Workshop Journal 7, no. 1 (1979): 66–94. Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania (Lawrence, KS, 2004). Max M. Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (Chicago, 2014); Thomas K. McCraw, The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy (Cambridge, MA, 2012). Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006). Brian Balogh, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, UK, 2009); Tony A. Freyer, Producers versus Capitalists: Constitutional Conflict in Antebellum America (Charlottesville, VA, 1994). Richard T. Ely, Property and Contract in Their Relations to the Distribution of Wealth (1914; reprint ed., 2 vols., New York, 1922), II, 579. Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), chs. 5–7; Mike O’Connor, A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism (Lawrence, KS, 2014), 48–81. Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997).

46

3 “ FEMALE WO MEN O R FEMININE L A DI ES ” 1 Gender and Women’s Rights before the Antebellum Movement Leigh Fought

To begin an essay on antebellum woman’s rights with the first explicitly woman’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848 would not only be a cliché but also limit the discussion of woman’s rights to a single narrative. Although an exciting yarn, at once inspiring and frustrating, the line running from Republican Motherhood to women’s prominence in the antislavery movement through woman’s rights conventions of the 1850s and on toward the woman’s suffrage movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century tells an ever narrowing and distinctly white story that continues to owe plot points to its original authors, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Women’s historians have added complexity, nuance, and dissent, but the tale of the antebellum woman’s rights movement remains largely homogeneous, a curious feature for its activists, who trained in a movement addressing racial inequality, and a distinct liability as they claimed to speak for all women. Historians have followed several lines of inquiry in addressing the antebellum women’s rights movement, addressing legal reform, abolition, and republican ideology, but all have had to contend with gender. As theorist Joan Scott argued, “the concept of gender legitimizes and constructs social relationships,” while “politics constructs gender and gender constructs politics.”2 In other words, ideas about the proper behavior and place of women in society influenced all institutions of power with the force of law, contemporary science, medical practice, and social custom, and women’s behavior was policed, permitted, and punished according to society’s ideals. Women, in turn, used these same ideals to influence and alter those very same institutions. Yet, even as they resisted proscriptions for their gender, women also internalized and deployed them in order to understand their place in the world and their interactions with other people. Given the many factors that described a woman’s life, from her race to her socioeconomic standing to the location of her home, most women came to very different conclusions and formulated very different ideals about their own gender. Therefore, if historian Elsa Barkley Brown was correct in contending that “all women do not have the same gender,” then placing the origins of the movement within the history of women’s gender can explain its particular make-up and limitations.3 By the time that a woman’s rights consciousness had produced activism in pursuit of legal, social, and political change, the dominant ideology held up “True Womanhood” as the 47

L EI G H F O U G H T

model for appropriate feminine behavior. Whether conforming to, critiquing, rejecting, or excluded from this ideal, no woman could escape its cultural force. According to women’s journals such as Godey’s Ladies Book (published 1830–1878), advice books such as Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), and the popular novels of the day, the “True Woman” confined herself to the “private sphere” of the home. There, pioneering historian Barbara Welter observed, she cultivated “the four cardinal virtues – piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.”4 Writers on domesticity, like Catharine Beecher, attempted to subsume all women through a presumed shared experience of motherhood, family, home, and all of their attendant work.5 In reality, this was neither a practical model nor an accurate description of most women’s lives, and the concept of a “true woman” implied its opposite, the “false” or perhaps “deviant” woman. Even many conservative women chafed at the constraints of the ideal. The “damned mob of scribbling women” writing sentimental fiction rejected “submissiveness” in their heroines, but most women recognized their legally-enforced dependence. Even proslavery, anti-woman’s rights essayist Louisa S. McCord conceded that God had not “perhaps given to woman the most enviable place in his creation.”6 True womanhood came to fruition in the Jacksonian era but grew from an older ideology of “separate spheres,” which divided the world into the public world of men and the private sphere of women. This notion had formed by the late eighteenth century and represented a new philosophy about relationships among classes of people. In the early modern era, “spheres” had described a social rank, its occupants, and their appropriate activities. The public sphere encompassed all of those duties related to the maintenance of the state or society, while the private sphere concerned those related to the household and family. That is, gender was different from spheres, and men and women performed different roles within all spheres. Although women were generally considered lesser versions of men in terms of intelligence, strength, and morality, like men, they held both public and private roles related to their social standing. Political theorists likened family to government, with both accepting hierarchy as inherent to society, government, and family. As the king was head of state, so was the father head of household.7 In the century leading up to the revolutionary era, however, the configurations of public sphere, private sphere, and gender shifted. New concepts about the social contract and government by consent resulted in challenges to hierarchy. At the same time, reproductive differences between men and women served as the bases for changing ideas about sexual difference that extended beyond genitalia. Enlightenment theorists began to envision more republican forms of government, but they defined the work of that government as explicitly male, thereby associating “public” with men. Child-bearing along with its attendant responsibilities handicapped women’s ability to assume any responsibility away from the household and thus made women more suited to the “private sphere.” In consigning women to the “private sphere,” identified with the home, men could maintain patriarchal authority over their household as something separate from the “public sphere” in which they questioned hierarchy. Furthermore, by identifying each sphere as masculine or feminine territory, theorists linked social roles to biology, and any trait or task assigned to one or the other sphere became an immutable characteristic of men or women. “Once biology became the marker not just of difference but also of inferiority,” historian Rosemarie Zagarri argued, “women’s bodies provided a convenient explanation for excluding them from the same rights and privileges that men enjoyed.”8 No longer considered imperfect 48

“ F EMA L E WOMEN OR F E M I NI NE L A D I E S ”

versions of their male counterparts, women now found themselves described in binary opposition to men. Men, for instance, had the capacity for reason, while women’s strength was sentiment. With greater value placed on masculine features, women found themselves still consigned to the lesser status.9 This metaphor of spheres was so powerful that, once identified by women’s historians in the 1960s, it became the prevalent analytical tool for nearly three decades and still influences historical inquiry. In using “separate spheres” to investigate the lives of women between the American Revolution and the Civil War, however, historians began to realize that most, if not all, women’s lives could not be understood through such a limited binary. “‘Woman’s sphere’ is the trope carried too far,” concluded Carol Lasser at a 1999 Society of Historians of the Early Republic symposium. After all, Lasser pointed out, “we begin to understand gender as an unstable, vital, and fluid relation, not as the enclosed space that has imprisoned our thinking.”10 Nineteenth-century women’s lives, then, could not be accurately represented by the very ideas about gender with which they had to contend because “woman’s sphere” neither included all women nor did it leave room for the actual experiences of women. At best, as Julie Roy Jeffrey conceded, the term could be invoked “to suggest the set of boundaries that were supposed to be observed by middle-class women and to suggest the gender ideology the conservatives proposed.”11 When considering women outside of the middle class, however, historians had to address Brown’s observation that “being a woman is, in fact, not extractable from the context in which one is a woman – that is, race, class, time, and place,” and to treat the whole as a distinct experience rather than a set of variations.12 For instance, at the time in which “woman’s sphere” took shape, an ideology of race similarly based on biological difference was also emerging to justify the enslavement of Africans.13 Yet, historian Jennifer L. Morgan found, “the connection between African women’s reproductive lives and their suitability for hard manual labor would link their status with their bodies in a way distinct from but related to the biology of race.”14 From their earliest observation by European men and their arrival in the British North American colonies, non-white women were distinguished from white women in law, gendered divisions of labor, and even in the ways that they mothered their children.15 While Anglo and African women may have shared the same biology of sex, which differentiated them from all males, the classification of black women as unlike white women gave them a discrete gender. Furthermore, in both the earlier and later iterations of public and private, masters did not permit slaves to have privacy in any conception of the word. As “woman’s sphere” became synonymous with “private sphere,” then enslaved women were further alienated from the same category of gender as white women. The converse did not apply to enslaved men. Although in the “public sphere” through their status as property and labor and because they were denied privacy, African and African American men were depicted as incapable of shouldering the responsibilities of self-government and therefore not within the same male sphere as Anglo men. In other words, as this racial ideology developed as part of a pro-slavery ideology, freedom did little to grant African Americans admittance into the privileges and protections of their respective gender spheres. Consequently, by the dawn of the nineteenth century, white Americans did not understand themselves as living in a society with two races and two genders, but one with two races and four genders: 49

L EI G H F O U G H T

white men, black men, white women, black women. This same process also applied to Native Americans, immigrants, and residents of the territories acquired in the Mexican War, with all non-white or non-Anglo genders described as deviant and therefore inferior.16 As historians began to incorporate intersectional analysis, they also liberated themselves from the nineteenth-century rhetorical division of public and private spheres. This was not so easy a task. When Mary P. Ryan attempted to tack down a definition of “public,” she discovered that in “the pragmatic practices of democracy, the public sphere or realm splinters, inevitably and unregrettably, into more mundane and multiple political spaces.”17 Thus, historians have offered various conceptualizations of those spaces. Mary Kelley conceived of the public sphere as “the social space situated between the institutions of the family and the nation state,” while Elizabeth Varon pointed out that “public” encompassed physical spaces, publication, and “a grouping of citizens who, literally and figuratively, embodied ‘public opinion.’”18 Anne McClintock offered a similar definition of “domesticity,” a concept almost synonymous with the private sphere. Arguing that “domesticity denotes both a space (a geographic and architectural alignment) and a social relation to power,” McClintock demonstrated that the imagery of enclosed spaces associated with a sphere masked those social relationships, obscuring the ways that ideas associated with the private sphere were actually integral parts of such public sphere concerns as imperialism and class conflict.19 Historians looking at the public sphere also turned to relationships and actions that did not fit neatly into the sphere dichotomy, employing the concept of “civil society,” essentially a third sphere that overlapped the other two. Mary Beth Norton described it as a place in which “citizens discuss and possibly try to influence public policy,” thereby becoming “state actors.”20 These civic conversations lay outside of direct, electoral politics and existed anywhere that people debated about or acted upon the conditions that influenced their world. As neither public nor private, nor male nor female, civic space could be used by people with little or no formal power. This broader understanding of “public” then became the place of patriotic celebrations, slave rebellions, and ladies’ sewing circles; and it was also the place in which women first articulated, developed, and advanced an idea of their rights. The term “women’s rights” entered the American lexicon with the work of Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a popular work among elite women in the United States. Those American women recognized that a new nation founded on republican principles required a new gender ideology that would permit the concept and the reality of an active woman citizen. Although they recognized inherent gender difference, they did not believe that those differences excluded women from reason or natural rights. Elite American women melded this vision to their aristocratic entitlement to a public role as both members of the propertied classes and as intelligent, educated beings. They did not conceive of themselves as voters, but instead argued for civil liberties, the right to be equal to men before the law, even in marriage. Abigail Adams’s oft-repeated plea that her husband, John, “remember the ladies” drew upon this consciousness that women had a vested interest in the creation of the new nation. Women would be held to its laws and should thus be entitled to the attendant rights and privileges. They asked for an independent legal identity, rather than burial in their husbands’ through coverture. John rebuked Abigail as “saucy,” suggesting the obstacles that women like her faced from men of their class, who were reluctant either to 50

“ F EMA L E WOMEN OR F E M I NI NE L A D I E S ”

share power with their wives or to concede equality with a dependant whose property and body they controlled.21 With few models and much resistance, elite women such as Judith Sargent Murray, Mercy Otis Warren, and Susannah Rowson, working through the print culture, carved a role for women as “republican mothers.” This ideal for gender argued that, because women bore and raised the next generation of Americans, they served in the front lines, tasked with raising virtuous citizens who would dispassionately exercise morality and reason in governing the nation either directly or indirectly. As such, they themselves should be, first, recognized as moral and rational and, second, allowed to cultivate their morality and reason through education. Educated women could inform themselves about events of national importance and thereby exercise judicious influence over their sons and husbands. They would also teach their daughters to do the same. “The Republican Mother integrated political values into her domestic life,” explained historian Linda Kerber, and thus “the mother, and not the masses, came to be seen as the custodian of civic morality.”22 “Influence” was the key concept in this new idea of women’s role. As Rosemarie Zagarri pointed out, “when the term ‘influence’ was used in relation to men, it often referred to the covert exercise of political power,” and proponents of this new ideology meant their own use of the term to be understood that way. For women, however, this sort of power generally carried with it the association of royal mistresses who swayed monarchs through their sexual wiles, the very opposite of the moral and rational pressure that proponents of this new ideology hoped to exert. Therefore, the association of female political influence with a proper sexuality contained by motherhood legitimized women’s interest in politics by stripping it of passion and, by extension, partisanship. The invocation of motherhood politicized something most women considered inevitable, tied the education of girls to the future of the nation, and justified a political role for women.23 This was not without consequences. Feminist theorist Judith Bennett noted that most women in history have had to make “patriarchal bargains” when redefining contemporary proscription on gender, and Republican Motherhood fit Bennett’s model of “patriarchal equilibrium,” a process whereby women pay for gains in one area with losses in another.24 As Clare Lyons discovered in her study on sexuality in revolutionary and early national Philadelphia, “women were granted intellectual competency in exchange for the acceptance of a new, inert female sexuality.”25 More importantly, as Carol Berkin pointed out, “neither expanding women’s economic opportunities nor extending their legal rights found a place in the woman question agenda.” Therefore, “the intellectuals who debated the woman question narrowed rather than expanded woman’s sphere.”26 Republican Motherhood may have carried cultural force, but no legal changes resulted to grant them the right to property or their children. Women had a political role, but their citizenship was indirect, predicated upon influence through sons and husbands, confined to their homes, and tied to a particular type of sexual behavior. Invoking a seemingly universal female experience of motherhood also masked the new ideology’s singular application to white women who had developed Republican Motherhood in response to their own class and race concerns. While the argument for educating future mothers of future citizens theoretically benefited women outside of the elite, whose capacity was not in question, only families with the economic luxury of 51

L EI G H F O U G H T

sparing their daughters’ labor and the availability of publicly-supported schools could fulfill that potential. Hostility toward black education shut free African American girls out of all but a few northern classrooms, with doors opened to black boys much sooner than to their sisters. Their lack of education was then used as a sign of inferior intelligence, thereby reinforcing the existing racial ideology that associated black women with labor rather than intellect and limited them to bodies without minds, Phillis Wheatley’s renowned genius notwithstanding. In any case, the question of black male citizenship was in limbo, so any construction of female citizenship that placed them auxiliary to their husbands had no meaning for black women. Subsequently, community activism prioritized black male citizenship and privileged the masculinity that would legitimize it.27 For enslaved women, the entire discussion was moot. Thus, under Republican Motherhood, white women reproduced citizens while black women reproduced labor and, as slaves, property. Tying female virtue to sexual behavior also became a tool by which to exclude nonelite women from influence. Clare Lyons noted that women of the “rabble” in Philadelphia included sexuality as part of their definition of freedom. “Sexual freedom,” she argued, “symbolized women’s claims to individual independence and their assertions of Lockean rights of self-determination.”28 This stood them in opposition to those who insisted upon a more constrained sexuality that emphasized virginity before marriage, celibacy outside of marriage, and monogamy within marriage, with miscegenation out of the question. This dichotomous view of sexuality emphasized women’s control over their own choices, reinforcing feminine free will; but, Republican Motherhood framed the choices as good or bad, moral or immoral, virtuous or debauched. A woman could choose to be chaste and therefore contribute to the health of the republic, or she could choose to be lascivious and threaten the nation. One choice entitled her to political influence, the other marginalized her. Enslaved women were entirely disqualified from this choice. White masters and mistresses defined their female slaves’ gender through labor and reproduction only, stripped of the social and emotional contexts of family and motherhood. Without the morality of that context, white masters and especially mistresses dumped all of their anxieties about unrestrained sexuality onto their slaves. If Republican Mothers were the embodiment of chaste, reasoned, virtue, then enslaved mothers were their lascivious, unintelligent, immoral opposite. The credence of this idea grew along with the expansion of slavery. Because these features justified their enslavement, they were tied to black female gender rather than their status as slave and freedom from slavery did not liberate them from this depiction. Equally troubling stereotypes plagued black men, and both became reasons to exclude them from the blessings of liberty.29 As a result, African American sexual behavior worried black church leaders throughout the nineteenth century. Ministers such as the Reverend Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, exhorted their congregations to practice sexual continence as part of a broader agenda of moral uplift that would prove African Americans’ civic virtue. This sort of argument resembled that of the white proponents of Republican Motherhood in that citizenship had to be earned as a privilege through proper behavior rather than being endowed by the Creator as a natural right. It also became a mark distinguishing the aspiring black middle class from the working class.30 Rather than a 52

“ F EMA L E WOMEN OR F E M I NI NE L A D I E S ”

capitulation to white norms, however, adoption of such gender ideals as Republican Motherhood was part of a life lived in opposition to racist expectations about African Americans and their families. For a black woman, then, Republican Motherhood entailed liberation from a restrictive understanding of her gender as merely procreative but also an acceptance of another definition that limited her to a particular type of sexuality and power. Indeed, as black women developed their own ideals of gender that included elements of white womanhood, they founded black womanhood on freedom and self-determination rather than motherhood and influence, although the former incorporated the latter. Selfdetermination began with emancipation for themselves and for their children and families, and grew through both property ownership and community building.31 The first freed them from the control and abuses of masters and mistresses, and allowed them to make decisions about most aspects of their lives. The second signified economic self-sufficiency. The third usually took place within a church and situated them within a self-governing society that both paralleled and was part of the larger process of creating the American nation. Enslaved women developed a similar ideology of gender for themselves that integrated both self-determination and community even when emancipation was not possible. In her study of antebellum Virginia slave women, Brenda E. Stevenson found that they seized “the prerogative of slave female principle, the protection and procreation of black life in the face of white opposition.” 32 While bondswomen developed a gender consciousness of resistance and community, free and white women developed one that insisted upon some form of recognition as vested members of the American nation. The roles they created for themselves, however, consistently contended with pressure to limit the very influence that lay at the heart of their new-found political identity. Women’s presence at patriotic and political celebrations served as potent symbols in legitimizing the festivities with virtue and nonpartisanship embedded in the ideal of white femininity and their status as nonvoters. Yet, this image of a disinterested but politically-engaged woman masked partisan sympathies that ran as deeply as their husbands’ and fathers’. In one of the many ironies about the intersection of gender, class, and politics in early Washington, D.C., historian Catherine Allgor observed that “women and men of political families handled the explosive issues of power and politicking in a republican environment by cloaking the power in female garb and by denial.” Hostesses from the president’s wife, Dolly Madison, to boarding house matrons used the niceties of parties, teas, and dinners to facilitate the sort of partisan deal-making necessary to a functioning government. In doing so, Allgor found, “middle-class and elite women used a veil of respectability to work aggressively toward their political goals.”33 As partisan divisions deepened, women were accused of violating the bargain that allowed them to emerge as political actors in the first place. Federalists and Republicans alike had used white women’s support as evidence of their own rightful claim to national leadership, granting women the free will to make a selection between the two parties. As with sexual morality, however, there was a right and a wrong choice. One party’s good wives and daughters were the other’s sluts and slatterns. By 1829, even a presidential candidate’s wife was not off-limits as Andrew Jackson’s opponents portrayed his wife, the pious Rachel, as a rough-hewn rube, the victim of seduction, and an adulteress.34 All three traits indicated her moral weakness and inadequacy as a virtuous influence upon her 53

L EI G H F O U G H T

husband, potentially the next president of the United States. When he did become president, a new scandal erupted concerning Margaret Eaton, the widowed daughter of a boarding house proprietor in Washington, D.C., and subsequently the wife of Jackson’s Secretary of War, John Eaton. This “petticoat affair” laid bare the political influence of Floride Calhoun, wife of Secretary of State John C. Calhoun. Their husbands’ opponents represented the former as an uncouth adulterer and the latter as wielding illegitimate power, each symbolizing the worst fears about women of their respective classes and each representing the consequences of allowing women to hold any sway in politics. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, partisanship was clearly part and parcel of politics, and women could no more reserve their proclivities toward one party or another than men could. Women, who were expected to police political division and mitigate its destructive tendencies, implicitly received the blame for the erosion of a mythical unity and consensus that had never existed in the first place. Thus, they were no longer entitled to a place in the political landscape. Ironically, as men’s electoral power increased with universal white male and limited black male suffrage, women’s decreased. In one oftcited New Jersey case, single, propertied, white women lost the right to vote at the same time that it was gained by all free white men. If the legitimacy of the republic now rested on the participation of all white men, then the political influence wielded by white women was suspect and a threat to democracy, Floride Calhoun being a prime example. The Jacksonian Democrats, for all of their idolization of representative government, understood the Common Man as just that: a man. Rosemarie Zagarri labeled this twodecade-long process a “Revolutionary Backlash,” hypothesizing that the mid-nineteenthcentury iteration of separate spheres “may actually have been a reaction against women’s more extensive involvement in politics, a convenient way to explain and justify excluding women from party politics and electoral activities.”35 Only when a second political party system emerged in the 1840s did women resume their place at public, political gatherings, this time with explicit encouragement of their party sympathies. Elizabeth Varon’s study of Virginia women demonstrated that they were welcomed at Whig events. These new, “Whig women,” Varon argued, were both “partisans who expressed their allegiance to the Whig Party, and mediators whose ‘disinterestedness’ enabled them to promote civic virtue, temper political passions, and focus public affairs on the common good.” The latter qualities implicitly condemned Democratic women in the mold of Rachel Jackson and Margaret Eaton, and the Democratic Party soon re-learned the propagandistic power of visible feminine support. This newer vision of women in politics, however, appeared within the context of “True Womanhood,” a new development in the ideology of gender that simultaneously consigned women to apolitical domesticity and provided them with the tools to engage in more complicated political activism through social reform.36 Bearing many of the characteristics of Republican Motherhood, the ideology of domesticity embedded in “True Womanhood” further entrenched the household as the natural habitat of women and reaffirmed virtue as moral piety and sexual purity, while also eliminating the political ramifications of feminine behavior. As a response to the market revolution, domesticity married pre- and post-industrial divisions of labor, allowing its precepts to be applied to both rural and urban women. Work deemed masculine moved outside of the household and became invested with monetary value, while work defined 54

“ F EMA L E WOMEN OR F E M I NI NE L A D I E S ”

as feminine remained in the household. With the rise of wage labor outside of the home, women’s labor in the home became literally de-valued, even when women paid other women to perform it, although the work itself was integral to the functioning of the household and, ultimately, the national economy.37 In cities, the products of women’s productive work could now be purchased and their children’s labor was no longer integral to family survival, leading domesticity advocates to urge women to focus on cultivating a warm, loving, and virtuous family life. Furthermore, because the imagery of “separate spheres” trafficked in dichotomies, and because domesticity further collapsed “feminine,” “private,” and “home,” woman’s sphere stood in marked contrast to the “masculine,” “public,” and ultimately “foreign” sphere that men must dominate. As keepers of the private sphere, women provided a safe haven for their husbands and sons from the rough and tumble public world of wage labor, business, and politics. Because this work was unpaid and connected to child-bearing, child-rearing, and traditional gender divisions of labor, the proscriptive literature portrayed women as both biologically-suited to domesticity and expected to enter in the spirit of a calling. Elite women, of course, could afford to purchase or pay women to relieve some of the labor of this vocation.38 Women’s relative position to power, however, had not shifted much since their foremothers created Republican Motherhood. The democratization of white male political power and the emphasis on a competitive marketplace only reinforced the revolutionary era contradiction in which men were equals in the public area but masters in their own home. Retrenchment of slavery in southern states as the cotton market boomed intensified this hierarchy on plantations. Woman’s importance and power continued to lie in her sway over the men in her household. Now, however, hostility toward women’s political behavior and awareness of forces beyond the state readjusted the focus of women’s influence from politics to culture. Rather than pressuring men to become judicious political actors, women should, as Nancy Cott observed, “fit men to pursue their worldly aims in a regulated way.”39 Patriarchy, then, continued to inform men’s understanding of masculinity and thus entitlement to natural rights. Only when husbands discovered that they could protect some of their family’s wealth from an unstable economy by vesting their wives with the power to own property did they agree to some change to separate estates. Those instances were limited and far between. Only New York recognized married women’s right to property, and then only after 1848. Because men relied upon women’s unpaid labor, which could be coerced through women’s financial dependence, they had no impetus to change the laws to grant women more independent economic or legal power.40 Furthermore, because patriarchal families were a coveted privilege held by white men, specifically in the urban middle class, working-class, black, and enslaved men replicated the pattern in their own struggle for national inclusion. For example, rather than embrace working women as fellow laborers in a class-based struggle to affect the conditions of factories, working-class men either construed them as victims in need of protection or more useful to the labor movement as housewives who did not undercut men’s wages or compete with them for jobs, and who supported the family’s economic health through household economizing. While their analysis incorporated a view of class struggle that extended beyond the workplace, their view of class followed the dominant division of men’s and women’s work. As trade unions found traction in party politics, working 55

L EI G H F O U G H T

women became less useful to working men’s goals. The black civil rights movement followed a similar pattern, but its activists also struggled against an imposed racial ideology that drew black men and women together as partners in resistance. As a result, black women were much more welcome in the civil rights movement than white women were in trade unions. Being a collective movement that relied upon the organizational skill of women in antislavery organizations or churches, civil rights became a family writ large, and the ideology that posited women as caretakers of the home expanded to incorporate the community.41 A similar argument emerged among middle-class white women. Taking into consideration Anne McClintock’s postulation that domesticity could refer to a place, a relationship, and actions, then domesticity could empower a woman to domesticate the spaces outside of her home, thus explaining Elizabeth Varon’s observation that “the doctrine of separate spheres came to coexist with a countervailing conception of female civic duty.” If a woman’s sphere could be understood as action as well as a place, then she could preoccupy herself with suitable feminine matters outside of her home or use her home as a base for activism that extended into the outside world through mutual aid societies, benevolence organizations, and reform movements. The wider the scope of their reform vision, however, the more likely they were to challenge male prerogative, and permission to act in this civic sphere was predicated on joining their interests with the men of their class. Thus, like Republican Motherhood, the point of view embedded in their concern cloaked unequal power relationships and difference among women.42 Women outside of the middle class quite often defined themselves in opposition to these gender expectations, even if some could see and even long for the privileges that went with conformity. Working-class and black women continued to develop an ethos of self-determination as part of their own ideal of gender. The young, single women who entered the New England mills or moved to cities had escaped the authority of father without entering the patriarchal relation of marriage. While their bosses assumed those paternal roles to a degree, the young women understood the relationship as one of consent and, through labor organization, sought to limit the extent of their employers’ control.43 As the free black population expanded in the North through state-level emancipation, manumission, and escape from bondage, women formed voluntary associations that addressed the particular vulnerabilities of women in poverty, orphans, and deficits in education, as well as supporting men’s organizations and the church as a whole. Their development of a free, black female gender capitulated to certain points of patriarchy, such as the importance of their influence rather than their leadership, because their lives as part of this community were entwined with black men’s assertion of masculinity. Nevertheless, as white women developed a consciousness through Enlightenment ideals that led to the antebellum emphasis on individualism, black women could never entirely separate themselves from their connection to a larger body that faced racial oppression.44 Enslaved women, too, had developed a gender identity in opposition to the one imposed upon them by their masters and mistresses. Whereas free black women used the ideas connected to the domestic sphere as a weapon against racist assumptions about their womanhood and families, bondswomen often found the physical space of that sphere and its relationship to be the site of resistance. Slave mistresses may have complained to their diaries about the ways that the hierarchy on which slavery rested also contributed 56

“ F EMA L E WOMEN OR F E M I NI NE L A D I E S ”

to their own oppression, but they in no way sympathized with the black women around them. Mistresses could violate the dictates of passivity to assume the mantle of mastery in partnership with their husbands, and they did so with an un-ladylike zeal for violence. The pervasiveness of control and abuse that characterized every space and relationship connected with slavery led slave women to develop what Stephanie Camp has termed “rival geographies” that incorporated previously understood modes of resistance, maintenance of kinship networks, and seemingly feminine frivolities such as the décor of their cabin and the style of their hair; and with the prevalence of rape, enslaved women used sexual choice as a sign of self-assertion.45 That latter point exposed a problem in one of the most sympathetic and raciallyintegrated reform movements of northern women. Abolition challenged the existing ideologies surrounding race by recognizing African Americans’ capacity to be fully functioning members of the republic, thereby erasing racial distinctions of gender. Women, in fact, led the move toward racial integration in the movement through their own, parallel organizations. In both organizing the movement and developing antislavery ideology, black and white women transgressed many gender norms and challenged their compatriots’ interpretation of citizenship. Black and white women gravitated toward moral suasion tactics that returned them to a more explicitly political interpretation of influence, and the challenge to patriarchy within the ranks of the American Anti-Slavery Society became the origin of their own claim to more direct political engagement.46 Nevertheless, abolitionism was a largely white, northern, middle-class movement that, with notable exceptions, proposed to speak for slaves. As such, abolitionist women filtered what information they learned about the realities of slavery through their own lens of domesticity and universal womanhood. Doing so produced such powerful propaganda as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and introduced a heretofore absent gender dimension to critiques of slavery. Yet, when speaking about rape, a form of violence directed at women as women, they identified the crime as a violation of virtue first, unintentionally shaming the victim as damaged goods. Enslaved women, on the other hand, experienced rape as violence. Nor might antislavery women understand sexual bargains that enslaved women might have to make in order to negotiate privileges and protections for their family or to exercise self-determination in choices about their bodies. Thus, former slaves, such as Harriet Jacobs, took not only the risk of a public voice but also of exposing their experience to an audience that could only understand their sexual history as one of deviance and dishonor rather than survival and resilience. The two – indeed, three – groups of women might overlap in their concerns for freedom and in representing a feminine experience as distinct from men’s, but the details of their separate women’s experiences were so divergent that each understood her gender to be entirely different from the others. The leaders of the women’s rights movement emerged from the antislavery movement bringing this disjuncture with them. In its first decade, they attempted to breach some of the differences of class and race by building coalitions across those lines by addressing property rights, equal wages, equal education, and, to a much lesser degree before 1865, suffrage. Indeed, some black women found that they had more room to exercise leadership and advance agendas in the woman’s rights movement than they did in the black convention movement of the same years. Still, as the distance between the black civil 57

L EI G H F O U G H T

rights and the women’s rights movements widened, black women understood the relationship between gender and disfranchisement differently than white women, a difference that multiplied with every variable that affected a woman’s distance from power. The collapse of the American Equal Rights Association in 1867, which split the black male suffrage movement from the woman’s rights movement and spawned the woman’s suffrage movement, exposed the narrow definition of gender that white woman’s rights advocates had assumed.47 The women’s rights movement, then, was implicitly founded on a construction of gender that had evolved over the previous seventy-five years. Whereas men, over that time, were granted ever more direct political power based on an idea of inherent, natural right, women had to justify their entitlement to civil liberties through their performance of an idealized gender role that could be assumed only by a narrow group of women. Grounded in an argument for influence rather than suffrage, as Republican Mothers or True Women, they had to adhere to a concept of virtue based in sexual behavior and education that reinforced the exclusion of African Americans and working-class women. Women outside of the elite and middle class developed their own conceptions of gender that responded to the oppression in their lives. White woman’s rights activists were able to delineate distinct issues affecting women as a class, and thereby appeal to women from different constituencies. In shaping the movement, however, they rejected concerns that they considered extraneous to their understanding of women’s rights, but that other women could not separate from their own experiences of gender. These problems continue to plague feminists and inform women’s relationship to the state into the twentyfirst century. In terms of gender history, The Women’s Rights Movement was actually A Woman’s Rights Movement. After all, if all women do not share the same gender, then all women do not share the same woman’s rights movement, and many women found empowerment and civil recognition through other avenues. As historians of gender explore the proposition that there are multiple genders, then so do they recognize that there are multiple woman’s rights movements.

Notes 1 Jane Swisshelm quoted in Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 224. 2 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, 5 (Dec. 1986): 1070. 3 Elsa Barkley Brown, “‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics,” Feminist Studies 18, 2 (Summer 1992): 30. 4 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, 2, part 1 (Summer 1966): 151–174. 5 Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 98–100; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), 158–163. 6 Lauren McCall, “‘Shall I Fetter Her Will?’ Literary Americans Confront Feminine Submission,” Journal of the Early Republic 21, 1 (Spring 2001): 95–113; Louisa S. McCord, “Enfranchisement of Women,” in Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays, ed. Richard C. Lounsbury (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 108. 7 Mary Beth Norton, Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), xii–xiii, 70, 146; Clare A. Lyons, Sex among the

58

“ F EMA L E WOMEN OR F E M I NI NE L A D I E S ”

8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20

21

22 23 24 25

Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 117–118. Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 169. Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 164–167. Carol Lasser, “Beyond Separate Spheres: The Power of Public Opinion,” Journal of the Early Republic 21, 1 (Spring 2001): 115–123. See also the other essays from that symposium: Michael A. Morrison, John Lauritz Larson, Mary Kelly, Julie Roy Jeffrey, Laura McCall, Carol Lasser, “Redefining Womanly Behavior in the Early Republic: Essays from a SHEAR Symposium,” Journal of the Early Republic 21, 2 (Spring 2001): 71–123. Julie Roy Jeffrey, “Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist Women and Separate Spheres,” Journal of the Early Republic 21, 1 (Spring 2001): 79–93. Elsa Barkley Brown, “‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics,” Feminist Studies 18, 2 (Summer 1992): 30; Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Intersectionality as Method: A Note,” Signs 38, 4 (Summer 2013): 1019–1030. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 363–364; David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Jennifer L. Morgan, “Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology,” in New Studies in the History of American Slavery, ed. Edward Baptist and Stephanie Camp (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 47. Morgan, “Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder,” 21–64. Duncan J. Macleod, “Toward Caste,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 217– 336; John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (1988; 3rd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 12–14, 90–94; Ann Little, Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Anthony Mora, Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848–1912 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 141–49. Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy in Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7. Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 2; Elizabeth Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 2. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 34–36. Norton, Separated by Their Sex, xii–xiii. On civic space or civil society, see also: Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 8–9; Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 2; Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 5–13; Ryan, Civic Wars, 1–18; Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 2. Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 40–41; Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence (New York: Knopf, 2005), 157–158; Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 222–224; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 133–134. Kerber, Women of the Republic, 11. Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 126, 127–130. Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 72–81. Lyons, Sex among the Rabble, 3.

59

L EI G H F O U G H T

26 Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers, 156. 27 Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 183–184; Graham Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 217–223; Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 30–35, 113–117. 28 Lyons, Sex among the Rabble, 288. 29 D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 94; Deborah Gray White, Aren’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985; revised, New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 29–38. 30 Lyons, Sex among the Rabble, 357; Richard A. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 153–156. 31 Adams and Pleck, Love of Freedom, 12–14. 32 Leslie M. Alexander, “The Challenge of Race: Rethinking the Position of Black Women in the Field of Women’s History,” Journal of Women’s History 16, 4 (2004): 50–60; Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (1985; New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 11–42; Martha S. Jones, All Bound up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Brenda E. Stevenson, “Gender Conventions, Ideals, and Identity among Antebellum Virginia Women,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); White, Aren’t I a Woman? 33 Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 82–88, 113–114; 124–136; Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 240–241; David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 232–233. 34 Allgor, Parlor Politics, 196–197; Norma Basch, “Marriage, Morals, and Politics in the Election of 1828,” Journal of American History 80, 3 (Dec. 1993): 890–918; Patricia Brady, A Being So Gentle: The Frontier Love Story of Rachel and Andrew Jackson (New York: Macmillan, 2011), 213–215; John F. Marszalek, The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny, and Sex in Andrew Jackson’s White House (New York: Free Press, 1997). 35 Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 30–37, 135; Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 7. 36 Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 3–4; Ryan, Women in Public, 30–37. 37 Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 127–136; Natasha Kirsten Kraus, A New Type of Woman: Discursive Politics and Social Change in Antebellum America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 38 Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 63–100. 39 Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 98. 40 Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 172–186; Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 42; Suzanne Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), 55–86. 41 Thomas Dublin, Women at Work (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 200–202; Carol Lasser, “Gender, Ideology, and Class in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 10, 3 (Autumn 1990): 331–337; Stansell, City of Women, 136–41.

60

“ F EMA L E WOMEN OR F E M I NI NE L A D I E S ”

42 Jones, All Bound up Together, 23–27, 101–108; McClintock, Imperial Leather, 34–36; Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 2; Valerie C. Cooper, Word, Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). 43 Dublin, Women at Work, 89–96; Lasser, “Gender, Ideology, and Class in the Early Republic,” 331–337; Stansell, City of Women, 133–137. 44 Alexander, “The Challenge of Race,” 50–60; Jones, All Bound up Together, 23–67. 45 Camp, Closer to Freedom, passim; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 11–42; Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 25–31; Stevenson, “Gender Conventions, Ideals, and Identity among Antebellum Virginia Women,” 169–190; White, Aren’t I a Woman? passim. 46 Debra Gold Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Beverly C. Tomek, Pennsylvania Hall: A ‘Legal Lynching’ in the Shadow of the Liberty Bell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 47 Jones, All Bound up Together, 119–149; Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Faye Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sally G. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 162–174.

61

4 RE LIGION AND R EF O R M I N T H E EARLY AMER I C A N R EP UBL I C John Fea

In 1822, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to his friend, the noted physician Benjamin Waterhouse, lamenting the irrationality of much of American religious life: I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither king nor priests, the genuine doctrine of only one God is revived, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian. Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment. As a believer in progress he could not imagine that traditional Christian beliefs – the Trinity, the deity and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the inspiration of the Bible – would last very long under reason’s relentless assault.1 Jefferson could not have been more wrong. What he apparently did not realize from his perch at Monticello was that he was living in an era of intense religiosity in the United States. The evangelical revival that some historians call the Second Great Awakening was stirring all around him. New religions, including Mormonism, Adventism, Spiritualism, and various forms of New Thought and Transcendentalism, would soon diversify the American religious landscape like never before. Ironically, Jefferson was partly to blame. When he wrote the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom (1786), and the framers of the United States Constitution drafted the disestablishment clause of the First Amendment, they could not have imagined the emergence of what historian Jon Butler has called an “antebellum spiritual hothouse.” Without government support, denominations competed for members and offered a brand of Protestantism that was attractive to a growing nation of farmers moving to the frontier. Moreover, for those who stayed in the more mature societies along the Atlantic seacoast, the religious fervor would inform attempts by middleclass Protestants to build a Christian nation and Christianize the frontier through a series of reform efforts and benevolent societies.2 During the nineteenth century the United States population experienced rapid growth, but the rise in church attendance outpaced it. Tens of thousands of Americans found a new relationship with God through evangelical revivals. They received Jesus Christ as savior and rededicated themselves to a life of Christian service. Revivals occurred sporadically, but forcefully, throughout the country. In the South and West religious awakenings took place in camp meetings such as the one at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August 1801, where up to 25,000 people gathered together in the small frontier town to 62

R EL I G I ON A N D R E F O R M

pray, fast, and listen to evangelistic sermons. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale College, led a series of revivals on campus in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The revival fires ignited so often in western and central New York that Charles Grandison Finney, one of the awakening’s chief promoters, called the region “the burnedover district.” During the 1820 and 1830s Finney traveled to cities across the country conducting revival meetings. He preached extemporaneously, urged men and women to take control of their own salvation, and instituted new forms of revivalism such as the “anxious bench,” a seat where those convicted by his preaching could receive prayer. In 1857–1858, the awakening sanctified the marketplace. The “Businessman’s Revival” began through a series of noonday prayer meetings in New York City and quickly spread to urban centers across the United States.3 New religious movements also found a place in this spiritual marketplace. Presbyterians Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone set out to restore the spirit of the first-century church. Their Restoration movement spread among people looking for a common-sense approach to Protestantism that drew on the primitive faith they had read about in the Acts of the Apostles. Joseph Smith founded the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons, after he received revelation from God through an encounter with angelic beings that he believed added to the teachings of the Bible. Other Protestant groups, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists, or Millerites, built their religious community around a Saturday Sabbath and a belief in the imminent return of Jesus Christ. Their leader, William Miller, drew followers to his movement when he predicted that Christ would return on October 22, 1844. There was a certain Protestant logic to this proliferation of new denominations and religious movements. As men and women read the Bible and interpreted it for themselves, they began to gather with other believers who read and interpreted the Bible in the same way.4 Protestantism also made inroads among enslaved and free blacks in this period. In the South, slaves forged their own understanding of Christianity, one that stressed joyous singing and dancing and hope for freedom. These religious celebrations birthed a distinct AfricanAmerican Protestantism that is still with us today. Though slaveholders remained reluctant to convert their slaves, many of them were attached to those Protestant denominations – such as the Methodists and the Baptists – who preached more democratic forms of Christianity and celebrated spiritual equality before God. Some churches in the South opened their doors to slaves and free blacks, usually reserving seats in the balcony for them. Free blacks also began to establish their own congregations and denominations. In Philadelphia, Richard Allen was a popular Methodist preacher among the African-American community. In 1793 he established the Bethel Church for Negro Methodists and eventually organized a separate black denomination: the African Methodist Episcopal Church.5 Disestablishment also paved the way for rational religion and skepticism, a part of the religious landscape that has recently drawn much attention from historians. Unitarians had been a growing segment of New England culture since the late eighteenth century, but in the decades following the Revolution they had permeated the region’s educated classes. Their writings found their way into the curriculum at Harvard, where Henry Ware, a Unitarian, was appointed Hollis professor of divinity in 1805. By the 1830s the Transcendentalist movement challenged Unitarian authority in intellectual circles. Triggered by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address in 1838, Transcendentalists 63

J O HN F E A

questioned the important role that reason played in the liberal theology of the Unitarians and defined belief in terms of subjective experience and romanticism. As the Unitarians and Transcendentalists did battle for control of New England intellectual life, religious skepticism gained popularity in the United States through the writings of Thomas Paine and secularists who, like Thomas Jefferson and his followers, championed the separation of church and state. Paine’s The Age of Reason, a scathing attack on traditional Christianity, gained popularity among immigrants, the working class, and frontier settlers, particularly in Kentucky and the Mississippi River Valley, who opposed attempts by eastern Calvinists to forge a Christian nation. Many of these immigrants gravitated to the DemocraticRepublicans. The promoters of the Second Great Awakening understood their evangelical revival in terms of opposition to what they perceived as the unorthodox faith of Unitarians, Transcendentalists, secularists, skeptics, Paine, and Jeffersonians.6 Historians have understood religion in the early republic through several different interpretive lenses, but two of these lenses – consumerism and democratization – have had the most influence in the field. Some have suggested connections between the diverse and free-wheeling religious culture made possible by disestablishment and the market revolution. As ordinary people adjusted to a free-market economy, they applied consumer habits to their choice of churches. Though historians have shown that the links between Christianity and consumerism date back to the colonial period, early nineteenth-century religious developments such as the shift from Calvinism to a more free-will understanding of salvation, the advent of capitalism, and the end of state-sponsored churches, set American religion on a new path that is still with us today.7 Nathan Hatch, in his magisterial The Democratization of American Christianity, relied heavily on the post-revolutionary theological shift from Calvinism to free-will evangelicalism, although his interpretation is informed less by the marketplace and more by the democratic political culture of the early nineteenth century. The most important historical actors in Hatch’s interpretations are frontier Methodists and Baptists, two of the era’s fastest-growing denominations. Why did Methodists and Baptists grow so quickly? According to Hatch, these groups challenged the longstanding authority of older, more eastern-based denominations such as the Presbyterians and Congregationalists by fusing a free-will theology (and a rejection of Calvinist ideas of predestination) with the freedom that they, and the United States as a whole, were experiencing in the political realm.8 As the revival fires burned and new forms of Protestantism and religious skepticism emerged, and ordinary evangelicals became consumers and democrats, many middle-class evangelicals set out to forge a Christian republic. Though the United States Constitution made it clear that there would be no official state church or religious establishment in the nation, Protestant parachurch organizations known as voluntary societies or “benevolent” societies sought to create an unofficial moral establishment. Those touched by the Holy Spirit during these revivals set out to be “salt and light” (Matthew 5:13–16) in the world around them. They evangelized neighbors and strangers in the hopes of preparing their souls for eternal life. But the practice of being a Christian witness in the world also required converts – new and old, women and men – to address a host of social problems that they believed to be undermining the moral fabric of American society. Middle-class evangelicals, who had benefited the most from the burgeoning market economy, had the wealth and the social prestige to forge such a moral republic. They applied the social 64

R EL I G I ON A N D R E F O R M

requirements of their faith to fight poverty, drunkenness, sexual immorality, crime, the disrespect of the Sabbath, and slavery, just to name a few of their causes. They promoted Christian learning in Sunday schools and reached hundreds of thousands with the gospel message through the distribution of the Bible and religious tracts. Fueled by the threats of secularism and infidelity they formed what Lyman Beecher described as a “disciplined moral militia.” In an address before the Charitable Society for the Education of Indigent Pious Young Men for the Ministry of the Gospel, one of the dozens of benevolent societies organized during this period, Beecher argued that the “integrity of the Union demands special exertions to produce in the nation a more homogeneous character.” He called for the “prevalence of pious, intelligent, enterprising ministers through the nation, at ratio of one for 1000,” to “establish schools . . . and colleges, and habits, and institutions of homogeneous influence” that would “lay the foundations of our empire upon a rock.” Many who worked on behalf of these benevolent societies believed that their labors would usher in the return of Jesus Christ. By 1837 there were 159 so-called “benevolent societies” in the United States. Between 1789 and 1829 the nation’s thirteen largest societies – most of them unaffiliated with a specific Protestant denomination – spent more than $2.8 million to promote a more Christian and moral nation. In the same period, the U.S. government spent $3.6 million to build transportation and communication infrastructure (roads, bridges, canals, etc.).9 Evangelicals concerned with the moral reform of American life concentrated much effort on the religious education of children and young people through Sunday schools. A recent study by digital historian Lincoln Mullen found that Luke 18:16 – “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God” – was the most cited Bible verse in nineteenth-century periodicals.10 Some of the earliest Sunday schools in America were formed in the eighteenth century to provide biblical instruction to the children of the urban poor. Children would gather in churches to sing hymns, pray, read the Bible, and hear a short sermon. They were rewarded for regular attendance and their hard work memorizing biblical passages. If records of enrollment in Sunday school classes are any indication, the efforts of these schools were successful. By 1832 there were over 300,000 boys and girls attending Sunday schools in the United States, or about 8 percent of the young people eligible to attend such classes. The numbers were even higher in urban areas. For example, in the same year, close to 28 percent of Philadelphia children were attending Sunday schools. Because these schools focused on reading and writing, many of them drew large numbers of free blacks – both children and adults. Starting in 1824 a benevolent organization called the American Sunday School Union was formed to stimulate Sunday school attendance across denominations and provide literature to schools operating around the country.11 Other reformers worked to counter America’s addition to alcoholic beverages. In the mid-1820s Americans consumed about seven gallons of alcohol per person each year (compared to 2.8 gallons in 1995). People drank whiskey for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the early republic, much in the way that they drink coffee or other caffeine-laced beverages today. Alcoholic beverages were cheap (costing less than coffee or tea) and were healthier than drinking water. Alcohol was blamed for its effect on families, young people, crime, the strength (or weakness) of the American military, and poverty. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century there were several local attempts – mostly in New 65

J O HN F E A

England – to curb the destructive effects of alcohol on American life, but the movement became national when Beecher published six sermons on temperance in 1827. For Beecher, intemperance was “the sin of our land.” America’s alcohol problem was a moral one, but it had eternal consequences. It would lead to behavior that would separate individuals from God. Beecher made a direct connection between the depravity of the culture and the need for salvation – a fitting message in the midst of the Second Great Awakening. He concluded that “ardent spirits” should be “banished” from the “list of lawful articles of commerce, by a correct and efficient public sentiment.” In 1826, temperance advocates formed the American Temperance Society to urge citizens to engage in total abstinence from alcoholic beverages. By 1835, the Society could boast five thousand chapters and a million members, making it the largest reform association in the United States.12 Other moral reformers focused on defending the Christian Sabbath. They worried how the United States could remain pure before God when so many people labored on Sundays, the God-appointed day on which Christians were to rest from their labors. As the nation slowly turned to manufacturing and industry in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and everyday life became more influenced by the demands of the market, the temptation to add Sunday to the regular work-week was great. Many Christian reformers wanted to make sure that the Christian character of the nation would not be sacrificed in favor of the greed and materialism of the marketplace. Sabbath reform began in earnest, however, when a group of Christian ministers and laymen decided to challenge an 1810 law that required federal postal employees to work on Sunday. They argued that every other federal agency but the post office was closed on Sunday, but 10,000 postal clerks and mail handlers were forced to miss church services because they had to go to work. Several reformers, including Beecher and Arthur Tappan (two men who seemed to be somehow behind every major religious reform movement in America at this time), formed the General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath. Local chapters were formed quickly throughout the country. These chapters published tracts, organized pro-Sabbath rallies, and were the first to utilize petitions on a national level to make their religious and political point. Soon the cause extended beyond the postal service as Sabbatarians pushed for the Sunday closing of taverns, theaters, bakeries, offices, and other places of business.13 The early nineteenth century also saw a revolution in print – newspapers, magazines, books – that would be used to advance the idea that the United States was a Christian nation. Some of the nation’s first American historians began to write and publish during this period and they did not shy away from trying to discern the hand of God in American history. Many of these historians believed that God had intervened on behalf of the United States during the American Revolution and they wrote to remind Americans of their spiritual heritage in the hopes of reforming society along Christian lines. Mercy Otis Warren, in History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805), was overtly providential in the way she told the story of the American past. She thought that the overthrow of English dominion by a band of colonial soldiers, and the creation of a government based on freedom, was so momentous that it could only be attributed to a “superintending Providence.” Warren believed that the “religious and moral character of Americans yet stands on a higher grade of excellence and purity, than that of most of nations” and challenged her readers to live up to the gift of independence that 66

R EL I G I ON A N D R E F O R M

God have given them. As the nineteenth century rolled on, George Bancroft published his multivolume History of the United States: From the Discovery of the American Continent (1834–1874). Bancroft was a Unitarian who, like Warren, also believed in the role of God’s providence in shaping the American past. He thought that the United States was a Christian nation established and sustained by God for the purpose of spreading liberty and democracy to the world.14 God’s providence in American history was a dominant theme in school textbooks during this period. Authors of these books employed providential history to teach students how to be good citizens of a Christian republic. Charles Goodrich’s History of the United States started with a brief lesson on history: “History displays the dealings of God with mankind . . . It cultivates a sense of dependence on him; strengthens our confidence in his benevolence; and impresses us with a conviction of his justice.” Noah Webster’s History of the United States ends with an appendix titled “Advice to the Young.” He urged students of American history to obey their parents, read the Bible, avoid sin, love their neighbors, and disdain luxury. This blend of history and morality was considered a foundational part of any good education. And then there was Mason Locke Weems. An Episcopalian minister and traveling book salesman, Weems’s biography of George Washington, The Life of Washington, ran through forty editions between 1799 and 1825. The tales Weems told about Washington, including the story of him cutting down his father’s cherry tree, were published over and over again. His stories were included in more than twenty-five nineteenth-century schoolbooks, including the famous McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers. Weems understood that if America was going to be a Christian and moral nation it needed to be “fathered” by a Christian statesman.15 No other benevolent society took advantage of the rise of popular print culture like the non-denominational American Bible Society. Founded in 1816 by Elias Boudinot, a former president of the Continental Congress and one of the nation’s leading Christian Federalists, the American Bible Society set out to place the text of the King James Bible, “without note or comment,” in every American home. From its “Bible House” in New York City, the American Bible Society employed steam-engine printing to produce cheap Bibles fast. They dominated the Bible market in the early nineteenth century and presided over 1,200 auxiliary Bible societies charged with the work of distribution. The founders of the American Bible Society believed that the Bible was important for two interchangeable reasons. First, it contained a salvific message that when accepted by faith alone would result in eternal reward. Second, the message of the Bible was foundational to the success of the American republic and the preservation of the United States as a Christian nation.16 Much of the grassroots effort behind the “benevolent empire” in the United States came from evangelical women, prompting historian Anne Braude to conclude that “Women’s History Is American Religious History.” Women dominated the membership rolls of Protestant churches in nineteenth-century America. They joined benevolent societies, and formed their own, as a means of expressing their faith in public life in a way that was not available to them in the eighteenth century. Men believed women had a natural capacity for charity work because their disposition was more tender and affectionate. As one of the leaders of the American Bible Society put it, women were able “to soften the severity of the male character and sympathize more fully” with those in need. Some believed that women had an important role to play in the development of Protestant 67

J O HN F E A

morality in the nation by training sons to exemplify a love for God and country. Such “republican motherhood” gave women a part to play in the cultivation of a virtuous republic and, as we will see below, provided an important incubator for more aggressive women’s activism.17 Nineteenth-century Protestants often debated the finer points of biblical theology. Virtually every denomination had their own schools, seminaries, and theologians for the purpose of defending their specific reading of the Bible. But for many, Protestantism was also defined for what it was not. Adherents to various denominations may have had their theological and ecclesiastical differences, but they were united in the fact that they were not Catholics. Their efforts at social reform and understanding of the United States as a Christian nation reflected this belief. Anti-Catholicism in America had been around since the founding of the British colonies in the seventeenth century, but it reached a fever pitch when Irish and German immigrants began arriving in the United States in large numbers between roughly 1830 and 1860. Beecher’s tract A Plea for the West discussed the dangers of “popery” on the American frontier and drew upon longstanding fears that Catholic beliefs were antithetical to Protestant liberty. Political parties such as the American Party (or Know-Nothings) were formed by Protestants with the intent of keeping Catholic immigrants out of the country. Movements to curb alcohol or distribute the King James Bible and other Protestant literature were all carried on with this Catholic threat in mind.18 Historians of American reform movements have always acknowledged the powerful role that religion played in these efforts, but it is only recently that postwar historians have given agency to religious ideas as the primary force motivating the work of antebellum reform. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s historians often argued that the religious language of these reformers was little more than a cover for other, less religious, motivations. For example, the works by Clifford Stephen Griffin, Charles Foster, and, to a limited extent, Timothy Smith, all argued that the early nineteenth-century benevolent empire was propagated by middle-class men who wanted to use evangelical moral codes to bring the passions of the working classes and immigrants under their control. According to this “social control thesis,” religion was a tool to accomplish this task. The most influential work to adopt this approach was Paul Johnson’s The Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (1978). Johnson argued that the Second Great Awakening in Rochester was used by the city’s middle-class capitalists and manufactures to instill moral order in their laborers for the purpose of enhancing their own economic self-interests.19 The critics of the social control interpretation of antebellum reform movements stressed the importance of ideas, particularly religious ideas, as motivating factors. While this emphasis on ideas and systems of belief can be found as early as Ronald Walters’s American Reformers: 1815–1860 (1978) and William McLoughlin’s Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (1978), it was presented most forcefully in Robert Abzug’s 1994 work Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination. In response to the “material reductionism” that he believed defined the historiography of antebellum reform, Abzug suggested that reform movements in the early nineteenth century were driven by the “cosmological thinking” of religious reformers. Abzug noted that reformers had a religious world view that shaped their understanding of everyday life and chided historians who did not take this cosmology seriously.20 68

R EL I G I ON A N D R E F O R M

Even as historians such as Walters, McLoughlin, and Abzug took religion at face value for the role that it played in reform movements, they were careful to note that the religious roots of these movements could be found in both the evangelicalism of the Second Great Awakening and more rational, liberal, and skeptical manifestations of religious belief. This was certainly the case with the antislavery movement and the women’s rights movement.21 Evangelical and non-evangelical reformers often put aside theological differences and came together in their conviction that slavery was a moral problem in a republic built on the premise that “all men are equal” and the idea that equality was rooted in the belief that natural rights came from God. William Lloyd Garrison (Baptist), Arthur and Lewis Tappan (Congregationalists), Lucretia Mott (Quaker), and Theodore Parker (Transcendentalist) all employed their religious convictions on behalf of the cause of emancipation. In 1833, Garrison led the effort to create the American Anti-Slavery Society. Its mission was grounded “upon the Declaration of our Independence, and upon the truths of Divine Revelation.” Those affiliated with the American Anti-Slavery Society and the antislavery cause generally carried out their work through itinerant lecturing, publications such as Garrison’s The Liberator, and the distribution of abolitionist literature through the United States Postal Service. Recently historians have pointed to the Atlantic dimensions of the antislavery movement in antebellum America. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, had a long tradition in England of opposing slavery, and American abolitionists in the nineteenth century worked closely with British abolitionists. Many American abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison and Lucretia Mott, came to embrace a belief in immediate emancipation from their conversations with like-minded antislavery men and women working across the Atlantic. In 1840, more than 500 abolitionists from France, England, and the United States, including Garrison and women’s rights and antislavery advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton, gathered in London for the General Anti-Slavery Convention.22 It has long been a staple of American history survey courses to distinguish between the varieties of antislavery ideas in antebellum America. Those who opposed slavery took several approaches to ending the peculiar institution, from immediate emancipation to gradual emancipation and colonization. These themes remain a staple in the historiography of antislavery, but recently scholars have expanded these categories by focusing on the role of women and black abolitionists. Women not only held leadership positions in the American Anti-Slavery Society, but the organization also promoted women’s suffrage. Many members of the Society, including Arthur Tappan, were not yet willing to embrace this progressive stance and eventually left to form the American and Foreign Antislavery Society.23 Historians of black abolitionism have shown how these champions of emancipation developed arguments grounded in a host of intellectual, political, and religious traditions, correcting the common stereotype that black abolitionists were simply motivated by what Manisha Sinha has described as “the ideas of moral uplift and self-improvement” associated with the “white middle class” or “Victorian and bourgeois values.” Recent scholarship has also given black women abolitionists, such as Sojourner Truth, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, a central place in the history of the movement.24 As we have seen, there was much overlap between the abolitionist movement and the women’s rights movement. The story of the fight for women’s rights in America continues 69

J O HN F E A

to rely on an older historiography centered on “separate spheres” and the so-called “cult of domesticity.”25 As the market revolution and industrialization transformed the early republic, middle-class women occupied the private or domestic sphere of the home. Women’s role in public life was limited by laws that gave men legal control over their wives’ property, prevented them from exercising basic legal actions such as filing for divorce and signing contracts, and forbade them to vote. Despite these limitations, women in the early nineteenth century formed schools that emphasized equality and women’s rights. Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and many others were active in antislavery and abolitionist campaigns that compared the failure to grant rights to slaves with the failure to grant rights to women. Like the abolitionist movement, the women’s rights movement drew heavily upon a transatlantic community. Mott and Stanton were inspired to pursue the cause in the United States by their observation of the proceedings of the 1840 General AntiSlavery Convention in London. In 1848, Mott and Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York, a gathering of men and women committed to women’s equality and voting rights. The delegates of the convention produced the Declaration of Sentiments, a statement, written by Stanton and modeled on the Declaration of Independence, that put forward a series of grievances and resolutions along these lines. It was signed by sixty-eight women and thirtytwo men. Though the women’s rights movement made few gains in the decades prior to the Civil War, the legacy of Seneca Falls and the work of Mott, Stanton, and others would go a long way toward gaining women’s voting rights in the early twentieth century.26 In the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, Americans proved to be what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “a nation of joiners.”27 They not only joined a diverse array of churches that allowed them to take control of their spiritual lives, but without a state church or a powerful central government to promote religion, reform, and moral order in society, middle-class Americans also turned to voluntary organizations such as the American Bible Society, the American Anti-Slavery Society, and the American Sunday School Union to forge a virtuous republic, advocate for social justice, defend equality, and forge a Christian nation. As historians of our current generation have taught us, religion provided meaning and identity to Americans in a rapidly changing world, while efforts at reform made sure that these changes would result in moral progress.

Notes 1 Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, June 26, 1822, accessed at Founders Online, http://founders.archives.gov/?q=Jefferson%20to%20Waterhouse%2C%20June%2026%2C%20 1822&s=1111311111&sa=&r=1&sr=. On Jefferson’s religious beliefs see Edwin Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996); Paul Conkin, “The Religious Pilgrimage of Thomas Jefferson,” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993); Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016), 267–300. 2 Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 3 Paul Conkin, Cane Ridge: America’s Pentecost (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); John Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817 (Bloomington:

70

R EL I G I ON A N D R E F O R M

4

5

6

7

8

Indiana University Press, 1998), 23–78; Charles Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1996); Kathryn Teresa Long, The Revival of 1857–58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Chris Lehmann, The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2016), 70–123, 153–193. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Richard Lyman Bushman, Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Richard Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of the Churches of Christ in America (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2008); David Rowe, God’s Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2008). Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South, updated edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2009). Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008). Recent scholarship on religious skepticism in the early republic includes Matthew Stewart, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012); Eric Schlereth, An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Christopher Grasso, “Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History (June 2008), 43–68; John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America: With Reference to Ghosts, Protestant Subcultures, Machines, and Their Metaphors: Featuring Discussions of Mass Media, Moby-Dick, Spirituality, Phrenology, Anthropology, Sing Sing Penitentiary, and Sex with the New Motive Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Sam Haselby has argued that secularism was a product of the American frontier in the early republic. Frontier settlers rejected the attempts of eastern elites to forge a Christian nation. See Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Haselby’s understanding of secularism is similar to the definition put forth by Jacques Berlinerblau, How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom (New York: Mariner Books, 2013). For an overview of recent literature on secularism in the early American republic see Christopher Grasso, “The Religious and the Secular in the Early American Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 36 (Summer 2016), 359–388. See, for example, Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For assessments of this approach see Chris Beneke, “The Free Market and the Founders’ Approach to Church-State Relations,” Journal of Church and State 52 (Spring 2010), 323–352; and E. Brooks Holifield, “Why Are Americans So Religious? The Limitations of Market Explanations,” in Religion and the Marketplace in the United States, ed. Jan Stievermann, Philip Goff, and Delef Junker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 33–59. For the continued influence of the market on American Christianity see Lehmann The Money Cult. Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity; also John Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). The most significant challenge to Hatch’s thesis has been Amanda Porterfield’s Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Porterfield’s understanding of early American religion is more nuanced than Hatch’s and more sensitive to change over time. She argues, contra Hatch, that the 1790s was a time of religious doubt in America, not a season of democratic evangelical revival. Though Porterfield does not deny the influence of the revivals in the early nineteenth century, she also points to

71

J O HN F E A

9

10 11 12 13

14

15

16

17

18 19

short periods of skepticism that emerged in the first two decades of the century. For a nice overview of Porterfield’s argument see Grasso, “The Religious and the Secular,” 371–372. Beecher’s speech is quoted in Richard Lyle Power, “A Crusade to End Yankee Culture, 1820–1865,” New England Quarterly 13:4 (Dec. 1940), 638–639. Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); John Fea, The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Charles I. Foster, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 121. Lincoln Mullen, America’s Public Bible: Biblical Quotations in U.S. Newspapers, website, code, and datasets (2016): http://americaspublicbible.org. Anne Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790–1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 79–105; Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre-Civil War Reformers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 72–76; W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcohol Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers, 70–71; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Prelude to Abolitionism: Sabbatarian Politics and the Rise of the Second Party System,” Journal of American History 58 (Sept. 1971), 328–330; Richard John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 169–205; Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 105–124. Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (1805; repr. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1989), 97, 641, 505, 686; Jonathan Tucker Boyd, “This Holy Hieroglyph: Providence and Historical Consciousness in George Bancroft’s Historiography” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1999). On the explosion of Christian print see Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 125–133; David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2011), 9. Charles A. Goodrich, History of the United States (Hartford: Barber & Robinson, 1826), 6; Noah Webster, History of the United States (New Haven: Durrie & Peck, 1832), 293–311; Mason Locke Weems, The Life of Washington: A New Edition with Primary Documents, ed. Peter Onuf (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996); Francois Furstenburg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 2006), 123–126; Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? 9–12. Fea, The Bible Cause. The American Tract Society, a sister organization of the American Bible Society founded in 1825, had a similar mission. See Karl Eric Valois, “To Revolutionize the World: The American Tract Society and the Regeneration of the Republic, 1825–1877” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1994). Anne Braude, “Women’s History Is American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87–107; Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Anne Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Lori Ginzburg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19th Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). Lyman Beecher, “A Plea for the West,” 1835, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/ document/a-plea-for-the-west/ (accessed July 20, 2016). Clifford Stephen Griffin, The Ferment of Reform, 1830–1860 (New York: Crowell Publishers, 1967); Foster, An Errand of Mercy; Timothy Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (New York: Peter Smith Publishers, 1957). By the 1970s the social control thesis was supplemented by Donald Mathews’s seminal essay, “The

72

R EL I G I ON A N D R E F O R M

20

21

22 23

24

25 26

27

Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process.” Mathews interpreted the revivals, and the reforms that stemmed from them, as a social movement that brought meaning to people’s lives through the strengthening of institutions, particularly Protestant denominations. Donald Mathews, “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An Hypothesis,” American Quarterly 21:1 (Spring 1969), 23–42; Paul Johnson, The Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978). For an overview of the historiography of antebellum reform see Glenn M. Harden, “Men and Women of Their Own Kind: Historians and Antebellum Reform” (Ph.D. diss., George Mason University, 2000). Ronald Walters, American Reformers: 1815–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978); William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling. Another study that takes religious ideas seriously is Leo Hirrel, Children of Wrath: New School Calvinism and Antebellum Reform (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998). See also Harden, “Men and Women of Their Own Kind,” 131–139. See, for example, Walters, American Reformers, 214; and Harden, “Men and Women of Their Own Kind,” 106–108. Other benevolent movements, which are not treated in this essay, that drew on evangelical and non-evangelical ideas include prison reform and what Abzug described as the “body reforms” (the dietary reforms of Sylvester Graham being the most prominent). Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 163–182. W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause; A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). W. Caleb McDaniel, “The Bonds and Boundaries of Antislavery,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 4 (March 2014), 85–105; Stacey Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Beth A. Salerno, Sister Societies: Women’s Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2008). See, for example, Manisha Sinha, “Coming of Age: The Historiography of Black Abolitionism,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York: The New Press, 2006); Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); David Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Waldo Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); John Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Nell Irvin Painter, A Life, a Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. Harper, 1825–1911 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994); Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). For an overview of this literature see Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Women’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” The Journal of American History 75 (June 1988), 9–39. Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart, eds., Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Boylan, Origins of Women’s Activism; Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Lori Ginzburg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Women’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Ellen Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869, new edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). For a recent study on early national Americans as “joiners” see Johann Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

73

5 BORDE RLANDS A N D C ULTURAL S UR V I V A L Native Americans in the Early National Era David A. Nichols Twenty years ago, when historians wrote of Native Americans in the early United States, they told a tragic but deterministic story of winners and losers. The War for American Independence spread devastation through Indian country, scorching towns, uprooting families, and splitting even distant Indian nations into factions. Almost immediately after that war ended, the new American republic embarked on a course of continental expansion and Indian expulsion. White Americans conquered two Indian confederacies in the Old Northwest, took southeastern Indians’ lands by bribery and force, purchased the vast province of Louisiana from a distracted Napoleon Bonaparte, invaded Florida, deported over 90,000 Indians from the eastern United States to western reservations, winnowed (inadvertently) the Plains and Pacific Northwest Indians with epidemic disease, colonized Texas, and seized the Southwest in the Mexican War. Nineteenth-century American officials and historians would characterize this as a peaceful process of expansion into uninhabited lands, whereby a divinely-favored republic pursued its destiny. Late twentieth-century scholars took a less favorable view of white Americans’ intentions, but they still portrayed the United States’ expansion as inevitable, and Indians’ resistance as doomed.1 Since the early 1990s, historians have begun replacing this narrative of inevitable decline with a more contingent and complicated account. The past quarter-century of scholarship has increasingly emphasized the ability of Native Americans to resist European and American expansion, sometimes for decades on end. Historians, most now armed with the methodology of ethnohistory – an interdisciplinary approach to indigenous history that employs anthropological insights, linguistic evidence, and historical documents – have also begun to look more closely at Indians’ cultural adaptability. Scholars ask what alterations Indians made in their lifeways to address changing political and environmental circumstances, and how they continued to maintain ties to their past. In the United States, the new American “empire of liberty,” Native Americans faced a dedicated and dangerous adversary, but Indians themselves remained tough, intellectually agile, and, in many parts of the continent, more politically powerful than the would-be masters of America.2 *** Since the great majority of Native Americans, prior to the twentieth century, could not read or write, they appeared in the documentary record only through literate European intermediaries. The Indians who left the biggest paper trails tended to live closest to white settlements and outposts, in the shifting zone of contact that contemporary whites 74

N AT I V E A MER I CA N S I N T HE E A R LY NAT I O NA L E R A

called “the frontier.” For most of the century following Frederick Jackson Turner’s introduction of the frontier as a fruitful topic of scholarly inquiry, historians treated it as a region where whites won and Indians lost. The former created new and dynamic societies, the latter withered, retreated, or fought futilely against the Euro-American “advance.” As late as 1981, Robert Berkhofer, Jr., in his essay on “The North American Frontier as Process and Context,” argued that contact between Native Americans and whites always unfolded the same way: indirect contacts (stories, diseases) preceded the arrival of explorers and traders, who in turn prepared the way for missionaries, soldiers, and land agents, who then subjugated and dispossessed peoples. Berkhofer, who understood that frontiers were Indian homelands rather than empty wildernesses, also understood white Americans’ imperialist motives and the human cost of American expansion – but he focused on how inevitably Indians paid that cost and whites collected it.3 Frontiers, however, did not always turn into violent zones of interethnic predation. Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson made this point in their introduction to the anthology in which Berkhofer’s essay appeared, observing that frontiers could become relatively stable borderlands of intercultural contact. Ten years later, Richard White expanded upon this observation in his powerful and influential study of Indian-white relations in the Great Lakes region, The Middle Ground. In regions like the Lakes country (or pays d’en haut), White argued, Indians and Europeans could develop a rough and persistent balance of power with one another. Native peoples might find themselves weakened by disease and warfare, but Europeans found their own strength attenuated by distance, imperial distractions, and a demographic balance that often favored Indians over whites. Both groups also wanted resources from one another – goods, military services, land – but since neither could conquer the other by force, Europeans and Indians had to develop more cooperative strategies. The diplomatic protocols, trading rules, and “creative misunderstandings” regarding political power that the uneasy neighbors evolved allowed these two very different groups to coexist; they constituted White’s conceptual “middle ground.” Behind these rules, though, lay distrust and barely-contained violence, which broke through the surface when new European regimes came to power: when British soldiers replaced French magistrates in the 1760s, and when American villagers replaced the British in the 1770s and 1780s. The social equilibrium of the pays d’en haut, White argued, did not long survive the second of these transitions. The new American nation-state that arose in the 1790s created a monocultural social order in which only one polity (the United States) would make the rules. White’s concept, however, proved irresistible to Native Americanists working in the earlynational era, who located “middle grounds” in other regions and contexts, analyzed how much power Indians enjoyed there, and asked why these zones of encounter and cooperation eventually came apart.4 White’s book generated its first major response in 1997, when Eric Hinderaker published Elusive Empires, a study of the Ohio Valley during the same era covered by The Middle Ground. Hinderaker argued that Indians’ and whites’ experiences as neighbors depended very substantially on whites’ imperial motives. The French, Hinderaker observed, didn’t just lack power compared to their successors; their imperial goal, to extract furs and food from the region, differed from that of Anglo-Americans. New France’s British conquerors wanted to turn Indians’ homelands into saleable real estate, but 75

DAV I D A . N I C H O L S

they could conceive of Indians having a place (if an unequal one) in a multiracial empire. Americans could not; they associated freedom with small landholdings, and considered Native American lifeways, particularly the communal ownership of land, unacceptably retrograde. The extension of their “empire of liberty” into the Ohio Valley presaged the end of an Indian presence there.5 A more geographically extensive, but equally gloomy view of Indian-white frontier relations appeared in Andrew Cayton and Fredrika Teute’s Contact Points, a collection of essays generated by a 1994 conference. The anthology borrowed Lamar and Thompson’s description of frontiers as “contact zones,” but its essays on the revolutionary and earlynational period described those eras’ borderlands as zones of violent dispossession. In their respective contributions, Stephen Aron contrasted the incompatible approaches Shawnees and white Kentuckians took toward land and its animal inhabitants, Lucy Murphy observed how easily a mining and trading frontier could collapse in fear and violence, John Faragher described how American officials employed “uncontrollable” white settlers to seize Indian land, and Andrew Cayton observed how the American national government used the rites of the treaty ground to consolidate their military conquest of the Old Northwest.6 One of the contributors to Contact Points, Stephen Aron, soon joined with Jeremy Adelman in asking what made a frontier a stable contact zone, rather than a domain of conquest and dispossession. In their 1999 essay “From Borderlands to Borders,” these two scholars argued that one could best describe the eighteenth-century Ohio-Great Lakes region with the terminology developed by Herbert Bolton: as a “borderland.” The fundamental characteristic of such regions, which in Aron and Adelman’s study included Spanish Missouri and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Texas, was the absence of a single bureaucratic state able to establish a monopoly of political power. Often, several nation-states competed for control of these regions, a competition that allowed Native peoples to seek allies and resources from the competitors, “playing them off” against one another. Borderlands turned into “bordered lands” as one imperial power, the United States, persuaded other nation-states to withdraw from a particular zone and established a monopoly of sovereignty and a preponderance of military power.7 Whether studying a “middle ground,” “borderland,” or “contact zone,” scholars in the 1990s agreed that the rise of the United States proved very bad news for Native Americans, who experienced racial hatred, increasing violence, loss of land, and loss of power. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, several scholars modified or challenged this view of deteriorating Indian power. Alan Taylor observed that even in Aron and Adelman’s “bordered lands,” indigenous peoples retained agency and maneuverability. After the American Revolution, Britain and the United States expended much effort turning the country around Lake Ontario into a “divided ground,” using international treaties, Indian land sales, and domestic laws to establish their authority. Yet in the face of this consolidation of power, the Iroquois still fought for their autonomy. By proposing a security barrier of white leaseholders, creating a new homeland in Upper Canada, and negotiating with the U.S. government or (in the Canadian Iroquois’ case) with the French Republic, the Oneidas, Mohawks and Senecas sought to “manage, rather than entirely to block, the process of [white] settlement.” In the end, New York and the United States had to use products of the old “middle ground,” gifts of food and 76

N AT I V E A MER I CA N S I N T HE E A R LY NAT I O NA L E R A

aid and bicultural mediators like French trader Peter Panet, to cozen or maneuver the Six Nations into surrendering their land.8 The Iroquois had suffered devastating losses during the War for American Independence, in which they lost forty towns to General John Sullivan’s 1779 invasion. Where Native peoples did not directly experience the destructive force of imperial warfare, they could preserve their autonomy far longer than did the Iroquois. Kathleen DuVal’s The Native Ground argued that in borderlands more removed from the zone of white settlement, Indians didn’t need to accommodate whites’ demands. These “borderlands” were actually regions where Native Americans called the shots. In the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Arkansas Valley, the Osages and Quapaws and eastern emigrant groups (like the Chickasaws) obliged white officials to follow their diplomatic and commercial rules, and held the balance of power into the 1800s. When the United States wanted to expand its influence into Arkansas, it had to do so through Native actors, like the Cherokee emigrants whom American officials supported in their war against the Osages. Ned Blackhawk’s concurrently-published monograph Violence over the Land, studying the Great Basin region from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, agreed with White, Faragher, Murphy, and DuVal that borderlands could become violent. However, Native peoples could turn this to their advantage. The Utes, one of Blackhawk’s focal nations, made violence a mode of production, exchanging Shoshone and Paiute war captives for Spanish trade goods. Nor did a violent borderland always remain thus: in the nineteenth century the Shoshones peacefully incorporated Anglo-American fur traders into their economic network, and the Utes accommodated rather than fought the first American soldiers to arrive in Colorado. Only with the arrival of Mormon settlers did the Great Basin Indians face a group whom they could not accommodate or intimidate.9 Pekka Hämäläinen, in his magisterial Comanche Empire, went further than DuVal and Blackhawk, arguing that powerful Native American groups could not only partner with European empires or oblige local whites to accommodate them, but could in some cases turn Euro-American provinces into their own colonies. The Comanches, a populous nation of horse-and-bison nomads, dominated the south-central part of the continent until the 1850s, in part by extracting tribute from the Spanish and Mexican provinces of New Mexico and Texas, in part by intensive raiding into northern Mexico, in part by building a trade network that extended into the central Great Plains. (Comancheria also projected considerable “soft power”: other Indian nations and whites voluntarily moved into the region and adopted the Comanches’ language and style of dress.) Comanche power did not decline until environmental stress and disease weakened the nation in the 1840s and 1850s.10 Discussing the same region, Brian DeLay observed that the Comanches, Kiowas, and Utes not only exercised considerable power in the southwestern “borderland,” but also could exert a profound influence on relations between the Euro-American empires that bordered them. After making peace with the Plains Indian nations on their eastern flank, the southern Plains and Great Basin nations began in the 1840s an intensifying series of raids into Mexico, some of which came within 150 miles of Mexico City. These raids, which DeLay called the “War of a Thousand Deserts,” yielded a rich haul of livestock and captives. They also weakened the Mexican nation-state, destroying its border settlements, diverting its army, and undermining its government’s legitimacy. This weakness 77

DAV I D A . N I C H O L S

proved invaluable to the neighboring United States in the war of 1846–48: Mexico put up a valiant fight against the skillfully-led and better-equipped American army, but in the end the Republic could not win a two-front war against both norteamericanos and Comanches.11 In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner conceived of the American frontier as the cutting edge of white American civilization. In 1981 Robert Berkhofer, reflecting a broader scholarly consensus, described frontiers as regions where, over and over again, agents of American expansion defeated Native American resistance. By 2008, however, thanks to White and DuVal and Hämäläinen and their peers, the historical profession had inverted its original perception of frontiers and borderlands: they were now places where Indians called the shots, where Native empires arose, and from which Indians could subordinate or even break neighboring Euro-American republics. *** Another preconception historians have increasingly sought to upend concerns the role of cultural change and the continuity of present and past in nineteenth-century Native American life. From the 1960s through the mid-1980s, scholars portrayed Indians’ adoption of European customs and lifeways as divisive and destructive. European religion produced internal political conflict, trade led to dependency and alcoholism, and adoption of whites’ customs made Native leaders more susceptible to foreign control. Mid-century historian Arrell Gibson presented an extreme version of this viewpoint in The Chickasaws, which characterized cultural change as the snake in that nation’s garden. Chickasaw men and women became “enraptured by insidious European ways and things,” which “debauch[ed] and displace[d]” their old lives, “corrupt[ed]” and corroded their honorable institutions, and set them on the path to subjugation.12 Gibson’s view of cultural change strongly resembled that of Tenskwatawa, Neolin, and other Native American prophets of the early-modern era, who viewed all things European as spiritual poisons and urged their kinsmen to return to the old ways. However, as Gregory Dowd argued in his pathbreaking book A Spirited Resistance, these “nativist” holy men had much in common with the Indian “accommodationists” (Dowd’s term) who embraced the whites’ lifeways. Both factions recognized that their nations had grown weak and needed to revive their spiritual and political power. Both urged their kinsmen to embrace change, which, as Patricia Limerick observed, had been the one actual constant in Native American life. And both developed innovative programs of renewal based in part on colonial examples. Accommodationists favored the adoption of European material culture, commercial farming, and, in the Southeast, chattel slavery. Nativists proposed a general purge of non-Indian influences from Native American life, and preached the common origin and interests of Indians, a separate race with united interests. Dowd’s sympathy lay with the nativists, insofar as their “struggle for unity” comprised his book’s main narrative, but he acknowledged that they were no more “traditionalist” than their accommodationist adversaries. Their belief in a single creator god, call for pan-tribal unity, and rejection of established institutions like polygyny or medicine bundles demonstrated the nativists’ innovative, rather than conservative, nature, their desire to make radical changes to the present by returning to an imagined past.13 78

N AT I V E A MER I CA N S I N T HE E A R LY NAT I O NA L E R A

In the aftermath of the American Revolution the nativist movement received its most effective leaders from, and gathered its strongest following within, the Shawnee and Creek nations, respectively. The Shawnees birthed the influential war captain Blue Jacket and the eminent nativists Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, while the Creeks’ Red Stick movement engendered a regional civil war and a bloody American invasion of the Deep South in 1813–14. Not coincidentally, these two Indian nations and their internal struggles have attracted much attention from scholars, particularly after Dowd underscored the broader significance of their nativist insurgencies. John Sugden, in his biography of Blue Jacket, observed that one can easily overstate the Shawnees’ nativist-accommodationist divide: some of that nation’s leaders emulated the nativists by organizing armed opposition to American expansion, while at the same time adopting Anglo-American habits and properties, like the well-appointed house and slaves Blue Jacket owned. More recently, Adam Jortner argued that nativist leaders had much in common with white Americans: the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa, by his account, pursued a political goal similar to the Americans, namely the creation of a separate Indian nation-state with an autonomous economy. “Nativists” didn’t always reject Euro-American institutions, and “accommodationists” weren’t always so accommodating toward whites.14 Other Shawnee histories have focused on that nation’s ability simultaneously to retain its established customs and beliefs while appearing to bend to the winds of change. Colin Calloway, who in his 1995 book on Indians in the Revolution had emphasized the devastating legacy of that event, focused in a later work on the Shawnees’ physical and cultural survival. The former Calloway attributed to that nation’s willingness to migrate, to become what one eighteenth-century British official called “the greatest travelers in America,” settling and re-settling from Georgia to the Ohio Valley to northern Mexico. The latter he ascribed to the Shawnees’ determination to retain old religious customs while selectively adopting elements of white American culture, such as livestock-raising. Meanwhile, Stephen Warren found a strong link between the Shawnees’ conservation of older lifeways and their decentralized political structure. Shawnee traditionalists could preserve older customs, like commercial hunting or the seasonal Bread Dances, in the autonomous towns they dominated, and could move those communities if white interlopers or reformminded chiefs threatened them. Even after the U.S. government tried to consolidate the Shawnees in eastern Kansas, and acculturated leaders tried to create a unified tribal government, the nation remained split into separate polities, as it remains today.15 The Shawnees enjoyed a longstanding connection to the Creek confederacy of present-day Alabama and Georgia. A Shawnee community resided in Creek country for more than a century, and from the 1790s to the 1810s Creek and Shawnee warriors fought alongside each other against American settlers. Despite their numbers and power, the Creeks drew comparatively little attention from twentieth-century historians, overshadowed as they were in the historical record by their more literate and bureaucratic Cherokee neighbors. This neglect ended in the 1990s, thanks in large part to the influence of historians Michael Green and Kathryn Braund, and several scholars probed the extent of socio-cultural change in the nineteenth-century Creek nation. Claudio Saunt identified the introduction of a market economy into Creek country as the main driver of change, noting how the deerskin trade and commercial agriculture concentrated property and power in the hands of a mestizo (biracial) elite. The Red Stick movement arose 79

DAV I D A . N I C H O L S

in response to this disruption of intra-ethnic solidarity, but as Joel Martin observed in Sacred Revolt, the Red Sticks used a methodology of revival just as disruptive as any European technology or institution, a set of dances and rites and pilgrimages that acted as a mass “ceremony of collective initiation.” As among the Shawnees, both the Creeks’ accommodationists and their nativists, in Saunt and Martin’s telling, sought revolutionary change.16 Other scholars, notably anthropologist Robbie Ethridge, drew attention instead to the Creeks’ ability to manage and absorb revolutionary change. In Creek Country, a “thick description” of Creek social geography based on the writings of agent Benjamin Hawkins (1798), Ethridge attributed the confederacy’s embrace of diversity to its multiplicity of clans and towns. The Creeks absorbed people from different ethnic groups by accepting them as separate but confederated communities. She also argued that a market economy generally strengthened ties between different families and groups, insofar as Creek men and women adapted the market to their “frontier-exchange economy,” trading clothing and food and other subsistence goods rather than accumulating wealth or debt. Andrew Frank seconded Ethridge’s overall assessment in his study of Anglophone whites who settled in the Creek nation. Frank observed that Creeks encouraged long-term white male residents to marry Creek women, and that they considered the children of these marriages fully Indian, since the Creeks practiced matrilineal descent. Biracial Creeks then served as diplomatic and cultural intermediaries, helping introduce their full-blooded kinsmen to European lifeways or negotiate with the American government.17 The Creeks and Shawnees represented only two of the historic Native American groups whom scholars have credited with the ability to manage change, peacefully absorb new people and ideas, and retain at the same time their older culture. Historians have often considered the Cherokees, who in the 1820s adopted their own written language and constitutional government, exemplars of cultural revolution. In 1998, however, Theda Perdue argued that at least half of the Cherokee population – the female half – remained culturally conservative. Prior to the American Revolution, she noted, Cherokee men and women led separate economic lives (hunting and farming, respectively), determined by their gendered spiritual power. Separation did not imply inequality for women, however. The Cherokees’ matrilineality gave women authority over land use, clan vengeance, and the disposition of war captives. The Cherokees’ adoption of Euro-American “civilization” in the early nineteenth century theoretically mandated the abolition of clan vengeance, the adoption of patrilineal rules of descent, and the movement of men into farming, all changes that would curtail women’s power. In practice, however, the majority of Cherokees resisted so dramatic a change in gender roles. Women continued to practice horticulture, and men “farmed” by purchasing slaves to work the fields for them; meanwhile, most Cherokees continued to look to women, rather than the more patriarchal National Council, for advice on land use and blood vengeance. To borrow the terminology of Noam Chomsky, gender constituted a “deep structure” of culture that Cherokees and other Indians were slow to change, even as they adopted some of the technological “vocabulary” of Euro-Americans.18 The persistence of traditional lifeways, and the management of change, played an increasingly important role in scholarship about other Native American nations. Elsewhere in the Southeast, James Carson described how the Choctaw incorporated 80

N AT I V E A MER I CA N S I N T HE E A R LY NAT I O NA L E R A

elements of Euro-American culture (like cattle and cotton cultivation) through the use of language, another cultural deep structure, making new plants, animals, and practices familiar by assigning them old and recognizable Choctaw names. Christina Snyder, in a brilliant synthetic overview of slavery in the Southeast from the Mississippian era (ca. 900–1500 CE) to Removal, acknowledged that southeastern Indians’ adoption of African-American slavery did represent a significant change from their previous enslavement of war captives, insofar as slaves now became a racially distinct caste. (In a study of Choctaw and Chickasaw slavery published three years later, Barbara Krauthamer observed that acculturated Indian masters also now used slaves as capital goods, freely exchanging them for land, livestock, and other means of production.) Among the Seminoles of Florida, however, African-American slaves lived as tributaries in separate villages under the protection of war captains, whose patron–client relationship, according to Snyder, resembled old Mississippian “social and political” hierarchies.19 Among the oft-beleaguered Indians of the Northeast, meanwhile, Daniel Mandell, Karim Tiro, and Cary Miller found an equally energetic struggle to hold onto the past. Mandell, studying the remnant Algonquians of southern New England, found that in the nineteenth century they maintained their separate identity by hanging onto reservations where they could periodically gather, and living in communities where they could insulate themselves from the capitalist marketplace. Tiro, in his book on the Oneida nation of Iroquois, observed that well after Americans assumed they had vanished into the white mainstream, the People of the Standing Stone retained their traditional gender roles (similar to the Cherokees’), maintained their belief in witchcraft and healers, and continued to make a living through hunting and basket making. And Miller argued that the Ojibwas of the northern Lakes preserved an unbroken link to their past through their political institutions, through the chiefs (or ogimaag) who represented and guided the Ojibwas’ communities, and pre-Columbian institutions like the midiwiwin (medicine society) that valorized and legitimized spiritual leaders.20 This assiduously maintained continuity with the past concurrently became an interest of ethnohistorians studying western Indian nations, as for instance Ned Blackhawk. Another specialist on the Southwest, James Brooks, devoted his magisterial book Captives and Cousins to the persistence of one particular Native American institution in New Mexico and its borderlands: slavery. Like the southeastern Indians examined by Snyder, the pre-Columbian Utes, Navajos, Comanches, and other southwestern Indians enslaved captives for labor or to serve as symbols of male military prowess. During the colonial era, they adapted slavery to the demands of the European market and interethnic diplomacy, selling captives to the Spanish for ransom (or as servants) and employing them as intermediaries with their original Indian or European kinfolk. This new, multivalent system of slavery endured not only through the colonial era, but deep into the nineteenth century, well after first Mexico and then the United States took over New Mexico. The Southwest remained a region that Euro-Americans could disrupt but not easily change without the active cooperation of Native peoples. Even in western regions where Europeans brought devastating and immediate change, like eighteenth-century California, Indians continued to exercise historical agency and choice. Steven Hackel, in his study of California’s missions, did not downplay the crises that province’s Native peoples endured: an ecological shock to their food supply, and epidemic diseases that scythed down 81

DAV I D A . N I C H O L S

thousands of Indians who joined the missions. Yet despite these wrenching changes and the severe discipline of the missions, which one European visitor compared to West Indian plantations, Indian converts retained some power, as secular Spanish officials appointed Native American men as alcaldes (mayors) and counselors and organized them into local militias. They also preserved some of their old cultural forms, like prayer poles and marital gift exchanges, and blended them with the new religious regime.21 Elizabeth Fenn, however, counsels caution when we assume Indians could adapt to all changes, or accumulate and hold power in western or interior regions. In the eighteenth century the Mandans, the subject people of Fenn’s recent Encounters at the Heart of the World, enjoyed a prosperous subsistence and maintained a trading network that extended from New Mexico to Canada. In the nineteenth century, however, their fortunes declined as American fur traders bypassed them, replacing the Mandans’ north– south commercial axis with an east–west one connecting Saint Louis with the Rockies. Those same traders also brought environmental stresses that weakened and nearly destroyed the once-prosperous nation: rats which ate the Mandans’ food reserves, and an 1837–38 smallpox outbreak that devastated an already-stressed people. Fenn underscores a point that Richard White had made thirty years previously: the threats that Indians faced came not merely from white soldiers and settlers, but also from changes in trade patterns and environmental catastrophes. Most Native Americans lived on a knife’s edge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That many balanced there ably should not make us forget how easily uncontrollable circumstances could push others into the abyss.22 *** One’s perspective on the history of Native North Americans depends, it seems, on the structure of the basic research question one asks. Traditionally, historians have asked “What did whites do to Indians?” The resulting scholarship has revealed much about whites’ policies and attitudes, and about Native Americans’ struggles to keep their land and sovereignty, but ultimately its foundational question demands a moral judgment, and scholars have not rendered a merciful one. White Americans let greed and fear get the better of them. Native Americans suffered and died. The moral assessment determines the gloomy end.23 Over the past quarter-century, scholars have more frequently asked the question “What did Indians do?” The answers their research has yielded tell a richer, more complex story of survival and (to borrow Gerald Vizenor’s term) “survivance,” even of triumph. Through force and negotiation, Indians governed the territory of their homelands and set the terms of interaction with Euro-Americans. They enriched themselves through old means (trading and raiding) and new, and met their white neighbors as allies or even patrons, not inferiors. Most altered their lifeways in response to environmental changes and new economic opportunities, but none completely abandoned the deeper structures of their culture, the terminologies and ceremonies and social expectations that made them unique. None simply became the passive recipients of a foreign power’s actions, tragic victims of a more important nation’s story. They were instead the central characters of their own distinct narratives, and of a continental story that stresses interaction, continuity, and persistence.24 82

N AT I V E A MER I CA N S I N T HE E A R LY NAT I O NA L E R A

Notes 1 Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (East Lansing, 1967); Colin Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge, 1995); Mary E. Young, “Let’s Hear It for the Losers,” Reviews in American History 24 (Dec. 1996): 579–584; Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion (New York, 2008). 2 On ethnohistory, see Patricia Galloway, Practicing Ethnohistory: Mining Archives, Hearing Testimony, Constructing Narrative (Lincoln, 2006). Space considerations preclude my discussing in this essay the interrelated issues of federal Indian policy and white attitudes toward Native Americans, but I refer readers interested in these subjects to the following: Andrew Cayton, “‘Separate Interests and the Nation State’: The Washington Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West,” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992): 39–67; and Andrew Cayton, “Radicals in the ‘Western World’: The Federalist Conquest of Trans-Appalachian North America,” in The Federalists Reconsidered, ed. Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara Oberg (Charlottesville, 1998), 77–96, both covering the Federalists’ preferential investment of national power in the Northwest and Ohio Valley; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA, 1999), on the tension between Enlightenment philosophy and land hunger in American policy-making; Daniel Richter, “‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’: Hunters, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Winter 1999): 601–629, on the ironic point that federal “civilization” policy actually encouraged Indians to return to a subsistence-oriented, rather than a commercial, economy; Andrew Isenberg, “The Market Revolution in the Borderlands: George Champlin Sibley in Missouri and New Mexico, 1808–1826,” Journal of the Early Republic, 21 (Fall 2001): 445–465, on the United States’ Indian factory system and its attempted commercial alliance with Trans-Mississippi Indian nations; Tim Garrison, The Legal Ideology of Removal: The Southern Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations (Athens, GA, 2002), on the role that statelevel courts played in building a legal justification for Indian Removal; Thomas Ingersoll, To Intermix with Our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from the Earliest Times to the Indian Removals (Albuquerque, 2005), on the relationship between Removal and white Americans’ aversion to Indian-white intermarriage; Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York, 2007), on essayists’ and political leaders’ creation of an “anti-Indian sublime” that intensified interracial hatred; Izumi Ishii, Bad Fruits of the Civilized Tree: Alcohol and the Sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation (Lincoln, 2008), on the Cherokees’ use of federal liquor prohibitions and “civilization” policy to bolster their own legal sovereignty; Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA, 2009), on settlers’ and indigenous peoples’ struggle to assert legal jurisdiction over frontier regions; Leonard Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (Charlottesville, 2009), on Americans’ effort to isolate Indians from the “Westphalian system” of interstate relations; and Robert Owens, Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind (Norman, 2015), on the fears of pan-Indian “conspiracies” that led white officials to isolate and coerce the Trans-Appalachian Indian nations. 3 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1953), 1–38; Ray Allen Billington, America’s Frontier Heritage (New York, 1966); Robert Berkhofer, Jr., “The North American Frontier as Process and Context,” in The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared, ed. Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson (New Haven, 1981), 43–75. 4 Lamar and Thompson, “Comparative Frontier History,” in Lamar and Thompson, The Frontier in History, 3–13; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 1991), quote p. x. See also the forum on this book that appeared in The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 63 (Jan. 2006): 3–96. Pays d’en haut is French for “upper country.” The term “borderlands” originated with Herbert Bolton, who in the early twentieth century characterized Spanish-Indian relations in the Southwest as accommodative,

83

DAV I D A . N I C H O L S

5

6

7

8

9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17

focused on trade and alliance rather than conflict. See John Francis Bannon, ed., Bolton and the Spanish Borderlands (Norman, 1964). Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge, 1997). Regarding the place of Native North Americans in the British empire see Edward Countryman, “Indians, the Colonial Order, and the Social Significance of the Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 53 (April 1996): 342–362. Aron, “Pigs and Hunters: ‘Rights in the Woods’ on the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” Murphy, “To Live among Us: Accommodation, Gender, and Conflict in the Western Great Lakes Region, 1760–1832,” Faragher, “‘More Motley Than Mackinaw’: From Ethnic Mixing to Ethnic Cleansing on the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783–1833,” Cayton, “‘Noble Actors’ upon the ‘Theatre of Honour’: Power and Civility in the Treaty of Greenville,” all in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830, ed. Andrew Cayton and Fredrika Teute (Chapel Hill, 1998), 175–204, 270–303, 304–326, and 235–269, respectively. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (June 1999): 814–841. Cf. Pekka Hämäläinen and John Wunder, “Of Lethal Places and Lethal Essays,” American Historical Review (Oct. 1999): 1229–1234. Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 189–236; Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York, 2006), quote 404. On the British relationship with the Upper Canadian (Grand River) Iroquois see also Timothy Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 1783–1815 (Lincoln, 2008), 123–195. Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, 2006); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA, 2006). For the Sullivan expedition, see Joseph Fischer, A Well-Executed Failure: The Sullivan Campaign against the Iroquois, July–September 1779 (Columbia, SC, 1997). Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, 2008). DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.–Mexican War (New Haven, 2008). Robert Berkhofer, Jr., Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787–1862 (Lexington, 1965); Arrell Gibson, The Chickasaws (Norman, 1971), quotes 30, 37, 106; Richard White, Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, 1983); J. Leitch Wright, Jr., Creeks and Seminoles: The Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People (Lincoln, 1986). Patricia Nelson Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987), 189; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, 1992). John Sugden, Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees (Lincoln, 1999); Adam Jortner, The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier (Oxford, 2012). Colin Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (New York, 2007), quote 166; Stephen Warren, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795–1870 (Urbana, 2005). Jerry Clark, The Shawnee (Lexington, 1993), 14–15, 20–21; Michael Green, The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (Lincoln, 1982); Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815 (Lincoln, 1993); Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians (Cambridge, 1999); Claudio Saunt, “Taking Account of Property: Stratification among the Creek Indians in the Early Nineteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 57 (Oct. 2000): 733–760; Joel Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (Boston, 1991), quote 175. Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill, 2003); Andrew Frank, Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier (Lincoln,

84

N AT I V E A MER I CA N S I N T HE E A R LY NAT I O NA L E R A

18

19

20

21

22 23 24

2005); and see also Theda Perdue, “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens, GA, 2003). On Hawkins see Florette Henri, The Southern Indians and Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1816 (Norman, 1986). The term “frontier-exchange economy” comes from Daniel Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy (Chapel Hill, 1992). John Ellisor observes that the Creeks maintained their polyethnic society, and the network of intermarried whites and sympathetic neighbors who supported it, until the Second Creek War of 1834–36. John Ellisor, The Second Creek War: Interethnic Conflict and Collusion on a Collapsing Frontier (Lincoln, 2010). Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln, 1998). Charles Joyner uses a similar model of acculturation – cultural “vocabulary” added to, without replacing, “deep structures” – in Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, 1984). On the comparative fluidity of gender roles in Ojibwa society, see Brenda J. Child, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (New York, 2012). James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Choctaws from Prehistory through Removal (Lincoln, 1999); Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2010), quote 233; Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill, 2013). On the choices eastern Indian leaders made regarding adaptation and cultural survival, see also Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln, 2002). Daniel Mandell, Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880 (Baltimore, 2008); Karim Tiro, People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Nation from the Revolution through the Era of Removal (Amherst, 2011); Cary Miller, Ogimaag: Anishinaabeg Leadership, 1760– 1845 (Lincoln, 2010). James Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community on the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002); Steven Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: IndianSpanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill, 2005); Jean-François de la Pérouse, Life in a California Mission: Monterey in 1786 (Berkeley, 1989). Sociologist Thomas Hall described the long-term resistance of the Southwest’s indigenous peoples to foreign conquest, and the ability of local actors to determine their own political allegiances, in Social Change in the Southwest, 1350–1880 (Lawrence, 1989). Elizabeth Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People (New York, 2014); White, Roots of Dependency, esp. 147–211. Theda Perdue and Michael Green, North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2010), xv. Gerald Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln, 2009). On the integration of borderlands and Native American history into the new field of “continental history,” see Alan Taylor, “Squaring the Circle: The Reach of Colonial America,” in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia, 2011), 3–23.

85

Part II ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

6 INTERNATION A L T R A V EL , INTE LLEC TU A L L I F E, AND GLOBAL I N F L UEN C ES ON THE UNIT ED S T A T ES Daniel Kilbride

Until very recently, the antebellum period would have seemed to be a singularly unpromising one to look for global influences upon American culture. Scholarship and, to a lesser extent, textbooks have left behind the old canard that the United States “turned inward” after the War of 1812 in order to focus on internal economic, political, and cultural development. Yet textbooks, in particular, have been slow to change their content to reflect a burgeoning new literature on American overseas engagement in this formative period. Chapters on the antebellum era still focus on economic developments like the transportation or market “revolutions,” on the evolution of a distinct political culture, and debates over chattel slavery.1 And, once in a while, the language of inwardness pops up explicitly, sometimes in the most surprising places.2 Nevertheless, recent attention to the embeddedness of the United States in all eras of its history within global commercial, cultural, and population streams has changed how historians approach the antebellum period for good, and for the better.3 To be sure, antebellum Americans gave historians good reason to think that the country really had become self-absorbed in the decades after 1815. After over a quarter-century of involvement in European wars, the Union embarked on a long period of peace with the Old World (Mexicans and Native Americans would not be so fortunate). In the wake of the contentious debates of the Federalist-Jeffersonian era over American policy vis-à-vis the French Revolution, the United States eschewed direct involvement in European troubles. As they saw it, those struggles were likely to stem from the usual causes – self-aggrandizing dynasties or land-hungry states – in which the country had not the least interest. But the United States would sit it out even when the stakes were high and worth fighting for. Intervention was sure to foment internal division, and the relatively weak republic was sure to devolve into the pawn of larger and more cynical powers. “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be,” explained Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821. “But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Besides, local and neighborhood affairs proved more than capable of keeping Americans occupied. Territorial expansion, transportation improvements, cultural development, Indian affairs, solving the riddle of slavery within a democratic republic – with that ambitious domestic agenda, why did Americans need to worry about what was going on in the rest of the world?4 89

DA N I EL KI L B R I D E

Moreover, in these years Americans developed an abrasive, chest-thumping brand of patriotism that insisted on the exceptional nature of their national identity. “[W]e, the American people, are the most independent, intelligent, moral and happy people on the face of the earth” went a typical pronouncement in 1845. That swagger stemmed from genuine pride in the nation’s accomplishments, but it also masked a gnawing sense of insecurity vis-à-vis the European world, Great Britain in particular. Newly independent Americans were certain that the republic would soon produce great accomplishments in science, the arts, and philosophy. In The Vision of Columbus, Joel Barlow predicted that the Old World, “Where men and science drew their ancient birth,/Shall soon behold, on this enlighten’d coast,/Their fame transcended and their glory lost.” The republic’s golden age of arts and science was slow to arrive, however, as the nation’s conservative critics were quick to point out. Sydney Smith’s jeer – “Who reads an American book? or goes to an American play?” – was only the best-known of many taunts hurled at the United States from Europe in the early nineteenth century. The fact was that Americans still looked to Europe as the seat of cultural legitimacy and craved its approval. So when travelers like Frances Trollope, Frederic Marryat, and Basil Hall (to name only the most infamous) underscored the differences between Americans’ self-image and the reality they had created, it stung sharply.5 Literate Americans paid close attention to the views of European critics, most of whom were British. Their peculiar blend of patriotism and insecurity – combined with postcolonial anxieties and a powerful strain of Anglophobia – made Americans singularly unable to engage these works with anything approaching coolness.6 To be fair, though, many of these women and men visited the United States with an eye to doing their mite to knock the cocksure young republic off its high horse. American and British writers had traded blows, some couched as fictitious travel narratives, during the “Paper War” of the 1810s, and the sniping continued for several decades more.7 Some Americans were aware that their obsession with British opinion was an unattractive trait. “Why this morbid anxiety about what is thought or said of you in England?” asked Richard Biddle of his compatriots in 1830. That insight did not stop Biddle from writing a 150-page pamphlet devoted entirely to a point-by-point refutation of Hall’s Travels in North America. So self-awareness did not necessarily produce tranquility. Americans’ high expectations for themselves, their hyper-patriotism, and the criticisms of foreign visitors created an intense desire that foreigners validate their self-image. “It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes,” observed Alexis de Tocqueville.8 Americans’ attention to the views of foreign travelers points to the oversized influence of travel to mold public opinion in this period. Visitors to Europe frequently published their letters and diaries upon returning to the United States, and newspapers and journals often featured the letters of local women and men who reported on their overseas adventures. News about foreign lands also came from other genres, such as missionary magazines. These writings were enormously popular with the reading public. The antebellum period witnessed the birth of the celebrity traveler, a figure who made his or her living by publishing and lecturing about their time spent abroad.9 Bayard Taylor, largely unknown today, was a household name in the antebellum period. Most of his nearly sixty published works were travel accounts, beginning with Views a-Foot: or, Europe 90

T R AV EL , I N T EL L EC T UA L L I F E , G L O BA L I NF L U E NC E S

Seen with Knapsack and Staff, in 1846. Predictably, given Americans’ interests, Europe was Taylor’s favorite destination, but he also wrote books about his visits to the Holy Land, China, and Africa, among other places.10 Most of those who published accounts of their travels were little-known even in their own day, however, and most of these texts made little impression.11 Even so, the popularity of European travel underscores Americans’ powerful sense of connection to European civilization in the post-revolutionary decades.12 Not everybody was comfortable with the intensity of that connection and the allure of European travel, which seemed to suggest the barrenness of American culture, a certain lack of confidence in themselves as Americans, in this period. “It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans,” Ralph Waldo Emerson charged.13 Emerson had a point: Americans really did seem to act as if things were more authentic, more legitimate, if they came from Europe. As a New Yorker explained to a traveling friend upon presenting her with a long shopping list in the summer of 1844, “We on this side feel as if everything was so much handsomer, and better, and desirable that comes from Paris.”14 Most Americans connected with Europe vicariously, through the writings of others, but as the nineteenth century progressed, more and more women and men experienced the Old World for themselves. Until the 1830s, probably no more than 2,000 Americans traveled abroad in any given year. That number doubled in the 1830s and increased significantly in the 1850s; the rate of growth in overseas travel outpaced the rate of population growth. Even so, in the 1850s only 0.06 percent of Americans traveled abroad, most of them visiting Europe. Even if the numbers remained small, that 0.06 percent represented a tripling of the percentage of Americans going abroad just thirty years before. And, although travelers remained overwhelmingly white and privileged, women increasingly made the Atlantic passage. From 1800 to 1860, women constituted 10–20 percent of voyagers to Europe. But their share of travelers rose sharply in the late antebellum period, perhaps accounting for 20 percent of passengers during the 1840s. As overseas travelers, women did not achieve parity with men until after 1950. The gradual rise in overseas travel (by far most of it directed to Europe) stemmed from a variety of causes. Passenger fares remained more or less steady, but disposable income among upper-middle-class and leisured Americans made even high fares affordable to that rarified cohort.15 More importantly, long-distance travel became far more regularized, accessible, and comfortable as the century progressed. It is no exaggeration to characterize a trip to Europe before the 1830s as an adventure. George B. Putnam published the first American guidebook in 1838, and British guides had appeared not long before then.16 Until then, travelers had to work everything out for themselves: find a ship, negotiate with a captain for passage and board, endure the raw conditions of the Atlantic passage, deal with customs agents, find lodging and, in short, arrange for all the large and small details of their travels – all on their own (or with the assistance of overworked American chargés d’affaires, if one could be found). It was an epic experience, one on which only the stoutest of hearts would dare to embark. In the 1830s, long-distance travel began to become commodified. Firms established trans-oceanic lines with regular schedules and posted rates.17 Guidebooks, led by the London publishing house of John Murray, became increasingly detailed, posting shipping, carriage and, eventually, railroad schedules, hotel information, the locations and hours of 91

DA N I EL KI L B R I D E

important sites like museums and public buildings, and advice about passports and customs troubles. Travel became less physically taxing as well. Although the golden age of steam would come later in the nineteenth century, the regular ocean services did strive to provide comfortable, if not luxurious, accommodations for their genteel clientele. And the steamships – noisy, smoky, and prone to breakdowns as they were – enjoyed the éclat of modernity and, over time, became something resembling floating palaces. As one international traveler observed, “in a steamship are combined the highest results of modern science, and the last achievements of modern art . . . she is at the same time a ship, a machine, and a hotel.”18 Americans went abroad for a variety of reasons, but nearly all of them, including business travelers, made at least some room for tourism. An overseas journey was likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime event even for those who could afford it. Because this experience was so singular, women and men were very likely to write about it – in letters to friends and family back home, and in private journals, to preserve the moment for revisiting later in life. Besides being a mundane record of paintings appreciated, castles visited, and mountains climbed, these writings also reflected the chief diversion of nineteenth-century travelers: the comparison and contrast of national characters. “The manners, customs, and opinions . . . of nations and individuals, without doubt, claim our first attention,” wrote John Eustace, the author of an Italian travelogue popular with Americans.19 Travelers were interested in comparing national characters not merely because it was a cultural imperative, but because they saw themselves as occupying a liminal position vis-à-vis the Old World – simultaneously apart from and in opposition to its vices but also part of its civilization.20 Nineteenth-century Americans were never able to reconcile this tension between exceptionalism and embeddedness, a failure which goes far to explaining the conflicted quality of early American culture. Until recently, historians have heard voices like John O’Sullivan declaring “We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of avoidance of nearly all their examples. The expansive future is our arena, and for our history,” far more clearly than those belonging to individuals like the Cincinnati lawyer Isaac Appleton Jewett, who wrote “There is much of query among travelling Americans, as to what of Europe might profitably be conveyed across the Atlantic.”21 Jewett’s comment points to the special role of travel in defining the porous boundary between American culture and the world outside. Although very few Americans relative to the population of the United States went to Europe during this period, they enjoyed an influence all out of proportion to their numbers. Travel – and, to a lesser extent, reading and writing about it – allowed privileged Americans to “claim social and professional positions for themselves, to gratify their desires for pleasure and especially for prestige, and to justify their privileges by demonstrating their superior taste and sensitivity,” argues William W. Stowe. Emerson alluded to the quasi-religious nature of European travel when he referred to its “idols,” and he was hardly alone. Via Eve Effingham, James Fenimore Cooper articulated this religious sensibility when she labeled American Grand Tourists “Hajjis”: those who have taken “the pilgrimage to Paris, instead of Mecca; and the pilgrim must be an American instead of a Mohommedan.” Michael O’Brien said of southerners that “The act of traveling acknowledged connection, but also was intended to refine difference, and individuals decided for themselves where the emphasis should lie.” 22 His conclusion stands for other Americans as well. Women and men may have 92

T R AV EL , I N T EL L EC T UA L L I F E , G L O BA L I NF L U E NC E S

decided for themselves at what point on the line between connection and difference they came down, but the choice was never between engagement and disengagement. Given the relative newness of the United States in the world community, Americans had to decide how, not whether, they would be shaped by the world around them.23 Those decisions were conditioned by the peculiar circumstances of the United States’ position in the early nineteenth-century world. Culturally-engaged Americans were part of a nation eager to take its place in the global community of states. That eagerness made them cosmopolitan, open to appreciating and appropriating the riches of other cultures.24 They were also imperial, aggressively and self-righteously expansionist.25 The imperial nature of the United States was more obvious to outside observers than it was to white Americans. As citizens of a republic born of an anti-imperial revolution, they hesitated to label themselves as an empire, unless it was to employ the highly qualified, self-congratulatory, and unintentionally ironic sobriquet “Empire of Liberty.”26 Finally, Americans were also a postcolonial people. Historians have hesitated to apply that label, perhaps because it is conventionally applied to subaltern populations and because Americans have seemed so aggressively imperialist themselves.27 However, there is no single model of postcolonial experience, and there is no reason a postcolonial society cannot transition to become an imperial one. In any case, the postcolonial condition of the United States injected an anxiousness into American society, a need to define its place as a nation among nations and, most importantly, a deeply felt insecurity about how its cultural productivity compared, and was seen to compare, with that of its peers and competitors.28 The imperial, national, and postcolonial orientations of the United States shaped how foreign influences shaped its culture, although they did so unevenly. Imperialism, intertwined with a deep strain of racism, sharply circumscribed cosmopolitanism, as it limited who Americans identified as their peers. Practically, Americans were only open to influence from Europe and cultures derived from it, although even here was a hierarchy bracketed by England at the top and Spain and the east toward the bottom. Vis-à-vis Europe, the cosmopolitan, national, and postcolonial strains of national identity mingled to create patterns of reception and resistance. Postcolonialism, for example, complicated Americans’ reception of British culture, but it had no influence on their orientation toward France, which was problematic for other reasons. The nationalizing impulse created the broadest challenges to foreign influences because of the imperative to fashion a distinct national identity free of the taint of the Old World’s corruptions. Few Americans, even zealots like Noah Webster, were fundamentalists on this question.29 But even if more were, isolating American culture from the outside was a practical impossibility. Foreign influences shaped American culture in innumerable ways; it would be hard to identify an important feature of American life that was not influenced in some way by the outside world. Even political culture, perhaps the feature of American life foreign visitors found most distinctive, was open to global influences. The point is not that voters took foreign relations seriously – although they did – but that United States political culture evolved out of its citizens’ sense of its place in global development. Americans’ ubiquitous praise of the Union, for example, stemmed from their understanding of modern history, often enhanced by travel. One southerner remarked that he drew from his travels in Europe the conviction that “a man ought to travel to know how to love the Union and 93

DA N I EL KI L B R I D E

its institutions; that he must witness the empty parade and abject misery of other nations before he can properly appreciate the happiness of his own.” This was precisely why Andrew Jackson, in his proclamation against nullification, called South Carolinians’ attention to “our neighboring republics, every day suffering some new revolution or contending with some new insurrection.” It could not but remind them, he believed, of “the advantages and honor of the Union.” Likewise, as William Gienapp observed, Americans “nurtured a deep-seated hatred of anything that smacked of aristocracy.” Jeffersonians had needled their Federalist rivals with being real or closeted aristocrats. Antebellum Democrats gleefully carried on this tradition, making it their mission to tar their Whig adversaries with the same brush. Pro-Union and anti-aristocratic rhetorics were staples of antebellum political discourse that grew out of the lessons Americans drew from their engagement with the outside world.30 Although widespread consensus prevailed on the evils of aristocracy and the merits of the Union, Americans more often disagreed on what attention to the outside world was teaching them. They mocked aristocracy, but divided sharply over a closely related matter, the appropriateness of gentility in a democratic republic. Gentility (alternately known as cultivation, refinement, and respectability) embraced a set of behaviors that marked the possessor as someone of elevated taste, personal merit, and social distinction. This code of behavior emerged in early modern European courts. It would seem to have been anti-American by definition. Could the manners and morals of aristocratic Europe be reconciled with those of a democratic republic? Many Americans, for good reason, were skeptical. “Refinement did not grow naturally from [Americans’] own upbringing and culture,” notes Richard L. Bushman. “It came from outside, the rightful property of another people. It often seemed like a contrivance and imposition, and how could it be otherwise when gentility was first devised for courtiers and brought to culmination at Versailles?”31 In fact, some features of refinement were widely reviled as un-American. Elite finishing schools for young women came in for special censure, since their curriculum, heavy on “ornamental” subjects like French language and literature, dancing, and musical instrumentation, was so clearly irrelevant to the lives of all but a tiny fraction of women. At the same time, however, rejecting gentility whole cloth was simply unthinkable. As a middle class – professionals, commercial farmers, merchants, entrepreneurs, and the like – developed in the early nineteenth century, these women and men struggled to adapt their material and moral lives to accommodate their increasingly ample means. Refinement, the code of gentle people, was there for the taking, but the European code had to be reconciled with American conditions. Existing English guides, most notoriously the letters of Philip Dormer, Lord Chesterfield, were, in their unapologetic embrace of elitism and debauchery, clearly inappropriate for American life. As a means of social differentiation, gentility provoked critics among those whom it attempted to leave behind. Working-class women and men especially resented the efforts of newly “respectable” people to stigmatize their ways of life.32 But this was an argument about the boundaries of an American brand of gentility, not an existential one about its legitimacy. The Astor Place Riots of 1849, which pitted the working-class fans of American actor Edwin Forrest against the “codfish aristocracy” supporters of Englishman William Charles Macready, after all centered on interpretations of Shakespeare (Macbeth, in this case), not whether Shakespeare ought to be staged in America 94

T R AV EL , I N T EL L EC T UA L L I F E , G L O BA L I NF L U E NC E S

at all.33 American gentility as it developed in the early nineteenth century was democratic, in the sense that it was open to those who could learn its mysteries and afford its accoutrements, and also respectable, in the sense that it diminished the worldliness of the aristocratic code by adding features like piety, industry, and modesty to the mix of qualities that made a person genteel. The trouble came in drawing the line that separated appropriate from inappropriate expressions of genteel behavior, and it was here that travelers and travel writers had standing that other Americans lacked. As people who had visited Europe, the source of refinement, travelers had credibility on this issue. Also, they had seen their compatriots act in ways unbefitting a republican citizenry. In condemning certain behaviors but not refinement as a whole, travelers helped reconcile republicanism and urbanity. Americans abroad were shocked to see their compatriots competing for tickets to exclusive balls and other affairs, soliciting invitations to aristocratic dinner parties, and even seeking to be presented at court. When the U.S. minister to Paris, Albert Gallatin, asked Virginian William C. Preston to help him sift through the avalanche of applications from Americans seeking entry into a ball in 1815, he could not hide his disgust at their “indecent and unrepublican eagerness to get into an aristocratic party.” Preston concluded that Americans harbored a “rapturous and romantic regard’ for nobility despite their republican airs. On the opposite extreme, Americans also condemned disrespect for royals and aristocrats, an affectation every bit as objectionable as servility. By the antebellum period, Americans no longer looked on aristocratic Europe as the existential threat it had been in Napoleonic times. It was possible, they concluded, to borrow selectively from the code of gentility without compromising their identity as republicans.34 Most Americans knew that they suffered a gentility gap vis-à-vis the Old World, so they were comfortable in deferring to Europeans on this score. Not so with other issues, most especially the advance of liberty throughout the globe. They paid close attention to news about struggles for national determination, republican government, and human rights in Europe and elsewhere. These events shaped American national identity by compelling reflection about America’s role in the world, although the extreme divisiveness caused by the wars of the 1789 French Revolution probably moderated Americans’ enthusiasm for foreign entanglements. Yet, nationalist and republican movements in Europe and the Americas occurred frequently enough to ensure that no consensus on the country’s orientation to revolutionary movements could solidify. Should Americans, as Adams argued, merely exemplify self-government to the world, or should they actively encourage its success? Perhaps no other issue more than this one exposes the hollowness of the dichotomy sometimes drawn between isolation and cosmopolitanism in early American history. Even the most zealous American exceptionalists, the Young Americans of the 1840s and 1850s, insisted on the centrality of the United States in the contemporary world.35 There is a large and diverse literature on Americans’ engagement with revolutionary movements, most especially the Revolutions of 1848, but most of it concludes that attention to these developments reinforced American exceptionalism. Not surprisingly, Americans expected other peoples to follow their revolutionary model, which they assumed was normative. But Americans had, by the 1830s, fashioned a very selective collective memory of the American Revolution. It became very conservative and respectable, short on violence, terror, civil unrest, violations of civil liberties, and other unpleasantness. The 95

DA N I EL KI L B R I D E

difficulties other peoples experienced in achieving independence and establishing selfgovernment spawned a paradoxical suspicion: as Philipp Ziesche writes, “Americans have concluded that other nations are inherently incapable of following the American model and that the perceived failure of foreign revolutions stems from not following that model closely enough.”36 The argument that attention to struggles for freedom and independence across the world buttressed American exceptionalism has been overstated. Consider the common observation that Americans tended to interpret foreign events in their own terms, flattening out local conditions, and establishing a narrow standard of “acceptable” revolutionary ends and means. The point is not that Americans did not do those things, but that they are not narrowly applicable to Americans. As Don Doyle shows in his global history of the American Civil War, foreign observers had very little understanding of the myriad causes of the sectional conflict and the complex issues confronting the Lincoln administration. The most idealistic puzzled over what they saw as the Union’s “failure” to take the first opportunity to end slavery. Few understood the constitutional arguments for and against secession and the limitations on presidential power.37 This confusion stemmed from a number of causes, chief among them the difficulty of understanding a complex foreign situation with deep historical roots. The same conditions confronted Americans observing progressive movements across the globe. These movements influenced American culture in diverse ways. The common pattern was for the public to respond to news of a revolution with widespread enthusiasm that transformed over time to cynicism or disappointment, confirming Americans’ sense of national exceptionalism. That outline, however, disguises a messier reality. The 1848 Revolutions, extensively covered in the popular press, are especially instructive here. The pattern held, especially when the revolution in France, ever the focus of Americans’ attentions, devolved into the bloody “June Days” and into the Second Empire. Yet many Americans, especially those on the ground, cautioned their compatriots to be patient with the progress of European self-government. Progress came in fits and starts, they cautioned; republicanism would, in its own time, take root in Europe. These observers were arguing against an absolutist conception of American exceptionalism. The United States might be distinctive for the time being, but as progress made its way across the globe it would become a republican nation amidst a community of republican nations. Americans drew other lessons. Southern hotheads in the wake of debates about the Wilmot Proviso drew back from glib disunionist talk when they saw what happened to “secessionist” movements like Kossuth’s Hungary. Kossuth’s 1851–52 visit to the United States prompted the most sophisticated debate about American intervention in world affairs since Henry Clay’s appeal for supporting the Greeks in 1824.38 The Revolutions challenged American reformers to examine their complacency toward disenfranchised groups and the limited scope of their tactics. It showed northerners that slavery limited their global influence by making it easy for reactionaries to taunt them as hypocrites. And, not least, it made unionists realize the global stakes of the Civil War. At risk was the fate of equality itself, the “electric cord,” Lincoln said, binding “the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together . . . throughout the world.”39 The 1848 Revolutions were not the only occasion when international pressure forced Americans to reflect on slavery and race in critical ways. As the borders of the 96

T R AV EL , I N T EL L EC T UA L L I F E , G L O BA L I NF L U E NC E S

once-ubiquitous institution of chattel slavery closed around the United States, Americans were forced out of their complacency about its future. In the revolutionary era, the notion that slavery was a necessary evil coexisted with a vague sense that it would, somehow, fade away and vanish in the course of time. Slavery disappeared in the western hemisphere through metropolitan legislation, slave rebellion, and nationalist revolution, but the controversy over the admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1819–20 made it clear that slavery in the United States was an expanding, thriving institution. Western civilization was reaching a consensus on the immorality of African slavery at the same time that it was becoming more entrenched than ever in the U.S. South. Foreign opinion forced slaveholders to defend themselves and their institution in new and creative ways at the same time it influenced internal critics of what was becoming known as the “peculiar institution,” who were deeply engaged in an international antislavery movement. The same visitors who criticized Americans for their chest-thumping nationalism, vulgarity, and lack of high culture also singled out slavery for censure. Many of these criticisms could be dismissed as simple anti-Americanism, but others cut deeply. Like Americans generally, southerners read the novels of Charles Dickens and greeted him warmly during his 1842 tour of the United States. And like their compatriots, they were hurt by the publication of American Notes for General Circulation. Dickens ranked slavery highly among his indictments of American life. He was disgusted both by the economic blight of the slave South and the offensiveness of proslavery ideology. Frances Anne Kemble’s criticisms of slavery also hit southerners hard. She married the Philadelphian, Pierce Butler, without, she later claimed, knowing that he was the owner of a large Georgia plantation. Her unsparing exposé of the contradictions between proslavery platitudes and the realities of planation life could not be dismissed as casually as could the criticisms of more obviously anti-American visitors.40 These accounts, and others like those by Harriet Martineau, threatened southerners’ selfimage as respectable people – women and men in the mainstream of western civilization who happened to be the owners of roughly four million enslaved human beings. They had to be answered. Southerners were as engaged as other Americans in the transatlantic literary marketplace. They became increasingly intolerant toward criticisms of slavery, especially in the South itself, but southerners did not wall themselves off from contemporary intellectual currents to protect themselves from antislavery sentiment.41 Instead, the region’s thinkers responded by repackaging slavery so that it might be seen as of a piece with the progressive spirit of the age. William Holcombe insisted, “African slavery is no retrograde movement, no discord in the harmony of nature, no violation of elemental justice, no infraction of immutable laws, human or divine – but an integral link in the grand progressive evolution of human society as an indissoluble whole.”42 After securing passage of the 1833 law abolishing slavery, most British abolitionists turned their attention to the United States, the world’s largest slaveholding society.43 That attention impelled southerners to defend slavery in terms meaningful to Victorian sensibilities. James Henry Hammond, responding to charges made by the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, acknowledged that the slaveowner was as a moral agent “responsible to the world” for his or her slaves. It was abolitionist agitation that forced slaveholders to control their property through “the power of fear” instead of “their affections and pride”; whenever possible, owners strived 97

DA N I EL KI L B R I D E

to advance the moral and material well-being of their property. Slaveholders were humanitarians, standing “in the broadest light of the knowledge, civilization and improvement of the age.”44 That slavery benefited Africans by rescuing them from barbarism to be raised up in the light of Christianity and western civilization may have been the most widely held plank of the proslavery argument. Some went further, arguing that slavery was part of God’s providential design to redeem Africa. The Dark Continent, having supplied savages to the New World’s plantations, would be civilized and Christianized by their Americanized descendants. International pressure also constrained southerners in how far they could go to advocate for slavery. When, in the 1850s, some radicals began agitating for the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade, they were quickly shouted down by those who understood that such a course would make the South a pariah in the Christian world. Southern-born African missionaries led the charge. South Carolinian J. Leighton Wilson, a Presbyterian, and Georgia-born Baptist Thomas Jefferson Bowen used their travels in Africa to show that the demand for slaves produced untold suffering that gave the lie to the proslavery claim that the trade saved lives by sparing war captives. Others made the case that reopening the slave trade would cross a moral line that would obliterate the South’s moral credibility. As Rev. John Adger insisted, the slavery controversy “has [been] from the first and still is a moral conflict. We lose strength whenever we abandon the ground of justice and truth.” The knowledge that the world was watching acted as a brake on the South’s drive to expand their slave empire by any means available.45 Slavery’s critics had a different relationship to foreign opinion. Historians have only recently begun teasing out the transatlantic networks of antislavery cooperation, but it is clear that American abolitionists were far more open to making positive use of foreign influence than their slaveholding opponents. Both radical and moderate antislavery activists in the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American Colonization Society, respectively, were eager to reach out to their British counterparts for support, resources, and ideas. The popularity and success of abolition in Britain stood in marked contrast to the marginal position of radicals in the United States; the moral support of British friends was especially important to the Garrisonian wing of American antislavery. But activists across the spectrum, whether they sought to end slavery via moral suasion or political action, learned much from Britons about means to reach, measure, and manipulate public opinion, exert pressure on the government, and fight racist caricatures of Africans.46 Black abolitionists owed even more than their white colleagues to the support they received in Europe, since the relative lack of prejudice they encountered there posed such a refreshing contrast to the United States. Both white and black activists shamed their compatriots by reminding them that Europeans had abolished slavery and treated people of color with dignity, in contrast with supposedly liberty-loving Americans. “I went to England, Monarchial England, to get rid of Democratic Slavery, and I must confess that, at the very threshold, I was satisfied that I had gone to the right place,” teased Frederick Douglass with his characteristic brio upon his return to the United States in 1847. Although it must have been extremely satisfying for abolitionists to poke Americans with their hypocrisy, it is likely that, as a tactic to advance the cause, it backfired. Douglass’s language was perfectly pitched to stoke the flames of American Anglophobia. His rhetoric alienated the very people who needed to hear his message that 98

T R AV EL , I N T EL L EC T UA L L I F E , G L O BA L I NF L U E NC E S

racism was a foundational element of American exceptionalism every bit as much as liberty and equality. In fact, despite their cosmopolitan airs – The Liberator’s masthead read “Our Country is the World – Our Countrymen are Mankind” – abolitionists were hardly immune from patriotic feelings.47 In his return speech Douglass had mildly rebuked his friend William Lloyd Garrison for supposing that he was happy to return to his “native country,” a statement that revealed the racial privilege that cleaved a gulf between the most well-meaning white abolitionists and their black colleagues.48 Exposure to Europe and to European abolitionists gave American activists a broader perspective on the means and ends available to them. But it was access to another part of the world – Africa – that stirred the antislavery pot in quite different ways. Antebellum Americans acquired information about Africa chiefly from three sources: colonists and colonization activists; missionaries; and explorers. The American Colonization Society had established Liberia on the western coast of Africa in 1822, thirty-five years after Britain had founded the neighboring colony of Sierra Leone as a refuge for poor people of color in Britain’s African diaspora. Colonizationists were a diverse bunch, but those who were sincerely antislavery (as opposed to those who just wanted to rid the country of troublesome freed slaves) reasoned that entrenched racism would forever prevent black Americans from achieving equality in the United States. They could only pursue the American dream, ironically, by leaving for somewhere where they could govern themselves free from white interference. But the great majority of free African Americans absolutely refused to consider leaving their homeland.49 To induce migration, the colonizationist press put out a relentlessly sunny picture of African life. Garrisonians and likeminded abolitionists who insisted on the moral imperative of immediate emancipation and the necessity of integrating freed people into the fabric of American life had no use for the colonizationists’ rendering of Africa. To deter colonization and emigration, they fashioned their own caricature of the continent that stressed its deadly disease environment, tropical lassitude, and savage inhabitants.50 Missionaries, many of whom developed an antipathy towards colonizationist schemes and who sympathized, to varying degrees, with abolition, developed a more complex and sympathetic portrait. Seeking the Christianization and “redemption” of the continent, they ministered to the natives, not colonists. They also wished to trumpet the glory of the missionary enterprise, and so their accounts combined an unsparing assessment of the physical challenges presented by Africa with a sympathetic, humanizing account of its people. Altogether, these literatures placed African people in the foreground. Missionaries, especially those with antislavery sympathies, presented readers with empathetic renderings of African peoples that challenged the racial stereotypes that undergirded support for the maintenance of slavery.51 These literatures intersected with others that informed American thinking about race. Racism pervaded white society in both the North and South, but as an intellectual construct racism stemmed from a vigorous international conversation between racial theorists and other authorities across the western world.52 Americans could, with credibility, claim a special expertise in the emerging field of racial science, but the so-called “American School” of ethnology emerged within a vigorous transatlantic conversation about the biological roots of race and other kinds of difference. As Reginald Horsman observes, when Arthur de Gobineau published An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races in 1854, “he was summarizing and amplifying more than a half a century of ideas on race.” 99

DA N I EL KI L B R I D E

In just a couple of years, Darwin’s Origin of Species would propel that conversation forward in completely new ways.53 What was more interesting, however, was the ways in which international engagement challenged American racism. Racialist thinking was becoming so conventional and popularized in the 1840s that writers were even beginning to divide Europeans into distinct racial types. Some of them even attributed the outcomes of the 1848 Revolutions to the racial flaws of European peoples. Americans abroad were quick to condemn those assessments. They admonished their compatriots at home of their responsibility to support peoples fighting for republicanism and self-government regardless of their complexion.54 The most controversial challenges to racialist thinking contradicted American attitudes toward Africans. Given how embedded anti-black racism was in American culture, these critics made only limited progress, but what is remarkable is that they made any at all. The essential ingredient in these reassessments was exposure to flesh-and-blood Africans. The ordeal of the Amistad captives provided one of the first occasions for this reassessment. As their case wound its way through the courts, abolitionists helped the rebels become popular culture sensations. Dramatic presentations, engravings, newspaper articles, sermons, and other media about the captives spread widely throughout the North. These accounts, which were mainly sympathetic, contradicted conventional understandings of Africans as lazy, shiftless, savage, and cowardly beings.55 As the Amistad faded in American cultural memory, the accounts of African explorers filled the gap. Particularly with the publication of David Livingstone’s hugely popular Adventures and Missionary Travels in 1857, American readers met native Africans who were barely recognizable to a people whose notions of Africans came from proslavery propaganda and minstrel shows. To be sure, accounts like Livingstone’s (and also those of Americans J. Leighton Wilson and Thomas Jefferson Bowen) competed with “dark Africa” accounts that confirmed Anglo-Americans’ most lurid prejudices toward African peoples.56 But the immense credibility possessed by these explorer-missionaries won them considerable attention in the popular press. Readers were simply shocked by what they read. One critic enthused: “We have thought so contemptuously of the black race and their land, that the facts here published, attesting the claims of Africa to respect and study, come upon the world like a new revelation.” The reception of these and other accounts of African travel reveals a seam of anti-racist sentiment that is all but unexplored in this era’s historical literature.57 Clearly, Americans did not need to travel to engage with and be influenced by the world outside their borders. Nevertheless travel endowed those with the leisure and wealth to engage in it a credibility that their compatriots lacked. Attention was paid to visitors to the United States and Americans abroad all out of proportion to their numbers or representativeness. Whether contact with the world came in the comfort of one’s parlor or through travel, the issue for Americans was never whether to engage with other peoples, but how to do so. It is simply not the case that Americans were divided “between sharply opposed conceptions of the process of nation building – pitting cultural independence against global interdependence; exceptionalist isolationism against expansive or expansionist outreach.”58 Cultural independence, to the extent that it was sought at all, was pursued as a means to engage with other peoples as a peer, not as an alternative to engagement. Even the development of a distinctive brand of American national identity speaks to Americans’ commitment to participate in an Atlantic, and eventually global, 100

T R AV EL , I N T EL L EC T UA L L I F E , G L O BA L I NF L U E NC E S

network of cultural exchange; disinterest in nationalism truly would have marked the United States as exceptional in the mid-nineteenth century.59 All parts of the globe did not influence the United States equally, or in the same way. As the westernmost outpost of western civilization, Americans were particularly keen to influence, and be influenced by, Europe. Other parts of the world, notably Africa and Asia, were, insofar as Americans were able to see them through the haze of prejudice and misinformation, negative examples – models of what Americans should avoid rather than what they should become. For antebellum Americans no less than for ourselves, isolation was neither desirable nor attainable.

Notes 1 For example, David Emory Shi and George Brown Tindall’s America: A Narrative History, brief 10th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016), chs. 8 and 9 (“The Emergence of a Market Economy” and “Nationalism and Sectionalism”), 286–345. 2 As in the subheading “Looking Inward, 1815–1860” to chapter 5 (“Developing a Continental Market) of Lawrence A. Peskin and Edmund F. Wehrle, America and the World: Culture, Commerce, Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 95. 3 Rosemarie Zagarri, “The Significance of the ‘Global Turn’ for the Early American Republic: Globalization in the Age of Nation Building,” Journal of the Early Republic 31:1 (Spring 2011), 1–37; see also the special issue “Whither the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 24:2 (Summer 2004), and in particular the essay by Andrés Reséndez, “Continental Possessions – Three Deepening Trends,” pp. 160–166. For recent works that globalize U.S. history, see Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (New York: Mariner Books, 1998); Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Carl J. Guarneri, America in the World: United States History in Global Context (Boston: McGraw-Hill Education, 2007); Lawrence A. Peskin and Edmund F. Wehrle, America and the World: Culture, Commerce, Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); and – the strongest evidence of all – a U.S. history survey text by Michael Schaller et al., American Horizons: U.S. History in a Global Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). The trade press, too, is active – witness the attention devoted to Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2014) and Don Doyle’s The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2014). 4 “Mr. Adams’ Oration: Address Delivered at the Request of a Committee of the Citizens of Washington, on the Occasion of Reading the Declaration of Independence, on the Fourth of July, 1821,” Niles Weekly Register n.s. 21:8 (July 12, 1821), 331; on Adams, see Charles Edel, Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); James Traub, John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 2016). 5 Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus; A Poem in Nine Books (Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1787), 203; “America,” Edinburgh Review 33:65 (January 1820), 79; Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96:4 (October 1991), 1031–1055. 6 Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763– 1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); also useful is Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

101

DA N I EL KI L B R I D E

7 Jennifer Clark, “Poisoned Pens: The Anglo-American Relationship and the Paper War,” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 6 (2002), 45–68; Herbert G. Eldridge, “The Paper War between England and America: The Inchiquin Episode,” Journal of American Studies 16 (April 1982), 49–68; Joseph Eaton, The Anglo-American Paper War: Debates about the New Republic, 1800–1825 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 8 An American [Robert Biddle], A Review of Captain Basil Hall’s Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828, 2nd ed. (London: R.J. Kennett, 1830), 5; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 2:225. Hall wrote that in no other country but the United States “does there exist such an excessive, and universal sensitiveness as to the opinions entertained of them by the English.” Basil Hall, Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Cadell and Co., 1829), 1:14. 9 Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Larzer Ziff, Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing, 1780–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 10 Views a-Foot: or, Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846); A Journey to Central Africa; or, Life and Landscapes from Egypt to the Negro Kingdoms of the White Nile (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1854); A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 1853 (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1855); The Lands of the Saracen; or, Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1855). Taylor is a surprisingly understudied figure, considering his influence and popularity. See Liam Corley, Bayard Taylor: Determined Dreamer of America’s Rise, 1825–1878 (Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2014). 11 See Harold Frederick Smith, American Travellers Abroad: A Bibliography of Accounts Published before 1900, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999); and Alfred Bendixen, “American Travel Books about Europe before the Civil War,” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Judith Hamera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 103–126. Ann Douglas has dismissed many of the travel “sketches” published in this period as dispensable works indicative of the general enfeeblement of American popular culture in this period: The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Noonday Press, 1998), 237– 238; see also William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5–7. 12 Unlike literary critics and anthropologists, historians have been somewhat reluctant to study travel as a cultural practice or to examine the experiences of Americans abroad. Important exceptions include Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Daniel Kilbride, Being American in Europe, 1750–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Philip Rahv, Discovery of Europe: The Story of the American Experience in the Old World (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1960); Mary Suzanne Schriber, Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830–1920 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997); and Christopher Mulvey, Transatlantic Manners: Social Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For the colonial period, see Julie Flavell, When London Was Capital of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); and Philipp Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in France in the Age of Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). More has been written about the post-Civil War era, when the pace of overseas travel increased dramatically. For a recent, breezy example see Nancy L. Green, The Other Americans in Paris: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). For a more extensive discussion of this literature, including works on Americans in specific countries, see the “Essay on Sources” in Kilbride, Being American in Europe, 215–222. 13 “Self Reliance,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. II: Essays: First Series, ed. Joseph Slater (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 46. Emerson would of course exploit that “fascination” in several of his own works, most notably English Traits (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1856). 14 Mrs. Samuel Jaudon to Harriet Colles, July 14, 1844, in Emily Johnston De Forest, ed., James Colles, 1788–1883: Life & Letters (New York: privately printed, 1926), 203. On the élan of

102

T R AV EL , I N T EL L EC T UA L L I F E , G L O BA L I NF L U E NC E S

15

16

17

18

19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26

Europe see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1997); and Maurie McInnis, In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740– 1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999). Brandon DuPont, Alka Gandhi, and Thomas Weiss, “The Long-Term Rise in Overseas Travel by Americans, 1820–2000,” Economic History Review 65:1 (2012), 144–167; and, on women, the more detailed report by the same authors, “The American Invasion of Europe: The Long Term Rise in Overseas Travel, 1820–2000,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, No. 13977 (May 2008), 17–18 and table 1, p. 54. On estimates of travel to Europe before 1820, see Susan Lindsey Lively, “Going Home: Americans in Britain, 1740–1776” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1996), 5; and Julie M. Flavell and Gordon Hay, “Using Capture-Recapture Methods to Reconstruct the American Population in London,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32 (Summer 2001), 37–53. [George P. Putnam], The Tourist in Europe: A Concise Summary of the Various Routes, Objects of Interest . . . (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1838); another American-authored guide of this period was Roswell Park, A Hand-Book for American Travellers in Europe, Collated from Best Authorities . . ., 2 vols. (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1853). On these developments see Will Mackintosh, “‘Ticketed Through’: The Commodification of Travel in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Early Republic 23:1 (Spring 2012), 61–89. Also, Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915 (New York: William Morrow, 1997); and Foster Rhea Dulles, Americans Abroad: Two Centuries of European Travel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964). James Freeman Clarke, Eleven Weeks in Europe; and What May Be Seen in that Time (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852), 326. On conditions aboard packets and steamships, see Stephen Fox, Transatlantic: Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), part one. John Chetwode Eustace, A Classical Tour through Italy, in the year 1802, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1816), 1:38. See also Roberto Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Silvana Patriarca, “Indolence and Regeneration: Tropes and Tensions of Risorgimento Patriotism,” American Historical Review 110:2 (April 2005), 380–408. Nicely captured in studies by David S. Reynolds, especially Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 175–308; and Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage, 1996). John O’Sullivan, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” United States Democratic Review 6:23 (November 1839), 427; Isaac Appleton Jewett, Passages in Foreign Travel, 2 vols. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1838), 2:225. Stowe, Going Abroad, 15; James Fenimore Cooper, Home as Found (1838; New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1871), 45. Cooper also acknowledged the enhanced cultural authority of Americans who had been abroad when Grace Van Cortlandt reflects vis-à-vis her cousin Eve that she “was so sensitive on the subject of the opinion of one who had seen so much of Europe” (5); Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 1:210. On the fragility of the Union in the geopolitics of the post-revolutionary era see James E. Lewis, Jr., The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Cosmopolitanism is an understudied subject, but see Tom F. Wright, ed., The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). On the merits of describing U.S. thought and behavior as “imperial” rather than labeling the U.S. an empire, see Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116:5 (December 2011), 1348–1391. Douglas R. Egerton, “The Empire of Liberty Reconsidered,” in James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, eds., The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic

103

DA N I EL KI L B R I D E

27

28 29 30

31

(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 309–330; Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton, eds., Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-Imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Eugene S. Van Sickle, “Reluctant Imperialists: The U.S. Navy and Liberia, 1819–1845,” Journal of the Early Republic 31:1 (Spring 2011), 107–134; Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, American Umpire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). In general, historians have been far more comfortable characterizing the pre-Civil War United States as an empire than were contemporaries. See Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” in Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 23–67; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2010); Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001); Andy Doolen, Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Bronwen Everill, Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Lawrence C. Howard, American Involvement in Africa South of the Sahara, 1800–1860 (New York: Garland Publishers, 1988). William Appleman Williams pioneered the interpretation that the United States had, since its inception, been an expansionist empire. See J. A. Thompson, “William Appleman Williams and the ‘American Empire’,” Journal of American Studies 7:1 (April 1973), 91–104. In establishing this national-imperial-postcolonial triad, with the addition of cosmopolitanism, I am following the lead of Michael O’Brien, who applied it to the American South in Conjectures of Order 1:2–7. The model is broadly applicable to the post-revolutionary United States in general. On postcolonialism, see, among very many works, Ania Loombia, Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Hellen Tiffin, eds., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002); and Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Hellen Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006). Both Haynes, Unfinished Revolution, and especially Yokota, Unbecoming British, assess this period of U.S. history in postcolonial terms. A. A. Phillips, apropos Australia, called this insecurity the “cultural cringe.” A. A. Phillips on the Cultural Cringe (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Publishing, 2006); Yokota, Unbecoming British. On Webster see Jill Lepore, A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Vintage, 2002). Letters from Three Continents, By M., The Arkansas Correspondent of the Louisville Journal (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1851), 17; James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, Vol. 2, 1817–1833 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896–99), 654; William E. Gienapp, “The Republican Party and the Slave Power,” in Robert H. Abzug and Stephen E. Maizlish, eds., New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America: Essays in Honor of Kenneth M. Stampp (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986), 51. On the meaning of the Union, see also Gary Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), ch. 2. Bushman, Refinement of America, 298. Like honor, a related concept, it has taken some time for historians to begin to integrate the concept of gentility into their interpretations of nineteenthcentury American culture. Earlier works included John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Noonday Press, 1990); and Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). More recently, see C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860 (New York: Oxford University

104

T R AV EL , I N T EL L EC T UA L L I F E , G L O BA L I NF L U E NC E S

32 33 34 35

36

37 38 39 40

41

Press, 1999); Charlene M. Boyer Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display: Planter Society at the Virginia Springs 1790–1860 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Charlene M. Boyer Lewis, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Thomas A. Chambers, Drinking the Waters: Creating an American Leisure Class at Nineteenth-Century Mineral Springs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002); Daniel Kilbride, An American Aristocracy: Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006); William Kauffman Scarborough, The Allstons of Chicora Wood: Wealth, Honor, and Gentility in the South Carolina Lowcountry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011); Marise Bachand, “Gendered Mobility and the Geography of Respectability in Charleston and New Orleans, 1790–1861,” Journal of Southern History 81:1 (February 2015), 41–78; Jacqueline Barbara Carr, “Marketing Gentility: Boston’s Businesswomen, 1780–1830,” New England Quarterly 82:1 (March 2009), 25–55; and Jennifer L. Goloboy, “The Early American Middle Class,” Journal of the Early Republic 25:4 (Winter 2005), 534–545. A story well told in Paul Johnson, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003). Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 63–69. Minnie Clare Yarborough, ed., The Reminiscences of William C. Preston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), 59–60. See also Kilbride, Being American in Europe, 107–115. There is a very large literature on responses to the French Revolution of 1789. For recent works, particularly those featuring the views of American travelers, see Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots; William L. Chew III, “Life Before Fodor and Frommer: Americans in Paris from Thomas Jefferson to John Quincy Adams,” French History 18 (2004), 25–49; and Matthew Rainbow Hale, “‘Many Who Wandered in Darkness’: The Contest over American National Identity, 1795–1798,” Early American Studies 1:1 (Spring 2003), 127–175. Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots, 169; this argument has most recently been made by Timothy Mason Roberts in Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). See also Charles Downer Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964); Merle Curti, “The Impact of the Revolutions of 1848 on American Thought,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 93 (1949), 209–215; Eugene N. Curtis, “American Opinion of the French Nineteenth-Century Revolutions,” American Historical Review 29 (January 1924), 249–270. Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015). “On the Greek Revolution, In the House of Representatives, January 20, 1824,” in Daniel Mallory, comp., The Life and Speeches of the Hon. Henry Clay, 2 vols. (New York: Robert P. Bixby, 1843), 1:432–439. Lincoln quoted in Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York: Vintage, 2006), 203. On the influences of the 1848 Revolutions on Americans see Roberts, Distant Revolutions; and Kilbride, Being American in Europe, 126–134. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842); Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, ed. John A. Scott (1863; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Jonathan Daniel Wells, “Charles Dickens, the American South, and the Transatlantic Debate over Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition 36:1 (2015), 1–25; Catherine Clinton, Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; New York: Vintage Books, 1991), popularized the idea of the Old South as a place dominated by anti-intellectualism, emotion, and prejudice. The much more sophisticated early work of Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

105

DA N I EL KI L B R I D E

42 43

44

45

46

suggested that the South’s commitment to the retrograde institution of chattel slavery made it suspicious, if not hostile, to new ideas. In later scholarship, they balanced an acknowledgment that southerners engaged to the intellectual currents of their age with their longstanding view that the South stood at loggerheads with the spirit of the age. For their mature view, see Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); see also Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Michael O’Brien, “On the Mind of the Old South and Its Accessibility,” in Michael O’Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 19–37; Cornelius A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg, eds., The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013); L. Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers, eds., The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); on southern efforts to suppress abolitionist sentiment, see Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (New York: Harper and Row, 1964); A. Glenn Crothers, Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth: The Society of Friends in Northern Virginia, 1730–1865 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012). William H. Holcombe, “The Alternative: A Separate Nationality, or the Africanization of the South,” Southern Literary Messenger 32:2 (February 1861), 84. Sam W. Haynes, “Anglophobia and the Annexation of Texas: The Quest for National Security,” in Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris, eds., Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Exceptionalism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 115– 145; Matthew Mason, “A World Safe for Modernity: Antebellum Proslavery Intellectuals Confront Great Britain,” in Barnes et al., The Old South’s Modern Worlds, 47–65; Elizabeth Kelly Gray, “Whisper to Him the Word ‘India’: Transatlantic Critics and American Slavery, 1830–1860,” Journal of the Early Republic 28:3 (Fall 2008), 379–406. Gov. Hammond’s Letters on Southern Slavery, Addressed to Thomas Clarkson, the English Abolitionist (Charleston: Walker and Burke, 1845), 23; Joyce E. Chaplin, “Slavery and the Principle of Humanity: A Modern Idea in the Early Lower South,” Journal of Social History 24:2 (Winter 1990), 299–315; Margaret Nicola Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); John Patrick Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002); Molly Oshatz, Slavery and Sin: The Fight against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Bertram WyattBrown, “Modernizing Southern Slavery: The Intellectual and the Proslavery Argument,” in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 27–49. John Bailey Adger, “The Revival of the Slave Trade,” Southern Presbyterian Review 11:1 (1859), 116; J. Leighton Wilson, “The Foreign Slave Trade. – Can It Be Revived without Violating the Most Sacred Principles of Honor, Humanity, and Religion?” Southern Presbyterian Review 12 (1860), 491–512; Thomas Jefferson Bowen, Central Africa: Adventures and Missionary Labors in Several Countries in the Interior of Africa, from 1849 to 1856 (Charleston: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1857). On Wilson, see Erskine Clarke, By the Rivers of Water: A NineteenthCentury Atlantic Odyssey (New York: Basic Books, 2013); O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 1:178– 181. A good case study on how international opinion constrained proslavery activism is made by Yonatan Eyal, “A Romantic Realist: George Nicholas Sanders and the Dilemmas of Southern International Engagement,” Journal of Southern History 78:1 (February 2012), 107–30; also, Miles Smith IV, “From Savannah to Vienna: William Henry Stiles, the Revolutions of 1848, and Southern Conceptions of Order,” American Nineteenth Century History 14:1 (2013), 27–51. W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Democracy: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); on colonizationists,

106

T R AV EL , I N T EL L EC T UA L L I F E , G L O BA L I NF L U E NC E S

47

48 49 50 51 52

53

54

55

see Everill, Abolition and Empire; Tunde Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998); Floyd J. Miller, The Search for Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); Lamin Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). “Country, Conscience, and the Anti-Slavery Cause: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on 11 May 1847,” in John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Ser. 1: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Vol. 2, 1847–54 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 59–60. McDaniel, The Problem of Slavery; Kilbride, Being American in Europe, 154–165; Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999). John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Everill, Abolition and Empire. Daniel Kilbride, “What Did Africa Mean to Frederick Douglass?” Slavery & Abolition 36:1 (2015), 40–62; James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787– 2005 (New York: Penguin Press, 2006). Joseph Yannielli, “George Thompson among the Africans: Empathy, Authority, and Insanity in the Age of Abolition,” Journal of American History 96 (March 2010), 979–1000. On sunny accounts typical of colonization literature, see Clarke, By the Rivers of Water, 191–208. Linda Frost, Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850– 1877 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Routledge, 1991); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Robert Singerman, “The Jew as a Racial Alien: The Genetic Component of American Anti-Semitism,” in David A. Gerber, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 103–128; Dale K. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For critiques of this literature, see Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001), 3–32; Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89 (2002), 154–173. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 2; also Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); William Ragan Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). David Brion Davis, Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Richard C. Rohrs, “American Critics of the French Revolution of 1848,” Journal of the Early Republic 14 (Autumn 1994), 359–377; Roberts, Distant Revolutions; and Paola Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); Kilbride, Being American in Europe, 128–132. Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York: Viking, 2012); Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Iyunolu Folayan Osagie, The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000).

107

DA N I EL KI L B R I D E

56 David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa; Including a Sketch of Sixteen Years’ Residence in the Interior of Africa . . . (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1858); J. Leighton Wilson, Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856); Bowen, Central Africa. On the tradition of “dark Africa” literature, see Michael McCarthy, Dark Continent: Africa as Seen by Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983); Howard, American Involvement in Africa South of the Sahara; Jeanette Eileen Jones, In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); and Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964). 57 “Book Notes,” North American and United States Gazette, February 5, 1859, p. 2 col. 6. 58 Peter Gibian, “The Lyceum as Contact Zone: Bayard Taylor’s Lectures on Foreign Travel,” in Wright, The Cosmopolitan Lyceum, 168. 59 Dorothy Ross, “‘Are We a Nation?’ The Conjuncture of Nationhood and Race in the United States, 1850–1876,” Modern Intellectual History 2 (2005), 327–360.

108

7 PARTY POLI T I C S A N D THE SEC TION A L C R I S I S A Twenty-Year Renaissance in the Study of Antebellum Political History Frank Towers

From history’s inception as a professional discipline in the United States, leading practitioners have criticized historians of politics for privileging high-level partisan competition over more complicated and inclusive accounts that connect society to American democracy’s formal arenas of elections and government. In 1911, Frederick Jackson Turner warned that “the political historian handling his subject in isolation is certain to miss fundamental facts and relations in his treatment of a given age or nation.” By the 1940s, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., seemed frustrated that such advice had been ignored. “Politics is a phenomenon of society and can be properly understood only in terms of society,” he wrote. “This statement is obviously a commonplace, yet it is one whose full implications have been explored only intermittently and capriciously by the writers of political history.” In the 1960s, Lee Benson, a pioneer of what became known as the “new political history,” advocated adopting social science techniques because “historical method, as developed to date, cannot satisfy the demands made upon it by researchers interested in mass behavior . . .”1 As evidenced by the persistence of these critiques, the tendency to treat politics as a world apart from American society proved difficult to remedy. By the 1990s, scholars surveying the field believed this long sought after breakthrough had finally arrived. Mark Leff announced that, “the amalgamation of political and social history is already well advanced.”2 Eric Foner declared “the old presidential synthesis – which understood the evolution of American society chiefly via presidential elections and administrations – is dead (and not lamented). And ‘politics’ now means more than the activities of party leaders.”3 Although heartened by recent changes, others thought more work needed to be done. Dan Feller advised historians “to surmount some of the conceptual barriers between social and political history by broadening our definition of ‘political’ beyond partisan activity.”4 Sean Wilentz wrote, “the job of reconnecting the pieces – and especially of recombining social and political history – has only just begun.”5 Finally, it seemed, historians were calling for a political history that fully integrated the world of elections and government with society around them. By 2016, historians could claim victory in the long campaign to bridge the divide between society and politics. Having refused “the false choice between a political history of elections and legislative battles on the one hand, and a social and cultural history

109

F R A N K TOW E R S

sensitive to minority marginal perspectives on the other,” the study of antebellum political history has opened up to a wider range of methods, topics, and interpretations such that, as Sean Wilentz said in a more recent essay, it “makes more sense to speak of American political histories, rather than of American political history per se.”6 Although this state of affairs will frustrate students seeking to quickly classify major themes and debates, that cost is offset by the closer engagement between political history and the general scholarship of the antebellum period. That engagement challenges historians of politics to read broadly in their period and make connections between seemingly disparate fields of study. Understanding how historians today study antebellum politics requires a detour into what the 1990s historians of politics were reacting against, namely the American version of the “new political history,” which rose to prominence in the 1960s.7 As Benson had urged, the new political history borrowed social science methods, particularly the behaviorist approach to voting that looked for the underlying, normative patterns, or systems, that informed the short-term drama of particular elections.8 Quantification of mass data on voters, abetted by new computerized analysis, provided a rigorous, thoroughly scientific means for discovering these patterns. By correlating long runs of voting returns with the social characteristics of the electorate as revealed through public records, especially the federal census, new political historians provided a much more complete picture of the electorate than had prior scholarship. The new political history matters for understanding the present state of the field because some of its findings have served as the point of departure for current trends. Beyond its methodological contributions, the new political history advanced three important interpretations of antebellum politics. First, these scholars delineated a “second party system” of stable competition between Whigs and Democrats that replaced an earlier Jeffersonian v. Federalist era and would be followed by a third system of Republican v. Democratic contestation. Second, the second party system inaugurated the “party period” that lasted until the 1890s and was characterized by high voter turnout, unprecedented public engagement with electoral politics, and powerful political parties that supplemented the capabilities of a relatively weak national government. From both of these claims, historians of the sectional conflict built a third argument about the timing of the Civil War. Because parties acted as stabilizers of national government, when they collapsed, as the Whigs did in the 1850s, the process of voter realignment opened the door for new, destabilizing parties grounded in sectional as opposed to national affiliations to push the country into disunion and war. The first of these contributions, the second party system, treated party loyalty as remarkably stable and rooted in deep social identities rather than momentary conflicts. Evidence for these patterns came from vote returns for Whigs and Democrats that despite fluctuation in the winners of particular elections exhibited consistent bases of support among constituencies defined by common social characteristics such as ethnicity and religion that corresponded to broad themes in each party’s policies. Although region and economic class mattered, the more primary identities of culture and faith applied across the country. Those deep patterns undercut claims made by traditional political historians for the significance of dramatic legislative confrontations or outsized personalities.9 110

PA RT Y P OL I T I C S A N D T HE S E C T I O NA L C R I S I S

A corollary to the party systems thesis was the “party period” explanation of nineteenthcentury elections and government, which held that “the types of parties formed in the 1830s and the patterns of partisan voting and partisan policymaking that stabilized by the 1840s endured for the rest of the century.”10 Led by Walter Dean Burnham, historians noted a spike in the rate of voter turnout in the 1830s that remained high until the 1890s.11 High participation was one of several indicators of the important role played by parties in American life. “With the full establishment of the second party system,” wrote one historian, “campaigns were characterized by appeals to the common man, mass meetings, parades, celebrations, and intense enthusiasm . . . In structure and ideology, American politics had been democratized.” Party identity rivaled other deep attachments like faith or ethnicity such that “political life formed the very essence of the pre-Civil War generation’s experience.”12 Parties not only provided a worldview for organizing public life, they also gave “cohesion to national politics and a measure of standardization to governmental forms and processes throughout the federal system.”13 As the organizers of policy and de facto managers of government appointments, parties provided “procedural unity” for an otherwise weak central government and thereby acted as crucial supplements to the state itself.14 The concept of the second party system managed to define the terms of debate such that critics of the ethno-cultural interpretation of antebellum voting ended up reinforcing the premise of a unique period of major party competition grounded in enduring voter identities. New political history claims for ethnic and religious identities as the basis for partisan attachments flew in the face of Progressive era scholars’ arguments that economics, especially banks, and slavery drove party conflict. Agreeing that the Progressives simplified politics by reading present-day economic rationality into the past, early critics of the new political history drew on a range of influences such as neo-Marxism, French Annales history, and cultural anthropology. Despite their differences these intellectual schools shared an interest in comparing cultures outside of older imperialist hierarchies in order to emphasize the internal coherence, or logic, of the myriad systems of ideas that human communities have created across time and space.15 Applied to antebellum America, scholars used these tools to study partisan rhetoric as an expression of a historically distinct worldview, or political culture, that may seem “paranoid” to modern readers, but was perfectly logical to nineteenth-century voters and office seekers. The most significant finding of this research was republicanism, the ideological legacy of the Revolution. At its simplest, republicanism conceived of liberty as the goal of government, viewed power and its corrupting influence as liberty’s foe, and conceived of a government by and for the people as the best guard against tyranny. Judging where and how power threatened the people’s freedom became the basis for broad cleavages in political thought that shaped the party system.16 Although sometimes aimed at showing the limits of voter studies, historians soon found ways to match political culture with election data. In general, Whigs and later Republicans supported Protestant moral reform, economic development via government-directed internal improvements, and the rule of law over majority will. Those policies attracted native-born, evangelical Protestants and middle-class strivers seeking to profit in the growing market economy. On the other side, Democrats advocated for a broad definition of liberty that resisted moral legislation on questions like Sabbath observance. Like Whigs, 111

F R A N K TOW E R S

Democrats supported capitalism but they opposed national-scale investments in banks and transportation that could privilege wealthy insiders at the expense of ordinary farmers and shopkeepers. That perspective fed Democrats’ exaltation of the common (white) man against enemies above, such as the Bank of the United States, and below, like the Five Civilized Tribes of the southeast. Democratic ideology drew votes from small farmers and artisans left out of the main currents of capitalist growth, as well as immigrants, non-evangelicals, and a majority of southern slaveholders.17 This research into the underlying sources of stability and change in the party system informed a related argument about the timing of the Civil War. Whigs and Democrats competed nationally because their battles over economics and culture pertained everywhere and, therefore, kept at bay those who sought to divide politics geographically according to pro- and antislavery majorities in the opposing sections. In 1846, a big event, the Mexican War, reintroduced conflict over slavery’s extension, but even then old loyalties died slowly, fading because of new cultural issues as well as gridlock over slavery’s expansion. The breakdown of stable, cross-sectional party competition opened a vacuum filled by the free-soil Republicans in the North and the militantly proslavery wing of the Democratic Party in the South, each of which viewed leaders of the other section as threats to liberty. Once politicians turned to sectional issues to mobilize supporters, disunion became inevitable. In this way the second party system’s rise and fall became a widely accepted explanation for the timing of the Civil War if not its fundamental causes.18 In the past twenty years, each of the new political history’s main tenets – party systems, the party period, and Civil War timing – has come in for sustained criticism, and its quantitative methods have fallen out of use. The combination of direct rebuttal, on the one hand, and a self-conscious turn away from older sources and subject matter, on the other, explains a great deal about three important developments in the study of antebellum politics: the collapse of any meaningful boundary between the early (Jeffersonian) and later (Jacksonian) eras; a broader definition of politics oriented around civil society that has shined a light on the politics of the disenfranchised; and renewed attention to the dominance of slavery as the driver of political conflict throughout the period. The first of these trends is a growing recognition of the continuity between politics before and after the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, the standard dividing line in second party system and party period narratives. A jumping off point for this critique has been the new political history’s case for a surge in voter turnout beginning in the 1830s, a statistical claim that informs cultural arguments about the significance of parties in American life. Historians working on the early 1800s have found a much higher rate of participation than claimed in earlier studies that labeled the earlier era a time of low engagement, “deferential-participant politics.”19 High points in early national voter turnout matched or exceeded the peaks of the Whig v. Democratic era. Whereas the second party system’s highest turnouts occurred in presidential contests – topping out at 80 percent in 1840 – the earlier era’s highs happened in races for state or local office and non-partisan ballot questions.20 Greater rates of voter participation before 1828 along with indications that voters took more interest in local questions than national ones cast doubt on the arguments that Whigs and Democrats were either the first to mobilize popular support or agents of democratization.21 112

PA RT Y P OL I T I C S A N D T HE S E C T I O NA L C R I S I S

Furthermore, despite party period claims that mass parties first appeared in the 1830s, recent research has shown that Jeffersonians and Federalists used most of the later era’s partisan strategies, such as preaching loyalty to party rather than individuals, mobilizing voters through press and public gatherings, and using bureaucratic organizations to coordinate campaigns and discipline rogue activists. Meanwhile, to the extent that Jackson’s Democrats departed from old norms, they often did so in ways that curtailed rights grounded in customs, such as replacing a “localist” tradition in southern courts with a more rigid language of individual rights that left women, slaves, and other vulnerable members of southern society with fewer claims on the legal system. In fact, the growth of institutionalized parties may have discouraged mass participation in ways that went beyond simply casting ballots. As Reeve Huston argues “Jacksonianism . . . appears to be as much a containment and redirection of popular democratic aspirations as a fulfillment of them.”22 Another challenge for the party period turnout model is the size of the electorate. Most high turnout arguments take the U.S. census decennial population reports as their baseline for determining how many eligible voters lived in a given district. Decennial returns are difficult to use for fast-growing states that added new counties and witnessed explosive growth within the ten-year snapshots of the census. Moreover, census takers tended to undercount the total population – conservative estimates put the total undercount at 10 percent – with the largest number of missing entries occurring among the poor, nonwhite, and highly transient. Were the uncounted included in census estimates, not only would the base of eligible voters increase (and the rate of turnout therefore decrease), but the undemocratic character of eligibility rules would be magnified by showing that an even larger number of adult Americans could not vote.23 Even if historians stick with inflated census numbers, all American women and a sizable proportion of men still lacked the franchise. Where new political historians emphasized the expansion of voting rights to propertyless white men in the early Republic, subsequent scholars have paid more attention to the majority of adult Americans who remained disenfranchised. For example, in the 1840 presidential election 80 percent of those eligible to vote did so but they made up only 34 percent of the adult population, a much lower figure than today’s total voting age turnout rates which regularly surpass 50 percent or more in presidential contests. As Jean Baker put it, “How could a society that arrested Susan B. Anthony and Virginia Minor for the classic behavior of inclusion – voting – be valued as the best in our political history?”24 Where the new political history treated casting a ballot as the ultimate expression of democratic involvement,25 subsequent studies have questioned voting’s significance as an indicator of political engagement. Exploring the legacy of revolutionary mistrust of “factions” and popular criticism of partisan politics as disreputable, Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin found that many Americans were not engaged partisans at all and their attitudes ranged from indifference to outright hostility. They pointed to numerous examples of voter fraud and electoral coercion that literary figures like Walt Whitman criticized and humbug showman P. T. Barnum admired.26 Antipartyism, the popular hostility to partisan politics, constituted “a parallel framework of nonpartisan belief and experience [that] coexisted alongside, and interacted with, partisan politics throughout the party period, helping to shape third party eruptions and American political thought.” 113

F R A N K TOW E R S

Longer studies by Mark Voss-Hubbard and Ronald Formisano uncovered the effectiveness of antiparty rhetoric in fueling successful third party challenges throughout the nineteenth century.27 Antipartyism informed not only third party challenges but major party ideology as well. Especially problematic for the party period thesis was the Whigs’ ambivalence towards partisan politics. Stitched together from the very different threads of the National Republican Party, the Anti-Masonic Party of the northeast, and John C. Calhoun’s nullifiers in the Lower South, Whigs shared a common antipathy to the party-aboveprinciple style of Jacksonian Democrats and they only reluctantly adopted the mass mobilization tactics of their opponents.28 Furthermore, the Whigs’ brief twenty-year lifespan was far from stable. Single-issue challengers like the North’s antislavery Liberty Party and the anti-immigrant American Republican Party cut into their support in the 1840s, as did the Lower South’s contests between Southern Rights and Union tickets in 1851.29 In the mid-1850s new challengers – the Know Nothings and the Republicans – capitalized on Whig weakness to topple the party once and for all.30 Meanwhile, other scholars have challenged the interpretation of the Democratic Party’s origins as a means for creating an equilibrium between national parties that would subsume sectional loyalties, a scheme often attributed to New York’s Martin Van Buren as a remedy to the dangerous sectional conflict exhibited during the Missouri Crisis of 1819–1821.31 Looking at party development in Illinois, Gerald Leonard found that “a Van-Burenite avant garde” defended the formation of institutionalized parties as “a conservative defense of traditional antiparty constitutionalism – the proposed party was to be a party of the whole sovereign democracy, not just a part of it . . .”32 John Brooke comes to a similar conclusion in his study of Van Buren’s home county of Columbia, New York. Brooke argues that Van Buren promoted regular procedures and institutional loyalty in order to conserve the revolutionary triumph of democracy over an aristocracy that had used the state to further its privileges. As such, Democrats inherited the Jeffersonian creation of a “party to monitor the exercise of power and protect the people’s rights.” They viewed Whigs as “part of a vast conspiracy to subvert the sovereign consent of the people.”33 The case can be made that neither Whigs nor Democrats regarded their foes as a loyal opposition necessary to democracy’s survival. This new appreciation for the instability of pre-Civil War politics has shifted attention to election violence. Discounted by the new political history as an aberration that occurred rarely and had little impact,34 recent studies have shown that “violence in and around the polls was not rare” and could change the outcome of the vote. The late antebellum era experienced at least 72 election riots that resulted in 110 deaths and many more injuries. In the mid-1850s Know Nothing Party election mobs drove away enough Democratic voters to tip the balance of elections in a few cities, most notably Baltimore. A study of South Carolina concludes that “paramilitarism and violence had been integral to the grassroots practice of proslavery politics since the 1830s and was a regular and recurring feature thereafter . . . limiting the boundaries of discourse and silencing dissent.” In his study of election practices Richard Bensel observed that, “although popular voting is the quintessential characteristic of a democratic political system, the polling place, in nineteenth-century America, was one of the less democratic sites in the nation.”35 For 114

PA RT Y P OL I T I C S A N D T HE S E C T I O NA L C R I S I S

other scholars, rioting at the polls was simply the rowdy excess of a highly engaged electorate, a kind of rough edge on the vibrant civic culture of Tocquevillian America. According to Mary Ryan, for example, “a riot was not so much the breakdown of the democratic process as its conduct by other means.” Commenting on the everyday rowdyism of elections, Jon Grinspan finds a connection between youthful interest in violent competitions and voting. Rather than discouraging participation, polling place fights attracted the attention of competitive-minded young men.36 Common to these competing interpretations of political violence is their focus on the polling place and voting. Antebellum voting was a public act regulated as much by the contesting parties as by the state. Polling places were often located in a privately owned facility such as a tavern or meeting hall. There, voters handed a printed ballot to an election judge after passing through a crowd of interested onlookers. Such a setting gave voting cultural significance beyond its instrumental role in choosing candidates. The ability to successfully cast a ballot marked the voter as a member in good standing of the community of citizens, whereas the inability to vote powerfully reinforced the lack of full citizenship for the disenfranchised.37 Election violence could break out when partisan crowds tried to intimidate rival voters who then fought back. Inevitably these conflicts tied into the question of social order and overlapped with other forms of collective violence such as proslavery intimidation of suspected abolitionists, riots by urban fire companies and tavern gangs, and honor-driven confrontations between individual men. In these cases the perpetrators used violence to establish their dominance in the social life of particular neighborhoods that extended to polling places and electoral contests. Whether evidence of anti-democratic coercion or a rowdy but engaged electorate, the prevalence of political violence challenges an impression of antebellum voting as an individualistic act governed by rational choice.38 As some scholars revised the party period thesis about popular participation, another group cast doubt on its view of parties as vital supplements to a weak national government. Variously labeled the “new institutionalism,” “policy history,” and “political economy,” these studies focused on the state itself and its role in creating paths for political development that reached beyond any specific electoral campaign. Scholarship advancing the “weak state” interpretation of antebellum government emerged during the Cold War as part of an effort to identify what made America “exceptional” to the totalitarian systems of Europe. It was during the 1950s that historians such as Louis Hartz and Daniel Boorstin elevated to the status of a prophet Alexis de Tocqueville, who in the 1830s argued that democracy had freed America from the tyranny of the state only to oppress it by the force of public opinion.39 This case for America’s limited government continued in the new political history’s focus on parties and voters to the neglect of governance, and in political culture studies of republican ideology, which pitted state power against the people’s liberty. Although they agree “that antistatism shaped the structure of the federal government,” historians who argue for a stronger state presence in the nineteenth century argue that “the result was not simply a state that was weak by European standards . . . but a state that commanded significant political strength in numerous policy domains and one that substantially influenced American life.”40 Among its achievements, the early American government made possible the capitalist expansion that ironically extolled the individual entrepreneur as its guiding force. As 115

F R A N K TOW E R S

Richard John observes, “In the United States, no less than in France, Germany, or Great Britain, big government preceded big business.” John’s history of the U.S. postal service illustrates this point. The postal system created a federally-run communications network staffed by federal employees that spread literacy, news, and nationalism. Similarly, John Larson showed how political demands on the state stimulated public works, such as the National Road and the Erie Canal, that facilitated trade and migration into the interior. Whereas early projects had been state-directed, a spate of bankruptcies and corruption scandals abetted anti-statist arguments against federally-directed improvements so that by the time of the railroad boom in the 1840s private actors controlled transportation projects albeit with the bulk of funds still coming from government in the form of land grants and loans.41 In these and other realms, the distinctive feature of American government was not its weakness but instead its diffusion among a dizzying mix of local, state, and federal authorities and private and semi-private agencies (publicly chartered banks, for example). By delegating and doubling governmental powers to innumerable lower-level actors the American state increased its ability to carry out policy even as it decreased the unitary power of its central government. As William Novak has argued, this “infrastructural capacity” helps to explain the paradox of a country that prides itself on limited government moving in short order to dominate the continent and later the world. Party politics mattered in this history – for example, anti-statist Democrats killed the Bank of the United States – but particular changes in party power could not overthrow the long-term path set in the 1790s of federal power quietly asserting itself throughout the economy and society.42 In summary, the concept of a second party system, and its corollary of a party period of high voter engagement, has been challenged, if not replaced, by an argument for continuity between the early and later eras of pre-Civil War political history and a dramatically revised interpretation of the place of party in antebellum democracy. Recent scholarship has found continuity in terms of party organization, fluctuating voter participation, and partisans’ reluctance to accept their rivals as a legitimate opposition. Furthermore, studies of antipartyism and election violence have called into question the depth of voter loyalty to parties as well as the orderliness of the democratic process. Finally, new studies of governmental institutions have cast doubt on the claim for parties as critical supplements to a weak American state. As such, these disparate studies, most of them launched as responses to arguments dating from the new political history, mark a significant intellectual departure from the standard narratives that reigned in the latter third of the twentieth century. Whereas the foregoing studies correspond to a model of critique and revision of older scholarship, an equally significant vein of recent writing has bypassed those debates by redefining the subject matter of political history beyond the confines of voters, parties, and legislatures. Building on work already underway in the 1980s, historians have developed a much more complete understanding of how disenfranchised Americans acted politically and how their history redefines the boundaries of the political. Historians of nineteenth-century women have led this drive for “a more inclusive definition of politics than is usually offered.” For example, Paula Baker advocated “a relatively broad” understanding of politics that could “include any action, formal or informal, taken to 116

PA RT Y P OL I T I C S A N D T HE S E C T I O NA L C R I S I S

affect the course or behavior of government or the community.”43 Studies of women’s political activity fit with scholarship that has dismantled the concept of “separate spheres” – the bourgeois rhetorical designation of a masculine public of work and politics and a feminine private sphere of home and family – as in any way an accurate description of lived reality.44 In the 1980s a wave of studies explored antebellum women’s work in reform, voting rights, and the basic definitions of citizenship.45 From this opening, historians have found abundant evidence that despite being denied the vote,46 women made their voices heard in politics through several different means. A relatively small number were active partisans who wrote extensively about party politics and influenced party decision-making in their capacity as advisors and power brokers. Some attended partisan gatherings as passive symbols of a particular candidate or party’s virtue. In the middle, thousands of women, most of them white and middle-class, used petitions and voluntary associations to influence public policy.47 To bring these female political activists into political history, historians have turned to the public sphere, a “transparent domain of information, association, and conversation . . .” that “mediates between private life in all its forms and the governing polity.” Unlike formal government with its sharp boundaries on participation and power, the more diffuse public sphere brings into political history the conflicts raging in antebellum society, often with people denied the vote at their center because every American could participate in the street corner debates, petition campaigns, parades, speeches, and boycotts that shaped public life. Describing the potential of this new subject matter, Mary Ryan said “the public was no more than an invitation to imagine a historical plane of commonality and connection that did not pulverize differences, where power was recognized without erasing the less powerful.”48 The diffuse network of community organizations that undergirded public sphere debates emerged out of a battle over the legitimacy of voluntary associations, corporations, and other privately organized entities engaged in public action. Understood by the revolutionary generation as potential competitors to the state, legislators tried to suppress them in the 1790s and early 1800s, but when they were voted out of office these same political actors turned to voluntary associations to combat their opponents in government.49 By the 1840s, the ability to organize for public action through voluntary association had become a favored vehicle for Americans either disengaged from the parties and/or denied the right to vote and hold office. Instead of resorting to federalism’s checks and balances, these activists appealed to the public’s moral sensibility. These “moral minorities,” as Kyle Volk terms them, “propagated a pluralistic conception of democracy in which the protection of minority rights was essential to the preservation of moral freedom, cultural diversity, and social equality.” To do so, however, required disenfranchised Americans to fight a public discourse that treated their civil society contributions as “social” rather than “political.” Nancy Isenberg argues that women who made their voices heard on questions ranging from the Mexican War to suffrage rights fought a battle over “the meaning of civil society” in which “feminists sought to justify women’s political equality and their public presence.”50 Women’s political activism necessarily brought debates about gender identity into partisan contests. As Daniel Howe states, the Whigs’ “ties to evangelical reform movements like temperance and an intimation of their faith in the moral influence of women on 117

F R A N K TOW E R S

men” made them the beneficiaries of this surge in women’s political activism and imbued their campaigns with a more egalitarian message than the Democrats, an ironic twist on 1830s campaign rhetoric that promoted the Democrats as the party of the common man (but not woman).51 Taking this analysis forward to the 1850s, other historians have argued that “Democrats and Republicans positioned themselves within a larger cultural debate then being waged over the wisdom of changes their constituents were making (or resisting) in their own family practices and gender roles.”52 Democrats weaved into their policy positions a cultural defense of a man’s right to be sovereign within his home, free from outside interference, whereas Republicans advocated for the ameliorative power of the state to make families more virtuous through a connection to moral reform programs, either private or state-sponsored.53 Historians also found in abolitionist rhetoric a rich vein of gendered metaphors used to attack slavery, often under the lead of female activists who argued that “slavery desecrated domesticity.”54 Applied to the coming of the Civil War, the battle between reform-minded supporters of the domestic family, a view more popular in the North, and traditionalist advocates of patriarchal household relations, who were more prevalent in the South, mapped onto the sectional division over slavery. These competing gender ideologies made the Civil War readable as a “crisis in gender.” Looking at the South Carolina Low Country, ground zero for the secession movement, Stephanie McCurry found a patriarchal worldview that stood “in distinct contrast to bourgeois gender ideology” of the North. Such an understanding of their identity as men and women made nonslaveholding South Carolina whites receptive to proslavery extremism “on the common ground of gender.”55 In the same way that these studies of gender have broken open the definition of politics, histories of African Americans, most of whom whether free or enslaved could neither vote nor hold public office, have also pushed beyond the formal world of elections and government.56 In his study of black politics in the rural South, Steven Hahn proposes a “broad understanding of politics that is relational and historical, and that encompasses collective struggles for what might be termed socially meaningful power. Which is to say that the appropriate conceptual universe of study must be determined by a specific social and historical context.” These guidelines inform Hahn’s new interpretation of slave politics. The enslaved used such seemingly apolitical means as family organization, rumor, and flight to push for self-rule apart from white interference, a drive for a separate nation that contrasts with more conventional narratives of the black freedom struggle that foreground the quest for inclusion in a nation originally restricted to white men.57 Although not always in agreement with Hahn’s argument about nationalism, other historians have shown the importance of African-American politics for shaping both big questions about citizenship and slavery as well as narrower ones about specific party battles and elections. In his study of Boston’s African-American community, Stephen Kantrowitz investigates an almost metaphysical quest for a “citizenship of the heart” in which African Americans “infused the word ‘citizen’ with meaning beyond a common set of rights and obligations.” Similarly, rather than focus on the fight for equal rights before the law, Patrick Rael looked at how “black northerners cofabricated with other Americans the political racial discourse of the public sphere.” Mobilizing through their own voluntary associations, African Americans advanced a “black protest ideology” against white supremacist denigration, but found that the price of entry into a common 118

PA RT Y P OL I T I C S A N D T HE S E C T I O NA L C R I S I S

discourse ended up reinforcing other hierarchies of gender, class, and “Western civilization” that blunted the potential for fuller liberation.58 Meanwhile, battles between runaway slaves and their pursuers along the sectional border helped to polarize opinion on both sides. Across the late antebellum South politicians and voters turned rumors of slave revolt, often pushed by the enslaved, into a rationale for choosing the hardline proslavery wing of the Democrats over more moderate, and pro-Union, elements of the opposition. In 1856, fears of combative slaves in Kentucky and Tennessee drove nervous border state moderates to vote for Buchanan. Three years later, “slaves’ aspirations for freedom and white electoral politics converged” in John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. The raid and its aftermath, in which Republicans became suspect of aiding the rising, “ended the possibility of an alliance between Virginia’s Opposition and sympathetic Northerners in a ‘United Opposition’” to southern fire eaters who increasingly preached disunion as the only way to preserve slavery. The next summer, a series of fires in and around Dallas, Texas, set off another panic over slave rebellions, helping to solidify Lower South support for southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge’s presidential candidacy and then for secession following Lincoln’s victory.59 Although a less obvious place to look for politics beyond the franchise, the links between the antebellum public sphere and the formal world of diplomacy and statecraft have yielded new insights into foreign influences on American politics. Indigenous Americans have provided the most complicated example of the transnational dynamic. Some peoples, most notably the southeastern Indians forcibly deported to the West by Andrew Jackson, exercised a fragile dual sovereignty that gave them a voice in state politics and won allies at the federal level. For the Cherokee, some of whom had the vote, working within the American public sphere made sense as a way to advance their claims. Others, like the Comanche of the Plains, lived outside of U.S. control and ignored its political structures in pursuit of their own national aims. As Brian DeLay has shown, indigenous politics played a critical role in weakening the power of the Mexican state and opening the way for U.S. conquest in 1846. 60 European connections have also drawn attention from historians interested in the transnational history of politics. Longstanding antipathy to Great Britain shaped public policy and entered into electoral contests. Events such as the Revolutions of 1848 provided a point of reference for Americans contemplating the pros and cons of national self-liberation. The flood of immigrants arriving between 1845 and 1854 brought not only fears of foreign influence that gave rise to the Know Nothing Party, but also a cadre of radical immigrant activists who invigorated the antislavery cause in America. And numerous American political activists corresponded with European counterparts, visited their countries, and brought them to America to advance causes that cut across national boundaries.61 These histories of the disenfranchised, public discourse, and transnational influences have shown that the larger public sphere in which much of this history took place can better connect social identities and divisions to questions about the distribution of power and governance than can a narrower focus on formal parties and eligible voters. In this way the last two decades of scholarship have met the timeworn call for a history of politics that fully engages society. 119

F R A N K TOW E R S

A final break from political history as it was practiced from the 1960s to the 1990s has been in relation to slavery. Not only have the enslaved been shown as political actors in their own right, but conflict over slavery has reemerged as the dominant force driving antebellum politics. Although earlier scholarship recognized slavery’s significance in the sectional conflict, it did so within a political culture framework that made the case for other factors, most notably party system equilibrium and the autonomous impact of ethno-cultural conflicts on its collapse. As noted above, that narrative emphasized sectional divergence ending in a clash of northern and southern civilizations in the Civil War. In the urbanizing northeast, so the story went, a rising middle class increasingly viewed home and work as separate spheres and from that division developed new awareness of the need to protect the vulnerable, be they their own children or slaves in the South. Meanwhile a retrograde South remained rural and committed to a different version of household relationships that privileged male mastery over dependents above all else, even profits. The second party system forestalled conflict because its cross-sectional parties managed to compromise on sectional issues. When it fell apart in the 1850s, as much a result of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party as renewed sectional agitation, the last national institutions turned sectional and disunion became inevitable.62 Although elements of this argument continue to inform recent political histories – for example, arguments about gendered political cultures draw on this juxtaposition of modern and traditional families – for the most part, historians have jettisoned this teleological view of Civil War causation and dramatically revised slavery’s place in antebellum politics and society. Slavery now appears as the spearhead of nineteenth-century American capitalism rather than its rearguard, and studies of slaveholders emphasize their vast wealth, political influence, and global connections, all factors that help explain their dominance of American political economy into the 1850s.63 Studies of the Constitution and antebellum courts have shown how American law protected property rights in slaves at the expense of other claims, such as the universality of liberty announced in the Declaration of Independence. Thereafter, slaveholders and their political representatives prevented the federal government from exercising key powers to tax personal property (slaves) or regulate interstate commerce (the domestic slave trade).64 As early as the 1787 Constitutional Convention, friends and foes of slavery recognized that slaveholders’ ability to use government in defense of their interests would be the primary struggle in national politics. In the North, slaveholders relied on “doughface” allies, primarily in the Democratic Party, to prevent what by the 1790s was an already robust antislavery movement that fully engaged partisan politics and criticized the “slave power” for stifling free-labor opportunities long before Republicans would ride that argument to victory.65 Rather than an emerging middle class that connected domestic ideology to the evils of slavery, the opposition to slavery now seems to have been driven primarily by those most directly harmed by the institution: first and foremost, African Americans, and, secondarily, poor white farmers and workers threatened by competition with the products of slave labor if not competition with enslaved workers themselves. Challenging arguments that racism dominated white workers’ politics regarding slavery, Bruce Laurie has recently shown that “there was no single working-class position on slavery; rather 120

PA RT Y P OL I T I C S A N D T HE S E C T I O NA L C R I S I S

workers exhibited diverse views from proslavery to antislavery to abolitionist, with the weight shifting toward the second two over time.” In these studies, natural rights arguments and a defense of democracy from tyranny outweighed the rhetoric of middleclass domesticity.66 From this revised picture of antislavery as older, more politically engaged, and the early source of ideas that animated the Republican Party in the 1850s, historians have moved the abolitionists from the periphery to the center of northern politics. In her innovative study of the discourse of disunion, a prime example of how public sphere debates impacted formal political processes, Elizabeth Varon traces the dialectic between the “incisive and trenchant . . . political analyses” of “radical abolitionists” and proslavery politicians who made abolitionists better known by working “relentlessly to keep them front and center in the slavery debates.” By 1858 immediate abolitionist ideas had been mainstreamed by Republican Party leaders who described disunion “as a cataclysmic collision” and a “secular vision of deliverance.”67 Similarly, James Oakes has shown the centrality of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass to the Republican cause. Referring to the title of his most recent study, Oakes explains, “the scorpion’s sting was the radical policy, borrowed from the abolitionist movement, adopted in principle by the Republican Party in the 1850s, and substantially implemented during the first year of the Civil War.”68 Meanwhile some scholars have taken the Republican critique further to argue that northern Democrats were, in fact, tools of the South. According to Michael Landis, the Democratic Party “banner may have read freedom, equality, and democracy, but the reality was an organization dedicated to slavery, concentrated wealth in the form of land and slaves, and antidemocratic minority rule.”69 For the South, historians’ new appreciation for slavery’s modernity has undermined familiar arguments that the section’s politics were governed by an ancient ethic of honor and that tensions within the section could largely be explained as a contest between forward-looking townsmen and industrious small farmers, more dominant in the Upper South, versus the tradition-bound planter elite and their retainers who reigned in the Lower South.70 The turn toward transnational and comparative history has helped to recast the slaveholders from defensive-minded parochialists to aggressive imperialists fully enmeshed in battles for international commercial and political supremacy. As scholars have demonstrated, under the Virginia dynasty, early national presidents acquired new territories for slavery, flushed out pockets of free black resistance on the border, and pursued the growing cotton trade with Europe. In the 1840s slaveholders responded to the threat of British emancipation in the Caribbean and Mexican instability by pressing for Texas’s annexation, an aggressive act that led to the acquisition of even more slave territory in the Mexican War. This pattern of slaveholder dominance in foreign policy met with growing resistance in the North and in the next decade provoked the all-out battles over slavery in the territories.71 Studies of the southern middle class have found that domestic ideology and bourgeois family values had plenty of adherents among white southern Democrats, including secessionists.72 Other scholars have highlighted the power of slaveholders in party and government and their willingness to subvert democratic principles if it protected their overriding goal of protecting and expanding slavery. For example, when, in 1850, Californians 121

F R A N K TOW E R S

rejected slavery in their new state constitution, southern politicians began abandoning their earlier unconditional support for local self-government (a version of state’s rights) in favor of federal protection for slavery in the territories as a constitutional defense of property rights. And within California proslavery forces used every trick at their disposal, including violence, to forestall Republican control of the state. Similarly, during the secession crisis proslavery leaders showed little hesitation in coercing nonslaveholding whites to back their cause, as illustrated in histories of the South Carolina upcountry and northern Alabama.73 Scholarship that emphasizes polarization over slavery has a counterpoint in literature on Civil War causation that highlights contingency and the war’s avoidability. Among the most influential of these works is Edward Ayers’s 2003 history of nearby counties in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Slavery is central to this history but instead of creating a stark divide, the institution “connected the North and South. Its dark threads were woven through Unionism as well as secession.” Giving credence to compromise proposals that would have moved ahead with earlier settlements on slavery’s territorial status, Ayers argues that “left to themselves the white people of the border would never have descended into such conflict.”74 Aside from its claims for contingency, Ayers’s analysis of slavery in American politics fits with the case for seeing slavery as a national, as opposed to sectional institution that spread its tendrils into the public life of the free states and the political alliances of its elected representatives. This perspective on slavery fits with Hahn’s advice that treating “slavery as national” allows historians “to think more fully about slavery, emancipation, and, eventually, the Civil War not so much as manifestations of fundamentally antagonistic forms of social and productive organization or of ‘irrepressible conflicts’ between a ‘free-labor North’ and a ‘slave-labor South,’ but rather as central aspects of American state formation . . .”75 Hahn’s recommendation speaks to the ways that the transformation of political history in the last two decades has made possible a new perspective on the sectional conflict. Bringing together histories of the founding era with the later antebellum decades shows continuities between an early, intense battle over slavery’s expansion that shaped later developments. Paying attention to the public sphere activism of the disenfranchised has shown the importance of antislavery to the larger world of politics and its influence on the policies of elected leaders. Meanwhile studies of political economy have shown slavery’s reach into the courts and federal administration as well as its advanced place in the capitalist economy itself. It would be convenient to end the essay on this summary of what changes have been made to study of antebellum politics since the mid-1990s, but that would distort the actual output of political history in our time and leave students wondering why they find a steady flow of books that continue the traditional focus on political leaders and big events. For example, in light of the foregoing it may be surprising to know that the last two books on late antebellum politics to win the Bancroft Prize, awarded annually to the best books in U.S. history, were a history of the Democratic Party and a study of Abraham Lincoln’s views on slavery, authored by Sean Wilentz and Eric Foner, both of whom earlier in their careers wrote on the need for political historians to broaden their focus.76 Their recent success in writing about “high” or “formal” politics should indicate the continued value of studying leaders and elections. 122

PA RT Y P OL I T I C S A N D T HE S E C T I O NA L C R I S I S

In addition to Wilentz and Foner there is an array of other fresh approaches to elite politics, such as Rachel Shelden’s study of interpersonal friendships among congressmen living in Washington’s boarding houses, or William Dusinberre’s study of President James K. Polk’s double career as a politician and slaveholder, or Amy Greenberg’s close-up look at the leaders involved in the Mexican War who prevented a postwar settlement that would have annexed all of Mexico.77 Each of these books turns to familiar sources and methods to reconsider key questions in antebellum politics – the power of party in congressional policy-making, the place of slavery in government, and character of the Mexican War. Others, following Ayers’s lead, have emphasized contingency in their close readings of Washington decision-making between Lincoln’s election and the firing on Fort Sumter six months later.78 Students will find a score of other works that revisit subjects that would have seemed old-fashioned even in the 1960s, but which remain vital to understanding democracy before the Civil War.79 In conclusion, the study of past politics has been transformed in the past twenty years. New methods, new subject matter, and new interpretations abound. At the same time an appreciation for earlier work and narrative forms persists. Rather than argue for a new synthesis or a more integrated approach to this now diverse field, it is perhaps better to celebrate the coexistence of antebellum America’s many “political histories.”

Notes 1 Frederick Jackson Turner, “Social Forces in American History,” The American Historical Review 16:2 (1911), 217–233, 231; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “The Need for a Cultural Comprehension of Political Behavior,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 72:2 (1948), 180– 198, 180; Lee Benson, “An Approach to the Scientific Study of Past Public Opinion,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 31:4 (Winter, 1967–1968), 520–567, 527. 2 Mark H. Leff, “Revisioning U.S. Political History,” The American Historical Review 100:3 (June 1995), 829–853, 852. 3 Eric Foner, “Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition,” in Eric Foner, ed., The New American History. Revised and Expanded Edition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), xi. 4 Dan Feller, “Politics and Society: Toward a Jacksonian Synthesis,” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (Summer 1990), 135–161, 158. 5 Sean Wilentz, “Society, Politics and the Market Revolution,” in Foner, The New American History, 62. 6 Seth Rockman, “Jacksonian America,” in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds., American History Now (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 53; Sean Wilentz, “American Political Histories,” OAH Magazine of History 21:2 (April 2007), 23–27, 23. 7 The term “new political history” has been used to describe several distinct intellectual schools. For example, in English historiography it refers to linguistic and cultural analysis. See Dror Wahrman, “The New Political History: A Review Essay,” Social History 21:3 (Oct. 1996), 343–354. 8 Robert A. Dahl, “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest,” The American Political Science Review 55:4 (Dec. 1961), 763–772. 9 Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966); William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Paul Kleppner et al., The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981). For case studies see Lee Benson, The Concept of

123

F R A N K TOW E R S

10 11 12 13

14 15

16

17

18

Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900 (New York: Macmillan, 1970); Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties, Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); William G. Shade, Banks or No Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics, 1832–1865 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972). Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3. Walter Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 1836–1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1955); Walter Dean Burnham, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review 59 (1965), 7–28. William E. Gienapp, “Politics Seem to Enter into Everything,” in Stephen E. Maizlisch and John J. Kushma, eds., Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840–1860 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1982), 15, 66. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American Nation State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 25 (quotation). Also see Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); and Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). Richard L. McCormick, “The Party Period and Public Life: An Exploratory Hypothesis,” Journal of American History 66:2 (Sept. 1979), 279–298, 287. For frequently cited examples from these trends see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974); Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Also see James W. Cook, “The Kids Are All Right: On the ‘Turning’ of Cultural History,” American Historical Review 117:3 (June 2012), 746–771. Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (1978; repr. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1983), 6; Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79:12 (June 1992), 11–38, 11. Also see the essays in Joyce Appleby, ed., “Republicanism in the History and Historiography of the United States,” American Quarterly 37 (Fall 1985); Robert E. Shallhope, “Republicanism, Liberalism, and Democracy: Political Culture in the Early Republic,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 102 (Jan. 1993), 99–152. Notable examples of this work include Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Mills Thornton, III, Power and Politics in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828–1856 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Baker, Affairs of Party; John Ashworth, “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats”: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1983); Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Lacy K. Ford, The Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). A helpful guide to this thesis is Marc Kruman, “The Second American Party System and the Transformation of Revolutionary Republicanism,” The Journal of the Early Republic 12:4 (Winter 1992), 509–537. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s; William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Michael F. Holt, The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004); Joel H. Silbey, Storm Over

124

PA RT Y P OL I T I C S A N D T HE S E C T I O NA L C R I S I S

19 20

21

22

23

24

25 26 27

Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Ronald P. Formisano, “Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic’s Political Culture, 1789–1840,” The American Political Science Review 68:2 (June 1974), 473–487. See “Introduction” and “Appendix 1: U.S. Election Turnout, 1820–1825,” in Daniel Peart, Era of Experimentation: American Political Practices in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), Kindle edition. Also see Jeffrey L. Paisley, The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 383–388; John Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 330–332; Donald J. Ratcliffe, The Politics of Long Division: The Birth of the Second Party System in Ohio, 1818–1828 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 9–11. Jeffrey L. Paisley, “The Cheese and the Words: Popular Political Culture and Participatory Democracy in the Early American Republic,” in Jeffrey L. Paisley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches in American Political History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 47, 49; Reeve Huston, “Rethinking the Origins of Partisan Democracy in the United States, 1795–1840,” in Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith, eds., Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015). For an overview of this literature see Reeve Huston, “Rethinking 1828: The Emergence of Competing Democracies in the United States,” in Emmanuelle Avril and Johann N. Neem, eds., Democracy, Participation, and Contestation: Civil Society, Governance and the Future of Liberal Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2015), quoted on p. 15. Also see Graham Peck, “Was There a Second Party System? Illinois as a Case Study in Antebellum Politics,” in Peart and Smith, Practicing Democracy; Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). For a recent look at these questions and full data on eligibility and turnout see Walter Dean Burnham, “Triumphs and Travails in the Study of American Voting Participation Rates, 1778–2006,” The Journal of the Historical Society 7:4 (Dec. 2007), 505–604. Also see Kenneth Winkle, “The U.S. Census as a Source in Political History,” Social Science History 15:4 (Winter 1991), 565–577; Donald J. Ratcliffe, “Voter Turnout in Early Ohio,” Journal of the Early Republic 7:3 (Autumn 1987), 223–251, 228–231; Gerald Ginsburg, “Computing Antebellum Turnout: Methods and Models,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16:4 (Spring 1986), 579–611; Ray M. Shortridge, “Estimating Voter Participation,” in Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flannigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, eds., Analyzing Electoral History: A Guide to the Study of American Voting Behavior (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981), 137–152. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 2. Population and eligibility estimates calculated from data in Burnham, “Triumphs and Travails,” 584–585, and United States, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1975), 15–19. In 1840 presidential voters comprised only 18 percent of the total population, a large share of whom were under twenty-one years of age. For current turnout rates see Michael McDonald, The United States Election Project, online database at www. electproject.org/home/voter-turnout (accessed August 27, 2016). Jean Harvey Baker, “Politics, Paradigms, and Public Culture,” Journal of American History 84:3 (Dec. 1997), 894–899, 895. Baker, Affairs of Party, 267. Also see Silbey, American Political Nation, 141. Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 10, 79, 84, 153. Mark Voss-Hubbard, “The ‘Third Party Tradition’ Reconsidered: Third Parties and American Public Life, 1830–1900,” Journal of American History 86:1 (June 1999), 121–150, 124 (quotation); Mark Voss-Hubbard, Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics before the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

125

F R A N K TOW E R S

28 Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 32. 29 Reinhard O. Johnson, The Liberty Party, 1840–1848: Antislavery Third-Party Politics in the United States (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009). 30 David Mayhew, Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 61. 31 For an influential statement of this case see Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), ch. 6. Also see Lynn L. Marshall, “The Strange Stillbirth of the Whig Party,” American Historical Review 72:2 (1967), 445–468; Michael Wallace, “Changing Concepts of Party in the United States: New York, 1815–1828,” American Historical Review 74:2 (Dec. 1968), 453–491; John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic: Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 326–327. For a recent restatement of this thesis see Jeffrey S. Selinger, Embracing Dissent: Political Violence and Party Development in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 84. 32 Gerald Leonard, The Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 11. Also see Robert E. Shalhope, The Baltimore Bank Riot: Political Upheaval in Antebellum Maryland (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 111, 147. 33 Brooke, Columbia Rising, 340, 449, 451; Kathleen D. McCarthy, American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society, 1700–1865 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 123, 192. 34 Howard W. Allen and Kay Warren Allen, “Vote Fraud and Data Validity,” in Clubb et al., Analyzing Electoral History, 153–193, esp. 179. Also see Silbey, American Political Nation, 148; Gienapp, “Politics Seem to Enter into Everything,” 26; Gary W. Cox and J. Morgan Kousser, “Turnout and Rural Corruption: New York as a Test Case,” American Journal of Political Science 25 (Nov. 1981), 669–687; and Walter Dean Burnham, “Comment on Bensel: ‘But the Bumblebee Flies Anyway, Doesn’t It?’” Studies in American Political Development 17 (Spring 2003), 28–33. 35 David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 184; Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 123–124; Stephen A. West, From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850–1915 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 47; Christopher Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 130; Richard Frank Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Law, Identity and the Polling Place (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 8, 290 (quotations). 36 Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 131; Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001), 295; Shalhope, The Baltimore Bank Riot, 52; Jon Grinspan, The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Kindle edition, ch. 1. 37 Bensel, American Ballot Box, ch. 2. 38 Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department and the Nineteenth Century City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 94; Grimsted, American Mobbing; Olsen, Political Culture and Secession, 147. 39 Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955). 40 William J. Novak, “The Myth of the Weak American State,” American Historical Review 113:3 (June 2008), 752–772, 755–756; Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins

126

PA RT Y P OL I T I C S A N D T HE S E C T I O NA L C R I S I S

41

42

43 44

45

46 47

48 49

50 51

of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4. Richard R. John, “Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party,” in Jacobs et al., The Democratic Experiment, 56; Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Novak, “Myth of the Weak American State,” 764–770; Brian Balogh, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 279. For an example of path dependency see Gautham Rao, “The Early American State ‘In Action’: The Federal Marine Hospitals, 1789–1860,” in James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer, eds., Boundaries of the State in U.S. History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780– 1920,” American Historical Review 89:3 (June 1984), 620–647, 622. A landmark study is Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). For an overview see the introduction to Carol Lasser and Stacey Robertson, Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010). Ryan, Women in Public; Lori D. Ginzburg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Nancy Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Ellen Carol Dubois Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). Between 1776 and 1807 New Jersey allowed propertied women to vote. See Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, “‘The Petticoat Electors’: Woman’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776– 1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 12:2 (Summer 1992): 159–193, esp. 160. Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Voices without Votes: Women and Politics in Antebellum New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010), 50–63; Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 86. Also see Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); John F. Marszalek, The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny, and Sex in Andrew Jackson’s White House (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997); Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). Brooke, Columbia Rising, 4–5; Ryan, Civic Wars, 4. Also see Baker, “Politics, Paradigms, and Public Culture,” 899. An influential starting point for this scholarship is Craig J. Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere (Boston: MIT Press, 1992). Albrecht Koschnik, “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Kyle G. Volk, Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 6–7; Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 66, 71. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 82. Quotations in Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press,

127

F R A N K TOW E R S

52 53

54

55

56

57

58 59

60 61

62

2007), 190, 848. Also see Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 13–14. Michael Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 7. Rebecca Edwards, “Domesticity Versus Manhood Rights: Republicans, Democrats and ‘Family Values’ Politics, 1856–1896,” in Jacobs et al., The Democratic Experiment, 176, 186. Also see Nichole Etcheson, The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787–1861 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Melanie Susan Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Wallace Hettle, The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum America Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12. Stacey M. Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists of the Old Northwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 48. Also see Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women and the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 7. Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 70, 128, 225. Also see Lee Ann Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). An older vein of historiography has explored African-American engagement with partisan politics. See, for example, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” an essay written in 1941 by Charles H. Wesley, reprinted in John R. McKivigan, ed., Abolitionism and American Politics and Government (New York: Garland, 1999), 160–202. Also see Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 2. Also see Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin, 2012), 6, 9; Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 10. Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Douglas R. Egerton, “The Slaves’ Election: Frémont, Freedom, and the Slave Conspiracies of 1856,” Civil War History 61:1 (March 2015), 35–63, 63; William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 189; Donald E. Reynolds, Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Andre M. Fleche, The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Timothy Mason Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); Jay Sexton, “Anglophobia in Nineteenth-Century Elections, Politics and Diplomacy,” in Gareth Davies and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., America at the Ballot Box: Elections and Political History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Caleb W. McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013). For critiques of this perspective see Edward L. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (New York: Norton, 2005), 131–144; Bruce Laurie, “Workers,

128

PA RT Y P OL I T I C S A N D T HE S E C T I O NA L C R I S I S

63

64

65

66

67 68

69 70 71

Abolitionists, and the Historians: A Historiographical Perspective,” Labor: Studies in Working Class Histories of the Americas 5:4 (Winter 2008), 17–55; Frank Towers, “Partisans, New History, and Modernization: The Historiography of the Civil War’s Causes, 1861–2011,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1:2 (June 2011), 237–264. For an overview see Sven Beckert et al., “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History 101:2 (2014), 503–536; and Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,’’ Journal of Southern History 75 (Aug. 2009), 627–650. For a critique of this scholarship that surveys its findings see John J. Clegg, “Capitalism and Slavery,” Critical Historical Studies 2:2 (Fall 2015), 281–304. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009); George van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Leonard Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); and Matthew Mason and John Craig Hammond, eds., Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). Bruce Laurie, “Workers, Abolitionists, and the Historians: A Historiographical Perspective,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 5:4 (2008), 17–55, 53 (quotation). For a synthesis of recent scholarship on antislavery politics see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 461–499. Also see James Oliver Horton and Louise E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origin of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Jonathan Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery. Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 15, 319–320. James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014), 18. Also see James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); and James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013). Michael Todd Landis, Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 3. For an influential example of this interpretation see William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990–2007). Edward B. Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Matthew Pratt Gutterl, American

129

F R A N K TOW E R S

72

73

74

75 76 77

78

79

Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of the Union: The Cotton South, Federal Politics, and the Atlantic World, 1783–1861 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). John W. Quist, Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998); Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Frank J. Byrne, Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006); Frank Towers, “Navigating ‘the Muddy Stream of Party Politics’: Sectional Politics and the Southern Bourgeoisie,” in Jonathan Wells and Jennifer R. Green, eds., The Southern Middle Class in the Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 180–201. Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Christopher Childers, The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012); Leonard Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2007); West, From Yeoman to Redneck; Margaret Storey, Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004). Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859– 1863 (New York: Norton, 2003), xix–xx, 187. Also see Adam I. P. Smith, “Beyond the Realignment Synthesis: The 1860 Election Reconsidered,” in Davies and Zelizer, America at the Ballot Box. Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, 14–15. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010). William Dusinberre, Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James K. Polk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Rachel A. Shelden, Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Knopf, 2012). Nelson D. Lankford, Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 (New York: Viking, 2007), 236; Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 6; William J. Cooper, We Have the War upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860–April 1861 (New York: Knopf, 2012); David Goldfield, America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011). For a critique of this scholarship see James L. Huston, “Did the Tug Have to Come? A Critique of New Revisionism of the Secession Winter,” Civil War History 62:3 (Sept. 2016), 247–283. Nichole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Douglas R. Egerton, Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010). For a valuable traditional documentary editing project see the multivolume Papers of Andrew Jackson edited by Daniel Feller and published by the University of Tennessee Press.

130

8 LITE RATU R E A N D C ULTURE DUR I N G T HE AME RIC AN RE N A I S S A N C E John Ernest

The literary period known as the American Renaissance isn’t what it used to be, though perhaps scholars are getting closer to understanding what it actually was. Now generally considered to cover virtually the whole of the antebellum era, the title American Renaissance, as applied to literature, was first used to characterize the five-year period from 1850 to 1855, and it was used to refer to the interrelated work of five writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman.1 This first and immensely influential characterization was the work of F. O. Matthiessen, whose monumental study of this short period of imaginative writing, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, was published in 1941. So successful was Matthiessen in making his case that one hardly even thinks to ask whether there was something that would be deservingly remembered as an American Renaissance. Rather, the questions raised over time about Matthiessen’s formulation of the period have been about the length of this momentous development in American cultural and literary history and the credentials of the writers who should be included as vital exemplars of this flowering of American letters. In time, though, more substantial challenges emerged, but even then, the term American Renaissance proved durable. Books and articles gave us “the American Renaissance Reconsidered,” directed us to “The Other American Renaissance,” took us “South of the American Renaissance,” reconstituted the American Renaissance, rewrote the American Renaissance, even questioned “What American Renaissance?” and eventually called out in resistance, “Death to the American Renaissance.” But the thing just wouldn’t die.2 The main title of Matthiessen’s book, a title to which he himself was not particularly committed, has been extended far beyond Matthiessen’s intentions, but the title still honors Matthiessen’s work in that it continues to mark a significant development in American intellectual and literary history.3 Authors have been added to Matthiessen’s original list of five extraordinary literary lights, and the Renaissance has been extended far beyond the five-year span which initially sparked Matthiessen’s interest. One might wonder, of course, how far you can expand a period of literary achievement, and how fully you can populate it, and still have it operate as a remarkable Renaissance, but the term has held, even when it has been used simply to characterize the antebellum period broadly, from the 1830s to the Civil War, with some writers even slipping in beyond the war. In all cases, of course, Matthiessen’s authority was both acknowledged and challenged, and his influential book 131

J O HN ER N E S T

was taken as the door one needed to either open, widen, or break down – all of which actions would result in one entering, in effect, either as friend or foe, the literary and ideological realm Matthiessen identified as the American Renaissance, there to rearrange the furniture and reset the agenda. So numerous were the extensions of or challenges to Matthiessen’s authority in the 1980s, in fact, that in 1991 Michael J. Colacurcio published a review essay titled “The American-Renaissance Renaissance,” one of the best considerations available both of Matthiessen’s book and of the numerous books and articles it either inspired or provoked.4 In this essay, I want to explore the literary landscape of the American Renaissance by following Matthiessen’s map, but I want to suggest that what is most striking about Matthiessen’s book is that his map didn’t lead him to different terrain. I want to look at the American Renaissance that Matthiessen didn’t see but should have, and I want to suggest that what makes this period so illuminating is ultimately its resistance to a stable framework for literary assessment. The decade or so preceding the Civil War was one in which the very possibility of stable discourse and sound philosophy was threatened, a time when language was contorted beyond the breaking point in support of an incoherent culture – a time, in short, when the creative possibilities of literary expression were most needed, since all other forms of expression were well in the process of being thoroughly corrupted. Why did so many works of “imaginative vitality,” to borrow Matthiessen’s phrase, emerge during the decade (or decades, depending on who is defining the period) before the Civil War?5 The answer, I suggest, is that more mundane forms of expression were rendered meaningless. From Supreme Court decisions to regional debates to the wonders of Walden Pond, public discourse, from philosophical declarations to legal applications, was so corrupted by the political divisions, the racial fictions, and the gendered assumptions of the time that imaginative vitality, by both oppressors and oppressed, was the only currency with any significant power of purchase in the land. Small wonder, then, that so many writers responded to the challenge with imagination and force. When reality itself can’t be trusted, literature’s ability to create imaginative worlds becomes especially valuable – and when language loses its hold on meaning, the ability to get at meaning through creative rhetorical manipulations is in high demand. *** It is important to remember that Matthiessen’s primary contribution was to impose order, a unified literary program with a clear set of philosophical priorities, on what had been a cacophony of voices. “Matthiessen’s striking evocation of a complex ‘moment’ of emergent literary greatness quite evidently created,” Colacurcio observes, in the space formerly occupied by an assortment of variously interesting but oddly motivated and generically peculiar writers, a full-blown literary “period,” with a rationale (or at least a diagram of relation) so compelling it has come to seem inevitable: a fact of intellectual nature rather than a convenience of literary study.6 Most of the debates, at times even battles, that have followed have had to do with how the significant relations of the past might be diagramed, and to what purposes – but the idea of the period, however broadened in time or stretched in philosophical reach, has 132

L I T ER AT UR E A N D C U LT U R E

remained. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Matthiessen’s formulations have been subjected to the natural forces of the critical ecosystem. When a number of scholars challenged Matthiessen’s ideological tendencies and brought new literary theories to bear upon the literature of the period, Frederick C. Crews responded with a famously annoyed characterization of such “new Americanists,” and the result was, eventually, a series of books edited by one of Matthiessen’s challengers called “New Americanists” – and in the passing of time, Crews’s review was itself reviewed, in a review essay titled “Imagining Authorship in America: ‘Whose American Renaissance?’ Revisited,” published in American Literary History, a journal formed in 1989 partly to revitalize a field represented most prominently by the rather staid journal American Literature, which for years had seemed to be grounded firmly in Matthiessen’s 1940s, and which itself was redesigned and revitalized at roughly the same time.7 Yet another story of reevaluation and dispersals extends from one of the studies included in Crews’s review, and one of which he largely approved, David S. Reynolds’s Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. As the title suggests, Reynolds’s book largely maintains Matthiessen’s pantheon of great authors, but Reynolds looks to the immense and varied field of popular writing of the time, demonstrating that such writings often proved remarkably influential for writers like Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau, to which Matthiessenian list Reynolds adds Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe. Critiqued, extended, attacked, and continually renewed, Matthiessen’s concept of an American Renaissance is a center that has largely held against the centrifugal force of both methods and texts to be considered and adopted. Let’s begin by taking seriously the heart of Matthiessen’s argument – that those works he associated with the American Renaissance are important for what they reveal about U.S. cultural history (and perhaps about the role of literature in guiding or explaining U.S. cultural history). Establishing the framework for his study, Matthiessen observes, “The one common denominator of my five writers, uniting even Hawthorne and Whitman, was their devotion to the possibilities of democracy.”8 This seems a fair statement about Matthiessen’s five writers, and it is certainly a compelling consideration when announcing an “American Renaissance” rather than an outgrowth of a significant development in global literary history. And when I call this the heart of Matthiessen’s argument, I do so advisedly. Matthiessen’s preface – the short essay that has defined the terms of almost every challenge to the authority of his book – ends with an affecting story, one worth quoting at length: I have kept in mind the demands made on the scholar by Louis Sullivan, who found a great stimulus for his architecture in the functionalism of Whitman. “If, as I hold,” Sullivan wrote, “true scholarship is of the highest usefulness because it implies the possession and application of the highest type of thought, imagination, and sympathy, his works must so reflect his scholarship as to prove that it has drawn him toward his people, not away from them; that his scholarship has been used as a means toward attaining their end, hence his. That his scholarship has been applied for the good and the enlightenment of all the people, not for the pampering of a class. His works must prove, in short (and the burden of proof is on him), that he is a citizen, not a lackey, a true exponent of 133

J O HN ER N E S T

democracy, not a tool of the most insidious form of anarchy . . . In a democracy there can be but one fundamental test of citizenship, namely: “Are you using such gifts as you possess for or against the people?” These standards are the inevitable and right extension of Emerson’s demands in The American Scholar. The ensuing volume has value only to the extent that it comes anywhere near measuring up to them.9 It’s worth considering the possibility that Matthiessen was entirely sincere in ending his preface, and launching his study, with this dedication to the possibilities of democracy. He turned to these writers as if to identify the key to national possibilities, and he approached his study as if to prove himself worthy of handling that key. Later scholars would note that Matthiessen’s particular brand of democratic faith was shaped by cold war ideological undercurrents, but it would be dangerous to claim that the scholars of any era can be free of their own era’s ideological dynamics, so we need to think carefully about how to engage in the ideological dynamics of Matthiessen’s analysis. To say this is to acknowledge that Matthiessen is invested in the writers he studies, to the extent of identifying with them. But what is particularly interesting about his approach is not simply that he acknowledges this identification, this influence, but that he claims to influence the writers in turn. “Works of art,” he states, “can be best perceived if we do not approach them only through the influences that shaped them, but if we also make use of what we inevitably bring from our own lives.”10 He lingers over this point to emphasize the dual trajectories of influence, forward and back, sketching out a simple but significant point about the dynamics of historical study. So the question of democratic commitment opens, in this way, to a question of literary greatness. Does the literature of the past inspire us to live up to the promise of democracy? And is our inspired response rewarded when we focus it on the literature of the past? Lesser literature, one can imagine Matthiessen saying, might provoke great thoughts – but, once provoked, can the literature sustain and reward the attention of the inspired citizen-scholar? Considering that question can lead us, in turn, to Matthiessen’s understanding of how such authors are shaped. “An artist’s use of language,” he asserts, “is the most sensitive index to cultural history, since a man can articulate only what he is, and what he has been made by the society of which he is a willing or an unwilling part.”11 The question is not only where great literature comes from, but where great writers come from – and Matthiessen’s American Renaissance is, then, a time which so shaped its artists as to lead to a compact period of particularly visionary democratic literature. What is interesting, though, is that the period that produced what Matthiessen envisioned as visionary testaments to the power of democracy was a period marked by sectional and racial divisions and crises, a time when the nation’s denial of its founding ideals was especially pronounced. The decade began with the Compromise of 1850, an attempt to resolve sectional conflicts that served largely to heighten them. The Compromise included an updated and strengthened Fugitive Slave Act – an act which, many northerners argued, required all American citizens to become slave catchers. The law placed the issue of runaway slaves under federal jurisdiction, allowing federal commissioners to force citizens to aid in the recapture of those slaves who reached the North while also denying fugitive slaves trial by jury or the right to testify on their own 134

L I T ER AT UR E A N D C U LT U R E

behalf. The Compromise of 1850 was followed by other measures that added to the violations of African-American rights and civil security. In 1854, Congress approved the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed voting citizens of those regions (and the vote was, of course, restricted) to determine themselves whether their territory would enter the Union as a slave or a free state. This act led to increased violence in the territories, and contributed to the formation of the Republican Party as an antislavery political force. In 1857, the Supreme Court announced its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that African Americans had no rights which white Americans were obligated to respect. The political and ideological debates that followed this decision helped to further define the already sharp divisions that were leading the nation towards open conflict. When John Brown led his group of black and white soldiers in the raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, what had long been an open if localized war became sharply focused. John Brown became a white martyr to a cause that had, by this time, a long history of soldiers and martyrs. In that year, the Anglo-African Magazine, an African-American publication in New York, published the public reports of an early revolutionary with those of a later one, placing Nat Turner next to John Brown, black militancy next to white, and called for Americans to recognize the inevitable struggle ahead and to decide what role they would play in that struggle. The time had come, argued many, to complete the still-unfinished work of the American Revolution. Thus narrated, the story of this consequential period in American history still speaks heroically, if only conditionally, about the promise of democracy – that is, if the martyred John Brown should find his Battle Hymn, and the second American Revolution should be realized – but it also speaks of the systemic attempt to deny that promise, at least so far as black Americans were concerned. And that is a story, and a constituency, that Matthiessen almost entirely avoids, beyond noting that he could have written a book called The Age of Fourier which would have treated “all the radical movements of the period,” stressing “the fact that 1852 witnessed not only the appearance of Pierre but of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”12 But there is a strong case to make for considering the 1850s to be the decade when the ideological contradictions required for racial exclusion and the sectional divisions grounded in the system of slavery came to a point, the decade when black America, enslaved and free, started to become a visible and pressing presence on the national stage. Understood in such terms, the American Renaissance would still be a period grounded in the 1850s that extends backwards, to at least 1830, and forward, to and beyond the Civil War. Indeed, one of Matthiessen’s primary claims about his chosen writers applies with even greater justice to those African-American writers diligently (and eloquently) working for the abolition of slavery and the recognition of human rights. Matthiessen said of his writers, “They felt that it was incumbent upon their generation to give fulfillment to the potentialities freed by the Revolution, to provide a culture commensurate with America’s political opportunity.”13 Can it be that any of our canonical writers have a better claim to this grand mission than, say, Frederick Douglass, or than Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women who drafted and signed the Declaration of Sentiments, a document based on the Declaration of Independence, at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848? An American Renaissance defined by such writers would still be decidedly a moment in U.S. intellectual history that would influence virtually all that follows, and it has proven to be a period very much shaped by the perspectives we bring to it. 135

J O HN ER N E S T

But reenvisioning the American Renaissance in such terms is not merely a matter of supplementing Matthiessen’s work, adding to his list of authors, questioning his ideological allegiances, and pressing against his emphasis on symbolism and other literary devices. It might be envisioned as a matter of considering Frederick Douglass as the guiding light of this period, rather than Ralph Waldo Emerson, but even that would not quite do the period justice. I have in mind, instead, an approach to literary history inspired by Mary Helen Washington’s provocative Presidential Address to the American Studies Association on October 29, 1997, “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies if You Put African American Studies at the Center?”14 Similarly, what happens when we place African-American history at the center of American history through the antebellum years and from that perspective construct an understanding of literary history? What happens if we endeavor not merely to rearrange, recontextualize, or enlarge Matthiessen’s literary temple, but to reconstruct it from the ground up? What if we attempt to piece together an understanding of the American Renaissance that helps us to understand not an idealized but an actual American history, one in which African-American and white women writers were particularly savvy contributors? For a great many scholars and enthusiasts of American literary history, the response to such an approach is likely to be, “Well, there goes the neighborhood.” To be sure, the complaint would not be a matter of including African-American writers in our understanding of literary history. The complaint would be registered on the grounds of literary quality, with Matthiessen leading the charge. Of the various points Matthiessen makes in setting up his argument and method for American Renaissance, the one on which he is most forceful is his insistence that the literary critic’s “chief responsibility” in the consideration of books is to “evaluate them in accordance with the enduring requirements for great art.”15 The critic’s greatest obligation, Matthiessen insists, “is to examine an author’s resources of language and of genres, in a word, to be preoccupied with form.”16 For many, this consideration places women’s literature, by far the most popular literature of this period, out of the running for inclusion in the significant works of the American Renaissance, and it certainly eliminates almost all African-American writers, male and female. What Matthiessen and others have looked for in great literature are works that show the greatness of the culture and/or the time by transcending that culture and those times. With rare exceptions – Jane Tompkins, most powerfully – most of the debates about or expansions of Matthiessen’s gallery of great writers have generally shared his understanding of “the enduring requirements for great art” and have found certain groups of writers, with rare exceptions, lacking. Even beyond battles over the American Renaissance, the artistic merits of early African-American literature have long been a subject of considerable debate. Scholars have regularly pronounced, sometimes in print and often in conversation, William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) a bad novel or Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) a subliterary text, and have barely noticed the dozens of texts that have thus far not received the level of critical attention enjoyed by Brown, Wilson, and a relative handful of other African-American writers of this time. For many readers of even those texts that have been accepted into the canon, what makes the early writers representative of African Americans generally are the conditions under which they lived – and what makes them remarkable is that they reached a level of achievement that meets the standards of those 136

L I T ER AT UR E A N D C U LT U R E

who enjoyed the benefits of education and a privileged life. As John Reilly observed long ago, Despite other variety, the most prevalent assumption among those who think about Afro-American literary history – whether in articles, books, or classroom presentations – is that the success of literature can be discerned in its utility as social documentation, an assumption to which is sometimes joined severe judgment of works composed, it is presumed, before Afro-American authors had the option to choose art over combative writing. In other words, works of literature are dissolved into their referents.17 One result has been an approach to African-American literary history that has focused on the development of literary talent as measured by increasingly recognizable achievements in established genres, a romantic narrative of African-American writers who have endured considerable oppression but still have persevered in their literary ambitions until their achievements were established, sometime in the late twentieth century, beyond all reasonable doubt. Another result has been an approach to literary history that has focused on an imagined progression from necessarily political writing in the nineteenth century (antislavery publications, for example) to increasingly more “universal” themes grounded in black history and experience. It is hardly surprising, after all, that early anthologies of AfricanAmerican literature offered only a brief sampling of nineteenth-century publications, that the percentage of African-American writers in American literature anthologies today increases as the volume nears the present, or that even recent anthologies of AfricanAmerican literature struggle to represent, in their subdivisions and other organizational schema, the difficult tension between the political and the aesthetic that has been the hallmark of African-American literature. But when considering such dismissals of early African-American literature, as well as similar dismissals of nineteenth-century white women’s literature, it is good to remember that we are operating in a critical tradition that has been so largely defined by a study that associates literary greatness with the promise of democracy and that measures scholarship itself by the “one fundamental test of citizenship, namely: Are you using such gifts as you possess for or against the people?” Certainly, writings by white women and by AfricanAmerican women and men meet that standard, and do so more powerfully and successfully than does the work of any number of canonical American writers. There is good reason, in other words, to conceptualize the American Renaissance as an age in which the national character and the promise of democracy were being exposed in the period’s most powerful and influential literature – with a broad and historically-informed understanding of what constitutes power and influence in literary and cultural history. It was a time when women were refining the means for negotiating their restricted social positions and for asserting their moral authority on the national stage through their writings, and a time when African Americans were working to preserve the very possibility of national character through their creative use of the disruptive and restorative potential of literary discourse. For my money, the defining statements of the time come not from Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau, or Whitman, but from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick 137

J O HN ER N E S T

Douglass. Published first in serial form from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852 in an antislavery newspaper, The National Era, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in book form on March 20, 1852 and was an immediate sensation. The first edition of 5,000 was sold out within two days; within a year, over 300,000 had been sold, and by the end of the decade over one million copies, in various editions and translated into more than fifteen languages, had been sold internationally, with actual readership extending far beyond sales. Such success was unprecedented. As Joy Jordan-Lake has observed, “few books have had more impact upon the history of the United States” than did Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and “few have evoked such powerful emotional responses – and few continue, scores of years later, to do so.”18 At both the actual and the symbolic center of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the transplanted white northerner Miss Ophelia is the recipient of a brief but revealing lecture from her slaveholding cousin Augustine St. Clare, who explains, Planters, who have money to make by it, – clergymen, who have planters to please, – politicians who want to rule by it, – may warp and bend language and ethics to a degree that shall astonish the world at their ingenuity; they can press nature and the Bible, and nobody knows what else, into the service; but after all, neither they nor the world believe in it one particle the more. It comes from the devil, that’s the short of it; and to my mind, it’s a pretty respectable specimen of what he can do in his own line.19 In a nation demonstrably fond of its own mythology, one even capable of producing visionary literature devoted to “the promise of democracy,” it is certainly worth noting the extent to which theology, the Constitution, the legal system, the economic system, and social manners were all implicated in the corrupting priorities of the system of slavery – from virtually insane legal distinctions and processes to convenient cultural fictions for justifying economic and cultural dominance and social status. And what follows from this corrupting process? Douglass responds in his most famous oration, his response to an invitation to speak in Rochester, New York, with an address presented in Corinthian Hall on July 5, 1852 – a speech that transforms the fourth of July from a day for celebrating liberty to a day that reveals to the slave, “more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”20 Unlike Stowe’s novel, Douglass’s “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July” would be recognized as a great literary achievement by anyone, regardless of their approach to literature – but it was preeminently a speech about the corruption not only of all principle but of language itself, and therefore a speech that argued for the primary American responsibility to call things by their proper names: “The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie.”21 These two statements – the first in one of the nineteenth century’s most demonstrably influential novels, and the second in one of the nineteenth century’s most powerful orations, both in 1852 – identify the true character of the age that we would eventually come to celebrate as the American Renaissance. If it was a period that saw a stunning flowering of literary art, it was also a period that saw one of history’s great philosophical crises. A nation that had identified itself as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, a nation 138

L I T ER AT UR E A N D C U LT U R E

founded on and devoted to the written word, a nation that proudly proclaimed certain philosophical principles as its raison d’être, was also a nation that engaged in the systematic violation of reason, principle, and discursive stability, a nation overseeing the breakdown of all meaning precisely because it had claimed for itself the challenge of the meaningful articulation of the purpose of human progress. The representatives of the dominant culture in the nineteenth century committed what amounts to a collective act of suicide, destroying the ideals, the religious and political institutions, and even the language to which they claimed devotion and on which they based their identity. The mix of economic crises and opportunities, the demographic changes that came with national expansion and increased social mobility, the fertile ground for utopian schemes and new religions, the development of printing technologies and print distribution methods, and the complex matrix of relations and tensions engendered by the economic, theological, and scientific requirements for the system of slavery all contributed to the development of a powerfully incoherent country accustomed to insisting on its preeminent coherence. Small wonder, then, that the literature of this period variously reflects and responds to this crisis. Even the writers Matthiessen identifies lead one in this direction: the Melville who wrote “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and especially The Confidence-Man; the Hawthorne who arguably embedded a murder mystery into his novel of a failed utopian experiment, The Blithedale Romance; the Whitman who emerges as much from the social terrain of Melville’s Confidence-Man as from Emerson’s Poet; the Emerson who wanders through the existential crisis of “Experience”; and the Thoreau who looks for philosophical purity by distancing himself from the always-encroaching world, and finds only a tenuous solace. These and other writers draw one into a powerfully threatening time – not one that speaks of the promise of democracy so much as philosophical and social chaos, the democracy that emerges from disorder. And it is exactly this situation that complicates the question of artistic assessment. Writers operated within the turbulent dynamics of this period, and their tools included the corrupted discourse and loaded social constructs of the time. Thus it is that some of the most powerful responses to Matthiessen have been by scholars who have insisted on different measures for assessing literary value. Particularly since the 1980s, feminist scholars have challenged the dismissal of the most popular literature of this period, writings by white women – often by way of a deeply historicist approach to nineteenth-century American literary history. Jane Tompkins, for example, in her groundbreaking study Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (1985), simply turned the tables on traditional standards of literary merit by way of an “embrace of the conventional” that led her “to value everything that criticism had taught me to despise: the stereotyped character, the sensational plot, the trite expression.”22 Tompkins observes that “stereotypes are the instantly recognizable representatives of overlapping racial, sexual, national, ethnic, economic, social, political, and religious categories; they convey enormous amounts of cultural information in an extremely condensed form” (xvi). Indeed, Tompkins argues, “as the telegraphic expression of complex clusters of value, stereotyped characters are essential to popularly successful narrative.”23 It is a compelling argument, one capable of transforming one’s reading of a great number of literary works, and perhaps of addressing the inability of scholars, still today, to bridge the divide between immensely popular and academically respected writings. 139

J O HN ER N E S T

Tompkins’s primary example supports her case powerfully. Often dismissed for its sentimentalism and its stock characters, no novel more fully exemplifies the force of the literary dynamics that Tompkins studies than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and no other novel manages to present characters and plot lines that so fully serve the “multilayered representative function” which for Tompkins and many others defines the nineteenth-century American literary landscape. Indeed, Stowe’s reliance on convention and stereotypes helped her place her novel at the center of the national stage. A good part of what distinguishes this novel is that Stowe represents struggles over slavery and the integrity of the white Christian republic by way of characters who represented the various cultural types that had come to inhabit the American social and literary landscape: earthy, inscrutable blacks, white southerners troubled by slavery, white southerners who aggressively defend both slavery and the South, white northerners who assume the moral superiority of the North, antislavery Quakers, and submissive, loyal, and pious slaves. Troubling these categories and driving both the novel’s plot and its moral trajectory are various characters who do not quite fit into their assigned or assumed racial categories – a white southerner who is described as a “non-sequitur,” light-complexioned African Americans who give voice to national ideals, and a U.S. Senator whose views on slavery are transformed by the very story that Stowe relates in the novel. The novel, in effect, explores a culture being changed by slavery – and as slave traders rise to the level of gentlemen and the most fully realized Christian characters die before the novel’s conclusion, Stowe asks her readers, in effect, where they fit into this new world.24 While many readers rightly observe that Stowe, at her best, largely deals in what historian George M. Fredrickson has called “romantic racialism” – the idealization of the black race as more spiritual, more emotional, and even more feminine (in accordance with gender stereotypes of the century) than the Anglo-Saxon race – the novel’s movement from stereotypes to non-sequiturs captures well the challenge faced by African-American writers of the time.25 African Americans regularly found themselves reduced to stereotypes and caricatures, bound within the narrative borders of the few stories white America was prepared to tell or hear about them, and their challenge was to develop approaches to telling a more complex truth in a culture that maintained strict controls over allowable evidence, witnesses, and conclusions. I have in mind here Dwight McBride’s important meditation on this question in Impossible Witnesses, in which he explores “the rhetorical markers that constitute the terrain of abolitionist discourse” and locates autobiographical performance within the “discursive terrain” of the transatlantic antislavery movement.26 McBride asks, “What does it mean for a slave to bear witness to, or to tell the ‘truth’ about, slavery?”; and he answers that, since abolitionist discourse “produced the occasion for bearing witness,” it regularly prepared audiences for “an experience that had already been theorized and prophesied.”27 “In this way,” McBride observes, “the slave serves as a kind of fulfillment of the prophecy of abolitionist discourse . . . Before the slave ever speaks, we know the slave; we know what his or her experience is, and we know how to read that experience.”28 Or as Frances Smith Foster puts it, “while white abolitionists were eager to privilege the authenticity of black writers’ descriptions of slavery, it was only insofar as their descriptions confirmed what white readers had already accepted as true.”29 African-American writers, then, needed to work through the stories readers were prepared to understand to get at the stories that needed to be told. Put a different way, 140

L I T ER AT UR E A N D C U LT U R E

they needed to work with corrupted discourse to get at truth. One might well apply to early African-American literature generally what William Andrews identifies as a distinctive feature of African-American autobiographies published from 1760 to 1810: narrative “seams or cuts” that appear “when facts are revealed – made tellable – in a way subversive to the text,” moments when “the presence of colorless white screens is deconstructed long enough for the absence to call attention to itself and demand a creative hearing for the silences in the text.”30 Gradually, scholars seem to be making the turn away from simply defending the apparent roughness of nineteenth-century AfricanAmerican autobiographical writings to exploring their often strategic seams and their crafted silences. But scholars are only beginning to appreciate the extent to which AfricanAmerican writers worked as cultural editors, turning an incoherent world back on itself. In Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and William Wells Brown’s Clotel, for example, we have two texts that mix freely the conventions of fiction and autobiography. The blending of voices and techniques, and the mix of conventions associated with established forms of writing, guide readers into a world of noisy contentions, and the identity of the narrator (indeed, even the cultural self-positioning that the author achieves by way of the narrative) is revealed largely through a deafening mix of voices. As Frances Smith Foster observes in her groundbreaking study of antebellum slave narratives, “Writers had long discovered that elements of mimesis, romance, history, and myth could be combined in ways which far exceeded the advantages offered by any one structure. The slave narrators, likewise, created a form which was an amalgam of traditional and innovative techniques.”31 A great deal of African-American writing of this period simply doesn’t fit into the generic categories often used to assess (and, ultimately, dismiss) this body of literature. Instead, this body of literature argues for the need to deconstruct, to disorient, to reveal through crafted silences, to expose through jarring juxtapositions. In his novella The Heroic Slave, Frederick Douglass has his narrator promise his readers only a history constructed of “glimpses” into a subject “covered with mystery” and “enveloped in darkness.” “Speaking of marks, traces, possibles, and probabilities,” the narrator states at the end of his introductory comments, “we come before our readers.”32 African-American writers regularly found that they could come before their readers in no other way. Some of the most powerful literature of the period now known as the American Renaissance engages in the messiness of history, and our best approach to this period is not to single out a handful of writers who seem to be corresponding with one another from their respective mountaintops but rather to take in the broad range of writings produced during this turbulent time. In Impossible Witnesses, McBride notes that his research involves “literary texts, political pamphlets, speeches, essays, newspaper articles, historical and scholarly treatises on both the institution and the morality of slavery, and, of course, slave narratives.”33 “This broad-ranging approach to understanding abolitionism,” McBride asserts, “rather than assuming a hierarchy among these forms, is concerned with the production of meaning that is possible when one considers the interplay of these forms taken together in the terrain that is abolitionist discourse.”34 While I have argued that the disputed terrain of slavery and “freedom” is the defining terrain of this period, I would suggest as well that McBride’s advice can be extended to any social, political, philosophical, and aesthetic concern of the time. The American Renaissance was, among other things, a time of great developments, technological and otherwise, in printing, publishing, and 141

J O HN ER N E S T

distribution. If one is interested in what makes American literature of this time distinct – and, indeed, if one is interested in following the transformation of “the literary” during this period – one needs to consider a great number of publications. When one does so, one is likely to appreciate why a great deal of literature that some would be inclined to dismiss has stubbornly endured over the years, and one might well emerge with an understanding of the American Renaissance as a glorious mess – a literature that speaks for “the promise of democracy” by enacting rather than simply representing that promise. Rather than telling a unified story, the literature of this time speaks through its tensions, through the contending forces of multiple perspectives, of fundamentally opposing assumptions, of diverging priorities, of warring truths. The northern historical fiction of James Fenimore Cooper speaks with and against the southern fiction of William Gilmore Simms; the crafted deceptions of Edgar Allen Poe work to secure the racial assumptions that the strategic deceptions of William Wells Brown work to expose. Fanny Fern’s leaves were as much a revolutionary force, in the newspaper business, in the art of the personality-driven sketch, as were Walt Whitman’s leaves of grass in poetry, though we have yet to appreciate the connection of Fern’s blogs to those of our own time. Maria Stewart, William G. Allen, Frederick Douglass, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun all addressed the possibility of peculiarly American contributions to the art of oratory (probably one of the nineteenth century’s most prominent genres in both white American and African-American literary history), but they are seldom read together – not even Stewart, Allen, and Douglass, all African-American orators. Melville’s The Confidence-Man might be productively read not only with Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass but also with William and Ellen Crafts’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, or other narratives involving the escape from slavery through disguise and social performance. Poetry of the period might be traced back to its original appearance in newspapers, there to reflect and resist the press of surrounding articles and editorials, and the same could be done with serial novels – all part of a reappraisal of the centrality of periodical culture, including a consideration of the force of reprinted material freely adopted from other periodicals in an age in which editors often played a much greater role than authors in the creation of the period’s reading habits and aesthetic protocols and practices.35 As with representative government itself, this is a literary history that requires some effort, beyond the acquisition of an aesthetic taste capable of distinguishing the upper classes from the lower. And entering this period by way of white female and AfricanAmerican male and female writers is especially productive, as one will often find that the literature one is accustomed to celebrating can be strangely limited in its power to capture the problems, and therefore the promise, of this time. The embodiments of the nation’s ideological contradictions, African-American writers led the way in the quest for a discursive and philosophical stability that remains the single most influential feature of the literature that emerged from the period we still have reason to call the American Renaissance. Accordingly, African-American written responses to the challenges of their world provide us with a framework for understanding the vitality of this period, from the great popularity of women’s literature to the formal experimentations of such writers as Emerson, Melville, and Whitman. And when one witnesses the strategic use of conventional plots in women’s writing – writing produced by those who were most subject to the force of convention – one begins to understand why this literature was so eagerly and 142

L I T ER AT UR E A N D C U LT U R E

broadly embraced. And when one takes in the whole of the writings produced during this time, from the seedy to the sermonic, from tales of adventure to slave narratives that appealed to a sense of adventure to approach truths for which readers were wholly unprepared, one finds a literature roughly as glorious as the history of American governance. Not always an uplifting story, but one still strangely encouraging, at times even inspiring, and sometimes unexpectedly sublime. Call it the American Renaissance; call it what you will. It is a literary history unlike any other, and one still capable of instructing and inspiring readers – all readers, regardless of race, gender, religion, or class.

Notes 1 Later the term American Renaissance was used to characterize the art and architecture of the later decades of the century. More recently, the title has been appropriated by a white supremacist website. I will be addressing only the American Renaissance that, still today, refers to antebellum American literature and culture. 2 Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease, eds., The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982–83 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); “The Other American Renaissance” is a chapter in Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Thomas M. Allen, “South of the American Renaissance,” American Literary History 16.3 (2004), 496–508; Jay Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Renée Bergland, “The Native American Nineteenth Century: Rewriting the American Renaissance,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 52.1–2 (2006), 141–154; Charlene Avallone, “What American Renaissance? The Gendered Genealogy of a Critical Discourse,” PMLA 112.5 (1997), 1102–1120; Russ Castronovo, “Death to the American Renaissance: History, Heidegger, Poe,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 49.1–3 (2003), 179–192. 3 Ironically, though Matthiessen named an epoch, he was himself ambivalent about the name. For the best review essay on Matthiessen, his influence, and his critics, see Michael Colacurcio’s “The American-Renaissance Renaissance,” The New England Quarterly 64.3 (1991), 445–493. Colacurcio notes that Matthiessen “grabbed a last-minute suggestion for a title and then apologized for its inaccuracy” (458). 4 A review of just book-length studies that trade on the concept of the American Renaissance assures one of its staying power for identifying an era, though the length, constituency, and significant developments in that era vary widely, depending on which study you consult. Some scholars seem to use the term in their titles as a familiar marking place, as if to operate in known territory, while others take on the concept to add to or otherwise alter our understanding of the American Renaissance. It is useful, then, to pause for a wide survey of works dealing with the American Renaissance. In addition to those works already mentioned, some of the notable examples of scholarship dealing with the American Renaissance are Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973); Robert D. Richardson, Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Leon Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Jeffrey Steele, The Representation of Self in the American Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988); Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven:

143

J O HN ER N E S T

5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Yale University Press, 1988); David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Stephen Railton, Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); G. M. Goshgarian, To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); John Bryant, Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jerome Loving, Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993); Joyce W. Warren, ed., The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), which includes Joanne Dobson’s essay, “The American Renaissance Reenvisioned”; Anne C. Rose, Voices of the Marketplace: American Thought and Culture, 1830–1860 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), which includes a chapter titled “American Renaissance”; Robin Grey, The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Timothy B. Powell, Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Arthur Versluis, The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Klaus Benesch, Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Robert E. Abrams, Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature: Topographies of Skepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), which includes an introduction titled “Transamerican Renaissance”; Joyce W. Warren, Women, Money, and the Law: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gender, and the Courts (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), which includes a chapter titled “Economics and the American Renaissance Women”; Bruce Mills, Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006); Larry J. Reynolds, Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Richard Hardack, Not Altogether Human: Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); and Martin Kevorkian, Writing Beyond Prophecy: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville after the American Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013). F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), vii. Colacurcio, “The American-Renaissance Renaissance,” 446. Frederick C. Crews, “Whose American Renaissance?” New York Review of Books, October 27, 1988, 68–81. Crews was critical of those he termed “new Americanists,” a critique that one of Crews’s targets, Donald Pease, took up in a 1990 essay titled “New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon,” published in boundary 2, 17.1 (Spring 1990), 1–37. Pease would later become the editor of a book series published by Duke University Press titled New Americanists. For an excellent account of such battles, and of their ongoing implications, see Michael P. Kramer, “Imagining Authorship in America: ‘Whose American Renaissance?’ Revisited,” American Literary History 13.1 (Spring 2001), 108–125. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, ix. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, xv–xvi. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, xiii. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, xv. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, viii. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, xv. Mary Helen Washington, “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies if You Put African American Studies at the Center? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 29, 1997,” American Quarterly 50.1 (March 1998), 1–23. I am aware that I am not attending to the range of writings one should address from this period – for example, Jewish American and Native American writers. As my argument will demonstrate, I am suggesting the need for a framework that accounts for the full range of voices and developing cultural traditions – in concert and tension with one another – though I focus in this essay only

144

L I T ER AT UR E A N D C U LT U R E

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

on African Americans and white women. But I would still suggest that the particular contingencies of African-American writers at this time make for a compelling case to address the possibilities of Washington’s question. It is worth noting, too, that renaissances abound, and that different traditions might lead us to different points of entry into cultural history. The Harlem Renaissance, for example, refers to works by black writers published in the early twentieth century, though I would hold to my argument that the first renaissance of AfricanAmerican writing is to be discovered much sooner. Kenneth Lincoln’s 1983 book Native American Renaissance addresses works published in the late twentieth century, and others have followed his lead – for example, Alan R. Velie and A. Robert Lee, eds., The Native American Renaissance: Literary Imagination and Achievement (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). Matthiessen, American Renaissance, xi. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, xi. John M. Reilly, “History-Making Literature,” in Studies in Black American Literature, Volume II: Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism (Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1986), 89. Joy Jordan-Lake, Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), xv. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 193. Frederick Douglass, “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?”, in Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900, ed. Philip S. Foner and Robert James Branham (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 258. Douglass, “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?”, 265. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, xvi. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, xvi. It is worth noting that the character identified as a “non-sequitur,” Augustine St. Clare (Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 201), is the same character who presents the speech I’ve quoted above. For George M. Fredrickson’s concept of romantic racialism, see chapter 4 of his essential study, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817– 1914 (New York: Harper, 1971). Dwight A. McBride, Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 1. McBride, Impossible Witnesses, 16, 5. McBride, Impossible Witnesses, 5. Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746– 1892 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 82. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 37. Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 82. Frederick Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Volume 5 (supplementary volume), 1844–1860, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 474. McBride, Impossible Witnesses, 2. McBride, Impossible Witnesses, 2–3. I am grateful to Jim Casey for helping me appreciate the centrality of editors and editorial practices in nineteenth-century literary and print culture.

145

9 CAPITALISM AND S L AV ERY IN THE UNIT ED S TAT ES Michael Zakim

I The recent surge of interest in “capitalism and slavery” belongs, like other such scholarly events, to a distinct cultural moment, this one born when the long-running focus of American historians on the “problem of the color-line” was interrupted by their rediscovery of the economy after the financial emergency of 2008.1 The result has been a dramatic proliferation of conference papers, plenary roundtables, dissertation proposals, and even review essays, all seeking to explore the inter-dynamics between one peculiarly rapacious institution and another. Have these investigations changed our understanding of racially-inscribed power, some will want to know. Have they complicated older assumptions regarding capitalism’s once-axiomatic relationship with liberal notions of personal agency? What are we to make of an ancient labor practice, others will ask, located at the heart of a system of wealth so closely identified with modernity and its creed of progress? Is the slavery-capitalism question, what’s more, to be viewed in terms of the longue durée, or as a volatile episode of world history born of crisis rather than continuity? All these questions come in response to newly ambitious claims, not only about slavery’s role in the development of capitalism in the United States, but about the essentially capitalist nature of the slave system itself, claims that have excited a new generation of scholars eager to reimagine the relationship between what are arguably the two definitive categories of the nation’s history. It is no surprise to find, then, that such questions have long engaged the attention of observers of the American scene. Alexis de Tocqueville directly addressed the issue of capitalism’s relationship with slavery, for instance, in the first volume of his Democracy in America. Traveling down the Ohio River in 1831, Tocqueville became witness to two separate versions of American civilization, as he reported. Gazing out upon the river’s southern bank, he noted the listless presence of gangs of slaves attending half-deserted fields in a landscape otherwise dominated by primeval forest. “One might say that society had gone to sleep,” as Tocqueville summarily denounced the forlorn effects of the chattel principle on human nature. Turning northward, he encountered a strikingly different view, this one suffused by the tireless clamor of independent-minded citizens each raising his own crops under the benevolent shelter of a well-appointed homestead. Surely, there was no better testament to “the taste and industry” of free persons living in a republic.2 Such Manichaean comparisons between idle Southerners and busy Northerners, already so clearly articulated by Tocqueville in the mid-1830s, became increasingly 146

CA P I TA L I S M A N D S L AVE RY

common in the years that followed, of course, developing into a zero-sum confrontation between rival systems of labor, wealth, property, and privilege that begat dire slogans regarding irrepressible conflict. “What is it that we hold most dear amongst us?” Lincoln thus asked in rehearsing the free soil indictment of slavery’s retrograde presence in the Union during a final campaign debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858. “Our own liberty and prosperity,” came the self-evident reply. And what constituted the single greatest threat to this vision of the nation’s material progress? “Slavery.”3 And, indeed, the banishment of slavery from the forward march of capitalism became constitutive of that very capitalism in the industrial century, which is why this binary emerged as the foundation of post-bellum consensus as well. “It was manufacturing and mechanical resources and the granaries of the West,” the digest of the 1860 federal census of manufactures, which was published in 1865, explained, that “enabled the republic to arm, subsist, and pay immense armies, and create iron-clad fleets to meet the emergency.” The South’s congenital want of the same rather than any shortfall of heroic effort, as the report was careful to observe, preordained the triumph of the industrial future over an agrarian past.4 That same post-hoc winner’s version of events eventually served as the linchpin of scholarly consensus too. Variously embraced by Ulrich B. Phillips in his Redemption-inflected account of the inherent limits on growth in a plantation economy, by Charles Beard in his Progressive-driven narrative of the capture of the federal state by industrial capital, or in Eugene Genovese’s emphatically Marxist description of the overthrow of a planter elite by new forms of class wealth and power, all agreed that slavery had devolved by the nineteenth century into a peculiar counterpoint to a distinct American telos of “liberty and prosperity.” Industrial revolution, according to these histories, was precisely that, a tumultuous assault on the country’s traditional political economy of yeoman households and craft workshops, as well as slave plantations, that had been organized around an agrarian gestalt of use rights, corporatist obligation, and organic hierarchy. The abolition of slavery, according to this view of events, largely unchallenged until recently, was part of a more general dynamic of “creative destruction,” that which Joseph Schumpeter famously ascribed to a modern capitalist economy which “can never be stationary.”5

II Nor were such assumptions regarding slavery’s fundamental incompatibility with capitalism restricted to those calling for its destruction. The vehement defense of the chattel system mounted in the 1850s by the Southern ideologue and social theorist George Fitzhugh drew on the very same opposition, albeit in inverted terms. Fitzhugh accordingly decried the morally ruinous effects of the thorough-going competition incited by “free society’s” febrile pursuit of a bargain at any price.6 And even the era’s champions of Southern industrialization, who, in contrast to Fitzhugh, endorsed capital-intensive technologies and rational management techniques, did so in hopes of moving the slave economy beyond its agricultural base, and that in order to halt the region’s growing dependence on the industrial success of others. When a large, ornate steam engine built in a Montgomery machine shop was put on display at New York’s Crystal Palace Exhibition of Industry in 1853, it consequently won enthusiastic notices. There was no better sign of an “active 147

MI C HA EL Z A K I M

manufacturing spirit” finally taking hold in the South, a development further underscored by the assortment of cloths and yarns shipped up to the Exposition from Southern mills. Slavery seemed poised to diversify. Of course, the extraordinary attention devoted to this rather meager demonstration of Southern art and artifice might lead some to the opposite conclusion, namely, that visions of a modern industrial slave regime remained an ideological abstraction, at best, “showy, and very useless,” as Horace Greeley pronounced in dismissing the Alabama-bred apparatus.7 Such arrested development informed a series of influential studies of the slave economy published by Ulrich B. Phillips in the 1920s.8 Phillips presented a thesis more commonly associated today with Eric Williams, whose Capitalism and Slavery, appearing on the eve of the disintegration of the British empire in 1944, argued that the enslavement of Africans constituted the driving force of a modern global economy after the sixteenth century which eventually fell victim to its own success.9 As Phillips had already explained two decades earlier, New World plantations functioned as the Archimedean lever of an “industrial regime” that mass-produced staple goods destined for a transatlantic consortium of merchants, manufacturers, and consumers. This promoted the planter into a veritable “captain of industry,” in Phillips’s terms, avidly optimizing his return on investment and utilizing year-round labor to do so while keeping a methodical account of the ensuing expenditures and receipts. His success is what transformed a “rough commonwealth . . . into a most productive factory,” underwriting the whole colonial project, which would thus become dominated by these landed enterprises. Family freeholds could not hope to compete with the economies of scale realized on the plantation, whose efficiencies were also favorably compared by Phillips to the wasteful system of sharecropping that dominated Southern agriculture after emancipation.10 This business model also proved highly effective in reproducing itself. Selling staples to voracious world markets whose demand only kept growing in response to the increasing supply, the American plantation complex expanded without interruption. Whenever the soil’s fertility began its invariable decline, pushing up the cost of production – and, first and foremost, the cost of slave labor – planters set out to conquer new territory, where they reinitiated the same pattern of development all over again. The American slave economy consequently generated a perpetual frontier, a political geography that should not, however, be confused with the democratic panegyrics of Frederick Jackson Turner, who airbrushed slavery out of his 1893 account of the contribution of the pioneering ethos to American individualism, apparently assuming that slavery and freedom constituted antithetical systems of belief as well as material practice.11 The plantation’s “striking repetition of process,” Phillips further argued, revealed how “conservatism and progress are not essentially antagonistic.” The slave South, that is to say, presented an alternative path of economic development, one that did not result in social dislocation or the fetishization of the new so endemic to both industrial economy and liberal polity. “The plantation system was in most cases not only the beginning of the development, but its end as well,” Phillips observed of this most dynamic stasis in which “the system led normally to nothing else.”12 That was also its undoing, however, for the cost of slavery’s immensely profitable perpetuum mobile was a structural inelasticity, or “decadence,” that resulted in a condition of constant overproduction, characteristic of the monopolistic nature of staple production, which then only deepened after the ascension 148

CA P I TA L I S M A N D S L AVE RY

of King Cotton to sovereign status in the nineteenth century. As a consequence, the American slave economy was never able to create new forms of capital, or new sources of wealth, or new uses for labor, which exacerbated its dependence on economies that did, turning slavery into something of a living anachronism. Once succeeding generations of slaves were acculturated to European practices, furthermore, becoming transformed into a disciplined laboring class, there was no longer any reason to keep them as chattel, as Phillips also noted of the escalating irrationality of the whole system. Its vehement abolition in the midst of the nineteenth century was a clear corroboration of this self-defeating dynamic.13 Civil War, as such, hastened the inevitable, which was also the basic assumption of Charles and Mary Beard’s magisterial Rise of American Civilization, whose chapter on “the Second American Revolution” presented a variation on the theme of slavery’s incommensurability with capitalist modernity.14 The antebellum South, the Beards adjudged from the vantage point of Fordist ascendancy in the 1920s, was trapped in a losing battle against the census returns, a struggle against “accumulating industrial capital . . . expanding railway systems, and widening acres tilled by free farmers.” There was no place for a traditional landed aristocracy in such an inexorable march of economic growth and technological innovation. Cotton, rice, tobacco, and naval stores might “command the world,” as Senator Hammond of South Carolina confidently decreed on the eve of secession, but that command was restricted to the world of yesterday.15 Entrenched elites never surrender power on their own accord, the Beards further contended. Roman patricians, French clericals, English nobles – all were consigned to the dustbin of history by the violent opposition of new social and economic forces. The same was true of the United States. “What do you propose, gentlemen of the Free-Soil party?” as the Beards quoted Jefferson Davis in a bitter confrontation with his opponents on the Senate floor in 1860. “Do you propose to better the condition of the slave? Not at all . . . It is not humanity that influences you . . . It is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the Government into an engine of northern aggrandizement.”16 That aggrandizement was meant to buttress a coalition of industrialists, farmers, and mechanics bound together in a program of high tariffs and home markets, united in opposition to Democratic Party policies “offering nothing to capitalism but capitulation.”17 The Party of Lincoln, in contrast, identified the nation’s Manifest Destiny with an integrated market system that turned all citizens into utility maximizers with their eyes on a boundless future. Antislavery promulgations of “free soil, free labor, and free men” were, as such, largely indifferent to the fate of the slaves, as Jefferson Davis contended, and Eric Foner has since explained in greater detail. The United States was the reserve of “white men,” Lincoln confirmed, a nation where every “Hans, Baptiste, and Patrick” could strike out on his own in unhindered pursuit of happiness in an economy uniquely poised to satisfy their material ambitions. That is why the “so-called Civil War” is better understood as a “Second American Revolution,” a revolutionary class war that reconstituted property and wealth in the restless image of industrial capital.18 Eugene Genovese’s Political Economy of Slavery, which was first published in 1965, presented the same irrepressible conflict between landed and industrial wealth while at once injecting it with a new level of nuance and complexity.19 The South was not an agrarian relic fighting a rearguard action against industrial revolution, Genovese insisted. 149

MI C HA EL Z A K I M

Nor was it, however, a modern production economy driven by the inveterate flux of market supply and demand. Antebellum slavery belied any such single, or singular, definition because it constituted a distinctly pre-industrial form of social and material life that nevertheless functioned as the pillar of Western industrialization, the source of essential goods and capital for a new kind of production regime. This structural duality informed Genovese’s well-known description of American slavery as “in but not of capitalism,” a consciously otiose formulation deployed to convey one “of the greatest anomalies in the history of capitalism.”20 Southern banks, for example, channeled enormous sums of cash and credit in financing more of the same – more land and more slaves – instead of encouraging change and innovation. Even when new technologies were the object of investment, they, too, were put into the direct service of the existing order. Ambitious development schemes such as railroad building were accordingly undertaken in order to reinforce old forms of economy, which then deepened the inability of planters to adjust to the fluctuations of the world market. Their land and slaves constituted particular kinds of assets that could not be opportunistically alienated in response to the rise and fall of cotton prices, exposing slaveowners to enormous risks without recourse to alternative investments. Manufacturing, for instance, was rarely an option in a plantation system that depressed local consumer demand while draining Southern wealth off to Northern businesses, much to the consternation of regional patriots. The same dearth of liquidity stymied agrarian reform as well. Wherever a program of agricultural improvement took hold, Genovese argued, citing Maryland as a prime example, the requisite fertilizers, livestock, and machinery were financed by the sale of slaves and a corresponding shift to the employment of free labor. But there was nothing anachronistic, or irrational, in the consistent refusal of planters to abandon their slaves in favor of temporarily more efficient avenues of capital accumulation. That was because slaveholders subscribed to a commercial logic that diverged from the instrumentalities of industrial economy. “It is difficult to believe that a regional ruling class of resident planters,” Genovese explained, whose lives had been formed by a social relation based on the theoretical assertion of absolute power over other human beings and by pretensions to community lordship, could blithely dispense with the very foundations of their social and psychological existence merely in response to a balance sheet of profit and loss.21 That “ideology of the master class” was no epiphenomenon, Genovese thus argued, since property rights, labor relations, and the exigencies of profit-making are all shaped as much by cultural logic as vice versa. Certainly, the economy does not follow an exogenous path of autonomous development paved by natural laws transcending time and place. This understanding of the interplay between the moral and material spheres of existence also allowed Genovese to strip race of its essentialist status and present the dominion of white over black as a form of class exploitation particularly suited to New World slave regimes. Racial hierarchy, as Genovese explained with great dialectical drama, and considerable pathos as well, in his magnum opus, Roll Jordan, Roll, anchored a powerful paternalistic form of social control in which neither master nor slave “could express the simplest human feelings without reference to the other,” an especially intimate system of 150

CA P I TA L I S M A N D S L AVE RY

class rule that struck a marked contrast to the anonymity of the wage nexus increasingly prevalent in the North.22 Command over one’s work force was as much an end as a means in the South, in other words, which meant that slavery was not simply dedicated to maximizing profits but to maximizing the planter’s power and prestige. That is why recurrent financial crises, structural inefficiencies, and even gnawing anxieties over the decline of cotton culture never drove Southern capitalists to free-labor solutions. Indeed, these would have constituted a distinctly “bourgeois” response to their problem. Slave society, in contrast, sought explicitly political solutions, which mostly meant the conquest of new territory, even at the risk of alienating Americans living outside the South.23 A more recent account of slavery’s immanent failure to industrialize is to be found in Sean Adams’s Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America, which strives to explain why bituminous coal that was mined in Virginia achieved a 2.4 percent market share while Pennsylvania’s less convenient anthracite was supplying 78 percent of the nation’s needs by 1860.24 Adams, too, ascribes this great divergence to irreconcilable forms of political economy. This does not mean that the absence of a coal industry in Virginia is to be attributed to the putative unsuitability of slave labor to non-agricultural production. The cause lay, rather, in Virginia’s political traditions, and, more particularly, in a system of government founded on notions of corporate privilege designed to undergird planter control. While all citizens of a republic enjoyed common civic rights, for instance, that was not true of property. Human chattel comprised an especially important form of property in slave society, requiring special protections. “We have a greater interest in the common stake, and ought to possess an authority in proportion to that interest, and adequate to its protection,” as a planter spokesman explained in justifying Virginia’s rotten borough system.25 And, indeed, disproportionate representation in the state’s General Assembly proved most effective in obstructing development projects or electoral reforms that might threaten existing property arrangements that were based on large-scale agriculture and high land values. This was not because slaveholders were culturally or ideologically hostile to commercial growth or technological innovation. Railroad mileage, for instance, quadrupled in Virginia over the decade prior to the Civil War. But such a modern transportation infrastructure was built to serve the plantation economy and bring its crops to market. By the same token, toll structures that would facilitate the movement of coal were consistently voted down by legislators because they would shift public resources from tidewater and piedmont counties to western mining districts that were also politically suspect – not without reason – as insufficiently loyal to the slave regime. The control enjoyed by established elites over government in Virginia was especially pronounced when compared to the situation in neighboring Pennsylvania, where intense partisan conflict and interest-driven politics, anathema to the oligarchical exigencies of slave society, had become the organizing principles of public life. This spirit of competition spawned massive corruption, “logrolling,” and a state bureaucracy that all proved vital to the development of industrial capitalism – Adams has little use for neo-classical catechisms regarding market efficiencies – as “new men” thereby gained access to Pennsylvania’s ruling institutions. A program of innovative business legislation followed which included geological surveys, subsidies for fresh technologies, and state-financed capitalization of high-risk ventures. Republican notions of a static commonwealth anchored in social 151

MI C HA EL Z A K I M

deference were jettisoned in favor of a different model of politics which located the general interest in the dynamic pursuit of wealth by self-serving, autonomous citizens.26 That same operating system eventually arrived to Virginia’s coalfields after the war, Adams observes, brought by Pennsylvania mining companies which proceeded to extract enormous mineral deposits in exchange for woefully little compensation. The antebellum planter regime was thus replaced by the no less imperious rule of limited-liability corporations that enjoyed their own post-agrarian forms of special privilege. These had little in common with the traditional priorities of a slave economy, but proved no less effective in channeling wealth and power into the hands of the wealthy and powerful.

III Free-soil truisms regarding the irrepressible conflict between capitalism and slavery have, as such, found a long afterlife in historical scholarship. That version of events did not go entirely unchallenged, however. The sharpest dissent was formulated by the disciples of a rigorous positivism known as cliometrics, a creed that rested on data culled from the rather limited antebellum statistical record. The best known of these studies is Time on the Cross, written by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman and published in 1974.27 The work’s evocative title belied its exclusively quantitative focus, which was better reflected in the book’s subtitle, The Economics of American Negro Slavery. True to that promise, Engerman and Fogel, who was awarded a Nobel prize in economic science in 1993, presented a high-functioning plantation system in which both master and slave rationally pursued their own “best economic interests.” Their respective efforts were transposed by the cotton economy into unrivaled levels of productivity (“35 percent” higher than anything achieved by Northern farmers during the same period), spectacular rates of growth, and relatively little exploitation, as measured by the ratio of income expropriated by the owners of capital, again in comparison to the wages paid by Northern industrialists to their hired laborers.28 All the numbers added up to an unmistakable conclusion, namely, that slavery constituted a leading sector – and authentic component – of American material progress in a period of industrial growth. The economic viability of slavery, so clearly manifested in its profitability, which was a function, in turn, of its tireless maximization of utilities, rested on a “wide-ranging system of rewards” made available to workers. These included bonuses, land grants, profit sharing, and a significant occupational mobility that all strangely summoned George Fitzhugh’s contemporary pro-slavery rhetoric invoking the “happiest” laboring class in the world.29 At the same time, econometrics shared a growing predilection on the part of scholars and the public alike to assign greater political agency to subaltern populations long marginalized by the reigning power structure. This was not the stuff of working-class struggles or of demands for racial equality that animated so much of the social history being written “from the bottom up” after the 1960s, however.30 Time on the Cross, rather, drew on micro-economic models of incentive pay and rational choice theory that were to be traced back to Adam Smith, via Frederick Winslow Taylor, and up to Reaganism’s “rediscovery of the market.” Fogel and Engerman were inspired, in other words, by a post-New Deal vision of economy that identified market success with moral outcomes.31 And while it would be preposterous to rehearse popular 152

CA P I TA L I S M A N D S L AVE RY

slogans equating free markets with free men in the context of chattel slavery, Time on the Cross nevertheless argued that the slaves’ lot – as evidenced in their diet, the quality of housing, family life, the relative absence of violence (including an explicit argument concerning the infrequency of sexual assault), and, most of all, the slave’s own subjective sense of self-worth – was made sufferable by their owners’ own enlightened focus on the bottom line. Time on the Cross subsequently integrated the American slave into a universe of cost benefit regressions, marginal income rates, and occupational mobility. Whatever else that might have shaped life on the plantation was adamantly bracketed. Certainly, any “ideology of the master class” proved immaterial to the syllogisms of profit and loss, which is what provoked Francesco Boldizzoni to complain in The Poverty of Clio about the tautological quality of the kind of “economic history” practiced by Fogel and Engerman, whose field of vision is restricted to enumerated data that can be integrated into quantitative models of market performance. As a result, the object of analysis ends up dictating the very terms of analysis, becoming trapped in a hopeless loop of causation. The problem, as Gavin Wright similarly observes in Slavery and American Economic Development, a volume that neatly summarizes the corpus of his own scholarship on the subject, is that utilitarian paradigms of pain and pleasure do not always match the decidedly illiberal calculus required to control a captive labor force.32 No one has more assiduously explored the illiberal structure of slave control than Edward Baptist, whose unflinching account of the rape, terror, and torture that comprised the foundations of the Cotton Kingdom rivals the most vehement abolitionist literature of its day.33 There is no trace of slave agency in Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, which, if anything, conjures earlier comparisons, most notably presented in 1959 by Stanley Elkins in his Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, of Southern plantations and German concentration camps, twin sites of modern unfreedom, In contrast to Elkins, however, Baptist does not consider the antebellum “slave labor camp” to have been an aberration in the annals of progress. It operated, rather, at the heart of a rationalizing world, becoming an essential component in “the making of American capitalism.”34 Baptist’s subject is America’s “second slavery,” a system “exponentially greater in economic power than the first,” which took root on the country’s southwestern frontier.35 There was nothing static about this economy, whose success rested on the intense exploitation of material and human resources that turned the Mississippi Valley into an incontrovertible scene of creative destruction driven by the rush of slaveholders after profit. They demonstrated great entrepreneurial initiative in optimizing the productive potential of their labor force while also striving to capture a growing market share for their product at the expense of any competitors who remained mired in outmoded technologies or inefficient management strategies. Such efforts explain why the real price of cotton kept falling even while world demand continued to rise. Seventeenthcentury patterns of territorial expansion into virgin lands thus proved irrelevant in the nineteenth-century Southwest, where cotton planters applied a distinctly novel business model far more suited to industrial modernity than to a colonial bailiwick, having become enthusiastic subscribers to the era’s post-Malthusian zeitgeist of unconstrained growth in a world shorn of natural limits.36 153

MI C HA EL Z A K I M

At the same time, the technical basis of this dramatic industrialization had little in common with the fly shuttles of Northern mills or the McCormick reapers harvesting western grains. Mass production in the plantation economy rested on its own distinctive technologies, foremost among these being the “whipping machine,” Baptist’s bitterly ironic nomenclature for the “innovation in violence” that served as the foundation of second slavery’s unprecedented gains in productivity. “The whip was as important to making cotton grow as sunshine and rain,” Baptist thus declares. And despite its decidedly pre-modern provenance – even though the newly improved version of plaited cowhide adopted in the Mississippi Valley was apparently more brutal, and efficient, than the “cato’-nine tails” traditionally wielded in the Chesapeake – the whip became a critical means for rationalizing plantation labor, calibrating work rhythms, establishing uniform quotas, and forcing slaves themselves to continually invent ever more cost-effective methods of picking cotton, and that in order to avoid a whipping. Torture, “practiced with . . . order, regularity, and system,” as Baptist quotes a contemporary source, consequently played an integral role in speeding up the production process of world capitalism’s most valuable commodity.37 Nor does Baptist just ascribe innovative labor practices to slavery. He also positions the Southern economy at the vanguard of financial invention, at the vertex of a vast globalized network of money, credit, debt, and securitization. The fact is, raw cotton fibers would never have yielded so much marginal value without being integrated into an extensive system of commercial instruments. Bills of exchange issued by a British trading house, for example, became the means for a New Orleans factor to purchase raw cotton from Louisiana plantations. The bales were shipped to Liverpool and purchased there by brokers who redeemed the original bills, encouraging the American seller to draw on their own accounts with drafts that could then circulate in the South as cash for facilitating the exchange of goods and persons. All this private paper was augmented by state initiatives that guaranteed the equity of Southern banks specializing in loans to slaveholders, who mortgaged their slaves in return. The subsequent debts were collateralized for sale in London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, and even in Boston, where investors had little inkling that their 5 percent per annum earnings comprised the tranched bodies of so many human beings.38 Walter Johnson is another persistent critic of older orthodoxies expounding the putative backwardness of America’s slave economy. In a detailed examination of “life inside the antebellum slave market,” Soul by Soul, Johnson documents the plantation’s embrace of the instrumentalities of industrial-age business.39 Infinite appropriation became the guiding ethos of a cotton-growing industry that constituted the acme of commodification, wedding persons and property together into expanding circuits of commercial exchange. That development rested on the wholesale abstraction of economic relations, rendered into a price system and credit network capable of bridging the seasonal and spatial discrepancies of globalized trade. Brokerage firms and transportation depots, buying and selling seasons, formal guarantees of ownership titles, the mass circulation of timely business information, state-sponsored buyer protection laws, price convergence, and the conscious “packaging” of goods for sale, which included breaking up families into more convenient retail lots – all were features of a slave economy that could not, it seems, be described as anything but capitalist. 154

CA P I TA L I S M A N D S L AVE RY

Johnson has recently expanded his investigation of “the greatest economic boom the world had ever seen” in a study called River of Dark Dreams.40 Like Edward Baptist’s second slavery, this takes place in the flush landscape of the lower Mississippi Valley, a region that became flooded by giant flows of capital once it was pacified by the federal government in the early years of the nineteenth century. The territory was divided into parcels of family freeholds, a Jeffersonian program for yeoman independence that, in fact, undermined any such possibility. That is because the value of free labor could not keep up with the value of land. A republic of householders was subsequently transformed into a slaveocracy, and the Southwest into a “disciplinary acrostic” of cotton plants broken down by seed, speed, and market grade, as well as slave bodies further fractured by nominators of acre and bale.41 The output of all this fieldwork was then consummated in a “Steamboat Sublime” which boosted the velocity of market transactions while dramatically reducing the attendant costs. Steam power on the Mississippi, Johnson even avers, proved far more central to the modern American economy than its application to factory production in Lowell.42 River of Dark Dreams recounts a familiar story of land speculation, fueled by the rising value of slave labor resting on cotton’s spectacular profitability, to then ambitiously argue that antebellum slavery effectively strove to reorient the whole political geography of the United States. The domestic slave trade that sent cotton hands “down the river” to labor on western plantations might seem part of an emerging matrix of continental exchange. In fact, with a price structure driven by global ratios of value, the American slave market operated as a vital branch of the world economy. “If it is right to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Cuba, Brazil, or Africa and carry them there?” Johnson quotes a contemporary advocate of commerce’s trans-national logistics. Slavery not only pushed commodification to its limits, in other words, but in so doing undermined existing notions of nationhood, replacing them with an “economy unmediated by the territorial sovereignty of the United States.” That process is best known today as globalization, by which we usually refer to capital’s eclipse of the nation-state as the primary “site” of political dominion. Johnson finds this dynamic already at work in the middle of the nineteenth century as he follows Southern slavery far offshore, to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Africa, propelled by the system’s chronic “overaccumulations” of land and slaves in search of the perennial quick fix of imperial expansion.43

IV River of Dark Dreams thus concludes by underscoring Eugene Genovese’s earlier depiction of the structural imperatives pushing slavery to reproduce itself at any cost. Walter Johnson does not believe, however, that this made slavery any less “of” capitalism. He stakes the opposite claim, in fact, and it is that view of the slave South as a moment of high economic rationalism – manifest in instrumental reason, expanding markets, consistent productivity gains, commercial infrastructures, administrative bureaucracies, and patterns of mass consumption – which seems to have become the new orthodoxy. This is an impressive catalogue of capitalist praxis.44 It is also a highly schematic one that casts the southern United States into a fully developed market society while doing the same for other parts of the transatlantic slave economy such as Cuba, Hispaniola, and Brazil. Such a broadened 155

MI C HA EL Z A K I M

panorama, reaching from “Liverpool to Louisiana,” thus serves to flatten the varieties of Atlantic society into an inclusive tent of universal truck and barter, reproducing the market’s own abstractions and inflating capitalism itself into something of a floating signifier largely detached from historical context. Accounting technologies are a good example of this catholic perspective on events, having recently emerged as a synechdoche of the plantation’s purported adherence to a modern, rationalized gesellschaft. An Italian invention of the late Renaissance, book-keeping has been applied to a great variety of economic arrangements ever since, ranging from sixteenth-century joint stock companies and eighteenth-century rural book credit to nineteenth-century railroad corporations, as well as cotton production.45 But does this systematic transcription of exchange values always represent the same material reality, the same constellation of market rules and property rights purportedly constitutive of a transcendent form of exchange economy? Or is the history of accounting, in fact, revealing of the opposite, namely, the great variety of forms of commercial intercourse over the centuries that should, in turn, force us to qualify our own use of “capitalism” as a singular rubric? A similar set of questions also suggests itself in regards to the economic significance of steam power, for instance, whose discrete techno-logic would nevertheless seem to be dependent on the social context of its uses. Steam-driven facilitation of trade between distant points in space was realized in a transportation infrastructure that linked New Orleans with Europe rather than its own hinterland, as Johnson argues. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, and even New York, the effect was largely reversed. Even steam, in other words, that singular icon of industrial revolution, proves to be a highly contingent, and inconsistent, event, providing further evidence of capitalism’s own contingency and plasticity.46 Any consequent effort to historicize the peculiarities and particularities of antebellum slavery should begin with Steven Hahn’s Roots of Southern Populism, which addresses the widespread disaffection of the region’s farmers from the developing market economy.47 These “miserable, non-descript cumbrer[s] of the soil, scratching from the land here and there for a subsistence, living from hand to mouth,” as a representative view from the black belt summarily ridiculed this majority of white Southerners, devoted themselves to a way of life consciously divorced from the plantation complex and its profit principles.48 Settling in the social and geographic periphery of the cotton kingdom – in Upcountry Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, western Virginia and North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southeastern Mississippi – these yeomen represented a “distinct socioeconomic formation,” Hahn tells us, deeply suspicious of progress and its multifarious development projects such as railroad building, which was not only controlled by distant concentrations of wealth but threatened to annex the Upcountry’s household economy to distant markets, a process well underway in the North and West. Such commercial progress would subvert the agrarian traditions that anchored this Southern life, organized as it was around common resources supplying the practical means for grazing and foraging, and hunting and fishing, guaranteeing each family’s material subsistence and undergirding the fixed patriarchal social order within which that subsistence was embedded. While the slave South thus begat a highly cosmopolitan class of moneyed planters, the region proved to be no less home to a zealously parochial majority wholly disinclined to take part in the greatest economic boom the world had ever seen.49 156

CA P I TA L I S M A N D S L AVE RY

This was no contradiction, Hahn argues. In fact, the South’s two separate economies politically complemented each other. Yeoman opposition to industrial development, together with demands for local autonomy and direct control over the means of their livelihood, were respected because the globalized plantation had no use for either the labor or the business, but only the loyalty of this population, which was, in turn, granted significant independence. Planters accordingly expressed little material or ideological interest in promoting a capitalist transformation of the countryside, in marked distinction to the general spread of commercial relations in the North. Indeed, any such claims regarding the market’s universality would have precipitated a dangerous confrontation between the South’s two main classes of citizens, consequently threatening the political hegemony of the planters.50 And so, while “rates of capital turnover,” “secondary multiplier effects,” and “subsidiary feedback processes,” not to mention “the efficiency of the markets,” became increasingly relevant to slaveowners, Hahn effectively asks if the South could actually be considered a market society at all, one in which civic life is governed by the same fluid, fungible conditions that underwrite commodity exchange.51 Certainly, the market system’s intrinsic abstractions and alienations could hardly be said to have overtaken the South, which is why recent studies of Southern capitalism have consistently bracketed the lives of most white citizens living there, again, in contrast to histories of Northern capitalism that emphasize the steady colonization of all of social life by commodity relations. Slavery, Hahn therefore concludes in setting the stage for the postbellum Populist revolt against those railroads and banks which succeeded the slaveowning class and aggressively integrated the Upcountry into the nation’s commercial networks, “provided economic, social, and cultural space for independent, non-market-oriented freeholders.”52 That is why hundreds of thousands of these non-slaveholders marched off to war in 1861, determined to defend a chattel system in which they had no direct stake. This last point is particularly noteworthy since arguments identifying slavery with modern capitalism have very little to say about war or abolition. And yet, by replacing older teleologies of irrepressible conflict with counterclaims emphasizing slavery’s industrial character, it becomes incumbent on scholars to explain why the “capitalism-slaveryempire” nexus did, nevertheless, implode. The question is not, as it once was, about whether slavery was too primitive to be integrated into industrializing divisions of labor but, rather, why it ceased to play any role at all in that system. Why did the reorganization of the American economy on the basis of wage labor, domestic consumer markets, machine technologies, urbanization, commercialized family farming, escalating class conflict, an activist state, and axioms of universal progress also entail the violent destruction of slavery in the United States? In the past, that coincidence informed facile conclusions regarding slavery’s anomalous relationship with the modern economy, and with modernity more generally. Today, however, instead of slavery serving as a historical anomaly, the Civil War does, leaving us clueless as to why the peculiar institution clashed so disastrously with “free society,” and why antislavery shibboleths about a “house divided” acquired such powerful resonance by the 1850s. What did contemporaries mean when they compared “Southern people” to “Northern people,” for instance, categories that seemed to infer the existence of two separate societies?53 In consciously rejecting older narratives, recent scholarship stubbornly refuses 157

MI C HA EL Z A K I M

to attribute those distinctions to rival systems of labor. Indeed, such dichotomies have given way to the opposite view, namely, an emphasis on the continuum of labor relations – and relations of exploitation – in antebellum America. If capitalism is understood to be a social order that privileges those citizens who employ their capital to generate more capital, and use their property and the labor they command in doing so, then this definition seems to apply in equal measure to New England cotton mills and Mississippi cotton plantations.54 It is of little consequence if labor is purchased under terms which hide the expropriation of marginal value by employers within a formal wage contract, thus facilitating a modern liberal rhetoric equating free men with free markets, or whether the laborer himself is owned outright, and nothing is hidden. And yet, below this level of abstract analogy, such distinctions seemed to have mattered a lot. The systemic brutality of the Mississippi Valley’s “second slavery” left its own working class with a severely narrow range of options for shaping the conditions of their employment, so to speak. In those same years, the capitalist reinvention of production practices in Northern factories and sweatshops provoked a powerful outburst of political resistance on the part of laboring men and women, who consequently organized trades unions (and strike funds), mutual associations, newspapers, political parties, cooperatives, neighborhood societies, legal defense funds, and even their own banks in battling the efforts of employers to extend their property rights to the work process itself. These steps were undertaken, moreover, in the name of an egalitarianism many believed to be both within their rights and within their grasp.55 Relations of production in the industrializing North, Christopher Tomlins has consequently argued in Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early American Republic, were irrevocably detached from the vested right of anyone to personally “order, control and direct” the work of others.56 Such patriarchal authority, long considered essential for inducing one person to labor on behalf of another, was overturned by a “free labor” ideology that privileged the autonomous will of every individual. The former remained slavery’s ontology, of course. But outside the South, as labor historians of a previous generation repeatedly showed, the common law relationship between master and servant was reestablished on the basis of contract, whose formal legalisms replaced coercion with consent, increasingly expressed in terms of cash. Of course, that “new employment relation” was not as free of constraint as it pretended to be. Tomlins reminds us that restrictions on personal movement (through residency requirements governing the franchise), vagrancy statutes making it illegal not to work, curbs on entry into various professions (by means of licensing practices), the criminalization of collective bargaining, and legal penalties for laborers who violated the terms of their employment contracts were just some of the measures now adopted for reinstituting the power of property-owners in an age of common men.57 Were these comparable to the mechanisms of social control practiced on the plantation? Karl Marx, who harbored little sympathy for the employer class, believed not, and accordingly insisted that “free labor” was no empty slogan. Since capitalism’s producing classes belonged “neither to an owner nor to the soil,” he argued, novel structures of prerogative and power had to be developed. In practical terms, this meant that a hired laborer could “leave the capitalist, to whom he has sold himself, as often as he chooses, and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit.” Such fluidity had no precedent in the history of work, and that was because this element of contingency – or what has since 158

CA P I TA L I S M A N D S L AVE RY

evolved into our notorious “flex-time” – was necessary for doing business in the radically fungible conditions of the new economy. This raises a fundamental question about the capitalist reorganization of society that was entirely irrelevant in the South, namely, how did the free negotiation between buyers and sellers of labor power, based as it was on market symmetry, equality before the law, and mutual consent (for otherwise the contract would be void), nevertheless allow power to accrue to some rather than to others? Here was the rub – or the profit margin – as Marx noted in what remains the best definition of industrial class relations to this day: “The worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labour-power, cannot leave the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class, unless he gives up his own existence.” Wage earners might no longer be beholden to this or that master, in other words, but, for that very reason, they are entirely beholden to a master class of capitalists exclusively positioned to give someone a job and, as such, control his fate.58 The employers of free labor thereby assumed their place as a new American ruling class, not by regular recourse to violence but by explicitly embracing the conditions of freedom. Coercion assumed a structurally neutral and largely invisible form in this order of things. Slavery, on the other hand, had no such use for invisibility. To that end, Walter Johnson quotes from Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, which was published in 1853. “It is the literal, unvarnished truth, that the crack of the lash, and the shrieking of the slaves can be heard from dark until bed time,” as Northup invoked the spectacle of discipline on the plantation. Such a “ceremonial of punishment,” as Michel Foucault denoted the corporate, corporeal quality of social control before such cruel and unusual practices were repudiated by liberal opinion, served as a foundation of planter rule.59 The same brutish methods were deployed when slaveholders converted “black hunger into white supremacy” by personally distributing meat rations to the quarters, for instance, in another raw, intimate application of power over the bodies of others, offering another stark contrast to the machinations of the cash nexus by which “individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do,” as Frederick Hayek once described the importance of the price system in maintaining public order in market society.60 Certainly, capitalist democracies cannot rely on systematic torture and continue to congratulate themselves on the progressive nature of their institutions, which also explains why the whip became the focus of so much moral outrage in the antebellum North. Solomon Northup’s memoir of his captivity in the South was, as such, consciously designed to appeal to that emergent humanitarian sensibility, written in a trope that Karen Haltunnen has perspicaciously characterized as a “pornography of pain” that, in fact, informed the whole genre of slave narrative. Mass-circulated tales of the chattel system’s brutal realities contributed to the self-fashioning needs of a cohering American bourgeoisie seeking to distance itself from such arbitrary violence, thus recasting this venerable American institution into an atavistic affront to the civilizing process.61 For that reason, the whip was eclipsed in public discourse by an even more naked violation of modern selfhood, the practice of slave breeding, which is the subject of a riveting essay by Amy Dru Stanley exploring the “moral differences between wealth creation in the South and the North.”62 Instead of situating slavery at the center of American industrial progress, Stanley asks how it came to be excluded in the first place. How was slavery implausibly – but effectively – redefined as an alien presence in a 159

MI C HA EL Z A K I M

republic conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal? Antebellum debates over the breeding of slaves were at the heart of that abolitionist effort, which is why Fogel and Engerman devoted an entire chapter of Time on the Cross to debunking “the myth of slave-breeding,” and why Edward Baptist argues that the practice was immanent to the capitalist logic of accumulation. Rather than determining the relative validity of these rival allegations, Stanley explains why the question incited so much controversy to begin with. Slaves produced two kinds of assets: staple cotton (or sugar, or tobacco, or rice) and more slaves. This elementary calculus had informed plantation economics since the late eighteenth century. However, it acquired a powerfully new cultural resonance in the industrial century. Thaddeus Stevens gave voice to that view when he compared Pennsylvania farmers to Virginia planters and noted how the latter “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!” William Ellery Channing, author of the country’s best-selling guide to individualism, Self-Culture, mobilized the same moralizing lexicon in denouncing the “unfeeling cupidity” so widespread in a society of slaveholders, and then comparing it to the “influence of love” which reigned in free society and functioned as the spiritual counterpart to contractualism’s free will.63 Channing and Stevens were both engaged in drafting a horrific indictment of Southern civilization, contending that since the reproduction of slaves was a signal imperative of the plantation economy, the very creation of human life – the exclusive prerogative of God everywhere else in Christiandom – had emerged as no more than a market variable in the South. Slave society was not only saturated in sin, it followed, but was utterly, profoundly beholden to the profit motive. Did the breeding of human beings for commercial gain constitute the acme of capitalist logic, or its antithesis? The answer was far from obvious.64 Northern condemnation of slavery’s sexual licentiousness, Stanley argues, drew upon an implicit acknowledgement of that ambiguity, for it recognized the dangers endemic to a market economy that liberated personal ambitions and appetites. At the same time, recognition of these dangers underlined market society’s very ability to overcome them. A social system resting on self-interest and the conflicts that invariably followed, liberals anxiously understood, required a modern “spirit of capitalism,” as Max Weber famously contended, a rational self-mastery able to check appetites without sacrificing ambitions. Allusions to the inborn debauchery of the Southern planter became a way to mark those boundaries, a reflexive affirmation of free society’s unique capacity to police its own libido. “Freedom is the only certain cure for the evils of Freedom,” as one popular lecturer characteristically proclaimed at Boston’s Mercantile Library in 1849. Lincoln referred to the same when he explained to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield that America would stand or fall by “the capability of a people to govern themselves.” Slavery, according to these critics, was incapable of any such self-government, for neither the slave nor his owner enjoyed moral sovereignty over their lives. They were victims, rather, each in his own way, of a rapacious greed immanent to a decadent kingdom of whoredom that intrinsically wed love to gold. Only when these values were strictly divorced from each other could capitalism develop into a viable model of social order, able to protect society from the commodity’s indefatigable promiscuity, which otherwise knew no bounds.65 160

CA P I TA L I S M A N D S L AVE RY

A similar juxtaposition between bourgeois propriety and the brutish nature of property relations on the plantation informs Mark Tushnet’s study of The American Law of Slavery.66 Slavery, as Tushnet contends, comprised a “total” system of social organization, to be contrasted with the “partial,” or fragmented, quality of interaction that was intrinsic to industrial life.67 Such fragmentation was effected by the labor market, where it was no longer possible to purchase the whole laborer but only a portion of his or her labor power, thus leaving non-essential, or non-economic, aspects of life outside the reach of either the state or one’s employer, ensconced, instead, in an autonomous realm of private individuality. The slave experienced no such autonomy, of course, nor any guarantees of his individuality whatsoever. The highly idiosyncratic rule of one’s master was the only law the slave knew, one wholly infused by the former’s personality and private sentiment.68 Tushnet explores the implications of this deeply embedded paternalism by revisiting a well-known decision handed down by the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1829 that overturned John Mann’s conviction for assault and battery. Mann was originally put on trial for shooting and wounding a slave named Lydia, whom Mann had hired from her owner, during a purported escape attempt. Lydia’s injuries had obvious economic repercussions, both for her owner and for Mann, since they impaired her ability to work. The court could thus have upheld Mann’s conviction and, in so doing, bolster the protection of slave property under lease, helping to regulate a growing sector of the Southern slave economy. But there were far more pressing matters at stake for Southern courts than such commercial utilities, the most critical being the protection of the status of white men. This goal extended far beyond any business concerns. “The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect,” Judge Ruffin therefore decreed in distinguishing that power from any other form of social authority or personal prerogative.69 Even parental control over children was different, for while filial obedience was no less anchored in organic hierarchy, children were nonetheless raised in order to assume a place among society’s freemen. “With slavery it is far otherwise,” Ruffin continued in justifying the court’s decision to exonerate Mann from any responsibility for having shot Lydia. [The slave] is to labor upon a principle of natural duty [by which he] surrenders his will in implicit obedience to that of another. Such obedience is the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body. There is nothing else which can operate to produce the effect.70 The needs of government in a slave system thus transcended commercial logic. Indeed, they needed to be protected from commercial logic, which would otherwise separate racial power out from property rights, a fracturing of patriarchal prerogative increasingly evident in the disintegration of the household economy in the North.71 The dominion of white men over slaves was incontrovertible, in other words, lying outside those principles of contract – whether social or commercial – which turned everything into a subject of negotiation.72 Although not directly concerned with the cultural apparatus of modern personhood or the legal abstractions of racial control, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global 161

MI C HA EL Z A K I M

History presents a narrative of slavery and capitalism that pivots around this same opposition – or, in more historical terms, transition – from autocratic coercion to liberal consent and the consequent development of new methods for organizing both labor and capital.73 The global history of cotton begins with the emergence of a system of “war capitalism,” Beckert’s fresh version of the older, more opaque notion of “primitive accumulation,” by which the violent seizure of land and labor in Asia, Africa, and America was carried out on behalf of European venture capitalists.74 This early incarnation of capitalism became the basis of a trade economy dedicated to wealth accumulation that was founded on violence rather than contract, on massive expropriations rather than property rights, and on the personal dominion of masters instead of the rule of law. With the active support of military-fiscal states newly capable of projecting power over great distances, European mercantilists muscled their way into existing circuits of peasant production and distribution around the globe. Those efforts rearranged the world’s economy after the sixteenth century – if they did not, in fact, invent that economy – by tying Liverpool, Alsace, Dacca, the Mississippi Valley, and the West Indies together into an expansive matrix of profiteering. “The beating heart of this new system was slavery,” Beckert writes, which proved as central to the ascendancy of the West as the more familiar explanations of technological innovation, cultural proclivity, and geographical advantage.75 When the bulk of cotton cultivation was eventually transferred from Asia to the Western hemisphere, where it came under the direct control of European planters, millions of African slaves accordingly followed. They were subject to a production regime whose dramatic gains in output were based on an intensification of violence. The very success of this “military-cotton complex” would also push capitalism beyond its early war footing, so to speak.76 The shortened production chain by which British merchants supplied cotton fibers grown on Britishowned plantations to British textile manufacturers setting up shop in England encouraged new uses for capital, most notably in the form of mechanization – spinning jennies, water frames, and a self-acting mule that combined the actions of both – and the cotton mill, which not only housed this array of new apparatuses but growing numbers of hired laborers as well. The resulting economies of scale, together with the administrative and legal support of the state, effected a steady fall in prices, allowing British manufacturers to undersell the rest of the world’s cloth producers. This is when factory-made cottons from Manchester came to dominate those regions of Asia and Africa that had served as the principal source of fabrics for European merchants during the previous period of the history of cotton. Modern capitalism was born, then, of a close collaboration between the lords of the loom and lords of the lash, a “diversity of . . . forms” that proved to be the system’s defining trait.77 That diversity also became the source of structural divergence, however. The manufacture of cotton cloth, in contrast to the production of cotton plants, engendered an economy that not only employed free rather than slave labor, but embraced a far more dynamic material culture. Societies organized on the basis of war capitalism, in contrast, were unable to generate new forms of capital. Egypt’s failure to create a wage labor system or a domestic consumer market was a case in point. So was Brazil’s. The reasons are familiar by now. Slaveholders mobilized considerable political influence in order to protect a highly profitable status quo of staple crop production for world markets, tying capital up in agricultural commodities and the ancillary slave trade. In Cuba, for instance, 162

CA P I TA L I S M A N D S L AVE RY

war capitalism was extremely effective in organizing enormous numbers of chattel labor but utterly incapable of building a single cotton mill.78 This was no less true of the slave regime in the United States, where the plantation system dominated the capital, labor, and entrepreneurial resources of the South, inhibiting the development of domestic markets, settlement of the region by free-labor immigrants, and the integration of yeoman farmers into commercial relations. How telling it was, Beckert recounts, that De Bow’s Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States, published in 1852, sold six times more copies in the free than the slave states.79 In fact, war capitalism developed a distinct variant in the United States due to the unique access of its planter class to a virtually unrestricted supply of land, labor, and capital, and to that class’s unrivalled influence over the federal government. The United States proved to be exceptional, too, because there was no other place in the world where both free and slave labor systems were so firmly established within the same polity. This was a recipe for disaster – or civil war – Beckert contends, for no sovereign state could possibly satisfy the incongruous demands that resulted. Pressures grew in the North, for example, to redirect fixed capital investments away from labor and into the expansion of plant and equipment. The results were not restricted to the sphere of production, but effected considerable change in the political and legal order, which was reestablished on free competition and social flux, that which made industrial revolution so revolutionary. This included novel methods for subduing a restive working class without enslaving it, principally by extending the franchise to landless day laborers and so ensuring their loyalty to the regime. Methods of government on the plantation, meanwhile, remained far more deferential, and personal, in a structure less suited to the dynamic quality of modern capitalist praxis but critical for maintaining order in slave society. The outbreak of civil war thus led some to observe that “events themselves drive to the . . . emancipation of the slaves,” as Marx wrote as early as 1861. Armed confrontation between North and South – between industrial capitalism and war capitalism – signaled a clash between two forms of social life that “can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent.”80 Beckert’s epic narrative underscores that view, long embraced by scholars of capitalism who consider the abolition of slavery to be another chapter in the history of an especially volatile economic system that keeps upending and then reinventing itself. Indeed, the history of capitalism reveals just how much the Southern economy diverged from modern industrial practice, and how much the end of slavery was as integral to that history as slavery’s earlier rise. This is no contradiction, of course, but testament to the unrelenting dialectics of a permanent revolution that continues to this day.

Notes 1 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989; orig. 1903), 1. 2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969; orig. 1835), 345–346. In more explicit terms: “The convenience of being served by slaves renders whites indolent, and the fertility of the land, from which one reaps abundant harvests with little effort, favors this disposition.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Letters from America, ed. Frederick Brown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 245. Also see “Slavery vs. Manufacturing,” Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine 18 (March 1848).

163

MI C HA EL Z A K I M

3 October 15, 1858 (Alton, Illinois), in The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, ed. Robert W. Johannsen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 316. 4 Manufactures of the United States in 1860 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1865), vi. 5 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 83. See, too, Stanley I. Kutler, Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 2010). 6 George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society (Richmond: A. Morris, 1854), esp. 34–79. 7 Scientific American, June 28, 1851; September 24, 1853, 13; Greeley quoted in Robert C. Post, “Reflections of American Science and Technology at the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1853,” Journal of American Studies 17:3 (1983), 343–344. 8 Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South: Selected Essays in Economic and Social History, ed. Eugene Genovese (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968). 9 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). 10 Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South, 20, 103, 66–68. 11 Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South, 20. “When American history comes to be rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident.” Frederick J. Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Chicago: American Historical Association, 1893), 217. See, too, Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975). 12 Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South, 248. 13 Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South, 87. The South was bound to fall into a Malthusian trap once all its lands were under cultivation, the antebellum political economist George Tucker wrote. The price of labor would then begin to collapse. “This may be called the euthanasia of the institution, as it will be abolished with the consent of the master no less than . . . the slave.” George Tucker, Progress of the Population (New York, 1843), 109–110. 14 Charles Beard and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1934; orig. 1927). 15 Beard and Beard, Rise of American Civilization, 54–55. 16 Beard and Beard, Rise of American Civilization, 5–6. 17 Beard and Beard, Rise of American Civilization, 30. 18 Beard and Beard, Rise of American Civilization, 53; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); October 15, 1858 (Alton, Illinois), in Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 316. See, too, Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). 19 Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South, 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989). 20 Eugene D. Genovese, “The Janus Face of Merchant Capital,” in Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 16; Genovese, Political Economy of Slavery, 36. 21 Genovese, Political Economy of Slavery, 41. 22 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1972), 3. 23 Only in industrial society did society become embedded in the economy, as Karl Polanyi famously argued. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957; orig. 1944). 24 Sean Patrick Adams, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 3. 25 Adams, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth, 99. For the specific character of “slave society,” see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

164

CA P I TA L I S M A N D S L AVE RY

26 John Majewski also compares the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania in A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and reaches similar conclusions, though by insisting that the success of northern industry was to be attributed to the absence of the state in the economy. On the clash between “static” and “dynamic” forms of property in the early decades of industrial revolution, see Willard Hurst, “Release of Energy,” in Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956). 27 Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). Similar methods are to be found in Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, The Economics of Slavery and Other Econometric History (Chicago: Aldine, 1964). 28 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 4–5. 29 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 148–149; and see Robert W. Fogel, Slavery Debates: 1952–1990 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 24–48; see, for instance, George Fitzhugh, “The Blessings of Slavery” (1857). 30 Most famously, E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971). 31 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 41–76. See, too, Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 32 Francesco Boldizzoni, The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 16; Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 8–9; and Gavin Wright, Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978). See, too, Herbert G. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975). “The one great thing we have going for us is the premise that individuals act rationally in trying to satisfy their preferences. That is an incredibly powerful tool, because you can model it.” Charles Schultz, former president of the American Economic Association, in 1985, quoted in Paul Hirsch, Stuart Michaels, and Ray Friedman, “Clean Models vs. Dirty Hands: Why Economics Is Different from Sociology,” in Structures of Capital: The Social Organization of the Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 39. On the tautologies of economists more generally, see Melvin W. Reder, Economics: The Culture of a Controversial Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Musiesa, and Lucia Siu, eds., Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 33 Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). 34 Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). See, too, Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 35 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 49. 36 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 112–113. 37 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 117, 121, 120 (whips), 140. 38 See, too, Edward Baptist, “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, Collateralized and Securitized Human Beings, and the Panic of 1837,” in Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 39 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 40 Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 41 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 49, 167, 249–250. 42 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 73, 6.

165

MI C HA EL Z A K I M

43 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 401, 11, 12. 44 For instance, Robin Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997). For a good overview, see Anthony Kaye, “The Second Slavery,” Journal of Southern History 75:3 (Aug. 2009). 45 Eve Chiapello, “Accounting and the Birth of the Notion of Capitalism,” Critical Perspectives on Accounting 18 (2007). 46 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 294–295; Robert G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port: 1815– 1860 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939). 47 Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 48 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 402. 49 Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, 21, 36. 50 On the commercialization of Northern agriculture since the eighteenth century, see Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Martin Bruegel, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780–1860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 51 On “market society,” see Polanyi, Great Transformation. 52 Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, 84. Slave society left much of its commercial logics and logistics on the margins – and overseas – reminiscent of ancient and medieval institutions of trade. See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought: 1550–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 53 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 399. 54 Seth Rockman, “Unfree Origins of American Capitalism,” in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Achievements and New Directions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005); Walter Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,” Journal of the Early Republic 24:2 (2004). 55 For instance, Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 56 Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Judge Shaw quoted on 225. 57 Tomlins, Law, Labor and Ideology. See, too, Christopher L. Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Robert J. Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 58 Karl Marx, “Wage Labor and Capital” (1849), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1977), 72–94. Adam Smith was in general agreement. See An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 1976), book 1, ch. VIII (“Of the Wages of Labour”). On the relationship between constitutional democracy and civic inequality, see, too, Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” (1843), in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 26–52. 59 Northup quoted in Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 171; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 8. 60 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 171, 187; Frederick Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35 (Sept. 1945), 527. 61 Karen Haltunnen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” The American Historical Review 100:2 (April 1995); Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” in Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem of Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California, 1992), 105–160. More generally, Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 2005; orig. 1930). And see Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast (1840):

166

CA P I TA L I S M A N D S L AVE RY

The man writhed under the pain, until he could endure it no longer, when he called out, with an exclamation more common among foreigners than with us – “Oh, Jesus Christ, oh, Jesus Christ!” “Don’t call on Jesus Christ,” shouted the captain. “He can’t help you. Call on Captain T –. He’s the man! He can help you! Jesus Christ can’t help you now!” At these words, which I never shall forget, my blood ran cold. I could look on no longer. Disgusted, sick, and horror-struck, I turned away and leaned over the rail, and looked down into the water. 62 Amy Dru Stanley, “Slave Breeding and Free Love: An Antebellum Argument over Slavery, Capitalism, and Personhood,” in Zakim and Kornblith, Capitalism Takes Command, 125. 63 Stanley, “Slave Breeding and Free Love,” 123, 132. “The people had no significance as individuals, but formed a mass, a machine, to be wielded at pleasure by their lords.” William Ellery Channing, Self-Culture (Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1839), 124. 64 “In as far as one pays with money one is completely finished with any object just as fundamentally as when one has paid for satisfaction from a prostitute.” Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge, 1990), 376–377. On the relationship between the demimonde and capitalism, see, too, Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Steven Soderbergh, dir., The Girlfriend Experience (2009). 65 Daniel N. Haskell, An Address Delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1848); Lincoln in Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 142– 143. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (New York: Norton, 1972). See, too, Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; William Sanger, The History of Prostitution (New York, 1850). 66 Mark Tushnet, The American Law of Slavery, 1810–1860: Considerations of Humanity and Interest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 67 Tushnet, American Law of Slavery, 6. 68 Tushnet, American Law of Slavery, 30–37. 69 Tushnet, American Law of Slavery, 60. 70 Tushnet, American Law of Slavery, 60. 71 Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 352–359. Generally, Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 72 Roy Kreitner, Calculating Promises: The Emergence of Modern American Contract Doctrine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); William James Booth, Households: On the Moral Architecture of the Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 140–146. 73 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014). 74 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 29–54. More generally, Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1964); Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Verso, 1985). 75 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 94, 37. 76 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 104. 77 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 172. 78 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 168–170. 79 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 170–171, 129. 80 Published in Die Presse, November 7, 1861, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Civil War in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1961), 81–82.

167

Part III THE CIVIL WAR ERA

10 SE C ESSIO N A N D THE ONSE T OF C I V I L W A R Rachel A. Shelden

I The five months stretching from Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 to his call for 75,000 troops to face down the Confederate rebellion in April 1861 are among the most critical and consequential in U.S. history. These months – sometimes called “the Secession Winter” – comprised a unique historical moment when 31.5 million Americans were faced with the same set of choices about the future of their democratic experiment. As their political system failed them, communities across the country mobilized toward a civil war that would transform a nation, costing the lives of more than 750,000 men and formally freeing four million African Americans from enslavement.1 Although Americans’ decisions during these fraught months are critical for understanding the mid-nineteenth century, scholars have given less attention to them. In part this is because the Secession Winter is a unique historiographical moment – a five-month pivot – between two of the most contested and consequential questions in nineteenthcentury historical literature: (1) What caused the Civil War? and (2) Why did men choose to fight the Civil War? These two questions have produced thousands of monographs investigating nearly every imaginable detail of the sectional conflict. Their answers are both simple and complex. On the one hand, historians universally agree that, at base, the Civil War was about slavery and white supremacy. No serious scholar would dispute that Confederates seceded to protect slavery and that their armies fought for a nation built on the principles of white supremacy. On the other hand, significant disagreements remain regarding both the nature of sectional discord and of the war itself. Scholars still spar over critical questions such as whether war was inevitable, what the Republican Party intended to accomplish, why so many southern yeomen were committed to the Confederate cause, what northern soldiers were fighting for, and many others. Compared with several generations of sectional discord and four deadly years of fighting, the transition from ideological conflict to bloodshed often seems like it happened overnight. Yet, understanding why this transition happened so swiftly can tell us much about the nature of both the sectionalism that preceded it and the war that came. Ultimately, the Secession Winter illuminates two fundamental features of American society in the Civil War era. First, Americans understood the prospect of disunion as a fundamentally political problem; secession was, at its core, a political act of separation from the existing federal structure. Throughout the Secession Winter, therefore, men and women throughout the northern and southern states looked to federal politicians for 171

R AC HEL A . S H E L D E N

answers. Yet, the political system could not solve the sectional conflict or prevent war; the dispute over slavery had made Americans’ dual commitment to the Union and to state rights irreconcilable.2 Second, as the political system failed them, Americans looked to their communities to help guide their decisions about secession, support, and enlistment. As David Potter has thoughtfully explained, nineteenth-century Americans had a variety of loyalties, ranging from region, state, and locality to religious denomination, economic standing, gender, and race.3 Yet loyalties were not simply internal commitments; rather, they represented real communities of neighbors, friends, and other likeminded Americans. As the Secession Winter progressed, communities – not just individuals – made the fateful decisions to fight or defend disunion. In essence, Americans who had previously relied on the political system to solve the problem of slavery, turned toward their friends and neighbors to help guide them through the sectional crisis.

II For most American communities in November 1860, the possibility of dissolving the Union was agonizingly difficult. Since at least the Constitutional Convention of 1787, both Northerners and Southerners expressed fears that the democratic experiment would fail and the Union would cease to exist. Slavery was often, if not always, the cause of this fear. Talk of disunion had intensified following the annexation of Texas in 1846, as a result of increasing conflict over slavery’s protection and expansion. At each moment of crisis that followed, federal politicians worked to prevent secession, primarily by assuaging slaveholders’ concerns. By the late 1850s, white and black Northerners looked at these political compromises with frustration. Tired of catering to slaveholders, white Northerners increasingly supported antislavery political representatives in these years. Yet, most northern communities were committed to making their Union free, not destroying its very existence. At the same time, most white Southerners valued their place in the Union as long as the federal government protected their right to slavery.4 A small group of southern whites welcomed the prospect of disunion, however. These men, generally known as the Fire Eaters, had long argued that white Southerners were better off forming a new nation explicitly committed to the principles of slavery and white supremacy. As historian Eric Walther has explained, Fire Eaters such as Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, and South Carolinian Robert Barnwell Rhett actively pushed for secession from the United States for at least a decade.5 Yet, the Fire Eater community typically had faced a resistant public as long as white Southerners believed slavery was secure. The events of late 1860 would present the Fire Eaters with a unique moment to mobilize for separation. As the presidential election approached, this community of disunionists worked cautiously to build support for secession. For Fire Eaters, Abraham Lincoln’s election as the Sixteenth President of the United States on November 6, 1860, was the culmination of months of intense political maneuvering. During the preceding summer, fortune brought the 1860 Democratic Party National Convention to Charleston, South Carolina, a hotbed of Fire Eater activity. There, proseparation men worked to disrupt the selection of a single Democratic candidate. A divided Democracy, Fire Eaters reasoned, would propel a Republican into 172

S EC ES S I ON A N D T HE O NS E T O F C I VI L WA R

the White House and convince fellow white Southerners that it was time to leave the Union. Many Southerners were particularly fearful of an antislavery president by the summer of 1860 as a result of recent developments; among other factors, whites were still shaken by John Brown’s infamous raid on Harper’s Ferry and the publication of southernborn Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South. The former portended a violent overthrow of the peculiar institution, while the latter upset white solidarity by arguing that slavery compromised non-slaveholders’ economic and social well-being.6 With this background in mind, separationists helped to engineer a walkout of southern delegates from the Democratic convention, practically ensuring a split between two candidates. Ultimately a mostly northern branch of the party nominated Stephen Douglas of Illinois, while southern Democrats chose Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as their nominee.7 The Democratic rupture created a crowded presidential field that also included the Republican Lincoln and Constitutional Unionist John Bell of Tennessee. With two northern and two southern candidates, the election featured two largely sectional contests. Made up of mostly border-state men and former Whigs, Bell’s party offered few specifics, instead declaring a commitment to “no political principle other than the Constitution of the Country, the Union of the States, and the Enforcement of the Laws.” Still, he particularly appealed to border-state Southerners who had supported anti-Democratic candidates earlier in the decade.8 A specifically northern party, Republican support during the election featured marching companies of young men called “Wide Awakes,” who paraded through northern and border-state cities and cajoled Lincoln supporters to the polls in November. Partially as a result of their efforts and the crowded presidential field, voter turnout in the 1860 election reached its highest levels since the founding of the republic: 81.2 percent of eligible Americans cast ballots.9 Lincoln ultimately captured the Electoral College by a wide margin, winning 180 electoral votes entirely from northern and western states. Even a united Democracy would not have received enough electoral votes to best Lincoln.10 The election spelled triumph for the Fire Eaters. They expected a Republican president-elect would spread fear throughout the slaveholding states. Southern white communities knew that the Republican platform had specifically called for a ban on slavery in the territories and Republican political representatives had adopted antislavery, anti-slaveholder rhetoric in Congress.11 South Carolina found itself consumed with separationist rhetoric by the second week in November and the Palmetto State became a natural starting point for a white southern movement toward secession. Historians disagree as to why that state had radicalized so greatly by 1860. “The Problem of South Carolina,” as historian James Banner famously called it, has been traced to black majorities in the state’s low-country counties, the lack of a stable two-party system in the state, and an increasing fear of an abolitionist invasion in the wake of John Brown’s raid.12 Regardless of the origins of South Carolina radicalism, by 1860 communities across the Palmetto State had shown a readiness for separation. Members of the planter class increasingly believed their aristocratic lifestyle was under fire from radical abolitionists while, at the same time, yeomen understood their interests lay with the state’s large slaveholding farmers.13 Still, Fire Eaters did not want to force the issue of secession prematurely. South Carolinians, in particular, had learned from their failed efforts to rally other southern 173

R AC HEL A . S H E L D E N

states during the nullification controversy of the 1830s and more recent attempts at separation in the early 1850s.14 Many disunionist leaders wanted to be sure that other members of the Lower South community – Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas – would follow South Carolina’s lead in declaring secession.15 As William Freehling argues, migration and contingency brought the assurances that South Carolinians needed. Half of the adult population of South Carolina had dispersed into other Lower South states by 1860, bringing radicalism to their new destinations. Perhaps more important was the communication between pro-separation leaders in South Carolina and Georgia in early November. With tacit assurances that Georgia would follow South Carolina’s lead, Fire Eaters in the Palmetto State felt confident that their moment had arrived.16 On December 20, 1860, representatives at South Carolina’s state convention quickly declared secession from the United States. Members of the convention clearly articulated why they pursued separation. “A geographical line has been drawn across the Union,” the secession ordinance stipulated, “and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”17 Now it was up to communities in Washington and across the slaveholding states to react to the news.

III By early December, federal politicians had already begun to address the problem of disunion head on. Lawmakers gathered in Washington, D.C. for the start of the second session of the Thirty-Sixth Congress, hoping to stop initial moves toward southern separation. At first glance, the politicians who gathered in the capital city seemed to have a good chance of staving off secession. After all, political moderates had been successful in preventing movements toward disunion at other tense moments, most notably during the Missouri Crisis of 1820 and in negotiations over the Compromise of 1850.18 Outgoing President James Buchanan was the first of the Washington community to weigh in on the issue of secession during his fourth message to Congress on December 3, 1860. Yet, Buchanan’s words were confusing to people in both the northern and southern states. The president denied that any state could leave the Union constitutionally but, at the same time, he also denied that the federal government had any power to stop secession or coerce a state to remain.19 This mixed message, along with other pro-South behavior during the Secession Winter, has led many historians to hold Buchanan at least partially responsible for the crisis. Some, such as Jean Baker, view his actions in these critical months as borderline treasonous. From this perspective, Buchanan made matters worse in the succeeding weeks in his handling of federal property in South Carolina; he conceded control of Fort Moultrie to the secessionists in late December, and he refused to retaliate in early January when South Carolinians fired at The Star of the West, a merchant vessel sent from New York to supply Fort Sumter. When no further violence followed, the Buchanan administration was relieved, while many northern communities felt humiliated.20 Other scholars see more continuity between Buchanan’s early efforts at moderation and the actions Lincoln took when he assumed the presidency in March and in early April. Historians such as Kenneth Stampp have argued that Buchanan acted 174

S EC ES S I ON A N D T HE O NS E T O F C I VI L WA R

honorably during the crisis, emphasizing his second message to Congress in early January, in which the outgoing president defended the right of the federal government to enforce the laws.21 Buchanan was not the only member of the Washington community looking for political compromise, however. In both the Senate and the House of Representatives, moderates tried to bolster the chances for reconciliation in special committees. In the House, moderates formed a Committee of Thirty-Three (with one member from each state) under the chairmanship of Ohioan Thomas Corwin, while the Senate fashioned a Committee of Thirteen, which included several prominent leaders such as Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, New Yorker William Henry Seward, and John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. Crittenden – who famously succeeded the “Great Compromiser” Henry Clay in office – was responsible for the most promising plan: the “Crittenden Compromise” featured an extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean, among other pacifying measures. But the adoption of the Crittenden Compromise in the Committee of Thirteen was likely doomed from the start; at its creation, committee members had agreed that both Republicans and southern Democrats would have to sign on to a compromise proposal to send it to the full body of the Senate. Crittenden could not get enough support on either side and, as a result, the proposal stalled in committee. In mid-January, Davis and the other members from the Lower South states said their goodbyes and departed Washington to join their home state communities.22 Because they failed to compromise (or perhaps because they tried), Washington’s politicians have taken the brunt of responsibility for the failure of Union. Since the 1930s, one popular explanation for why the Civil War came in 1861 has focused on a “blundering generation” of politicians who caved to the radicals on both sides. Although few historians still subscribe to the “needless war” sentiment behind the original blundering generation scholarship, modern revisionists continue to blame federal politicians for heightening sectional tension.23 Several scholars have also held congressional Republicans responsible for the failure to compromise in December and early January, stressing their unwillingness to agree to Crittenden’s measures or to work toward conciliating Southerners.24 Whether a congressional compromise would have halted the move toward secession in the Lower South, however, remains an open question. Lower South congressmen certainly would have had great difficulty in eradicating the secession movements of their home states. The insularity of the capital’s social community had led politicians to greatly underestimate the secessionist fervor that had been bubbling back home since Lincoln’s victory. By the time these men departed Washington, Lower South men and women had already set their sights on secession; the movement for separation was well underway. In essence, the political system could not contain grassroots secessionist fervor by January.25

IV In fact, Lower South communities had been weighing the problem of a Republican presidency since at least October 1860. Talk of disunion ratcheted up amid South Carolina’s declaration and Congress’s failure to act. By early 1861, each of the Lower South states had called for secession conventions to consider the possibility of separation and had gone 175

R AC HEL A . S H E L D E N

through the process of selecting delegates. Candidate platforms typically fell into two groups. On one side were “separate state secessionists” who generally advocated immediate secession. On the other were “cooperationists,” whose attitudes toward the crisis ranged from outright unionism to a preference for acting as a unified southern coalition. Although cooperationists made up a significant portion of the delegations, separationists held a majority. In January and early February, state secession conventions in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas joined South Carolina in voting to withdraw from the Union.26 Whites in these states acted quickly and decisively, even while their Upper South brethren dawdled and initially rejected disunion. What made these communities so anxious to separate following Lincoln’s election? A number of historians convincingly emphasize the role of antiparty, anti-establishment frustration. For example, in his important study of Alabama, J. Mills Thornton points to a growing mistrust of the political elite among Alabamians, who looked to southern separatism as a way to prevent Republicans from gaining political dominance. As Thornton explains, Southerners feared that Republicans would “enslave” them politically and ideologically, taking away their equal stake in American society. Other studies of Lower South communities point to problems of economic development and fear of abolitionism and nativism, among other destabilizing factors that influenced southern politics. In essence, Lower South communities already believed that, by the end of 1860, the political system had failed them. White men in Lower South states then used their secession conventions to firmly reject the existing national political structure.27 Slaveholder communities tended to be overrepresented in these secession conventions, but non-slaveholders were no less committed to disunion. Although scholars agree that racial subjugation was at the heart of Lower South secession movements, explanations abound for how communities of non-slaveholders became so deeply invested in a nation built on slavery. Just as political historians emphasize the shared commitment to white liberty and antipartyism, other scholars have pointed to cultural and economic reasons for communal ties between plantation owners and poorer whites. In these works, southern whites were bound together by pro-slavery religious doctrine, patriarchal gender dynamics, or a shared economic system. The varying emphases in these studies are more about degree than difference; many consider a number of cultural and economic factors that helped to shape the relationship between slaveholder and non-slaveholder. The real divide among these historians is the extent to which antebellum southern communities shared cultural and economic norms with their northern brethren. While some point to similar cultural and economic systems in the North and South, others emphasize vast differences between the communities in these states.28 Yet, slavery made the crucial difference. Regardless of their methodological angle, scholars would agree that secession had popular support in the Lower South because of a perceived threat to racial hierarchy. Communities of white Southerners – both slaveholders and yeomen – had to evaluate their commitment to the Union against concerns about the future of slavery with a Republican president in office. After consulting friends and neighbors, some white Lower South communities did resist the move toward disunion and ultimately reject secession.29 But, by 1861, a majority of Lower South white men 176

S EC ES S I ON A N D T HE O NS E T O F C I VI L WA R

from all social classes were motivated by a belief that slavery was better protected outside the Union.30 During these months, African American communities throughout the Lower South watched the actions of their white enslavers with interest. Enslaved Southerners faced the Secession Winter in a variety of ways, unsure of how the crisis would influence their bondage. As W. E. B. Du Bois explained in his masterful Black Reconstruction in America, each member of these enslaved communities would “wait, look and listen and try to see where his interest lay.” Particularly in areas far from the northern border or coast, black communities may have looked toward disunion with circumspection, concerned that disunion could bring a worse fate.31 At the same time, other enslaved groups saw the secession crisis as an opportunity to create fear and panic among their enslavers. Some actively influenced the course of secession during those fraught months, using the specter of slave rebellion and mass desertion to affect white political behavior.32 Free black communities were no less attentive to events around them. Free peoples in places like New Orleans cautiously monitored white efforts toward secession and some worked to induce southern panic.33 As southern communities of color weighed the impact of secession, newly-elected Lower South delegates gathered in Montgomery, Alabama on February 4, with the charged purpose of creating a Confederate government.34 Although many southern whites had expressed an anti-party, anti-political sentiment in November and December, they overwhelmingly returned the established southern political community to positions of power in Montgomery. Much of the Fire Eater community that had so ignited the push toward secession was kept out of the deliberations and resulting Confederate structure.35 Delegates quickly elected Jefferson Davis and Georgian Alexander Stephens as their provisional president and vice president. The body also constructed an explicitly pro-slavery Confederate Constitution that otherwise closely resembled the U.S. Constitution. The seven Lower South states adopted the new governing document in early March.36 Throughout these months, Confederate officials waged a campaign to bring white communities in the remaining slaveholding states into the new nation. They hoped to persuade not only the Middle South states – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas – but also the Border South – Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. To garner support in these areas, many secession commissioners echoed the new vice president’s words on March 21, 1861 that the “cornerstone” of the new Confederate nation was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”37 Initially, efforts to bring in the other slaveholding states failed as state conventions rejected the prospect of secession in Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware in February.38 Noting this hesitancy among their closest geographic neighbors, communities that remained in the Union began to evaluate how they would respond to the Lower South.

V Northern communities responded to secessionist movements in the early months of 1861 in a variety of ways. Some wrote to their representatives expressing a desire to let southern 177

R AC HEL A . S H E L D E N

states go peacefully. Others hoped to broker sectional compromise. Still others were ready to use force to bring the states back into the Union. Because of the political nature of secession, many looked to the new administration for guidance and leadership. Yet, from his headquarters in Springfield, Lincoln was largely silent during the winter. He refused requests to conciliate white Southerners and he left compromise efforts in the hands of Congress and the outgoing president. Historians have debated the efficacy of Lincoln’s silence during this period.39 Still, most would agree that his silence stemmed from two sources. First, Lincoln had a misguided belief that most white Southerners were ardent unionists, who would ultimately reject secession. In addition to southern whites’ long history of idle disunion threats, Lincoln likely believed in southern unionism because of his personal experience with Southerners. His relationship with the Washington community, in particular, indicated that southern politicians would be willing to work with antislavery Northerners.40 Second, Lincoln was unwavering in his commitment to the Republican Party, both its political structure and its ultimate goals. Exactly what those goals were, however, has been the subject of substantial debate among historians. Much of this scholarly disagreement focuses on the origins of the Republican political organization and its electoral appeals throughout the 1850s. Some historians have pointed to the role of ethnocultural issues, such as nativism and temperance, that helped bring disparate politicians into the Republican fold. Others argue that its members were deeply committed to antislavery activism, highlighting Republican rhetoric promoting “free labor” ideology and “free soil” in the territories. This disagreement may hinge primarily on locality and scale. In the 1860 election, some local Republicans likely appealed to their individual communities’ interests in tariffs, sabbatarian laws, or immigrant restrictions, while others boasted a commitment to northern wage labor or halting the expansion of slavery. On a national level (and certainly in the slaveholding states), Republicans were known for their antislavery position. Opposition to slavery and its extension westward was the core ideology upon which the party was built. Thus, even after the Lower South seceded, Republicans risked abandoning their organizing principle by compromising on slavery.41 Outside of the Republican leadership, white and black communities throughout the North grappled with how (or whether) to meet the disunion threat. As Nicole Etcheson has shown in her study of Putnam County, Indiana, one northern locale could contain a wide range of reactions among its various communities. Many Northerners were torn between a love for the Union and a fear of a brutal civil war. When weighing this choice, white men and women in some northern communities expressed the preference for separation over violence. Several northern newspapers carried the message of caution and inaction over war. Among the most famous proponents of “peaceable secession” was the fiery editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, though his motives were not always clear. A few northern Democrats also railed against the possibility of federal coercion of the seceded states, preferring separation to bloodshed. On the other side of the political spectrum, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison seemed poised to let southern states go in peace, having long described the Union as “a covenant with death.”42 Although they were similarly committed to black freedom, some abolitionists expressed a willingness to forcefully keep the slave states in the Union, regardless of the violent consequences. In these early months, several members of the black abolitionist 178

S EC ES S I ON A N D T HE O NS E T O F C I VI L WA R

community saw the possibilities for what the Civil War became: a vehicle for emancipation. As a result, some free blacks actively encouraged a call to arms, hoping that disunion would bring an end to federal protection of slavery in the southern states. Others, like Frederick Douglass, were more cautious, fearing that the secession crisis would not necessarily produce a war to end slavery.43 Yet, most white communities in the North were more concerned with the Union than the plight of enslaved peoples in the seceding states. Believing that the Union represented a unique commitment to liberty, equality, and nation, these white Northerners feared that secession meant the end of majority rule and the end of the democratic experiment more generally.44 Still, because they had constantly been taunted with the threat of secession throughout the antebellum era, these men and women expected that a political settlement would and could be reached. As a result, Northerners urged their leaders to find some sort of compromise. Some state politicians, including most Democrats and men who had been active in the Constitutional Union Party, called for conciliation and drafted resolutions for peace. The New York City banking community and others with significant financial interests in the slave economy were similarly eager for a peaceful settlement, sending desperate pleas to Lincoln and congressional representatives to appease the South. Northerners who preferred some form of compromise convened during these months in a variety of cross-sectional peace meetings. In February, for example, workingmen’s groups from states along the border met in Philadelphia while many northern states sent delegates to a Peace Convention in Washington, D.C. In the latter case, the Virginia legislature had called peace delegates together with the hope of finding a political solution to the crisis. After several weeks of negotiation, the body produced a compromise proposal that closely resembled the Crittenden Compromise.45 After spending much of the winter in Springfield, Lincoln arrived in Washington just as the Peace Conference was finishing its work. The pro-compromise men submitted their final draft to Congress, which was wrapping up its session in early March, hoping for a last-minute gesture to Lower South whites. Once again, Republicans rejected the deal as a violation of northern rights and a subversion of their party platform. Ultimately, twothirds majorities in both Houses passed a last-ditch effort for peace by way of the “Corwin Amendment,” the original proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This political compromise, a product of the House Committee of Thirty-Three, prevented any amendment to the Constitution that would “abolish or interfere with” slavery. Lincoln gave tacit endorsement to this proposal, but without addressing the expansion of slavery into the federal territories it had little impact on the new Confederate states.46 Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861, also did not convince the Confederate communities to return. The new president showed a desire to maintain peace, once again promising that he would not “interfere with the institution of Slavery in the States that it exists.”47 Yet, white secessionists showed no signs of relenting, instead insisting that the Lincoln administration surrender federal property in their new national territory. Like Buchanan before him, Lincoln was faced with the prospect of hostilities at Fort Sumter almost immediately upon taking office. Over the next six weeks, he determined that he must re-supply the fort and any violent reaction from Confederates would be taken as a declaration of war.48 When a relief expedition arrived in early April, Confederates responded with gunfire. After a two-day bombardment, Major Robert 179

R AC HEL A . S H E L D E N

Anderson surrendered to Confederate officers on April 14. The following day, Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to “re-possess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union.”49 This call to arms would have a deep impact on white communities in the slaveholding states that remained in the Union up to this point.

VI Much like their northern counterparts, Upper South white communities had gone through a variety of reactions to secessionist movements and the failure to find political compromise. While some had immediately pushed for disunion, many preached caution and, in pockets throughout the Upper South, white communities declared their unconditional unionism in the face of Lower South separatism. In early 1861, legislatures in both the Middle South states – North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas – and the Border South – Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri – had rejected the political movement for secession. The majority of white communities there were committed, if tenuously, to maintaining peace. Why did the Upper South hesitate? Historians have posited several theories for what made these communities different from their Lower South counterparts. The relative strength of Upper South slavery has provided evidence for two very different perspectives. Some have suggested that slaveholders in these communities waited because they were less committed to the peculiar institution than their Lower South counterparts. Other scholars offer the more convincing argument that Upper South whites proceeded cautiously because they were deeply invested in slaveholding. Proximity to the North and U.S. federal fugitive slave laws made slaveholders unsure of which side would better protect slavery.50 The political system also played a crucial role in separating white communities in the Upper and Lower South. While two-party politics had largely disappeared in the Lower South by the time of Lincoln’s election, communities in the Upper South still held healthy party differences. As Daniel Crofts has shown, white unionists in the Middle South states used these varied political alignments to defeat the secession advocates throughout the early months of 1861.51 Yet, even as the political system provided unionist communities with temporary victories, the crisis continued as long as uncertainty about the status of the new Confederacy remained; many Upper South white communities disapproved of reunion by force. And so, like their northern counterparts, these men looked to their representatives to find a political solution to the crisis. Political failures in the Peace Convention and Congress were disappointing, but not necessarily decisive. It was Lincoln’s call for troops that ultimately swayed Upper South white communities. In April and May, white majorities in the Middle South states reversed course and voted to join their counterparts in the Lower South in seceding from the Union.52 The new Confederacy benefited tremendously from the addition of Middle South communities, which provided crucial resources such as iron and grain, horses and mules, and meat as well as manpower. Confederates were less successful in recruiting the Border South, however, which would have added even more by way of men and materiel. Maryland’s proximity to Washington, D.C., and the extensive rivers in Kentucky would have been particularly useful to the budding pro-slavery nation. The fate of these Border South states remained in flux at the end of the Secession Winter, and almost a year into 180

S EC ES S I ON A N D T HE O NS E T O F C I VI L WA R

the war.53 Lincoln was ultimately able to retain white communities in these states because they believed the Union protected their investment in slavery and, particularly, racial superiority.54 Yet, losing these states was a real risk for the Lincoln administration, as the divide between slave and free had played out at various points along the border for much of the antebellum era. Scholars disagree about the extent of this pre-war tension. For example, Stanley Harrold has argued that close proximity of pro- and antislavery forces along the border often had a radicalizing effect on Border South communities, propelling the United States toward disunion. Edward Ayers has taken a contrary view that proximity to the border created a more moderate outlook on sectionalism in these communities in the late 1850s. The debate may depend most of all on particular localities, however. Staunton, Virginia, and Louisville, Kentucky, for example, likely faced the Secession Winter quite differently. Even the individual white communities within these towns may have tended toward varying degrees of moderation or radicalism.55 When border communities did radicalize, it could lead to outright violence, and nowhere more spectacularly than in the western territories. When the Secession Winter arrived, many white communities in these areas had been engaged in hostilities both with other whites and with Native American communities in the region for at least a decade. Based on their experiences throughout the antebellum era, white, black, and native peoples could expect few political solutions to regional tensions. In these fraught months, communities often had to make choices for survival, rather than ideological commitment.56 The varying experiences along the border and in the west also help to explain why white communities in these areas did not always follow the wishes of their state conventions; some Middle South men and women rejected secession and some in the Border South promoted it. In East Tennessee and Western Virginia, for example, whites rejected the Confederate call and chose to remain loyal to the Union. Conversely, there were secessionists in Kentucky who professed loyalty to the Confederate nation.57 Enslaved communities were similarly unwilling to simply follow the wishes of their Upper South enslavers. Following Virginia’s declaration of secession, large numbers of black men and women throughout the state began rushing toward Union lines. While some remained cautious about the Lincoln administration’s intentions, the flow of African Americans to Union territory from April 1861 onward helped shape the course of the conflict to come. With their help, the failed political system of the secession era would be rebuilt.58

Notes 1 For the view that “Secession Winter” begins in October 1860, see Shearer Davis Bowman, At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 4. 2 A number of historians have tracked nineteenth-century Americans’ commitment to the federal Union. Although some scholars dispute that Northerners fought primarily for Union during the war, most would acknowledge the prevalence of Union rhetoric throughout both the northern and southern states in the antebellum period. This commitment to Union is demonstrable, in part, by how often Americans talked about “disunion” as an ominous

181

R AC HEL A . S H E L D E N

3 4

5

6

prospect. Elizabeth Varon explains the overwhelming fear of breaking up the Union in Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Gary Gallagher makes a similar point in The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 46–50. Kenneth Stampp’s essay, “The Concept of a Perpetual Union,” remains an important resource for explaining how many Americans began to see the Union as unbreakable in the decades following the Nullification Crisis of 1833. See Stampp, “The Concept of a Perpetual Union,” Journal of American History 65 (June 1978), 5–33. Americans in both northern and southern states were committed to the power of state rights, particularly when it served their sectional interests. One prominent example of northern commitment to state rights was the reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the biggest expansion of federal power in the antebellum era. While ex-Confederates often sought to portray Republicans as a nationalistic party, as Eric Foner has explained, Republican radicals “vigorously” defended the rights of states in the wake of the 1850 Act. See Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 134–138. Southerners, by contrast, advocated for a strong federal government in order to secure their property in slaves, turning to state sovereignty arguments for the protection of slavery only in the wake of the secession crisis. For an excellent explanation of this nuanced position see Arthur Bestor, “State Sovereignty and Slavery: A Reinterpretation of Proslavery Constitutional Doctrine,” Illinois Historical Society Journal 64 (1961), 117–180. William W. Freehling makes a similar point in “Reviving State Rights,” in Gary W. Gallagher and Rachel A. Shelden, eds., A Political Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Political History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 112–125. David M. Potter, “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” American Historical Review 67:4 (July 1962), 924–950, especially 946–950. For the long history of fear of disunion see Varon, Disunion! Michael Woods argues that there was a strong emotional component to the idea of Union, which was sometimes described as “a confederacy of the heart.” This emotional description also allowed for an argument against the continuing affective ties of unionism by those who preferred disunion. See Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 16, 21–31. Historians are still unsure where the term “Fire Eater” came from but, according to Eric Walther, “it was used as early as 1851 indiscriminately by both northerners and southerners to condemn anyone believed to be too far out of the political mainstream.” Walther draws the distinction between the Fire Eaters, who advocated southern independence, and southern radicals who “promoted southern interests but did not necessarily advocate secession.” Eric Walther, The Fire-Eaters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 2. Walther borrows his definition of Fire Eater from Avery Craven in Edmund Ruffin, Southerner: A Study in Secession (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1932). Although some historians have examined individual Fire Eaters, Walther’s volume remains the single best treatment of them as a group. His book effectively explains that Fire Eaters varied in background and interests, but were not “outsiders” as historians such as William Barney and John McCardell had previously argued. See Walther, Fire-Eaters, 7; William Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974); and John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979). For the role of John Brown’s raid see David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 356–384; and William W. Freehling, Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 205–221. For the importance of Helper’s book see George M. Frederickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Race, and Social Inequality (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988), 28–53; and Freehling, Road II, 246–268. For a useful discussion of both see Edward L. Ayers and Carolyn R. Martin, eds., America on the Eve of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).

182

S EC ES S I ON A N D T HE O NS E T O F C I VI L WA R

7 The best description of the 1860 Democratic National Convention remains Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York: Macmillan Company, 1948), 288–305. Nichols drew heavily upon the convention reporting of Murat Halstead, a political correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial: Halstead’s A History of the National Political Conventions of the Current Presidential Campaign (Columbus, OH: Follett, Foster, & Co., 1860). Nichols’s book illustrates the contingencies behind the breakup of the Democratic Party and, ultimately, southern secession. Also see Douglas Egerton, Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 64–81; Douglas G. Gardner, “‘An Inscrutable Election?’ The Historiography of the Election of 1860,” in A. James Fuller, ed., The Election of 1860 Reconsidered (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013), 245–264; and Freehling, Road II, 288–322. 8 “Constitutional Union Party Platform of 1860,” American Presidency Project, www. presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29571. Little has been written on the Constitutional Union Party, in part because of its short existence and roots in Whig and Know-Nothing politics. Two good exceptions include Peter B. Knupfer, The Union as It Is: Constitutional Unionism and Sectional Compromise, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); and, more recently, A. James Fuller, “The Last True Whig: John Bell and the Politics of Compromise in 1860,” in Fuller, The Election of 1860 Reconsidered, 103–139. 9 On the Wide Awake movement see Jon Grinspan, “‘Young Men for War’: Wide Awakes and Lincoln’s 1860 Presidential Campaign,” Journal of American History 96 (Sept. 2009), 357–378; and Jon Grinspan, The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 10 Breckinridge received 72 electoral votes, with Bell capturing 39, and the remaining 12 going to Douglas. The southern Democratic candidate won 44 percent of the vote in slaveholding states, with Bell winning almost 40 percent. About 16 percent of the vote went to Douglas and Lincoln in slaveholding states. See “Election of 1860” at the American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1860; Freehling, Road II, 339. 11 Among other sections devoted to the subject of slavery, the Republican platform argued in its ninth resolution that “The normal condition of the territory of the United States is that of freedom.” See “Republican Party Platform of 1860,” at the American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29620. For Republican rhetoric against slaveholders as the “Slave Power” see Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 1–11. 12 James Banner, “The Problem of South Carolina,” in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds., The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 60. For an excellent overview of the literature on South Carolina see James Haw, “‘The Problem of South Carolina’ Reexamined: A Review Essay,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 107:1 (Jan. 2006), 9–25. For the role of black majorities see Freehling, Road to Disunion, Volume I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 214–216. Banner emphasizes the importance of a one-party system in “The Problem,” 61–66, and Kenneth Greenberg echoes this focus on political organization in describing the influence of virtual representation in South Carolina in “Representation and the Isolation of South Carolina,” Journal of American History 64 (Dec. 1977), 723–743. For the increasing fear of abolitionist influence see Steven Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 57. 13 Scholars are divided over why poorer farmers would have been willing to support a push toward secession that was rooted in planter ideology and benefits. Lacy Ford and Stephanie McCurry both show that yeomen had developed a shared culture with the planter class in South Carolina. While Ford emphasizes a white insistence on “country republicanism” that necessarily united big and small farmers in republican and racial heritage, McCurry demonstrates that yeomen and planters had a common cultural commitment to the oppression of dependents, including both slaves and women. See Lacy Ford, The Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 50–51; Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the

183

R AC HEL A . S H E L D E N

14

15

16

17 18

19 20

21

Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 35–36, 296–302. Other scholars have argued that South Carolina was inherently un-democratic and ultimately unique in the antebellum South. In particular, Manisha Sinha has argued that the South Carolina planter class exerted outsized political power that, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, “emasculated American democracy” and led to an ideology of separatism. See Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 1–7. William Freehling similarly emphasizes the role of a powerful planter aristocracy in Road I. He argues that South Carolina planters saw themselves as part of a superior culture. See Road I, 221–222, 230–252; and Road II, 354–362. Ford, Origins, 120–121; Freehling, Road II, 385; William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 357–360; Richard Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights, and the Nullification Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 185–198. The phrase “Lower South” describes the seven states that initially seceded from the Union and formed a Confederate government (South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas). While scholars have divvied up the slaveholding states into a number of different categorizations, I have used William Freehling’s designations in The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 19 (which includes a useful map). Freehling refers to the four states that seceded following Lincoln’s call for 75,000 troops in April as the “Middle South” (North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas) and the states that remained in the Union as the “Border South” (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri). In various places throughout this essay I have also followed Daniel Crofts’s lead in combining these latter two categories as the “Upper South” in contrast with the Lower South states. See Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xv. For the dispersion of South Carolinians in the Lower South see Freehling, Road II, 363. Freehling suggests that, among other important contingencies, the completion of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad on November 1, 1860 was a tipping point in sending both states toward secession. Railroad executives and politicians celebrated in Savannah and Charleston on November 2 and 9, leading to mutual support for the disunionist cause. Road II, 406–420, 423–426. “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” Yale Law School Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale. edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp. For the political maneuvering behind the Missouri Crisis see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 147–160; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005), 218–253. “Fourth Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union,” December 3, 1860, at the American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29501. For historians who find Buchanan at least partially culpable for the crisis, see for example Jean Harvey Baker, James Buchanan (New York: Times Books, 2004), 121, 125, 137–138, 141–142; and William Freehling in “A Conversation with William W. Freehling and Michael F. Holt, September 19, 2008,” in John W. Quist and Michael Birkner, eds., James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 238–240. Buchanan had initially showed himself even more sympathetic to the secessionists when a South Carolina delegation came to Washington to negotiate over the forts. Buchanan was swayed, in large part, because of the departure of southern members of his cabinet (including Georgian Howell Cobb, Virginian John Floyd, and Jacob Thompson of Mississippi) and the growing influence of the remaining Northerners. See Baker, James Buchanan, 130–136; Potter, Impending Crisis, 535–543. Kenneth M. Stampp, Don E. Fehrenbacher, Robert Johannsen, et al., “The Presidency of James Buchanan: A Reassessment,” in Michael J. Birkner, ed., James Buchanan and the Political

184

S EC ES S I ON A N D T HE O NS E T O F C I VI L WA R

Crisis of the 1850s (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1996), 194–196. Stampp calls Buchanan’s behavior “first-rate during the secession crisis” (196). Also see Stampp, And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–61 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950), 46–47; Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 125–127; and William J. Cooper, We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860–April 1861 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 32–42, 118–120. Russell McClintock argues that Buchanan was “more in touch than his fellow Northerners with the daunting complexity of the situation,” in Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 68. 22 December 18, 1860, Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., 114. For a detailed discussion of the Kentuckian’s motives and maneuvering over the Crittenden Compromise see Albert Kirwan, John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for Union (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974), 373–405. 23 James G. Randall coined the phrase in “The Blundering Generation,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27:1 (June 1940), 3–28. Randall, Avery Craven, and others saw the carnage of the Civil War as “needless” in large part because they believed slavery was on the road to extinction. See Craven, The Repressible Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939). Contemporaries of Randall and Craven who critiqued the original “blundering generation” argument – typically known as “fundamentalists” – emphasized the fundamental split over slavery as the primary cause of sectional difficulty. For a useful summary of both the revisionist scholarship and its limits see Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism,” Partisan Review 16 (Oct. 1949), 969–981. Modern revisionists who focus on the coming of the war have generally moved away from the “needless war” theory. This revised approach relies on research from the 1970s that demonstrates slavery likely would have survived for many generations. For the efficiency and adaptability of slave labor see Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: Little Brown, & Co., 1974); and Robert Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989). For an example of historians who still emphasize the responsibility of a “blundering generation” of politicians for the onset of civil war, see Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978). Some recent scholarship of the war itself has trended back (though not entirely) toward the original concerns about wartime brutality and the lasting physical and psychological toll that fighting took on Americans. For a useful summary of this other strand of revisionism see Yael A. Sternhell, “Revisionism Reinvented? The Antiwar Turn in Civil War Scholarship,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 3:2 (June 2013), 239–256. 24 While many historians believe congressional Republicans were responsible for killing the compromise efforts, they disagree as to why Northerners rejected Crittenden’s proposals and others. In his first book, David Potter argued that Republicans misunderstood the degree of southern disunionism, believing that such talk was emblematic of the kind of threats that their pro-slavery colleagues had been making for years. Alternatively, Kenneth Stampp heralded Republican refusals to compromise, arguing that they were appropriately committed to the party’s antislavery principles at the expense of reconciliation in 1860. See David M. Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), 238–248; Stampp, And the War Came, 1–3, 9–12. Potter and Stampp directly addressed one another’s arguments in George Herman Knoles, ed., The Crisis of Union, 1860–61 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), 90–113. Recent scholarship remains divided over the intentions of and blame to be laid on Republicans for a failure to compromise in late December and January. William Cooper argues, for example, that Republicans were intractable in compromise negotiations (and not always for the purest antislavery reasons). See Cooper, We Have the War, 52–53, 60–63. Scholars such as James Oakes and Bruce Levine follow in the footsteps of Kenneth Stampp in promoting the heroism of Republican unwillingness to compromise on the issue of expansion. See James Oakes, Freedom

185

R AC HEL A . S H E L D E N

25

26

27

28

National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013), 73–74; Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South (New York: Random House, 2013), 44–47. Levine argues that Southerners were primarily responsible for the failure of compromise, arguing that these men found Crittenden’s proposal “insufficiently conciliatory” (emphasis Levine’s), p. 46. Russell McClintock echoes some of Potter’s themes of misunderstanding the disunionist threat in Lincoln and the Decision, 80–84, 94–95, 117–122. As I have argued, federal politicians were not the primary leaders of the secession movement; they followed the actions of their local communities back home. See Rachel A. Shelden, Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 4–5, 7, 172. The best study of the secession conventions remains Ralph A. Wooster, The Secession Conventions of the South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). Historians have debated both the meaning of the word “cooperationist” and the extent to which these men were represented in the Lower South conventions. In part this controversy hinges on the question of whether a majority of Lower South whites actually favored secession. The lack of party affiliation and the haziness of the word “cooperationist” complicates delegate counts. For an overview of these historiographical discussions see Potter, Impending Crisis, 495–502, especially 498n32. J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), xix–xx, 451–454. Other historians who have highlighted the role of anti-partyism and a focus on white liberty include John M. Sacher, A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Anthony Gene Carey, Parties, Slavery, and the Union in Antebellum Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997). Carey’s book provides a persuasive counterpoint to Michael P. Johnson’s study of Georgia, which argues that although slaveholders were outnumbered three to two in the state, they forced non-slaveholders into secession through a political coup. See Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977). For the role of economic factors in Lower South politics see Thornton, Politics and Power; William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974). For the emphasis on nativism and abolitionism see Walter L. Buenger, Secession and the Union in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984). For a useful overview of several state studies of secession see James Tice Moore, “Secession and the States: A Review Essay,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography XCIV (1986), 60–76. A sampling of excellent work on the shared culture of antebellum southern whites demonstrates that scholars remain divided on the issue of difference between North and South. For an overview of the argument that the North and South were two distinctive societies (or even civilizations) see James M. McPherson, “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question,” Civil War History 29:3 (Dec. 2004), 230–244. For an alternative view that emphasizes similarities between North and South, with slavery as the important difference, see Edward Pessen, “How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South?” The American Historical Review 85:5 (Dec. 1980), 1119–1149. For the role of pro-slavery Christianity see C. C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985); Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); and Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). While Goen points to a belief among Southerners that their religion was distinctive, Carwardine emphasizes the shared importance of Evangelical Protestants in antebellum political culture and Snay argues that southern clergy shared critical theological commonalities with their northern counterparts. For the importance of patriarchal gender dynamics see Lee Ann Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995);

186

S EC ES S I ON A N D T HE O NS E T O F C I VI L WA R

29

30

31

32

33

Laura Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); and Sarah N. Roth, Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Whites argues that yeomen were “empower[ed]” by a patriarchal dominance over their wives in a manner that echoed slavery, while Edwards shows that the southern family relied on women for perceived independence. Roth’s work illustrates that while women in the North and South might have disagreed about slavery, they shared and perpetuated common racial stereotypes. For the emphasis on a shared economic system see Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Random House, 1961); and Eugene Genovese, “Yeomen Farmers in a Slaveholders’ Democracy,” Agricultural History 49:2 (April 1975), 331–342; and modern works such as Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Genovese argues that slavery destabilized and stunted southern economic growth but, unaware of the outside world, yeomen “either aspired to become slaveholders or to live as marginal farmers under the limited protection of their stronger neighbors” (“Yeomen Farmers,” 338). Schermerhorn sees poorer whites as inherently enmeshed in a capitalist slave system through activities ranging from banking to slave trading, which ultimately tied them to the broader northern and Atlantic World economy. For communities in the Lower South that resisted secession see for example Margaret M. Storey, “Civil War Unionists and the Political Culture of Loyalty in Alabama, 1860–1861,” Journal of Southern History 69:1 (Feb. 2003), 71–106; Paul Horton, “Submitting to the ‘Shadow of Slavery’: The Secession Crisis and Civil War in Alabama’s Lawrence County,” Civil War History 44:2 (June 1998), 111–136; and David Williams, Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). Scholarship on the southern middle class and urban poor inherently undermined previous notions of a distinctive binary planter-yeoman southern economy. See, for example, Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004); and Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green, eds., The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011). W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1935; New York: Free Press, 1998), 57; citations refer to the Free Press edition. For the caution with which slaves approached secession see Ira Berlin, Barbara Fields, et al., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, Ser. 1, Vol. 1: The Destruction of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 9. For the varied experiences of enslaved peoples depending upon region, economic unit, and other factors, see Berlin, Fields, et al., Freedom, 4; Willie Lee Rose, A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). As these titles demonstrate, much of the excellent scholarship of enslaved communities in this era focuses either on the war itself or more generally across the antebellum period. Still, such work suggests a similar pattern of circumspection during the Secession Winter. For the ways in which enslaved peoples mobilized their communities to fight their enslavers both in the antebellum period and during the war, see, for example, Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 55–114. William Barney has called secession “the slaves’ revenge,” arguing that the various individual acts and expressions of humanity that enslaved peoples engaged in, helped to precipitate their enslavers’ “suicidal” mission to create a new nation. See Barney, “Rush to Disaster: Secession and the Slaves’ Revenge,” in Robert J. Cook et al., Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 10–11. See Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), 343–380.

187

R AC HEL A . S H E L D E N

34 Initial meetings in Montgomery did not include Texas. Although the Texas convention approved secession by a three-to-one margin on February 1, 1861, the unionist governor, Sam Houston, tried to prevent the state from joining the Confederacy. See James Marten, Texas Divided: Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State, 1856–1874 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 40–43; and Walter L. Buenger, “Texas and the Riddle of Secession,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 87:2 (Oct. 1983), 151–182. 35 Men who had previously served as representatives in U.S. state or federal positions quickly dominated the Confederate federal political structure. At its lowest mark, one-third of the Confederacy’s federal political positions fell to men who had previously served in the U.S. Congress. See Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer, The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1972), 24–25; and Ezra J. Warner and W. Buck Yearns, Biographical Register of the Confederate Congress (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), 290–292. For the exclusion of the Fire Eater community and the moderate nature of the Montgomery Convention see Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 45–57; William C. Davis, “A Government of Our Own”: The Making of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 8–30; and George Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 39–63. 36 The Confederates adjusted several provisions of the U.S. Constitution to further suit their proclivities, but the most striking parts of the document feature the explicit right to enslave African Americans, for example in Article I, Section 9 (4), preventing any law “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” See “Constitution of the Confederate States: March 11, 1861,” Yale Law School Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ csa_csa.asp. Stephanie McCurry concludes that the unique and explicit pro-slavery language was emblematic of the anti-democratic nature of the Confederacy. See McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 37 Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens, in Public and Private: With Letters and Speeches, Before, During, and Since the War (Philadelphia: National Publishing Co., 1886), 717–729. For a terrific overview of the racial appeals that secession commissioners made to the remaining slaveholding states see Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001). 38 Potter, Impending Crisis, 505–510. 39 For examples of historians who take a critical perspective of Lincoln’s silence see McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, 49–53; and Cooper, We Have the War, 31–33. For those who see Lincoln’s behavior more favorably see Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), I:702–703; and Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860–1861 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 114–147. 40 For the long history of idle disunion threats see Potter, Lincoln and His Party, 1–19. Potter argues that Lincoln’s understanding was part of a general “Republican incredulity” (see p. 17). Elizabeth Varon argues that disunion was part of a cultural language among all Americans in the antebellum era, as a prophecy, threat, accusation, process, and program. See Varon, Disunion! 6–14. For the importance of Lincoln’s experience with the Washington community in regard to his secession-crisis behavior see Shelden, Washington Brotherhood, 188–189. 41 For historians who emphasize ethnocultural issues see William Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Holt, Political Crisis; and Joel H. Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). For those who argue that the party was born of and sustained by antislavery principles alone see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and, more recently, Oakes, Freedom National. 42 Nicole Etcheson, A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 46–49. For an overview of northern newspaper editorials see Howard C. Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-Century

188

S EC ES S I ON A N D T HE O NS E T O F C I VI L WA R

43

44 45

46

47 48

49

for the American Historical Association, 1942); and Daniel W. Crofts, “And the War Came,” in Lacy K. Ford., ed., A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2011), 191. For Greeley’s role see David M. Potter, “Horace Greeley and Peaceable Secession,” Journal of Southern History 7:2 (May 1941), 145–159; James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 113–130; and Adam Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 160–164. Tuchinsky neatly summarizes the various interpretations of Greeley’s comments. Among the most prominent voices of the anti-coercion movement was New York City Mayor Fernando Wood, a prominent Democrat. Wood also briefly advocated an idea of multiple confederacies, encouraging the secession of New York. See Jerome Mushkat, Fernando Wood: A Political Biography (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990), 110–113. For the preference of some abolitionists for disunion see George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 56–60; and W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 212–216. The abolitionist Garrison proclaimed the Union as a “covenant with death” in describing the federal government’s relationship to slavery. See McDaniel, Problem, 216; and Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), 313. James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted during the War for the Union, reprint edition (New York: Vintage, 2003), 10–18; and David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 59–79. On the equivalence of Union with liberty, equality, and nation see Gallagher, The Union War, 46–49; Varon, Disunion! 4–5. For the efforts of Democrats and Constitutional Unionists see Nichols, Disruption, 450–459, 476–479, 484–491; McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, 152–158; and Stampp, And the War Came, 208–210. As Stampp points out, losing southern Democrats to a new Confederacy could only weaken their political organization (see p. 209). For the desperate pleas of the financial sector see Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 94–97. For various pro-compromise movements throughout the North and particularly the labor meeting in Philadelphia see J. Matthew Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 1994), 9–10. For an overview of the Peace Convention see Robert Gray Gunderson, Old Gentleman’s Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961). On consideration of the Peace Convention measures and passage of the Corwin amendment see Daniel W. Crofts, Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); and Potter, Impending Crisis, 550–552. For the importance of western expansion of slavery as a critical political issue see Michael Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Christopher Childers, The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012). “First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln,” March 4, 1861, Yale Law School Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp. Although David Potter once argued that Lincoln still clamored for peace and reunion even as he ordered Sumter re-supplied, most scholars agree that the new president had abandoned any such hope at least by early April. See Potter, Lincoln and His Party, 315–375; Stampp, And the War Came, 179–203; Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 285–288, 295–296. James McPherson neatly summarizes these different positions in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 272n78. Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation Calling Militia and Convening Congress,” in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 4:331–333.

189

R AC HEL A . S H E L D E N

50 For the argument that Upper South whites were less committed to slavery see Potter, Impending Crisis, 504–506; and Freehling, The South vs. The South, 18–25, 42–43. For the counterargument see Andrew J. Torget, “Unions of Slavery: Slavery, Politics, and Secession in the Valley of Virginia,” in Edward L. Ayers, Gary W. Gallagher, and Andrew J. Torget, eds., Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 9–34; and Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), xix–xx. 51 Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, xvi–xxi. Also see Holt, Political Crisis, 230–240, 248–259; and James M. Woods, Rebellion and Realignment: Arkansas’s Road to Secession (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987), 113–132. 52 Virginia’s secession convention, which had voted to reject disunion earlier in the spring, remained in session at the time of Lincoln’s call for volunteers and quickly reconsidered, passing an ordinance of secession on April 17. A majority of white Virginia residents approved the ordinance in a popular referendum on May 23. Arkansas and North Carolina similarly assembled secession conventions that overwhelmingly voted for separation on May 6 and 20, respectively. Tennessee’s state legislature bypassed a secession convention and submitted a “Declaration of Independence” from the Union to popular referendum, which was approved on June 8. See McPherson, Battle Cry, 278–284. 53 McPherson, Battle Cry, 284; William C. Harris, Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 7. 54 There are several excellent studies of the Border South in the Civil War era. While scholars emphasize different cultural and economic factors that influenced Border South whites, a sampling shows that issues of slavery and race were at the heart of white motivations. See Luke E. Harlow, Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Aaron Astor, Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012); Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Michael D. Robinson, “Fulcrum of the Union: The Border South and the Secession Crisis, 1859–1861” (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 2013). 55 See Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Ayers, Presence. Ayers focuses on communities in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Harrold looks at several Border South areas; Louisville plays a large role in the book. 56 For western border tensions among whites and natives see for example Jeremy Neely, The Border Between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007). Much more work is needed on the experience of native peoples during the secession crisis. 57 For a good overview of white anti-Confederate activity see Freehling, The South vs. The South, 47–82. There are a number of useful studies of unionism in the new Confederate states. See Robert T. McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels: A Town in the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–1869 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Richard O. Curry, A House Divided (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964); and Barton A. Myers, Rebels Against the Confederacy: North Carolina’s Unionists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). For pro-Confederates in the Union states see, for example, Lowell Harrison, The Civil War in Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975). 58 See Berlin, Fields, et al., Freedom.

190

11 WARTIME MI L I T A R Y MOBILIZATION , BUS I N ES S , AND TEC HN OL O G Y Mark R. Wilson

Civil War history is often thought of as a field dominated by traditional military histories, focused on battles, generals, and soldiers fighting in the field.1 However, there is a long, proud tradition of studying the sinews of the Civil War, defined broadly, to include subjects such as the mobilization of men and women (as soldiers and civilian war workers), wartime political economies, technology, and business. Before the Civil War centennial of the early 1960s, these subjects had already been investigated by many talented historians, including Wesley Mitchell, Fred Shannon, Frank Vandiver, Ella Lonn, Mary Massey, Charles Ramsdell, Richard Todd, Robert Bruce, William Hesseltine, and Russell Weigley.2 This early work was supplemented and challenged, during the later twentieth century, by dozens of new studies. By the 1990s, researchers starting new projects in this area (myself included) had the enormous advantage of being able to consult two heroic synthetic surveys of Union and Confederate mobilization, by Richard Bensel and Paul Koistinen. Their surveys showed that by the end of the twentieth century, there were already hundreds of high-quality studies that demanded the attention of historians of Civil War mobilization, technology, and business.3 Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have continued to learn more about these subjects. In this short essay, I concentrate on this newer work, dividing the discussion into two parts. In the first part, I point to areas in which advances in our knowledge seem to have been most dramatic. These areas include the Civil War’s environmental history, the history of disease and medicine, and intellectual property. Then, in the second part of the essay, I offer a brief overview of areas in which advances have been less revolutionary, but nonetheless important. Among these areas are the mobilization of military manpower and women on the home front; finance and trade; and the wartime experiences of business firms and business communities. Finally, in a brief conclusion, I suggest a few areas that still merit further study, even after a century and a half of valuable scholarship.

Recent Leaps: Works on the Environment, Disease and Medicine, and Intellectual Property Although the early twenty-first century has seen the appearance of all sorts of valuable scholarship on the Civil War, a handful of areas stand out as ones in which there have been giant leaps. These include histories focused on the environment and physical space; 191

MA R K R . W I L S O N

disease (and death) and medicine; and intellectual property (including patents). In each of these three areas, the quality and depth of our knowledge was far superior by the mid2010s than it had been just a decade and a half before. Although environmental historians may have been somewhat slow to tackle the Civil War, in recent years we have seen an outburst of new work focused on landscape and nature. Much of this new work was surveyed in a 2012 review essay by Lisa Brady,4 whose own book, published in the same year, offered an innovative discussion of how Civil War armies attempted to transform the landscape and alter “nature.”5 This high-concept, newer work, informed by the vibrant field of environmental history, transcended and complemented more traditional discussions of military alterations of the landscape, such as the new studies of field fortifications published by the prolific Earl J. Hess.6 By emphasizing the physical destructiveness of the Civil War, some of this new environmental history became entangled in a growing, sometimes contentious debate about the extent to which the 1861–65 conflict should be seen as an especially ruinous or otherwise “total” war. In Ruin Nation, published in 2012, Megan Kate Nelson emphasized the wartime destruction of forests and southern property, as well as human bodies.7 This account fit with others that highlighted the suffering of the South, including new work by Joan Cashin, describing civilians left hungry by ravenous armies on both sides.8 But this high-destructiveness interpretation clashed with other new works, such as those by Mark Neely and Paul Paskoff, who suggested that the extent of physical ruin was relatively low. This interpretive debate about destruction was connected to an even broader controversy, about the extent to which the Civil War was comparable to the “total” wars of the twentieth century.9 Related to the new interest in environmental history was a new emphasis on the Civil War’s effects on human experiences of time and space. Military and civilian uses of timekeeping technologies, along with changes in people’s consciousness of time, were discussed in an innovative 2005 book by Cheryl Wells, building on previous work by Mark M. Smith.10 According to Wells, modern timekeeping technologies such as mechanical clocks and watches were less useful during the war than we might imagine. Battles and wounded soldiers both caused irregular and constant crises, which could not be addressed using regular clock time. A few years later, Smith published a new study, focused on the sensory history of the war: how Americans saw it, tasted it, heard it, and smelled it.11 Like Wells, Smith described a chaotic war, in which many modern technologies proved inadequate. Instead, many soldiers and civilians experienced visual confusion, stench, and hunger. A similar emphasis on the physical environment and space-time appeared in creative new studies on the Confederate and Union home fronts, which depicted people in nearconstant motion, rather than remaining still, in stable home towns.12 The interest in people moving through physical space extended also to new studies of military transportation. Railroads in the Civil War have been studied at length, but in an important new contribution, William Thomas used a combination of cultural history and digital special analysis to tell us more. Thomas offered new evidence to suggest the importance of railroads in Civil War campaigns, in which some generals adopted a “railroad strategy.”13 Perhaps inevitably, the newer work on this subject, like many studies of wartime rail operations before it, tended to overemphasize the importance of railroads. Civil War armies did a lot of traveling using muscle power. This side of the war 192

MI L I TA RY MOBI L I Z AT I ON, BU S I NE S S, T E C H NO L O G Y

was illuminated in a 2008 book by Ann Norton Greene, which reminded us of the importance of horse (and mule) power.14 The new environmental histories of the Civil War became an important part of a larger explosion of work on disease, death, and medical care. In her 2013 book on the war’s environmental history, Kathryn Meier emphasized soldiers’ struggles to stay healthy, as they lived outdoors, fighting insects and disease.15 Mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and yellow fever were not just widespread, as Andrew Bell argued in a valuable 2010 book, but had the power to affect the operations of armies.16 Disease, not combat, was the number one killer of Civil War soldiers. The mass death of the 1860s was the main subject of one of the most celebrated new works on the Civil War era, by Drew Faust.17 The deadliness of the conflict now seems more impressive than ever, thanks to a major article by J. David Hacker, published in 2011. Using a simple statistical analysis of microlevel samples of U.S. Census data, Hacker concluded that the best estimate of the number of deaths caused by the Civil War is around 750,000 – about 20 percent more than the traditional figure, used by historians for generations, of 620,000.18 Joining the new work on disease and death were many excellent new studies of medicine and health care. Two impressive surveys of the subject, by Margaret Humphreys and Shauna Devine, both suggested that the Civil War years boosted medical professionalism and science-based medicine, as doctors and nurses shared their knowledge of anatomy, surgery, and disinfection.19 Several other new works taught us about the wartime medical experiences of African Americans, who suffered from the prejudices of health providers, but also demanded better service and came out of the war prepared to build their own medical practices and health care systems.20 And the early twenty-first century brought also a great deal of new information about the history of Civil War amputation, and amputees.21 As thousands of new amputees demanded better prosthetics, dozens of businesses and inventors responded, with new products, many of them patented. This was one important part of the broader history of innovation and intellectual property in the Civil War, a subject that was discussed at length in several new works. Among the most notable were studies published by Ross Thomson and Zorina Khan, both of whom used careful quantitative analysis of patent records to show that the Civil War inspired some bursts of innovation in particular fields (such as prosthetics and weapons), but certainly did not cause an overall jump in technological innovation. Peace, they suggested, was better than war, when it came to innovation.22

Less Dramatic But Still Significant Steps: New Work on the Mobilization of Women and Men, War Economies, Business Firms and Business Communities As the previous section has suggested, the new work on Civil War medicine, intellectual property, and the environment was truly explosive: by the 2010s, we thought of those subjects in entirely different ways than we had done just a couple of decades before. In most other areas, by contrast, the development of our knowledge was less revolutionary, if not insignificant. In part this was because there was already decades’ worth of strong work to build upon. Certainly, the new work of the early twenty-first century taught 193

MA R K R . W I L S O N

us more about the mobilization of civilians and soldiers, about economic mobilization in the Confederacy and the Union, and about the business history of the war. But for the most part, even the best of this new work caused only incremental gains to our knowledge. We might make one exception to the above general rule, by recognizing the excellence and originality of recent new histories of women in the Union and Confederacy. New studies by Judith Giesberg and Stephanie McCurry, in particular, forced us to reassess our understanding of women as political actors on the Civil War home fronts. They described women’s energetic responses to the highly intrusive wartime states, which demanded huge personal and economic sacrifices. On both home fronts, women demanded that wartime states not just take, but give and protect. Although their success in this wartime political project was mixed, their encounter with powerful state authorities in the 1860s likely shaped American politics for generations to come.23 Also valuable, if less truly original, was the growing body of work on the mobilization of military manpower. Here the highlights included two new, deeply-researched studies of Virginia, by Aaron Sheehan-Dean and Joseph Glatthaar, who both concluded that in the Confederate armies, wealthier men, including slaveowners, were well represented.24 Much of this new work seemed to suggest that morale among Confederate males, if not females, remained rather high, until late in the war.25 However, this interpretation was challenged by new research on the prevalence of desertion – the flip side of the extraordinarily high enlistment rates among white southern men.26 New research on manpower mobilization in the North tended to focus on the local level. As new studies by Russell Johnson and Rachel Shelden (and others) suggested, while state and national politics were important, it was largely at the local level that northerners grappled with the complexities of manpower recruitment. Here, the draft was an important factor, but the vast majority of soldiers were not draftees, but “volunteers,” who, after the first few months of the conflict, were able to claim a variety of substantial monetary bounties and bonuses, along with their regular pay.27 Meanwhile, other works added to our knowledge of different aspects of the military manpower story, including the mobilization of sailors;28 of foreign-born non-citizens;29 and of African Americans.30 Finally, several newer studies emphasized the importance of regular (professional) military officers, on both sides of the conflict.31 On the subject of Union and Confederate war economies, historians continued to debate the basics. Michael Bonner claimed that we should understand the South’s wartime political economy as an example of “expedient corporatism,”32 whereas John Majewski seemed to favor one of the more traditional interpretative frames, pointing to emergency state socialism, built on antebellum precedents.33 Other new works reminded us of both sides’ practice of seizing the property of persons alleged to be disloyal.34 But perhaps the most interesting element of the newer work on this subject was the suggestion that the Union and Confederate styles of war economy were not all that different. This was the conclusion that seemed to come from a combined reading of my own book and one by Chad Morgan, which together suggested that both sides, North and South, supplied their armies using complex combinations of state-run factories, imports, and private (for-profit) merchants and manufacturers. Military supply officers, including quartermasters and commissaries, emerged as the leading managers of the national war economies, as they 194

MI L I TA RY MOBI L I Z AT I ON, BU S I NE S S, T E C H NO L O G Y

simultaneously expanded their own in-house production facilities and their orders from contractors.35 Generally speaking, the war was a disaster for businesses in the Confederacy, and not bad for those in the Union. War finance in the South was a failure. Europeans refused to extend much credit to the Confederacy, which ended up relying heavily on money creation to pay for the war. This caused very high inflation, which made it difficult to do business of any kind, besides being hard on consumers and workers. Meanwhile, the United States managed a much more successful war finance effort, using a combination of borrowing (via bond issues) and new income taxes. The U.S. Congress made important new strides in the direction of a more nationally coordinated banking and monetary system, by providing for new nationally chartered banks and paper money (greenbacks). The Union’s solid war finance scheme bolstered private capital markets, including hundreds of existing banks, which continued to extend essential credit to merchants and manufacturers in wartime, just as they had been doing in peacetime. Although the Union did suffer from inflation, among other problems, military contractors and other firms in the North experienced the war years as a time during which it remained possible to do reasonably regular business, sometimes with the possibility of substantial profit. Behind the lines in the Confederacy, generally speaking, this was not the case.36 The micro-level business history of the Civil War remains thin, in part because the documentary record is so poor. Some historians have attempted to get around this problem by attempting to reconstruct the Civil War experiences of a handful of firms that have endured over two centuries.37 There have been some valuable new studies of individual companies, including two railroads: the Charleston & Savannah, and the Pennsylvania.38 However, much of the most important work on the war’s business history has continued to come in the form of studies of communities of businesses, and their leaders. New York City merchants and manufacturers were described by Sven Beckert, who argued that the Civil War helped bring them together. More recently, Scott Marler provided a rich account of the very different experiences of New Orleans merchants, who suffered greatly from being on the losing side of the war, and from the Union military occupation of their city.39 A related story of the business nightmares endured by pro-Confederate firms was offered by Mark Geiger, in a fascinating legal-economic history of Missouri bankers.40 Also provocative was an essay by Sean Adams, focused on Pennsylvania, which pointed to a wartime increase in incorporations, especially in the oil and mining industries.41 Perhaps the most notable new contributions to our knowledge of the war’s economic history were those that discussed trade and finance. The global cotton trade, immediately before the war and during it, was described at length in important books by Brian Schoen and Sven Beckert.42 Other historians added to our understanding of wartime tariff policies and the conflict’s impact – which could be surprisingly limited in many areas – on European and global trade.43 There was valuable new work on illegal or illicit “contraband” trading, as well as blockade-running.44 And Nicholas Parrillo’s important new study on long-run transformations of American governance reminded us that during the Civil War, privateering was still the rule: even U.S. Navy officers received much of their compensation in the form of captured prizes, rather than salaries.45 195

MA R K R . W I L S O N

Closely related to the work on transatlantic trade were new studies of the Union and Confederate efforts to secure financing overseas.46 Meanwhile, other historians expanded our knowledge of domestic war finance.47 Most notable in this field were new histories of the greenback, introduced during the Civil War by the Union. In a new book on Reconstruction-era regional political struggles over the greenback, Nicholas Barreyre rejuvenated an area of study that had been relatively dormant for fifty years, following the works of Robert Sharkey and Irwin Unger.48 Meanwhile, Michael Caires, building on work by Stephen Mihm, offered an important new account of the Civil War greenback, and its antebellum antecedents.49 Although these subjects were far from unknown to students of Civil War history, these new contributions of the early twenty-first century were remarkably original and valuable.

Conclusions Given the abundance of solid work on the history of Civil War mobilization, business, and technology, it is hard to predict how the field will develop over the next several decades. In this brief conclusion, I offer a few tentative suggestions. One area that will certainly see major growth in the near future is the history of technology in the Civil War era. As noted above, one small aspect of this subject, regarding intellectual property, has been well-studied in recent years. So too have a handful of other special topics, such as ironclad warships.50 Academic historians have done too little to discuss the uses of military technologies on the battlefield. One exception is Earl Hess, who has recently challenged those who believe that state-of-the-art rifles made much difference in battle.51 However, it appears that we will soon have valuable new surveys of technology in the Civil War.52 Those aspiring to contribute to this subfield will be able to draw on those new works; they may also benefit from doing more to appreciate the contributions of buffs, antiquarians, and reenactors, who have built up a great deal of knowledge about the war’s material culture.53 The war’s labor history also seems to call out for more attention. To be sure, dozens of books and articles have already told us a great deal about war workers, North and South. But this seems to be a thin area of Civil War history. We still need to know more about the lives and contributions of the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children of all ethnicities, whose labor allowed the Union and Confederate armies to function. In particular, it would seem that the workers who traveled with the armed forces, including thousands of teamsters, laundresses, and blacksmiths, should have their stories better told, perhaps in part through some of the kind of military archival sources that we have already used to document the work of the men with the guns. Given that transnational and global history is already becoming traditional, we should expect to see more studies that explore more of the global connections that helped to shape the Civil War. As noted above, we already know a good deal about the international cotton trade. However, we know far less about the wartime transnational histories of key northern exports and imports, including wheat, coffee, and rubber. This is not just a matter of economic history, but concerns the material lives of the Civil War armies as well. Union soldiers were provided with huge amounts of coffee, and large numbers of rubber blankets. Where did the coffee and rubber come from? Seeking answers to such questions might provide us with some interesting new histories. 196

MI L I TA RY MOBI L I Z AT I ON, BU S I NE S S, T E C H NO L O G Y

Finally, we would benefit from more comparative histories, looking not just at one side of the conflict, but at both sides at once. Such comparisons were offered a generation ago by the heroic synthetic works of Bensel and Koistinen; they were also provided, using a narrower regional frame, in the pioneering digital and print work of Edward Ayers.54 But all in all, little has been done on this score. As suggested above, we have valuable works on the New York City and Philadelphia business communities, and on the New Orleans merchants. In the future, we should have more comparative business histories, so that we can better understand what was similar, and what different, about North and South. Similarly, we have recently learned much more about women, and about military-industrial mobilization, on the Union and Confederate home fronts, but via separate monographs. Perhaps the next generation of scholars will begin to disrespect the traditional regional divide, and thus offer us a new set of original histories of the sinews of Civil War.

Notes 1 For an argument that the field has never been monopolized by traditional military history, see Earl J. Hess, “Where Do We Stand? A Critical Assessment of Civil War Studies in the Sesquicentennial Era,” Civil War History 60, no. 4 (Dec. 2014): 371–403. 2 Wesley Clair Mitchell, A History of the Greenbacks: With Special Reference to the Economic Consequences of Their Issue, 1862–65 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903); Fred A. Shannon, The Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861–1865 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1928); Frank Everson Vandiver, Ploughshares into Swords: Josiah Gorgas and Confederate Ordnance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1952); Ella Lonn, Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy (New York: W. Neale, 1933); Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952); Charles W. Ramsdell, Behind the Lines in the Southern Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944); Richard Cecil Todd, Confederate Finance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1954); Robert V. Bruce, Lincoln and the Tools of War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956); William Best Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (New York: Knopf, 1948); Russell Frank Weigley, Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography of M.C. Meigs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). 3 Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Paul A. C. Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996). My own short bibliographical survey of the field as it stood circa 2000 appeared in the notes and essay on sources in Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 241–293. 4 Lisa M. Brady, “From Battlefield to Fertile Ground: The Development of Civil War Environmental History,” Civil War History 58, no. 3 (Sept. 2012): 305–321; see also Matthew M. Stith, “‘The Deplorable Condition of the Country’: Nature, Society, and War on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier,” Civil War History 58, no. 3 (Sept. 2012): 322–347. 5 Lisa M. Brady, War Upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 6 Earl J. Hess, Trench Warfare under Grant and Lee: Field Fortifications in the Overland Campaign (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Earl J. Hess, In the Trenches of Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 7 Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

197

MA R K R . W I L S O N

8 Joan E. Cashin, “Hungry People in the South: Civilians, Armies, and the Food Supply,” in Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges, ed. Stephen Berry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 160–175. 9 Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Paul F. Paskoff, “Measures of War: A Quantitative Examination of the Civil War’s Destructiveness in the Confederacy,” Civil War History 54, no. 1 (March 2008): 35–62; Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, “Total War and the American Civil War Reconsidered: The End of an Outdated ‘Master Narrative’,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 3 (Sept. 2011): 394–408. 10 Cheryl A. Wells, Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861–1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). 11 Mark M. Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 12 Judith Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Yael A. Sternhall, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Wendy Hamand Venet, A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 13 William G. Thomas, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011). 14 Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Wilson, Business of Civil War. 15 Kathryn Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 16 Andrew McIlwaine Bell, Mosquito Soldiers: Malaria, Yellow Fever, and the Course of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010). 17 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008). 18 J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57, no. 4 (Dec. 2011): 307–348. For an article suggesting that the wartime deaths were not especially shocking to people of the mid-nineteenth century, who were accustomed to high death rates, see Nicholas Marshall, “The Great Exaggeration: Death and the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 1 (March 2014): 3–27. For a thoughtful response by Hacker to the Marshall article, see J. David Hacker, “Has the Demographic Impact of Civil War Deaths Been Exaggerated?” Civil War History 60, no. 4 (Dec. 2014): 453–458. 19 Margaret Humphreys, Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Shauna Devine, Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 20 Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Gretchen Long, Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African-American Medical Care (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 21 Guy R. Hasegawa, Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012); Brian Craig Miller, Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015). 22 Ross Thomson, “The Continuity of Innovation: The Civil War Experience,” Enterprise & Society 11, no. 1 (March 2010): 128–165; Ross Thomson, Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age: Technological Innovation in the United States, 1790–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); B. Zorina Khan, “The Impact of War on Resource Allocation: ‘Creative Destruction,’ Patenting, and the American Civil War,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 46, no. 3 (Winter 2016): 315–353. See also H. Jackson Knight, Confederate Invention:

198

MI L I TA RY MOBI L I Z AT I ON, BU S I NE S S, T E C H NO L O G Y

23

24

25 26 27

28 29 30

31

32 33 34

The Story of the Confederate States Patent Office and Its Inventors (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011); Guy R. Hasegawa, Villainous Compounds: Chemical Weapons and the American Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015). Giesberg, Army at Home; Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); LeeAnn Whites, “Forty Shirts and a Wagonload of Wheat: Women, the Domestic Supply Line, and the Civil War on the Western Border,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 1 (March 2011): 56–78. The research by Giesberg and McCurry was deeper and more innovative than that used by most studies of the wartime home fronts, including newer ones, such as Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York: Free Press, 2008); Joseph T. Glatthaar, Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Bradley R. Clampitt, The Confederate Heartland: Military and Civilian Morale in the Western Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011). Mark A. Weitz, More Damning than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). Russell L. Johnson, Warriors into Workers: The Civil War and the Formation of Urban-Industrial Society in a Northern City (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Michael T. Smith, The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2011); Rachel A. Shelden, “Measures for a ‘Speedy Conclusion’: A Reexamination of Conscription and Civil War Federalism,” Civil War History 55, no. 4 (Dec. 2005): 469–498; Steven J. Ramold, Across the Divide: Union Soldiers View the Northern Home Front (New York: New York University Press, 2013); William C. Harris, Lincoln and the Union Governors (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013); Timothy Justin Orr, “Cities at War: Union Army Mobilization in the Urban Northeast, 1861–1865” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2010). Michael J. Bennett, Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Paul Quigley, “Civil War Conscription and the International Boundaries of Citizenship,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 3 (Sept. 2014): 373–397. Bob Luke and John David Smith, Soldiering for Freedom: How the Union Army Recruited, Trained, and Deployed the U.S. Colored Troops (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Bruce C. Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Mark A. Smith, Engineering Security: The Corps of Engineers and Third System Defense Policy, 1815–1861 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009); Robert G. Angevine, The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth Century America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Wilson, Business of Civil War. See also Samuel J. Watson, Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821–1846 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013). Michael Brem Bonner, “Expedient Corporatism in Confederate Political Economy,” Civil War History 56, no. 1 (March 2010): 33–65. John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Daniel W. Hamilton, The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Rodney J. Steward, “Confederate Menace: Sequestration on the North Carolina Home Front,” in Berry, Weirding the War, 54–70.

199

MA R K R . W I L S O N

35 Chad Morgan, Planters’ Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). 36 These generalizations are nothing new. For some relatively recent works that discuss these themes, see Max M. Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 178–221; Franklin Noll, “The United States Monopolization of Bank Note Production: Politics, Government, and the Greenback, 1862–1878,” American Nineteenth Century History 13, no. 1 (March 2012): 15–43; John A. James and David F. Weiman, “The National Banking Acts and the Transformation of New York City Banking during the Civil War Era,” Journal of Economic History 71, no. 2 (June 2011): 338–362; Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 37 James M. Schmidt, Lincoln’s Labels: America’s Best-Known Brands and the Civil War (Roseville, MN: Edinborough Press, 2009). 38 H. David Stone, Jr., Vital Rails: The Charleston & Savannah Railroad and the Civil War in Coastal South Carolina (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 2008); Albert J. Churella, The Pennsylvania Railroad, Vol. I: Building an Empire, 1846–1917 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 284–325. 39 Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Scott P. Marler, “‘An Abiding Faith in Cotton’: The Merchant Capitalist Community of New Orleans, 1860–1862,” Civil War History 54, no. 3 (Sept. 2008): 247–276; Scott P. Marler, The Merchants’ Capital: New Orleans and the Political Economy of the Nineteenth-Century South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 40 Mark W. Geiger, Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861–1865 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 41 Sean Patrick Adams, “Soulless Monsters and Iron Horses: The Civil War, Industrial Change, and American Capitalism,” in Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of NineteenthCentury America, ed. Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 249–276. 42 Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014). 43 Marc-William Pelen, “The Civil War’s Forgotten Transatlantic Tariff Debate and the Confederacy’s Free Trade Diplomacy,” Journal of the Civil War Era 3, no. 1 (March 2013): 35–61; Niels Eichhorn, “North Atlantic Trade in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Case for Peace during the American Civil War,” Civil War History 61, no. 2 (June 2015): 138–172. 44 David G. Surdam, Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001); Samuel Negus, “A Notorious Nest of Offence: Neutrals, Belligerents, and Union Jails in Civil War Blockade Running,” Civil War History 56, no. 4 (Dec. 2010): 350–385; Jarret Ruminski, “‘Tradyville’: The Contraband Trade and the Problem of Loyalty in Civil War Mississippi,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 4 (Dec. 2012): 511–537. 45 Nicholas R. Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 46 Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837– 1873 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jane Flaherty, The Revenue Imperative (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009). 47 Robert J. Cook, Civil War Senator: William Pitt Fessenden and the Fight to Save the American Republic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011). 48 Nicolas Barreyre, Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).

200

MI L I TA RY MOBI L I Z AT I ON, BU S I NE S S, T E C H NO L O G Y

49 Michael T. Caires, “The Greenback Union: The Politics and Law of American Money in the Civil War Era” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2014); Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). On the same subject, see also Bensel, Yankee Leviathan. 50 David A. Mindell, War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); William H. Roberts, Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and Industrial Mobilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Harold Holzer and Tim Mulligan, eds., The Battle of Hampton Roads: New Perspectives on the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); Spencer C. Tucker, Blue and Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006); Robert E. Sheridan, Iron from the Deep: The Discovery and Recovery of the USS Monitor (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2004); Carl D. Park, Ironclad Down: The USS Merrimack-CSS Virginia from Construction to Destruction (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2007); Howard J. Fuller, Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008); Myron J. Smith, Tinclads in the Civil War: Union Light-Draught Gunboat Operations on Western Waters (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010); Kurt Hackemer, The U.S. Navy and the Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex, 1847–1883 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001). 51 Earl J. Hess, The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). The U.S. Army-run factory at Springfield, MA that was the most important designer of the rifle musket still deserves more study. However, see Kevin R. Spiker, Erskine S. Allin, Director of the U.S. Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts: Inventing and Manufacturing the New Weapons That Won the Civil War (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2014). 52 Thomas F. Army, Jr., Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); Barton C. Hacker, ed., Astride Two Worlds: Technology and the American Civil War (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2016); R. Douglas Hurt, Food and Agriculture during the Civil War (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2016). 53 To cite just one example, Craig L. Barry and David C. Burt, Suppliers to the Confederacy: British Imported Arms and Accoutrements (Atgen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 2012). 54 Edward L. Ayers and Anne S. Rubin, Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, the Eve of War (New York: Norton, 2000); Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (New York: Norton, 2003).

201

12 THE C ONFE DER A C Y O N T HE B ATTLEFIELD AND HO ME F R O N T Paul D. Escott

It is an exciting time to study the Confederacy. Digitization is putting more and more primary sources at the fingertips of any researcher with access to the internet. New tools such as social network analysis are opening unfamiliar perspectives on the past. Collaboration on a common research project is taking place through the internet among many different people, professors and students.1 The opportunities are not limited to the products of technology but are substantive and interpretive as well. Despite a continued outpouring of research on all aspects of Confederate history, little is settled. Wellconceived and splendidly executed studies point in different or opposite directions. Scholarly progress has opened up new areas of disagreement and put new questions on the table. The current state of the field invites ambitious works that aim to replace contradictions with understanding and convert puzzles into insights. Some historians may find this surprising, even a little bizarre. Those whose fields of study cover many centuries can be excused for aiming good-natured gibes at historians of the Confederacy. A government that lasted only four years, they may reasonably claim, should be well understood by now. But in fact questions continue to arise regarding many issues of fundamental importance. This essay will discuss the challenges in contemporary Confederate historiography that are concerned with the following: political leadership and the nature of the Confederate polity; morale, disaffection, and commitment among the Confederacy’s white population; the actions and aims of the Confederacy’s enslaved black population; the rebellious South’s military strategy and history; and what can be learned from closer attention to the war’s impact on the Confederacy’s physical and social environments.

Political Leadership and the Confederate Polity A little more than one hundred years ago, Nathaniel Stephenson, writing in the American Historical Review, expressed amazement and confusion over the behavior of the Confederate Congress. Its Journals masked a “tragic study in historical psychology,” a “dilatoriness” that was “a psychological mystery.” The Confederate Congress showed a remarkably “uncertain knowledge of its own mind,” and “its vacillation forms an amazing spectacle.” Stephenson was describing the inability of Congress to act on the idea of arming the slaves, this during a period of four months in which “the wave of fire which was Sherman’s advance moved steadily toward Richmond!” When “desperate remedies” truly were required, the legislators chose instead to fiddle “while Rome was burning.”2 202

THE C O N F EDER AC Y ON BAT T LE F I E L D A ND H O M E F RO NT

Surprising behavior from the Confederacy’s national legislature was not confined to the closing months of the war. In 1863 Georgia’s Senator Herschel Johnson confessed, “I am amazed at the lightness with which State sovereignty & constitutional obligation are treated by influential members of Congress – those too, who in former days were Sticklers upon those points.”3 Perhaps emergency conditions required some compromises of principle when a new nation was fighting for its life. But what is one to make of two additional, contradictory facts? Confederate congressmen favored unbridled patriotic rhetoric, the kind of rhetoric that declared that no sacrifice for the goal of independence could ever be too great. Yet as Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer and others have shown, the willingness to support necessary but strong measures evaporated in precisely those parts of the South that remained under Confederate control. Areas comprising the Confederate heartland, free from Union menace, steadily withdrew their support from the administration’s proposals, a fact that forced Jefferson Davis to depend ever more heavily on the votes of congressmen who could not go home and had nothing to lose. As early as October 1862 the government controlled only 63.2 percent of the Confederacy’s congressional districts, and that percentage had fallen to 52.8 percent by February 1864 and 33.9 percent by March 1865.4 Without the support Davis obtained from those districts, the Confederacy surely would have expired more quickly. The political conundrums are broader than the behavior of Congress. Was the political ideology of the slave South undergoing a fundamental change? Were Confederate leaders fundamentally opposed to parties or merely reluctant in time of war to appear disloyal by organizing an opposition? Were their fundamental values changing? Throughout the sectional crisis both the democratic values of Jacksonian democracy and the racial ideology of herrenvolk democracy had lauded the common man. The status of the ordinary nonslaveholder, declared John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, and others, was uniquely elevated and depended upon slavery. Yet studies by Michael Johnson, Wallace Hettle, and Stephanie McCurry document that the Confederacy was moving in a very different ideological direction. Distrust of the common man and a pronounced preference for aristocracy were growing. Setting themselves against basic American values and some powerful directions of western thought, the leaders of the Confederacy aimed to create a reactionary, aristocratic republic based on slavery and controlled by white male slaveholders.5 How fundamental was this change to the southern polity? The same question has been asked – but never completely answered – in regard to states’ rights. What did it mean that decades of incensed protests about states’ rights swiftly gave way to what one scholar called the creation of a central-government “leviathan”? The Confederacy saw a succession of powerful measures from the central government and the explosive growth of a bureaucracy whose size soon exceeded that of the North when compared to population. Was states’ rights merely “the armor that encased [slavery]”?6 It also is true that the South’s rebel government imposed an unprecedented level of control over the daily lives of citizens. Regulations, impressments, and laws like the tax-in-kind reached deep into the social fabric. There was good reason, as Mark Neely has shown, why Jefferson Davis ceased to boast about the Confederacy’s respect for individual freedom and constitutional liberty: military incarcerations by the Confederacy were approximately as great, and as arbitrary, as those under Abraham Lincoln’s government.7 Did Confederate leaders believe in liberty or in social control, as dictated by a slaveholding elite? 203

PAUL D. ES C OT T

Why was there so much criticism, maneuvering, and backbiting among the elite? Confederate diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut noted, only two weeks after Jefferson Davis took office, that “Men are willing to risk an injury to our cause, if they may in so doing hurt Jeff Davis.” Why did the Confederate government in Richmond encounter so much opposition from the states and their governors? What motivated a man like Joseph E. Brown of Georgia to castigate an absolutely essential measure, conscription, by declaring, “No act of the government of the United States prior to the secession of Georgia struck a blow at constitutional liberty, so fell, as has been stricken by the conscription acts.” Was localism a way of life, a principle, or a by-product of what James Henry Hammond dubbed “Big-Man-Meism”? How did narrowly provincial thinking coexist with growing hatred of the Yankees and a shared desire for national independence?8 Recent publications have raised another question regarding the desire for independence. For years, scholars tended to view southern politicians as on the defensive, both psychologically and politically, during the sectional crisis. Although they often responded to perceived threats in an overly aggressive manner that damaged their interests, their mindset seemed basically defensive. Work by historians like Edward Rugemer has turned this picture on its head.9 At least some of the southern elite confidently saw their system of plantation slavery as the wave of the future. The emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean had led to a decline in the production of export crops, as freed people fled from oppressive plantation labor and turned to family farming wherever possible. The future prosperity of the Atlantic world, therefore, would depend on slavery in the South, Cuba, and Brazil. Only slave-based agriculture could supply the needs of the industrializing world. To what extent was this assured and expansive mindset a fundamental part of the Confederate project? Computer-aided analysis, on a large scale, of data in newspapers and magazines, combined with thorough study of leaders’ papers, could provide the answer. Scholars have not found the key that would convincingly open the door to understanding all these intellectual mysteries. Assuredly, there are multiple factors involved in the behavior and motivations of the Confederacy’s political elite. Political shibboleths vied with unforeseen realities. Personal ambitions ran up against elements of the national interest. Local attachments and traditional habits of thinking competed with the collective effort to create a nation. The human reflex to resist change worked against enthusiasm to create a new, Confederate identity. Privation and suffering fed class resentments and disillusion. Yet all the while anger at the Yankees grew and fostered a powerful unity and Confederate identity, based on hostility to the foe. Where, among all these factors, was the essence of southern-ness? What was the Confederate cause, how was it understood, and how widely was it shared? These questions still challenge the best minds of scholars.

Morale, Disaffection, and Commitment – the White Population In recent decades a scholarly debate has been broadening over questions relating to morale, disaffection, the sense of nationalism, and the degree of commitment to the Confederate cause among white southerners. On the one hand, it is clear that all was not well in the Confederacy. There was an enormous amount of discontent, complaint, protest, and opposition among its citizenry. While those of modest means reacted against 204

THE C O N F EDER AC Y ON BAT T LE F I E L D A ND H O M E F RO NT

privation and the government’s failure to address their needs, many members of the elite fiercely attacked the central government over its strong policies, expanding size, and newly-exercised powers. Bitter cries from below about a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” competed with high-level anger and outrage over supposed invasions of state sovereignty and the creation of a “centralized military despotism.” Studies by David Williams (as sole author and with others), Mark Weitz, and Stephanie McCurry have added important dimensions to claims made earlier by this author. Undeniably, there was an elevated and important level of discontent within the Confederacy.10 On the other hand, several recent studies have focused on Confederates’ determination to fight on against the odds, even in extreme circumstances. A rebellion that was difficult to put down had many determined adherents. Gary Gallagher focused on the important role that Robert E. Lee’s army played, as both a revered popular symbol of the cause and a source of encouragement and belief in victory. William Blair found steadfastness and dedication among the citizens of Virginia, who took sustenance from the Confederacy’s dogged resistance and struggle for independence. Jason Phillips documented a strong though mistaken belief in victory, even in the last months of the southern nation, among many Confederate troops. Two important recent works have left the banner of a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” if not torn in two, at least somewhat tattered. Joseph Glatthaar, with a truly impressive amount of carefully analyzed data, has shown that officers and men who came from the elite did their full share of the fighting and sacrifice in Robert E. Lee’s army. Moving beyond Lee’s ranks, but keeping the focus on Virginia’s troops, Aaron Sheehan-Dean has marshaled evidence that rich and poor soldiers remained dedicated to the protection of home and family against Union forces pursuing hard-war tactics and the emancipation of slaves.11 These studies all add abundant and specific documentation to the undeniable fact that the Confederacy fought on through four exceedingly difficult and exhausting years. Granted, the Confederacy was a large and diverse aspiring nation, with millions of citizens. In such a large collectivity there were bound to be many diverse points of view. Yet, how can one explain the diversity of viewpoints, all based on legitimate evidence from valuable studies? Such contradictions call for additional studies designed to test possible explanations and see the Confederacy whole. The contradictory layers making up the South’s collective will need to be analyzed with attention to time, place, local circumstances, and situationspecific sources of motivation. One dimension that demands attention is the way in which physical location or differing on-the-ground experiences affected psychology and morale. There may have been a marked difference between the interior and front-line worlds of the Confederacy. Stephen Ash has alerted us to the different perspectives that were fostered by life in occupied areas, in no-man’s-land, or in the “Confederate frontier” where Federals “penetrated only sporadically.” It also is well known that in many wars the infliction of suffering has often made victims more determined and hostile. Surely this could apply to particular parts of the Confederacy. It might be especially relevant to the experience of Virginians, those in the path of General Sherman in 1864 and 1865, and to others who were under sustained Union assault in certain Confederate regions.12 For those in safe interior positions – places where the Federal army was not a threat but where demanding or unequal Confederate policies were a daily burden – the situation 205

PAUL D. ES C OT T

may well have seemed very different. For these southerners it may have been more natural and logical to see the Confederate government as a source of irritation and personal oppression – a government that was demanding much but failing in many of its fundamental responsibilities. Sources of motivation can be conceptualized as internal or external. Where and to what extent were Confederates inspired by a desire for an independent southern culture and nationality, and where or for whom did hatred of the enemy have the greatest impact on Confederate loyalty? Perhaps aspirations for cultural independence and nationality were associated with strong institutions, urban life, or heavy involvement in slaveholding. The way a southerner experienced and reacted to the war may have differed between rural and urban environments. These had very different access to news and channels of communication, especially as the number of functioning newspapers plummeted. Unless invasion threatened, a rural district probably was less informed about and less involved in the war than one of the burgeoning cities housing Confederate offices or crammed with refugees. Governors and other state leaders did much to shape morale, for good or ill. An ambitious politician like Joseph Brown of Georgia seemed more dedicated to his own career than to any national cause. He discerned that he could build his personal popularity by defending his people against the central government or by posing as a national patriot. As the occasion suited, Brown did both, and his prominence always affected public attitudes. It is important to analyze the actions of local leaders, and the changing attitudes of different regions, in relation to events on the battlefield and controversies over Confederate policies.

Actions and Aims of the Confederacy’s Black Population Historians recognize that the actions of African Americans had a significant influence on the Confederacy’s fate. Forming 40 percent of the population of the Confederacy, they obviously had the potential to affect the war’s outcome. The vast majority were enslaved, and there is virtually universal agreement that the slaves wanted to be free. Beyond these points, however, there are major disagreements and the opportunity to make a defining contribution. Decades ago James Brewer demonstrated in The Confederate Negro that the rebellious South used black labor in a multitude of ways to bolster its war effort. Pre-war boasts that slaves would farm while white men fought gave way to impressment of slaves in support of the armies. Tens of thousands of black southerners were forced to fell trees, build fortifications, carry munitions, work as teamsters, tend the wounded, and serve the armies in other ways, while the majority of slaves continued to labor on plantations. More recently Stephen Ash has emphasized the scope of measures taken in the Confederacy to keep the slave population under surveillance and control. Boys “as young as 16 had to ride patrol,” the army intervened to reinforce the efforts of slaveholders and civil authorities, and the “web of enforcement . . . ensnared thousands of black freedomseekers and returned them to bondage.” Due to such measures and the wartime labor shortage, Ash concluded that “the typical black field hand probably worked even harder during the war than before.”13 206

THE C O N F EDER AC Y ON BAT T LE F I E L D A ND H O M E F RO NT

More common are accounts that emphasize the steady dissolution of plantation discipline and efficiency and the mounting difficulties that southern women experienced when they tried to manage or discipline slaves. Complaints to their soldier husbands were frequent, and the more closely Union armies threatened, the greater were the liberties taken by the slaves. Slaveholders who had the means often tried to move their labor force to areas distant from military operations. Those who could not do so were disappointed in the results. Early in 1863 a harassed and despairing overseer in eastern North Carolina wrote to his wealthy employer, “I have had to wearke Evry skiam [scheme] to keep them hear . . . have gived off hogs and Cattle to Each family . . . the[re] are no Dependance in no nigro when the weard freedom is given.”14 A long line of important scholarly works assigns a major role to slaves in the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy. W. E. B. Du Bois described the “general strike” that debilitated the Confederacy. Armstead Robinson devoted much of his professional life to elaborating the various ways in which active and passive resistance by the slaves damaged the Confederacy. He argued that slavery “erode[d] the South from within” and became the Confederacy’s “millstone.” More recently Steven Hahn has argued in The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom that historians have failed to see the scope and true dimensions of slaves’ resistance in the Confederate South. He maintains that their actions amounted to a “revolt” or “rebellion” or “insurrection” that scholars have failed to credit. Instead of being pre-political in their thoughts or seeking to join the dominant society, the slaves waged war against the white system in pursuit of different aims and values.15 By contrast, William Freehling, another distinguished historian, has reached a very different conclusion. Freehling perceives the slaves as eager to gain freedom and ready to damage the Confederacy but shrewd in their assessment of both southern and northern whites. Rather than acting prematurely or taking excessive risks while whites remained in control, the slaves bided their time. When opportunities presented themselves in the South, they proved ready to act. But they also chose their actions with an awareness that northern whites feared racial upheaval and would be ready to suppress a slave insurrection. Likening the action of the slaves to the non-violent protest that dominated the twentieth century’s Civil Rights Movement, Freehling credits the slaves with initiatives that were finely calibrated to gain acceptance from the Union’s public and policy makers.16 To resolve these differing interpretations, a more detailed and comprehensive approach is needed. The experiences of slaves in the wartime Confederacy were extremely varied, both by place and time. The movements of the Union army determined where it would be easiest to escape from slavery and where the North would use “contrabands” most heavily or recruit the most soldiers. The needs of the battlefield determined where the Confederacy was most likely to impress slaves for support of its armies. Both these patterns changed over time. Similarly, slaves who lived in areas close to Union army operations had a very different experience from those who remained under Confederate control deep in an unthreatened region. The ability of slaveholders, or of the state or central government, to control slaves also changed as the Confederacy grew weaker. Attention to the many different circumstances in which African American slaves found themselves will help to clarify the overall picture. More attention is needed to identify the political ideas of the slaves.17 Keen observers of their owners and other whites, the slaves (or at least many of them) had developed a 207

PAUL D. ES C OT T

solid understanding of American political values and practices. They acted with political intent and forethought. It is possible to discern their politics from their actions and from statements they made during the war, or immediately after. Petitions drawn up in 1865 and coming from Kentucky and the Carolinas, for example, prove that the political knowledge of the Confederacy’s African Americans was quite sophisticated.18 Closer attention to their actions should yield new understanding. Both the Union and Confederate governments generated helpful documents. The Freedmen and Southern Society Project, originally directed by Ira Berlin, has opened a wealth of primary sources to researchers. Valuable studies have already been published regarding those who joined the U.S. army and those who worked or suffered on abandoned plantations and in contraband camps.19 But it also should be possible to assemble information from non-governmental, southern sources. The Visualizing Emancipation project at the University of Richmond has presented a model for wide collaboration in research on fugitive slaves.20 Individual historians as well as students engaged in class projects have contributed data drawn from newspaper ads about runaway slaves. Following a standard format for information, these researchers together construct a large database. From the pooled information, it becomes possible to map the travels of runaway slaves and to answer many other questions. Who became a fugitive and why? What was the gender balance among fugitives? How often and where did family groups predominate? What factors determined the timing of flights? How far did runaways travel, and how often were they caught? Scholars should not view April 1865 as an impermeable boundary and neglect connections to the immediate postwar period. Heather Williams has poignantly reminded us that no such boundary existed for the thousands of freed people who sought to reunite families once the fighting stopped.21 It is important to know where black veterans settled once the war ended and what kind of reception they received in white society and in the black community. In a rapidly evolving postwar political situation, we know that southern blacks promptly petitioned for their rights or for federal protection and sought to improve their position. What role did former soldiers play in those events, and how did they interact with leaders who had enjoyed education or been free before the war? Community studies focusing on where freed people settled immediately after the war could shed considerable light on the nature of that much-debated concept – plantation paternalism.

The Rebellious South’s Military Strategy and History No part of the history of the Confederacy has attracted more devoted and detailed interest than military history. The general public loves biographies of commanders, whether outstanding or flawed, and scholars produce thoughtful studies of men and campaigns. It is easy to understand the human factors that attract so much interest in military history. The spectacle of ordinary men displaying extraordinary courage, and the personalities of powerful commanders, account for much of the broad and sustained interest.22 But the reasons to pursue military history surpass its inherent drama. Applying the concerns and methods of social history to military studies has had enormous benefits. Few have illustrated its potential more impressively than Joseph Glatthaar. In a series of studies he shed new light on Sherman’s army, the interaction of 208

THE C O N F EDER AC Y ON BAT T LE F I E L D A ND H O M E F RO NT

black soldiers and their white officers, and most recently General Lee’s army.23 This last, impressive study will serve as a model to inspire other works. The potential of social history also can be applied with profit to studies of communities and their soldiers – how recruitment reflected social structure and relations of power, how the absence or death of soldiers affected the social network they left behind, and how military service changed social reality for those who returned and for their community. Some promising studies, including a comparative perspective, are underway.24 There is also another approach whose breadth and potential explanatory power offers many attractions: the study of strategy and issues related to high-level leadership. Some of the most interesting questions related to the Confederacy’s battlefield successes and ultimate defeat have been raised in recent years by such studies. Fruitful debate is underway on questions such as these: What was the Confederacy’s strategy? What plan was most likely to achieve success for a cause that was badly outnumbered in population and material resources? How well did Jefferson Davis and his generals perform? Were fundamental military principles followed or violated, and why? How well were the Confederacy’s resources marshaled and employed? Donald Stoker recently has asserted that strategy won the Civil War.25 His perspective also supports sharp analysis by Steven Woodworth on the fundamentals of Confederate strategy. Jefferson Davis’s basic strategy – an “offensive defense” – signified a fundamentally defensive posture married to a willingness to attack the enemy when favorable opportunities presented themselves. Such a strategy was consistent both with the Confederacy’s claim that it wanted only to be left alone and with accepted ideas of defense. Baron Carl von Clausewitz, the distinguished Prussian theorist, had declared that “The defensive form of war is not a simple shield, but a shield made up of well-directed blows.”26 But both Stoker and Woodworth question whether Davis and Lee, the Confederacy’s greatest general, were completely in agreement on this strategy. Lee was simultaneously the most audacious, aggressive southern commander and a strategist whose long-range assessment of the South’s prospects was fundamentally pessimistic. Jefferson Davis seemed to believe throughout the war that the Confederacy could prevail – gain its independence – simply by refusing to give up, by outlasting its foe. That was, essentially, what the American patriots had done in their eighteenth-century Revolution. Lee, by contrast, was much more impressed with the disparity in strength and resources. He appears to have believed that the South’s best chance lay in one or more stunning victories that would convince a shaken North to make peace before its superior resources could exhaust the South. In June of 1863 Lee skillfully and tactfully urged Davis to encourage peace sentiment in the North, an effort that could accompany his invasion of Pennsylvania. As Lee began that thrust deep into Union territory he declared, “if successful, [we] will secure our independence and win the war.” Woodworth highlights the tension in these two approaches. Stoker concludes that the Confederacy did not truly have a consistent strategy of “offensive-defense.”27 In a long war the North’s supremacy in vital resources would weigh ever more heavily against an increasingly depleted South. Perhaps Lee was right in thinking that a decisive, shocking victory that came sooner rather than later offered the best chance for independence. But it is impossible to say with certainty how the North would have reacted to such a defeat. Moreover, war weariness so afflicted the North in the summer 209

PAUL D. ES C OT T

of 1864 that Lincoln anticipated defeat in his bid for reelection. That fact led Stoker to fault Jefferson Davis for instructing General John Bell Hood to attack Sherman outside Atlanta. With a different strategy, Hood “might have kept Atlanta in the South’s hands until the election. But Davis had dictated otherwise . . . It was a critical and perhaps even fatal miscalculation.”28 Stoker also questioned whether Confederate goals were merely defensive, without designs of gaining territory.29 The appeal that Lee made to Marylanders and the fact that Bragg carried 15,000 rifles into Kentucky prove that Confederates hoped that southerners from the Border might join them. The southern interest in detaching states of the Northwest, where economic activity in the past had found an outlet in New Orleans, also suggests a less than defensive posture. But did these hopes amount to settled war aims? After ten months of war Jefferson Davis admitted that the Confederacy could not successfully defend every part of its extended borders. His admission raises a fundamental question: did the southern government disperse its forces too much, violating the basic principle that concentration of forces brings success? On this point popular politics collided with military strategy. Confederates, in every part of the new nation, expected and frequently demanded that their government protect them behind secure borders. To ordinary citizens – on whom the armies depended – defense of their homes and neighborhoods often was the first priority. “Keeping the army in the field,” observed Mark Weitz, “meant keeping the Union out of the South.” Moreover, a “Fabian strategy,” wrote Donald Stoker, “particularly one necessitating the temporary abandonment [of Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas] . . . would erode the South’s ability to fight.” Holding territory meant retaining scarce human and material resources.30 At one point Stoker commented favorably on a plan by Braxton Bragg, who urged that the South defend only its core (north of Florida and east of the Mississippi). Yet the government’s options were limited, politically. In that vein Charles Roland has argued, against the view of J. F. C. Fuller, that abandoning the Upper South to concentrate forces near Chattanooga would have “undone the Confederacy without a battle.”31 The debate is far from settled. Intrinsically related to these issues is the South’s departmental system. Through four years of war, Davis repeatedly modified the definition of his military departments. The system’s underlying assumptions, however, remained the same. A commander who headed a department was responsible for the security of his area and empowered to command all forces within it. This kind of military shield could give confidence to citizens within a department. Yet Davis also insisted that the departments must aid each other as circumstances required, something that their commanders increasingly refused to do. It is this author’s impression that the departmental system worked reasonably well in the early days of the war. Further analysis is needed for the changes made as the war progressed. Did the Confederacy keep too many troops on garrison duty in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida? Should it have drawn on that region for reinforcements needed elsewhere? Those states represented the core of the government’s remaining available resources, and their representatives in Congress were refusing to vote for necessary but strong measures as the war dragged on. Could troops have been sent elsewhere without dire consequences?32 210

THE C O N F EDER AC Y ON BAT T LE F I E L D A ND H O M E F RO NT

Other significant questions revolve around what Thomas Connelly long ago called the “politics of command.” Relations between Davis and his Secretary of War, on the one hand, and several generals with important commands, on the other, often were strained. This was especially evident in regard to Joseph Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard. How much of this problem was attributable to Davis and how much to the personalities of his generals? How many mistakes should be laid at Davis’s door? To what extent did the Confederate Congress inject itself into decision-making in order to promote favorites and take a swipe at Davis? The ties between Joseph Johnston and Senator Lewis Wigfall, a fierce critic of Davis, raise this question, as does the ability of P. G. T. Beauregard to corral support from fifty-nine congressmen arguing for his reassignment to a major post.33 Finally, the ability of many brave men in the Confederate armies to fight on, despite increasingly despairing conditions, merits further exploration. Was it due only to what is now called “group cohesion?”34 Was their dedication bolstered by rumor and selective analysis of news, or was it due to a belief in invincibility that Jason Phillips described in Diehard Rebels?35 How many were motivated by a strong sense of nationalism? When, on the other hand, did the core of military dedication suffer a fatal, debilitating blow, and why? Civilian morale and battlefield strength were closely related and must be studied together. Did an irreversible process set in during the summer of 1863? Had the certainty of a long war plus suffering on the home front combined by then to create an ever-growing stream of desertions? Surely this occurred before September 1864, when Davis admitted that two-thirds of southern soldiers were absent. Stoker added that by this point absenteeism had reached 49 percent in the army of Tennessee and 60 percent in the army of Northern Virginia. “In another speech Davis said there were a quarter of a million deserters ‘on the books of the war department.’”36 James Chesnut, who was in charge of South Carolina’s local defense against Sherman’s army, acknowledged that the will to resist had disappeared. The Palmetto State “was shamefully and unnecessarily lost,” he lamented. “We had time, opportunity and means to destroy him. But there was wholly wanting the energy and ability required by the occasion.”37

The Confederacy’s Physical and Social Environments38 Scholars are turning their attention to the environmental history of the Civil War, broadly considered. Such an environmental focus sees human beings and the natural world as one. Civilians and soldiers, including all their movements and actions, and the surrounding environment form an interconnected, constantly changing system whose elements affect each other. This is a new perspective for the Civil War era, though pioneering scholars have brought this vision to other periods of U.S. history. In recent years some historians have used an acute sensitivity to the environment to reveal what life was like in those years. New attention has been given to the sights, smells, and sensations experienced by soldiers and civilians as war changed their lives and physical worlds.39 To date most environmental works on the Civil War era have focused on the impacts of specific battles, human reactions to war’s devastations, and the realities of disease and suffering. The importance of disease, which wartime movement did so much to increase, is evident in the death toll of soldiers. Dysentery and other illnesses were a far greater threat to life than enemy bullets. Disease also ravaged many of the contraband 211

PAUL D. ES C OT T

camps.40 But the agenda for future projects goes beyond these themes and is both large and intriguing. The war moved human populations, altered human interactions, created new disease environments that affected people and animals, and affected human use of the land. Influences were reciprocal. Battles and the movement of armies impacted the land, but weather, landforms, and rivers powerfully affected soldiers and regiments. Battles could turn on extremes of temperature or drought or torrential rains. When men went to war, they altered the battlefield and partially denuded the human environment from which they came. The transformation of environments took place both in and beyond the path of armies. With fewer men cultivating fields, there were smaller crops, debilitated social and commercial networks, and diminished capacity to respond to nature’s challenges. Attention to these themes can yield insights in what we might call the primary environmental locale – where human beings and nature were directly affecting each other in dramatic ways. In addition, a broadly environmental approach is highly relevant to the secondary realms – where community processes, economic activities, and assumptions or attitudes changed due to change in people’s activities and surroundings. To take one obvious example, the food supply of the South was hostage to a host of environmental factors connected to the war. Secession cut commercial links and disrupted trade patterns on which southerners had long depended. Armies of invasion or defense destroyed crops, seized livestock and other animals, spread disease, and often left behind carnage and corpses. Natural forces, such as storms, droughts, molds, or blights, affected the nutrients available to civilians and soldiers. In turn hunger and privation created panic and disaffection at home, while they influenced the movement of armies, whose weakened men had to go into battle. Shortages of food on the home front could (and did) threaten governments, erode civilian support, or force changes in policy. The longer-term effects of changes in agriculture and livestock were important to individuals’ life fortunes, to economic activity, and even to the social structure of local communities. The enormous loss of livestock impoverished large portions of the South’s common people – affecting their economic standing as severely as the loss of wealth in slaves shocked the planter elite.41 Moreover, the events of the war spread disease among farm animals, with long-lasting effects. Because it was costly or difficult to replenish animal stocks, families suffered and a shift to commercial agriculture began to seem more appealing. Even legal traditions such as the open range – so important to small farmers – began to change. Erin Mauldin has shown that efforts to close the open range gained strength due to the persistence of hog cholera.42 When historians look more closely at specific communities, especially those in the path of armies, it is likely that they will see a wide scope of environmental effects. Just as environmental change affected the land, it altered human interactions. Economic activities had to adjust to losses, shortages, and new realities. Death and disease altered personal relationships, affected families, and brought new attitudes and different ways of looking at things. Subtle but important changes in psychology and behavior could be long-lasting. Environmental history – defined broadly – may bring a new understanding of how intimately and extensively the Civil War shaped the decades that followed. Taken together, the issues discussed in this essay make up an intriguing and challenging agenda for study of the Confederacy. Both the home front and the battlefield invite 212

THE C O N F EDER AC Y ON BAT T LE F I E L D A ND H O M E F RO NT

major new works by ambitious scholars. Mysteries that attracted scholars like Nathaniel Stephenson more than one hundred years ago remain unsolved, while important new questions have arisen from modern investigations. Understanding the complex nature of the South is vital to our knowledge of all of American history, and the Confederate years are a window onto a society revealing itself amid the crisis and stress of war.

Notes 1 See the Visualizing Emancipation project at the University of Richmond: http://dsl.richmond. edu/emancipation/. The collaborative nature of this project was described at the November 2014 meeting of the Southern Historical Association. 2 Nathaniel W. Stephenson, “The Question of Arming the Slaves,” American Historical Review 18, no. 2 (Jan. 1913), 299–300, 302, 295, 301, 302. 3 Herschel V. Johnson to Alexander H. Stephens, December 29, 1863, in Bell I. Wiley Papers, Special Collections, Woodruff Library, Emory University. 4 Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer, The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1972); Kenneth Martis, The Historical Atlas of the Congresses of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1865 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 117, 32, 34. (Percentages were calculated by this author from Martis’s data.) 5 George Rable, The Confederate Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); George Fredrickson, White Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Michael P. Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977); Wallace Hettle, The Peculiar Democracy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 6 Richard F. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Macon (Georgia) Telegraph, January 6, 1865. 7 Emory M. Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970); Mark Neely, Southern Rights (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999); Paul D. Escott, Military Necessity (Santa Barbara: Praeger Security International, 2006). 8 Quotations from Paul D. Escott, After Secession (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 62, 85; and Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 140. 9 For example, see Rugemer’s essay in David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis, eds., The Civil War as Global Conflict (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014). Thomas Schoonover, in “Napoleon Is Coming! Maximilian Is Coming!” in Robert E. May, ed., The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), reveals why the assumptions of southern leaders were mistaken. 10 For example, see Escott, After Secession; Escott, Military Necessity; David Williams, Bitterly Divided (New York: New Press, 2008); David Williams, Teresa Crisp Williams, and David Carlson, Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002); Mark Weitz, More Damning than Slaughter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); McCurry, Confederate Reckoning. 11 For example, see Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); William A. Blair, Virginia’s Private War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jason Phillips, Diehard Rebels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007); Joseph Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army (New York: Free Press, 2008); Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 12 See, for example, Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Jacqueline Glass Campbell, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

213

PAUL D. ES C OT T

13 James Brewer, The Confederate Negro (Durham: Duke University Press, 1969); Jaime Martinez, Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Stephen V. Ash, The Black Experience in the Civil War South (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 8, 10, 11, 22. 14 George Spruill to Josiah Collins III, in Paul D. Escott, Many Excellent People (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 62. 15 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963); Armstead Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 9, 4; Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 112–114. 16 William W. Freehling, The South vs. The South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), part 3. 17 A study underway by Susan O’Donovan promises fresh, valuable insights here. 18 See, for example, “Address by a Convention of Black North Carolinians . . .” in Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 128–130; Howard Fast, Freedom Road, new edition with documents and introduction by Eric Foner (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 265–267; Freedmen and Southern Society Project, online at www. freedmen.umd.edu/Roxborough. 19 Six of a projected nine volumes have been published by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, now headed by Leslie Rowland. See also Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and a forthcoming study by Thavolia Glymph. 20 See the Visualizing Emancipation project at the University of Richmond: http://dsl.richmond. edu/emancipation/. 21 Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 22 Tony Horwitz’s book, Confederates in the Attic (New York: Pantheon, 1998), suggests that nostalgia for a simpler time when individual heroism mattered helps to account for this popularity. 23 See Glaathaar’s The March to the Sea and Beyond (New York: New York University Press, 1985); Forged in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1990); and General Lee’s Army. 24 Judkin Browning is at work on a study comparing two regiments, one from Michigan and one from North Carolina, that met at Gettysburg. He focuses on the long-term effects of war on the soldiers and their home communities. 25 Donald Stoker, The Grand Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5. 26 Steven Woodworth, Davis and Lee at War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), especially ch. 6; Clausewitz quoted in Paul D. Escott, The Confederacy (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), 26. 27 Woodworth, Davis and Lee at War; Escott, The Confederacy, 75; Stoker, The Grand Design, 280. 28 Stoker, The Grand Design, 378. 29 Stoker, The Grand Design, 186–188. 30 Weitz, More Damning than Slaughter, 27; Stoker, The Grand Design, 213. 31 Stoker, The Grand Design, 120; essay by Charles Roland in Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott, eds., Lee and His Generals (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012), 21–22. 32 Charles Roland faults the Confederate high command for keeping too many troops on garrison duty in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. In the latter half of the war those troops actually outnumbered the Union forces disposed against them, whereas Confederate armies desperately needed reinforcement elsewhere. See Roland’s essay in Hewitt and Schott, Lee and His Generals, 31. 33 Escott, Military Necessity, 21, 51–53, 153. 34 The U.S. military today uses that terminology to refer to the social and experiential factors that work to unite the soldiers in a fighting unit. 35 Phillips, Diehard Rebels, 2 and passim. 36 Stoker, The Grand Design, 389. He adds that by April 1865 “three-quarters of the men in Lee’s and Johnston’s armies were at home when they were supposed to be in the ranks.”

214

THE C O N F EDER AC Y ON BAT T LE F I E L D A ND H O M E F RO NT

37 Quoted in Escott, The Confederacy, 122. 38 The author thanks Judkin Browning for sharing information about an important project in environmental history that he and Timothy Silver are undertaking. 39 Mark Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 40 Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Kathryn Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Margaret Humphreys, Marrow of Tragedy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Downs, Sick from Freedom. 41 Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, “The Antebellum Southern Herdsman: A Reinterpretation,” The Journal of Southern History 41, no. 2 (May 1975). 42 Erin Stewart Mauldin, “The Stockman’s War: Hog Cholera, Agricultural Reform, and the Fight to Maintain the Commons during the Civil War Ear,” paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Civil War Historians, June 12–14, 2014.

215

13 P OLITIC S AND C I V I L L I BERT I ES ON THE UNION HOME F R O N T Joel H. Silbey

Opposition to the American government’s wartime policies appeared before and during every armed conflict from the Revolution to the Middle Eastern episodes of the 1990s and early 2000s.1 In the Revolutionary War, Tories loyal to Britain engaged in vicious, often bloody, confrontations against supporters of the colonists’ revolution. In the War of 1812, New England Federalists strongly opposed the Madison Administration for its policies that had brought on the war, to the point where the dissenters threatened the secession of their states from the Union. In the years after the 1812 conflict, national political parties became increasingly important organizers and energizers of the nation’s political conflicts. These parties stressed different perspectives about the role of government and over the critical issues that were always present. Their differing commitments became an important element of political conflict during the war with Mexico when the Whig Party challenged the Democratic President James K. Polk’s actions which, they argued, had brought the nation into an immoral war against a weak neighbor. A young Whig congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, made a name for himself because of his angry speeches against what his party colleagues disdained as “Mister Polk’s war,” as well as other Administration policies.2 When the Civil War began, therefore, whatever the hopes of northern leaders that there would be unity behind their efforts to restore the seceded states to the Union, including through military action, a vigorous dissent emerged against President Lincoln and his colleagues. The dissenters argued that there was much to oppose. The war had introduced an unprecedented increase in the reach and authority of the federal government that, as the opposition Democrats saw it, went far beyond what the Constitution allowed. As a result, they fought a bitter political battle against the Administration, at first because of what they argued were its misguided moves that had led to the war, then its behavior during the conflict that they claimed severely threatened American liberties, and, finally, against its misguided and revolutionary policies about slavery and the reach of the federal government’s power. There was a steady drumbeat of criticism, often harsh, even hysterical, from legislators in local party speeches, in newspaper editorials, and on the campaign trail during wartime election contests. Their reactions (and those of the Republicans in response) reflected long-held outlooks about the role and power of government, especially at the federal level. At first, the Democrats – the minority party nationally for the first time in many years – held back from an aggressive resistance to Lincoln’s policies and followed a cautious approach, with many party leaders largely advocating a stance of what one of them 216

POLI T I C S A N D C I V I L L I BERT I ES O N U NI O N H O M E F RO NT

called to “sink the partisan in the patriot.”3 There were early signs of resistance due to actions by the Administration, but whatever the original challenges, while often intense and angry, they were fragmented, localized and intermittent. When the Lincoln government moved to arrest Maryland legislators in 1861 because of their efforts to impede Union troops passing through their state on their way to defend Washington, there were protests from some Democrats against this attack on civil liberties and signal of the Administration’s intention to move harshly against dissent – moves that Democrats argued went beyond their constitutional power. A veteran party congressman, Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, who had sought conciliation and compromise with the seceding states in 1860–1861, tried to unify the impulses against the Administration, but even as he laid out what was to become part of the Democratic argument against the federal government’s increased reach, his early attempts did not arouse the party masses (or others).4 Party leaders remained divided over what their stance should be, particularly what was acceptable in the face of military necessity. The so-called War Democrats committed themselves to support Lincoln’s policies to bring the South back in, even by the use of force. At the other end of the spectrum, those like Vallandigham and Connecticut’s former governor Thomas Seymour wanted nothing to do with the war and the actions that occurred because of it. Seymour joined Vallandigham in making a name for himself as a dissenter early in the war as he articulated an unending opposition, including any attempt to subdue the South by war, and by expressing his fears of what the war would do to Americans’ rights and liberties.5 In the middle remained a large group of Democrats committed to the Union but not ready as yet to support the Lincoln Administration’s war policies. At the outset of the war, party dissenters needed a defining issue to increase their ranks. In 1862 and early 1863, after a year and more of a frustrating war that had seen a series of Union military setbacks and no sign of finding a way to end the conflict, Vallandigham and other dissenters’ efforts became more formidable as new issues provided ammunition for a vigorous and widespread resistance. Historians have identified the stronghold of the growing dissent to be in the Middle Western states, especially in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. But it existed elsewhere as well, in New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, in particular. Democratic newspaper editors joined Vallandigham in angrily denouncing what was occurring. Wilbur Story of the Chicago Times and Marcus “Brick” Pomeroy of the (Wisconsin) LaCrosse Democrat became notorious as leading assailers of the war and the Administration’s policies. Local Democratic leaders, such as Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York City, joined in as well, as did his brother Benjamin, the editor of the New York Daily News. Daniel Voorhees, a congressman from Indiana, provided another strong voice against the Administration and its policies from the early days of the war. Democratic meetings and nominating conventions began denouncing the assault on American liberties. Vallandigham made a formidable case against the Republicans in his “Address of Democratic Members of the House of Representatives of the United States to the Democracy of the United States” issued in 1862, widely reprinted in Democratic newspapers and distributed as a pamphlet.6 The essence of the case they made against the Lincoln Administration was clear cut in their own minds as the war advanced. As Congress passed bills to buttress the North’s war 217

J O EL H. S I L B E Y

efforts, many Democratic dissenters, like Vallandigham, Voorhees, Seymour, and their colleagues, believed that the Administration’s behavior was due to its partisan goals and not primarily due to the needs of the country at war. The Pennsylvania Democratic leader Edwin M. Stanton (soon to be a member of Lincoln’s cabinet) referred to the “imbecility” of the Administration and argued it was clearly on too partisan a path in its policies and behavior to be capable of restoring the Union.7 In a partisan nation such was to be expected, if regretted and improper. Of course, the Democrats believed that they, too, were taking a political position in response, one based on their traditional ideology and commitments going back to the days of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. As the dissenters viewed what was going on, their beliefs were confirmed. All around them they saw what they considered to be frightening evidence of the overthrow of the people’s liberty as a result of the Administration’s actions. Besides its general impulse to corrupt the Constitution’s limits on the power of the national government, their fears were confirmed, in their eyes, by the second suspension of habeas corpus, militia laws to guide the states in their efforts to recruit troops, legislation that allowed the federal government to seize the property of those who it deemed threatened the war effort, and to punish them as individuals, the imposition of martial law, military arrests of civilians, and trials of the civilians arrested by military courts. At the same time Republican governors in several states (such as Oliver Morton in Indiana) used their powers to hamstring dissent within their borders.8 The Administration’s second suspension of habeas corpus in late 1862, this time encompassing the entire country although Lincoln’s original suspension (limited to Maryland) had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Taney in Ex-Parte Merryman – a ruling ignored by Lincoln – as well as the increasing involvement of the army in civilian affairs, and the creation of new taxes to finance the war, including on people’s income, confirmed that Lincoln and his associates were creating a centralized and consolidated government which was leading the nation into tyranny. To the Democrats the questionable actions of the Administration were becoming commonplace whatever its argument that what they were doing was based on the necessities forced on them in wartime and the need to save the Union. Rather, the Democrats argued, the Administration was determined to centralize all power and force people to conform to their determination.9 The early angry and often fragmented opposition was further catalyzed by the Administration’s institution of conscription in 1862, establishing a system to draft into the military those deemed eligible (originally males between the ages of 18 and 35, later 18 and 45) in order to fill up the army’s ranks, and second, by the Lincoln Administration’s adoption of slave emancipation policies. In the first case the government realized that its reliance on America’s volunteer tradition to raise armies was inadequate to deal with the country’s current conflict. This act did not solve the problem since its management was left in state hands who did a poor job in carrying out its purposes. The federal government relied on the deeply imbedded notion of the volunteer state to carry out its mandates. Originally, what little administrative apparatus there was depended heavily on local bodies that were largely ad hoc, not systematic. Many were called to report but refused to appear, or disappeared when searched for. Their local communities could not, or did not, do anything most of the time to rectify the problem.10 218

POLI T I C S A N D C I V I L L I BERT I ES O N U NI O N H O M E F RO NT

In the following year, Congress passed the Enrollment Act establishing a much more elaborate conscription machinery within the War Department involving the Provost Marshal General of the army as the organizer and manager of the draft at the state and local level. Under him, assistant provost marshals were appointed in each state, as well as the counties within them, to supervise conscription. Under them were enrolling officers at the local level, making up, in each jurisdiction, a system of government presence rarely seen before. This act (like the first attempt) had many loopholes allowing people to avoid serving by paying a commutation fee, or by hiring a substitute to go in their place. Such provisions hardly favored poorer males, either native or immigrant, and caused enormous tension as well as a great deal of evasion and overt resistance against the enrolling officers. The point was that the government’s attempts to conscript people provoked a strong backlash and resistance that often turned quite violent.11 In the second instance, despite its limited application which left most slaves outside its provisions still bound to their masters, Democrats saw conclusive proof that the Abolitionist wing of the Republican Party had taken over the Lincoln Administration. The longstanding Democratic charge against the Republicans as determined to end slavery in the nation whatever the Constitution allowed, was proving to be true. Their intentions were further underlined by the Administration coming to the decision, after much hesitancy, to begin to enlist former slaves as soldiers. They simply did not accept the need for the extensive enlargement of federal power that challenged their traditional basic beliefs and freedoms. Dissenters underscored their commitment to a limited federal power on the home front and believed Lincoln’s actions to be unconstitutional. As the historian Harold Hyman has summed up, the Democratic dissenters were ideologically united by “an idiom of antipathy to martial ways . . . of obeisance to the Bill of Rights . . . and a quest for static federalism racially ordered.”12 That was their bedrock as they forcefully began to challenge the Administration’s actions. By the middle of 1862 the opposition was in full roar. Whether well organized and centrally directed (as Republicans charged) or not, there was certainly a great deal of challenging – in print and orally, and by overt actions. As the government reacted and began to act against its dissenting opponents, questions arose as to the legitimacy of the actions it began to take against the resistance. The United States Constitution defined treason in a very limited way. It consisted of overt acts against the government during time of war attested to by at least two observers of the activity.13 Those government officials engaged in dealing with the issue took a much broader approach, however. Unacceptable dissent was resistance to the government’s efforts to fight the war, whether spoken or written, and not limited only to specific actions. The record began to show many arbitrary actions supported by no clear or precise rules, but dictated, rather, by the outlook and preferences of those in charge in different communities throughout the North. And under the terms of the second Confiscation Act the federal government could imprison people for treason. Nor were the authorities very fastidious about those they arrested. Union generals such as Ambrose Burnside in command in Ohio, and John Adams Dix, a leading pre-war New York Democrat, now commanding troops in the northeastern states, were infamous among Democrats for their vigorous suppression of dissenting speakers and newspapers in the areas they controlled and President Lincoln’s apparent agreement with what they were doing. 219

J O EL H. S I L B E Y

Democrats added other matters to the list of Administration outrages as well: its removal of a portion of the state of Virginia in order to create the new state of West Virginia without the consent of the state of which it was part, despite what the Constitution required; the imposition of taxes, including, eventually, a levy on income, in order to pay for the war; and parts of the old Whig activist agenda such as a protective tariff, federally financed internal improvements, and a national bank. Clearly all of this was government overreach, as the Democrats saw the situation. Their newspapers intensified their angry resistance to what was occurring, and party leaders pushed hard to prevent the repression and social changes underway. Editors of party newspapers from New York City to the Middle West – in Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and elsewhere – fueled the flames through their denunciations, scare stories, and angry warnings of the threat of an emerging dictatorship. The substance of their arguments did not vary much but the level of their anger grew as both the Administration’s policies continued and their repressive actions against dissent intensified.14 While government actions were often confusing and contradictory because of the absence of clear lines of authority, or a structure adequate to meet the pressures of wartime, Democrats saw all of the further expansion of central power underway as a threat to their rights and liberties. The Lincoln Administration’s policies confirmed their claims that the government was acting in a partisan manner to put across the Republican agenda, not behaving in a nonpartisan manner as it should in wartime. Their language grew more extreme, often filled with violent expressions and warnings. Clement Vallandigham, who the Ohio legislature gerrymandered out of his congressional seat, kept up his fiery attacks against the Administration on the stump in Ohio and elsewhere. “I see more of barbarism and sin, a thousand times,” he argued, “in the continuance of the war, the dissolution of the Union, the breakup of the government, and the enslavement of the white race by debt & taxes and arbitrary power.” He and his fellow Democrats summed up their message and their intention under the oft-repeated slogan “the Constitution as it is, the Union as it was.”15 The Democrats’ charges fueled the election campaigns that occurred at some level in every year of the war. Party leaders used the issues raised by the war and the presence of dissent and, to be sure, the actions of an aggressive and unremitting Republican policy machine, to call on voters to come with them in their battle to restore constitutional authority. The issue was clear – how far could the Constitution be stretched in wartime and how far could dissent be tolerated in reaction? The division over these was clear cut from the first: on one side the Democratic notion that dissent was necessary in the face of a tyrannical government; on the other side, the Republicans were equally committed to the notion that such dissent would be disastrous during a war to save the Union and, therefore, the Bill of Rights could be constrained due to the emergency that the nation faced.

An “Insurrection” against the Government As they developed their arguments and challenges to the Administration’s actions, the Democrats made important gains in congressional and state elections in 1862 in which they focused their campaign on Lincoln’s war policies. They gained thirty-five seats in the House of Representatives, won governorships in several crucial states, especially New 220

POLI T I C S A N D C I V I L L I BERT I ES O N U NI O N H O M E F RO NT

York, and took control of state legislatures in others. Although far from being the North’s dominant party electorally – Republicans not only controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress as well as most state governors in the Union – the Democrats were making progress. (Thomas Seymour was barely defeated in his run for the governor’s chair in Connecticut by a very narrow margin in a state that had become more Republican in recent years.) What remained unclear was how far the Democrats’ electoral rebound would go. While most opponents of the Administration’s war policies continued to engage in organized political activities, working within the traditional organs of government to express their anger, fighting elections, continuing their advocacy, and their resistance in Congress and state legislatures, the continued weakness of their position led many dissenters to move beyond the formal political process that they still found unresponsive and much more frustrating than the nation deserved. They demanded more vigorous reactions beyond unfriendly newspaper stories, stump speeches, and challenges on the floor of Congress. Despite the hesitancy of some Democratic leaders about encouraging protests outside the formal political system, opposition spilled over into a number of frightening riots and mob challenges in several cities that threatened the carrying out of government policies that the Republicans deemed necessary and proper to win the war and preserve the Union. There had been some of these outbursts earlier but now they were becoming more widespread. The Enrollment Act of 1863 led to a more vigorous and widespread federal effort than earlier, which led, in turn, to a shift to more confrontational and violent attempts to disrupt the actions mandated by the act. As Jennifer Weber has suggested, “the Enrollment Act changed the nature of dissent in the North. Until the law passed armed opposition to the war was scattered and generally weak.”16 But once the stakes had become higher for many potential draftees, they and their neighbors responded. As noted, under the act the federal government introduced procedures and institutions to register those eligible, and call them to report when chosen, and mandated that federal troops would join local authorities to enforce the procedures if necessary. As a consequence of the uproar against the act, the draft itself was effectively disrupted in several places, in small towns, rural areas, and in large cities such as New York and Boston, by civilian resistance and the aid given to draft evaders by their neighbors. Riots led to a great deal of property destruction and loss of life. Resisters harassed, threatened, and subjected those running the draft to violent attacks. Despite the decision to use the army to carry out the law, there were never enough troops to enforce the process, or find deserters, or arrest people for abetting resistance, especially in already hostile areas. Republican newspaper offices were burned down, federal enrolling officers charged with running the draft in towns, large and small, were prevented from carrying out their work, some were even killed, their enrolling sites destroyed, all, the rioters said, in the name of ending government tyranny and the war that had brought it to America. The most dramatic and destructive of these events was the New York City draft riots in the summer of 1863. During the four days of mob action, there was destruction of many buildings, many by fire, including the Colored Orphan Asylum; looting by the participants turned into attacks on black residents, including lynchings, in what one historian has called “a full fledged race riot.” More than one hundred people were killed. 221

J O EL H. S I L B E Y

The rioting was not brought under control until Union troops sent from the battle lines in Virginia arrived in large enough numbers to put down the assaults. There were similar anti-draft riots and destruction in other cities including Boston and Vallandigham’s home town of Dayton, as well as in many smaller communities. The government postponed the draft for almost two months as a result.17 Beyond the rioting, there were other violent confrontations, for example, persistent open armed battles in the border state of Missouri where guerrilla warfare occurred between supporters and opponents of the war. One historian has called all of these violent actions an “insurrection.”18 Republican newspapers and speeches agreed, charging that these attacks were the result of the dissenters’ advocacy. Lincoln supporters added to the violence as they were egged on to break up anti-draft meetings – and vigorously did so. What underlay the opposition and the violence that had become an important aspect of it? Historians have identified a range of elements that led some Americans to become dissenters. They point out that there were many tensions existing in American society that played out in the home front confrontation about the war. Rioters, in addition to their hatred of forced partisan conscription and the bloody racism that permeated their actions, were also reacting to a range of economic difficulties, bank failures and an agricultural depression among them, that severely hurt many. They were also affected by what one historian refers to as the underling defeatism fostered by the frustration of a stalemated, never-ending war, with all the hardships it fostered. The apparent futility of the conflict and its destructiveness filled Democratic newspapers and became a mainstay of the position of many editors. The prevailing question ‘can the Confederacy ever be beaten?’ became widespread in dissenting quarters with many believing that the answer was no. In sum, people were frightened, under economic and other pressures amidst a never-ending war that was being fought for the wrong reasons and on behalf of the wrong people. The rioters joined other dissenters (such as those who were of southern origin) in believing that the leaders of the war effort were seeking to change America by bloodshed and repressive activities.19

“A Fire in the Rear” The Republican response to the Democratic challenge was obviously hostile and intolerant of their arguments, coupled with a determination to continue the Administration’s policies and aims and to find ways of undercutting the Democratic surge. As the war progressed, Republican leaders saw many indicators of real dangers to the Union’s efforts to defeat the threat the country faced. Like the Democrats they did not trust their opponents. It was easy enough for the Administration’s supporters to argue that all of these events were caused by Democratic conspirators against the government. There were enough indications for Republicans to see the danger of continued dissent – in speech or in print, as well as from the activities of those they saw as traitors, adding up to what the President called a “fire in the rear.” Republicans especially denounced Vallandigham, the particular thorn in the Administration’s side. They became more and more convinced that he was engaging in acts of treason, conspiring with others like himself to break up the Union. Early on they labeled the dissenters as Copperheads (poisonous snakes that attacked without warning) and butternuts (the color of the Confederate army’s uniform). As William Blair has written, 222

POLI T I C S A N D C I V I L L I BERT I ES O N U NI O N H O M E F RO NT

“Unionists had no vocabulary beyond the word ‘treason’ to describe and respond to the enormity of what was happening.”20 At the outset of the dissenters’ assault there was no effective, well thought out structure to deal with the problem that the Administration perceived. What emerged as this dissent grew was anything but the “Constitution as it is,” rather, a haphazard system of local government institutions determined to use their power to hamper opposition and run the draft with little guidance from the Administration. These local officials kept up surveillance on those that they considered to be threats, closed down opposition meetings, harassed the opposition press, went after army deserters, and generally worked to hamper and limit the home front resistance to the war effort. But all of this continued to be done without much guidance or agreement. Who was to define dissent, and once defined, how was it to be policed? In 1861 and 1862 various government agencies – a Senate committee, the State Department, and later the War Department – employed federal marshals to find and arrest dissenters. Soldiers, under orders from local commanders, arrested those who for some reason were considered treasonous. They were joined by local military tribunals that became the arbiters of what speech was acceptable. Troops were all over the electoral landscape, at Democratic meetings throughout the campaign and, most of all, at the polls on election day, all of which became a massive bone of contention. Beyond the military involvement, postmasters were allowed to open the mail of allegedly suspicious people, choosing their targets due to the reports by their neighbors, often followed by arrests for their actions, or for preventive reasons. These people were then brought before civil courts, where most were discharged from custody, but only after delays and each taking a public oath of loyalty to the Union – an oath that became more demanding over time. Others arrested, however, were not released. Like other government actions these were not necessarily concerted efforts directed from above. But they happened nevertheless. The arrest of Vallandigham for violating Burnside’s Order Number 18 which forbade “the habit of declaring sympathy for the enemy” became notorious because of Burnside’s overreach. He had fanned the flames to a high pitch.21 What the two sides were contesting was what, if any, were the acceptable limits of dissent against government policy during wartime? What was the proper way to dissent – if any? Rioting and civic unrest were not new in America but their appearance now had raised the obvious question, could a war be successfully prosecuted if there was a constant “fire in the rear”? In Lincoln’s construct, the answer was no. In order to save the Union the President sometimes had to do things that were unacceptable in peace time. The Union came first.22 Most Republicans were convinced that the Democratic opposition was improper and dangerous. They responded by delegitimizing their opponents in their propaganda – and activities. They believed the rumors that were always rife in party newspapers, which they elevated into political charges against their opponents. They accepted that Democratic-led secret societies such as the Knights of the Golden Circle and its successors, the Order of American Knights and the Order of the Sons of Liberty, were dangerously dedicated to undermining the war effort and working hard to do so. Government supporters also believed the rumors of an organized northwest conspiracy that sought to separate the states of the Middle West from the Union and government 223

J O EL H. S I L B E Y

tyranny. When the rebel officer John Hunt Morgan led his Confederate raiders into Ohio, the press and party leaders argued that he was aided by dissenting Democrats. Although President Lincoln ultimately stepped in and took a more cautious position to prevent matters from getting out of hand, including ordering that Vallandigham not be jailed but sent into the Confederacy instead, and ordered the reopening of the closed Democratic newspapers in New York City, his less aggressive actions did not alleviate the opposition’s fears or stop the war supporters from continuing to try to thwart written and spoken opposition. In 1863 matters came to a head when Ohio Democrats nominated Vallandigham (who was now in Canada to meet, Republicans believed, Confederate agents to plan further mischief) as their candidate for governor. The ensuing campaign became what one historian has labeled “a referendum on the war.” On election day the voters largely dashed the Democrats’ glimmer of hope as a result of their surge in the elections of 1862. The Republicans won the Ohio governorship, as well as defeating other Democrats for numerous state offices there and elsewhere in that year. Lincoln telegraphed the Republican governor of Ohio when Vallandigham’s loss became clear: “Glory to God in the highest; Ohio has saved the Union.”23 Nevertheless, dissent continued despite the rout of the Democrats. Lincoln understood that only success in the war would keep the people behind him and his policies and, as the election season got underway in 1864, he saw only defeat in the upcoming contest given the war situation. The Union army’s victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in mid-1863, followed by other triumphs, seemed to alter the complexion of the conflict. The Democrats lost much of the political ground they had gained. But their anger, frustration, and determination remained and they came back strongly as the war began to go badly again for the Union in the first half of 1864. The bloody battles that occurred as General Grant opened an unrelenting offensive south of Washington soon became bogged down in the face of stubborn Confederate resistance. The apparent setbacks increased the gloom, the fears, and the challenges to the Lincoln Administration. The dissenters’ arsenal of pamphlets, newspaper editorials and speeches against the government grew more and more bitter, and, as the Republicans responded, continued to be shaped and defined by the now well-established rhetoric of treason versus tyranny. The dissenters’ racist anger against the Administration was stoked by the increasing enlistment of freed slaves into the Union army. The suppression of dissenting newspapers and the arrest of outspoken opponents confirmed to Democrats that the nation was well along on the course toward tyranny. Democratic spokesmen particularly denounced the way that the Lincoln Administration dealt with elections, corrupting them by doing everything they could to get out a favorable Republican vote in new and illegal ways: having the army give furloughs to soldiers who were likely to be Republican supporters, allowing them to go home on election day in order to vote; setting up voting operations in the field under circumstances in which anti-Republican voters would be under punitive pressure applied by their officers and other soldiers who had no hesitation in coercing those that they feared would not otherwise support the Administration. As a result, such prominent Democratic leaders as New York’s Horatio Seymour, no Copperhead, who had accepted the necessity of the war in order to restore the Union, now railed against the Administration’s tyranny that he saw and denounced its emancipation policy in the harshest terms before a great rally of Democrats in Albany, New 224

POLI T I C S A N D C I V I L L I BERT I ES O N U NI O N H O M E F RO NT

York’s capital. August Belmont, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, summed up what was at stake in his opening speech to the party convention in New York City: “four years of misrule by a sectional, fanatical and corrupt party, have brought our country to the very verge of ruin.”24 Reflecting the realities of the war and its effect on party politics, the Democratic convention proceeded to yoke General George McClellan, clearly a supporter of the war, as its presidential candidate, with a prominent peace Democrat, congressman George Pendleton of Ohio, as his vice presidential running mate, and agreed on a platform that familiarly opened by stressing Democratic conservatism and resistance to tyranny. After affirming their party’s “unswerving fidelity to the Union under the Constitution,” the convention’s drafting committee then went on to say that this convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretense of military necessity of a war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts for a cessation of hostilities . . . to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States.25 The Democrats had opted for an immediate ending of the war. Republican newspapers, pamphlets, and speeches at rallies focused on the so-called peace plank to foment anger against their treasonous “Copperhead” opponents – once again ignoring the Constitution’s definition of treason as an “overt act” attested to by two witnesses – something the Democratic platform did not encompass. The familiar opposing notions held by the parties descended into even further angry, often extreme, challenges to the legitimacy of the other side. There was always material to build up into conspiracies as Republicans read Democratic newspapers, or saw the difficulties of raising troops through the draft. As one Democratic newspaper argued when the draft was instituted, “all who wished to be butchered will please step forward. All others will please stay at home and defy old Abe.”26 The Republicans had a field day spreading the Democratic comments widely in assaulting “the Coward’s convention.” Although McClellan refused to support the peace plank in the platform, to the Republicans the Democrats had become the party of “Dixie, Davis and the Devil,” an insult spread widely in their campaign oratory. Secretary of State William H. Seward added to the din, making a speech during the campaign against Democratic behavior, reiterating that they were “the allies of treason.” Rumors of secret conspiratorial societies organized by Democrats continued to be blown up into a major threat that would explode at any moment unless the government acted. The climate was clearly infested with what one historian has referred to as “the paranoia of political discourse in wartime.”27 The Republican strategy was effective. Lincoln, running as the candidate of the Union Party – a change in nomenclature to indicate their commitment and that many Democrats 225

J O EL H. S I L B E Y

supported him – won a second term. The victory was helped by soldier voting (many had been given furloughs allowing them to return home and vote, others voted at polling places set up at army camps in the field). The presence of troops at many of the polling places allowed them to note who voted for whom and sometimes limit who was allowed to participate. Still, it is also noteworthy that Democratic strength in the total electorate was impressive. Despite their label as cowardly and treasonous, with their antiwar aura, and the Republican manipulation of the soldier vote, McClellan and Pendleton received 45 percent of the total popular vote, doing better than the Democrats had done in many states four years before. They did not do as well in the number of seats won in Congress and in state-level contests. And they only won the electoral votes of three states. They had been rebuked but not broken. The election was the last gasp of widespread political confrontation over the war. In the aftermath, the political firestorms quieted as the war began to wind down toward a Union victory. By then, the President was having more difficulties with members of his own party than from the dissenters. Many Democrats remained recalcitrant but with the Lincoln Administration firmly ensconced there was something of a backing off by both sides as they prepared to face the end of the war and what would follow.

“Conservatives and Constitutionalists” or “A Peace Movement That Imperiled the Union”? Historians disagree about the impact of dissent on the Union’s efforts during the war. The heated charges and claims offered by each side against the other in this bitter confrontation are clear enough. In the war’s aftermath there was a long tradition of writers about these events taking the side of the government, emphasizing the Democrats’ misbehavior and being charitable toward the actions of the Lincoln Administration toward dissenters – originally championed in the generations after the Civil War and given scholarly sanction in the works of scholars such as George Fort Milton and Wood Gray in the 1930s, followed by many others, who pointed out that there was much less harshness toward dissenters and less disregard of legal rights occurred than has been suggested.28 But how true is this positive position? While much is clouded by the hysteria, propaganda, and the lack of surviving records, some estimates have been made that about 13,000 civilians were imprisoned, many less than the dissenters suggested (most more likely to have been arrested for what they advocated in speeches and print rather than for their actions). In evaluating the extent and force of the draft, while it remained a running sore, these writers have found a lot more noise from the challengers but much less harshness against them than the latter usually argued. The Lincoln Administration reacted pragmatically to the opposition to conscription and worked to reduce the number of those called to serve. Casualties in riots against the draft were more limited than the noise and confusion suggested at the time. And behind it all was the Administration’s continuing argument that what was done was more necessary than the dissenters argued. Beginning in the 1960s, the historian Frank Klement sharply criticized this dominant perspective when he began to produce an impressive number of books on the subject including a biography of Vallandigham, an analysis of the secret societies, and a study 226

POLI T I C S A N D C I V I L L I BERT I ES O N U NI O N H O M E F RO NT

of the Copperheads in the Middle West. In addition, he published an array of articles on the subject (many of them brought together in a volume called Lincoln’s Critics), all challenging the dominant antidissenter historiography. His voice became a clear defense of the dissenters and the limits of their effect on the war. He argued that they were neither pro-Confederate, seditionists, nor traitors, but rather Americans fearful of the rise of restrictive government even in wartime. They believed that they were right and American liberties were endangered due to the actions of the Administration and its agents. The dissenters, Klement suggested, were “conservatives and constitutionalists destined to oppose the Lincoln Administration with words and votes and court cases, not revolution.”29 He emphasized that the Republicans greatly exaggerated the matter, that most of the claims about organized secret societies and a national network of subversive activists were overblown and inaccurate. Dissenters were relatively small in number, largely disorganized, with mixed motives for their attitudes, including their ethnic fears and despair about their economic situation in the confusion of war, as well as their partisan loyalties and the southern heritage of many of them. They were not much of a threat except in the fevered brows of their political opponents. From the beginning of Klement’s efforts, other historians challenged his findings and repeated and underscored their belief that the dissenters were more disruptive and dangerous than his suggestion of the relative lack of danger from their activities. Instead, these critics emphasized that the Lincoln Administration’s repressive acts were limited in number and effect, with most of the arbitrary force applied occurring in the border states. Mark Neely, in a series of books and articles, suggests, first, that the claims of the Administration’s denial of civil liberties were exaggerated by the dissenters, and the disruptions that the latter caused by their political assaults were very damaging to the Union’s war effort. He also suggested that Lincoln’s policies “had been aimed at dangerous Confederate sympathizers . . . at bridge burners in Missouri and at the legion of draft dodgers throughout the land. All along the policy threatened freedom of speech and the press but only incidentally.”30 In rebuttal, other historians may agree that Lincoln’s defenders have a case but argue that in the political atmosphere of the time the actions against dissent loomed very large in the eyes of the President’s opponents whether they were Copperheads or more prudent members of the Democratic Party. They pointed out that much repression, either by government agents, troops, or local citizens intent on crushing whatever dissent existed, also took place beyond border areas in states such as Ohio, Indiana, and others. Further, William Blair argues, the system established to deal with internal threats “encouraged rash actions, quick arrests based on slim charges against behavior that had not yet become treasonous,” with a “pronounced proclivity to bend the Constitution to suit the emergency” by the Lincoln Administration.31 Whatever its extent and intensity, it was enough to fuel a political issue that tied such action in with the other excesses of the Administration. As such the actions against political dissent were always a major political reality. The actions of Union soldiers and their commanders loomed large to those either under the gun or who challenged the Administration without committing treasonous acts or taking action against the war effort. Mark Neely also noted that the Democratic Party was a loyal opposition – if not every party adherent was. 227

J O EL H. S I L B E Y

If their rhetoric was calculated to goad Republicans, it also played a legitimate role in preserving civil liberties in wartime America . . . a role crucial to a democratic country involved in war. They helped keep the army and the Republicans honest. They helped prevent the U.S. army from an increasing reliance on military arrests, trials and other activities. Their protests about political abuse of the internal security system forced Abraham Lincoln, in his habeas corpus proclamation . . . to disclaim any attempt to interfere with the electoral process.32 Most recently Jennifer Weber and Stephen Towne have made the strongest reiteration of the early argument about the dangers to the Union’s war effort inherent in the dissenters’ advocacy. Weber has little good to say about the latter and their activities. To her, they were reckless, obstructive, and divisive, provoking much debilitating confrontation at the community level. She argues that antiwar sentiment was vigorous enough to be effective against the war effort. It was strong enough to lead to the deep divisions and disruptive violence which certainly weakened carrying out the draft. She refers, in sum, to “the chaos behind the Union lines” due to the riots, and other violence in 1863.33 Stephen E. Towne has also sharply criticized Klement and his followers’ conclusions by arguing that the secret societies and organized plots against the war were realities. His exhaustive study of the network of Union spies, soldiers and others organized by department generals and other officials sent to uncover threats to the nation due to dissenters’ activities, based on the massive surviving records, supports this description. The thousands of agents sent out looking for dangerous activities reported back how numerous and well organized the challengers were and how ready they were to act against the Union. Towne takes the reports seriously and finds strong evidence of a wide range of conspiracies to disrupt the Union war effort, secret plots to free Confederate prisoners, and other attempts to aid and abet Confederate raids into the Union, justifying the arrests and trials that followed. (Many of the latter occurred just before the election of 1864 – to the delight of Republican politicians.) He concludes that “this hidden army [of investigators] played a significant part in defending the United States from widespread conspiracy in the North during the American Civil War.”34 Since much of what was reported was based on rumors, overheard conversations, and perhaps vivid imaginations, it is worth asking, about the evidence used, are these reports suggestive, but not conclusive? Towne believes the investigators’ reports to be accurate about what they uncovered even though verification of their accuracy in the tensions and hysteria of the time is not always present. There is no doubt that the rabble-rousing activities by Democrat politicians and editors in the hot-house atmosphere of wartime were part of a violent scene in many parts of the North, and certainly unhelpful to the Union cause. On the other side of the equation, as noted above, even those scholars who believe that the dissenters went too far in their rhetoric and activities acknowledge that they had something of a case against the Lincoln Administration. Jennifer Weber points out that the dissenters’ opposition to some of the government’s activities was useful against an Administration that had gone too far. In his classic study of the Civil War era, James McPherson also takes a middle viewpoint and joins with Neely and Weber in seeing some 228

POLI T I C S A N D C I V I L L I BERT I ES O N U NI O N H O M E F RO NT

usefulness in the dissenters’ behavior in their establishing their case against Administration excess.35 At the same time, it can also be pointed out that the dissenters were not guilty of many of the things they were charged with, for example, their treasonous activities; and that, in the case of the often raucous dissent, no matter how light the hand of the government may have been, it was far beyond what Americans were accustomed to. Criticisms of the various conclusions about the dissenters’ efforts continue to appear. Several recent studies of local areas during the war differ about the impact and effectiveness of the dissenters’ actions. For example, Robert Sandow is closer to Klement’s findings in his study of western Pennsylvania, while Matthew Warshauer aligns himself with those who challenge Klement; the title of Warshauer’s 2013 essay says it all: “Copperheads in Connecticut: A Peace Movement That Imperiled the Union.”36 The debate over the threat to the Union from the dissenters, therefore, continues. In the years after the Civil War, echoes of the domestic battles of 1861–1865 continued to resonate in American politics for a generation and more. The Republicans continually waved the “bloody shirt” of treason against the Democrats in election campaigns to remind everyone of the latter’s anti-Union position during a war for the nation’s survival. The Democrats continued to defend themselves or, as the nation entered a new era, changed the subject as much as they could.

Notes 1 See Samuel Eliot Morison et al., Dissent in Three American Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). 2 Lincoln’s assaults on President Polk and his policies are well covered in the two excellent recent biographies of him: David H. Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); and Michael L. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). See also Donald Riddle, Congressman Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957). 3 Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 39–41. 4 On Vallandigham see Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970); and James L. Vallandigham, ed., The Record of Honorable C.L. Vallandigham on Abolition, the Union and the Civil War (Columbus, OH, 1863). 5 See Joanna Cowden, “The Politics of Dissent: Civil War Democrats in Connecticut,” New England Quarterly 56 (Dec. 1983), 538–554. 6 Klement, Limits of Dissent, 97–98 and passim; Frank L. Klement, Dark Lanterns, Secret Political Societies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984); and Frank L. Klement, Lincoln’s Critics: The Copperheads of the North, ed. Steven K. Rogstad (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Books, 1999). 7 See Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York: Knopf, 1962), for evidence of Stanton’s anger toward, and disdain for, Lincoln, because of his vacillation and his party colleagues’ pursuit of political advantage. 8 Silbey, A Respectable Minority, chs. 2 and 3. 9 Phillip Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994). 10 Useful studies of the draft as fact and as controversy are Eugene Murdock, One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971); and Eugene Murdock, Patriotism Limited, 1862–1865 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1967). 11 See Murdock, One Million Men.

229

J O EL H. S I L B E Y

12 Harold M. Hyman, A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War on the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1973), 77. 13 The full language of Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution reads: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in Open Court.” 14 Silbey, A Respectable Minority, 60. 15 Vallandigham, Record of Vallandigham, 189. 16 Jennifer Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 103. 17 Weber, Copperheads, 109; Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance in Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974). 18 Weber, Copperheads, 203. 19 Klement, Limits of Dissent; Klement, Lincoln’s Critics, esp. 43–92; Weber, Copperheads, 198. 20 William A. Blair, With Malice Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 36. 21 Burnside’s directive continues with the statement that “Treason, expressed or implied, will not be tolerated in this department” and those guilty of such will be immediately arrested. 22 Weber, Copperheads, 198. See also James M. McPherson, This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 216. 23 Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. II; Weber, Copperheads, 120. 24 Allan Nevins, The War for the Union (New York: Scribners, 1960), vol. II, 302; Silbey, A Respectable Minority, 130. 25 The platform is most conveniently reprinted in Kirk H. Porter and Donald Bruce Johnson’s standard work, National Party Platforms, 1840–1964 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966). 26 Nevins, War for the Union, vol. II, 389. 27 Silbey, A Respectable Minority, 167; New York Evening Post, August 2, 1864; Mark E. Neely, The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 2–3; Adam I. P. Smith, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 162. 28 George Fort Milton, Lincoln and the Fifth Column (New York: Vanguard Press, 1942); Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York: Viking, 1942). 29 Klement, Lincoln’s Critics, 23; among other studies influenced by Vallandigham’s argument see G. R. Tredway, Democratic Opposition to the Lincoln Administration in Indiana (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1973); Hubert Wubben, Civil War Iowa and the Copperhead Movement (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980). 30 Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 67. 31 Blair, With Malice Towards Some, 127, 192. 32 Neely, Fate of Liberty, 209. 33 Weber, Copperheads, 117. 34 Stephen E. Towne, Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 306. 35 Weber, Copperheads, 217; James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 448–449. 36 Both Warshauer’s essay and Robert M. Sandow, “Damnable Treason or Party Organs? Democratic Secret Societies in Pennsylvania,” are in Andrew L. Slap and Michael Thomas Smith, eds., This Distracted and Anarchical People (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 42–59 and 60–80 respectively.

230

14 W AGING WAR, CON DUC T I N G DIPLOMA C Y Leadership and the American Civil War Brooks D. Simpson The American Civil War is perhaps the most studied of the wars fought by the United States, and it retains a secure hold on both scholarly interest and the popular imagination. That said, rarely do students of the conflict integrate the military, naval, and diplomatic fronts into a larger narrative that reflects the multiple fronts where the Union and the Confederacy waged war. Yet military events affected diplomatic circumstances, which in turn often focused on issues related to the conduct of the naval war, especially the Union blockade. Nor could one overlook the ever-present discussion about whether Great Britain and France would recognize the Confederacy, followed by possible mediation to settle the conflict or even intervention to secure southern independence. Essential to the triumph of the United States was the cooperation of military and naval forces on the rivers in the western theater and on the coastlines and shores of the eastern theater. On land, at sea, and at the negotiating table, leaders battled to achieve their objectives in a struggle that proved most sanguinary. All too often examinations of leadership are reduced to biographical studies of prominent individuals, an exercise that complicates the effort to understand the role leadership played in military and naval operations as well as diplomatic negotiations. To be sure, biographies offer detailed descriptions and deeper understandings of who did what, why, and how, even if at times biographers fall prey to the notion of ranking their subject against his peers, especially in the military realm. A review of the most prominent of these works would consume far too much time and space. Rather, one might turn to exploring military, naval, and diplomatic leadership in a broader, larger sense in terms of what leaders faced in waging war and negotiating settlements. At first glance, for example, it would seem inevitable that scholars would focus on various generals in an effort to describe how and why one side won while the other lost. To do so, indeed, suggests that people matter in shaping the outcome of events, and that the result of the conflict was neither preordained nor inevitable. Else why should we study people who were simply the tools of larger and uncontrollable historical forces? Yet we should nevertheless approach the subject cautiously. All too often studies of Civil War high command devolve into biographies of individual commanders and accounts of major battles or campaigns. This is understandable given the ready readership and predictable debates that shape such studies. Was Ulysses S. Grant a butcher (or a drunk)? Was Robert E. Lee the prisoner of a bloodlust that proved far too costly? Should we conclude 231

BRO O K S D. S I M PS O N

that William T. Sherman was little more than a wild-eyed arsonist whose extreme rhetoric barely concealed an unbalanced mind that fantasized about terrorism? Why was George B. McClellan so problematic, and exactly what was Joseph E. Johnston’s problem? That so many studies of Civil War generals endlessly revisit the same themes suggests that biography alone cannot quite address the issue. Nor should we limit the definition of military leadership to those individuals who happen to be wearing uniforms – the generals, admirals, and others who were in command of soldiers and sailors. Of the two commanders-in-chief, Jefferson Davis possessed far more military experience than did his counterpart in Washington, Abraham Lincoln, but it remains unclear whether such experience proved advantageous in his attempt to conduct the Confederate war. Much has been made of Lincoln’s talents as a natural strategist, a masterful handler of generals, and as someone who balanced military and political needs in his military appointments, as highly favorable studies by T. Harry Williams and James McPherson argue. Yet Lincoln could meddle in the affairs of his generals to the point that he may have helped create the complicated climate in which the Army of the Potomac operated in the eastern theater, while in the West his instincts nearly led to Ulysses S. Grant’s undoing in the early stages of the Vicksburg campaign.1 When it came to civil subordinates, moreover, Lincoln appeared to have the advantage over Davis. To be sure, most people find much fault with Simon Cameron’s administration of the War Department in the conflict’s first year, but his successor, Edwin M. Stanton, has usually received much praise for his work on behalf of the Union war effort. William Marvel’s recent biography paints a darker portrait of Stanton that is worth considering, at least in part.2 Historians accord Gideon Welles high marks for his administration of naval affairs, but then they also say the same of Stephen Mallory’s struggles to make do with the Confederate naval effort by supporting technological advances and making the best out of very little. Given the continual turnover in the office of Secretary of War for the Confederates, it is much more difficult to assess how well that office functioned: part of the problem was that Davis was often his own secretary of war. In assessing military leadership during the Civil War, one must first consider the challenges both sides faced in framing and implementing a successful military strategy. For the Confederates, victory was predicated upon survival, putting up a determined defense of the Confederate homeland, and promoting northern war-weariness while sustaining Confederate morale, in part by considering the possibility of offensive operations and even invasions of enemy territory. Robert E. Lee stressed the latter approach, believing that Confederate defensive victories alone failed to elevate Confederate morale or depress Union support for very long. Yet offensive operations and aggressive fighting proved costly in manpower and materiel. In contrast, Union generals looked to eliminate enemy resistance altogether. Over time this concept expanded beyond enemy military forces to include Confederate infrastructure, logistics, and civilian morale, as well as a decision to strike at the institution of slavery itself. That last decision had mixed consequences: while striking at slavery and welcoming the help of African Americans as soldiers and laborers weakened the Confederacy’s material ability to resist, it also intensified Confederate resistance by striking at the very heart of the southern social, economic, and political order. Some generals shrank away from supporting that decision, while others, led by Ulysses S. Grant, supported it. It would be left to Grant and his key subordinate William T. Sherman 232

WAG I N G WA R , C ON DUC T I NG D I PL O M AC Y

to wage war with a sword in one hand and an olive branch in the other. Yet in a war that aimed not to destroy the South but to destroy Confederate independence while reestablishing the foundation for sectional reconciliation, Union commanders faced as daunting a task as did their opposite numbers in gray.3 Such responsibilities seem in retrospect to be nearly overwhelming, calling for men of exceptional ability to assume the responsibility for such a momentous burden. Yet Americans went to war in 1861 having very little previous military experience. Although most commanding generals on both sides shared a common educational experience at the United States Military Academy at West Point, that institution’s curriculum was designed to train engineers, not combat commanders: cadets spent more time learning French than they did about the means and ends of military action. Moreover, although many of the men who served in high military position during the Civil War could claim to have seen combat during the Mexican American War, only a handful had ever commanded a thousand men in combat, let alone ten thousand.4 In short, while many of the generals who commanded armies had professional military training, that training was in some ways suspect, in other ways outdated. Experience proved a great teacher, especially on the Union side. The ranking Confederate generals at the beginning of the conflict were (with the exception of the fallen Albert Sydney Johnston) still in charge as the war drew to a close, while the Union high command of 1861 had given way entirely to a new team during the last year of the war, a team whose members, including Grant, Sherman, George G. Meade, George H. Thomas, and Phil Sheridan, had worked their way up the chain of command, mastering one level at a time as they learned through experience. It could be a costly education, and not everyone passed the course: indeed, some of the earliest students thought to be the brightest, including McClellan and Don Carlos Buell, were not around at the end, while others, notably William S. Rosecrans, briefly burned brightly before burning out. One might well claim that nothing succeeds like success, especially success seasoned with a little luck. Yet, a general’s ability to direct his forces on the battlefield while remaining cool and focused in itself does not explain what made a general successful. Indeed, one of the challenges present in studies of military leadership during the American Civil War is found in addressing the tension between tactical skill and strategic result. Some Civil War battles featured rather adroit applications of the tactical art, where generals handled their forces on the battlefield skillfully. Robert E. Lee’s admirers can point to Second Manassas and especially Chancellorsville as great triumphs brought about through skillful maneuver followed by devastating attacks. However, Lee found it difficult to take advantage of the opportunities provided by such triumphs. They still proved costly in terms of casualties; the Confederate triumph could be attributed in part to the incompetence of the foe’s military leadership; and in the end Lee could not transform battlefield success into strategic advantage. Decisive battlefield triumphs were few and far between during the Civil War, and it proved even more challenging to take advantage of the result to secure strategic success. The exceptions highlight why this was normally the case. Take the battle of Nashville, where George H. Thomas delivered what came close to a knockout blow against John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee. Given that Hood’s army had been badly damaged at Franklin, the Confederates struggled unsuccessfully to put up much of a sustained fight; 233

BRO O K S D. S I M PS O N

even as they left the field, the Federals proved unable to mount a successful pursuit that would have finished the job. While Hood’s army never again fought effectively as an organization, significant portions of it rejoined other Confederate forces, so the notion that it was destroyed at Nashville is overwrought. While Thomas deserved plaudits for his performance, especially given the fact that his superior, Ulysses S. Grant, was fast losing patience with him, the victory itself was not a sign of particular military skill, let alone genius. Thomas drove off an army already largely shattered. Or take Chickamauga, where Thomas’s performance as a defensive commander deservedly earned him the title “the Rock of Chickamauga.” In one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, fortune smiled on the Confederates when a massive Rebel assault hit a portion of the Union line that had just been weakened as the result of an unseemly command snafu. Even then, just as at Gettysburg on July 2 several months before, the Confederate attackers soon found themselves facing a stubborn defense that checked the butternut drive. Luck, misfortune, and a significant disparity in the ability of army and corps commanders could result in dramatic battlefield successes or lead to what seemed to be disastrous reverses, but the long-term result rested on how such battles affected the operational plan that reflected strategic priorities. Lee understood this all too well. In December 1862 his army fended off Federal assaults at Fredericksburg, inflicting significant losses in one of the most one-sided battles of the conflict. Five months later, fortunes smiled on Confederate arms again at Chancellorsville, which some have called Lee’s greatest victory despite the loss of trusted corps commander Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Yet Lee realized that these victories meant little in the larger scheme of things, for the Union’s Army of the Potomac would rest, repair itself, be reinforced, and then resume operations. Both in 1862 and 1863 he sought to break that strategic stalemate by going northwards across the Potomac. Neither effort ended well.5 Some generals sought to avoid battle altogether, for different reasons. George B. McClellan believed that the entire fate of the republic hinged on one great climactic battle, to be fought by him, and thus preferred not to seek combat until he believed that the odds of victory were overwhelmingly in his favor. Thus, while he skillfully maneuvered the Army of the Potomac down to the James River and then up to the gates of Richmond in 1862, he never felt ready to strike what he believed would be the final blow. It did not hurt that his opponent, Joseph E. Johnston, preferred retreating to advancing, for basically the same reason. William S. Rosecrans showed great ability in the summer of 1863 when he forced Braxton Bragg out of central Tennessee in the oftoverlooked Tullahoma campaign, although that achievement was overshadowed when he barely held on to Chattanooga after Bragg defeated him at Chickamauga. Stonewall Jackson outmarched rather than outfought his foe in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862. Finally, William T. Sherman, at best a mediocre battlefield tactician, is best known for his willingness to maneuver, as in the Atlanta campaign of 1864 (where again Joseph Johnston proved a willing dance partner) and in his marches from Atlanta to the sea and through the Carolinas. Thus, what made a Civil War general a success as a military leader was not simply his skill on the battlefield: most battles were slugfests that left both sides bloodied and exhausted, and often it was the general who first moved on (and where he moved) that 234

WAG I N G WA R , C ON DUC T I NG D I PL O M AC Y

determined whether the result was a victory or a defeat. Rarely did commanders conduct successful pursuits, in part because preparations for such an action had to take place before battle was joined in the first place. Rather, it was the general who could weave together battles in pursuit of a successful campaign who often prevailed. This was true of Jackson in the Valley, and it was true of Lee from the defense of Richmond through Second Manassas, and, to a lesser extent, his invasion of Maryland and the capture of the Union garrison at Harper’s Ferry, an achievement often overshadowed by the carnage at Antietam. The general most adept at making battles serve the purpose of his campaigns, however, was Ulysses S. Grant. During both the Vicksburg and the Overland campaigns Grant managed to fight battles that served the purposes of his overall operation. During the Vicksburg campaign his success was obvious: in less than four weeks after crossing the Mississippi River Grant’s men fought and won five battles, captured the state capital at Jackson, and drove the Confederates into Vicksburg, commencing a siege that resulted in the surrender of some 30,000 Confederates on July 4, 1863. Less appreciated but in several ways just as effective was Grant’s Virginia campaign against Lee in the spring of 1864, in which Grant, undeterred by battlefield setbacks, stalemates, and draws, made his way southward to lay siege to Richmond and Petersburg, pinning Lee to the defense of the Confederate capital and nullifying Lee’s ability to launch a telling counterstroke that would restore Confederate fortunes. Grant, like Lee, proved a master of the operational art of conducting campaigns. Other Civil War generals showed glimpses of such talent, but only Grant and Lee proved able to sustain a high level of achievement across multiple campaigns. Three aspects of military leadership have received short shrift in the literature, although they were critical to the outcome of the war. First was a commander’s ability to form an administrative staff that he could utilize to get the job done on the march and in camp as well as on the battlefield. Not all generals had sufficient staff officers to perform these duties, including Robert E. Lee, who had a handful of personal aides as well as a small staff. Given Lee’s penchant to issue orders and then let events unfold, this was particularly unfortunate. At the other end of the spectrum was Grant, who added to an already growing staff structure when he came east in overall charge of the Union armies in 1864. Grant’s staff officers helped plan operations; they played key roles in laying the groundwork for important moves, most notably the crossing of the James River in June; and they served as Grant’s eyes, ears, and occasionally mouth when it came to supervising the actions of corps commanders to ensure that Grant’s orders were followed. At the same time George G. Meade’s staff proved able to manage the affairs of the Army of the Potomac. We know the most about these three staffs, although bookshelves groan with the accumulated recollections of staff officers, in which the author tended to celebrate the accomplishments of his commander in a format that provided prime fodder for biographers of commanders.6 Nor do scholars pay much attention to the logistical challenges of command. Yet the problems of supplying an army with food, uniforms, and armaments, however boring they might be to the untried eye, were an essential part of Civil War command; so too was the determination to sever the foe’s supply lines, whether by surrounding the enemy (Grant at Fort Donelson and Vicksburg, Lee at Harper’s Ferry), threatening lines of supply (Bragg versus Rosecrans at Chattanooga), or slicing rail connections (Jackson at Second Manassas, Grant at Petersburg, and Sherman at Atlanta).7 235

BRO O K S D. S I M PS O N

Finally, scholars tend to overlook the extent to which command remains a team concept, with a command system’s health and effectiveness a measure of how well superiors and subordinates work together. There is very little work on how corps commanders performed, although one can always remember Douglas Southall Freeman’s magisterial Lee’s Lieutenants as pointing the way for such studies.8 Just as a successful Civil War general had to see beyond the battlefield when it came to military operations, so too did one need to grasp the importance of civil-military operations and public opinion in the American context. Simply put, a general’s success depended in part on how well he worked with his civil superiors and accepted the constraints and conditions of political circumstances. Of all the Confederate commanders, only Robert E. Lee managed to forge a constructive relationship with his civil superior, Jefferson Davis; both Joseph E. Johnston and Pierre G. T. Beauregard spent much of the war arguing with the Confederate president. On the Union side, McClellan’s relationship with Lincoln quickly deteriorated, while the prickly egos of Don Carlos Buell and Rosecrans hampered their careers. Some generals, like Joseph Hooker, enjoyed playing politics, while others, including George G. Meade, found themselves victimized by political infighting; a few generals, notably George H. Thomas, refused to play the game altogether, then wondered why they did not get what they felt they deserved. For all his talk about despising politics and politicians, William T. Sherman was well-connected politically through his father-in-law, the classic elder statesman, and his brother, a senator from Ohio. Again, however, it was Grant who set the standard. Not only did he benefit from the services of his hometown congressman, Elihu B. Washburne, but he forged a relationship with Lincoln that was grounded in his understanding of the challenges Lincoln faced.9 The ability to understand the political dimensions of the conflict separated able generals from their less capable counterparts. Here again Grant, Lee, and Sherman excelled in understanding what was needed from them to advance the war effort. Other generals were also able to make the connection between political goals and military means, but they were out of sync with the course of affairs. Foremost in this category was George McClellan. As Ethan Rafuse reminds us in McClellan’s War, the general sought to wage a limited war precisely because he embraced the conservative goal of reunion and reconciliation. To escalate the conflict, especially when it came to slavery, promised to complicate that process, embittering the Confederate enemy. It was not that McClellan misunderstood the relationship between means and ends, but that he resisted the shift in government policy, one brought about in part by his inability to achieve a decisive battlefield victory.10 In short, Civil War military leaders may be the subjects of many a book, but Civil War military leadership remains seriously understudied and underappreciated. We need to know much more about how someone went about the process of exercising command, whether that meant planning operations, dealing with civil superiors, forging cooperative bonds with subordinates, supplying one’s army, gathering and interpreting intelligence, or maintaining both morale among the men and a good image in the press – all matters critical to military success. Such studies will allow us to make far more discerning assessments and promote more careful analysis of just how well generals performed during the conflict. 236

WAG I N G WA R , C ON DUC T I NG D I PL O M AC Y

Studies of land operations dominate Civil War military history, yet one cannot account for Union triumph without taking into account the war on the rivers and off the coast of the Confederacy. Simply put, it was the combined operations featuring cooperation between armies and naval squadrons and flotillas that proved critical in penetrating the Confederacy along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers and in gaining control of the Mississippi River. The ability of Union armies to move men and supply forces along the Virginia coast was essential to the military planning of George McClellan and Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia, while Union amphibious landings along the coast of the Carolinas afforded other opportunities for success throughout the conflict. Squadrons patrolling the Confederate coastline eventually formed an effective blockade that reduced what the Confederacy could import to support its struggle for independence, although scholars differ over exactly how important the blockade’s contribution was to the final result.11 In contrast, the Confederacy struggled to mount a significant naval effort. Its gunboats along western waters proved little more than a nuisance, while forts along rivers usually offered little more resistance unless they were ideally situated to contest Union naval advances, as was the case at Fort Donelson. Elsewhere the Rebels fell far short of matching their foes when it came to constructing ironclads: in many ways the March 1862 effort of its first ironclad, the CSS Virginia, proved to be the high water mark of that endeavor. Nor did experiments to build a submarine produce a telling counterpunch in Confederate efforts to smash through the blockade squadrons. Rather, the Confederates were reduced to creating or improving upon preexisting coastal defenses and damaging Union trade through the deployment of commerce raiders, most famously the CSS Alabama. Meanwhile, blockade runners sought to evade Union squadrons, with mixed results. To a large extent, the naval war was asymmetrical. The attention paid to duels such as those between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia or the USS Kearsarge and the CSS Alabama obscures the fact that there were no fleet versus fleet operations, despite the efforts of the Confederates to defend their ports, their coasts, and their rivers with vessels, mines, and forts. Larger operations were beyond Confederate capacity; whatever real chance the Rebels had was dependent on their ability to purchase British-built vessels to conduct operations. Such circumstances led to a significant difference in the quality of naval leadership. While one may argue as to whether Union generals were superior to their Confederate counterparts, when it came to naval commanders, the advantage clearly lay with the Union, with David G. Farragut winning the most renown. Moreover, in several instances it was the ability of Union army and navy officers to work together that led to critical Union successes, especially in the western theater. The United States made far better use of combined operations than did their opponents.12 Finally, most people overlook the degree to which Civil War diplomacy was directly related to issues of military strategy. Yet military operations and diplomatic relations were intimately intertwined. Had Confederate diplomacy succeeded in securing British and French recognition followed by intervention should the Union pass up an offer to mediate the conflict based on Confederate independence, it would have been far more difficult to subdue the rebellion, and any victory would have come at a greater cost. Union diplomats in turn worked hard to minimize European support for the Confederacy. Unable to prevent French intervention in Mexico while the war was being fought, 237

BRO O K S D. S I M PS O N

nevertheless the Union diplomats, buoyed in part by Union military successes, proved able to prevent recognition and intervention, as well as some of the more extreme forms of British assistance to the Confederacy.13 The goals of Confederate diplomacy were simple to understand, but difficult to achieve. In pursuit of independence, Confederate diplomats sought the support of Great Britain and France. Ideally, this support would take the form of not only recognition of the Confederacy’s status as an independent nation but also a commitment to intervene in support of that objective. Surely the Confederacy’s chances of victory would increase significantly if it could count on the Royal Navy as well as British and French land forces to augment their own military and naval strength, as well as a possible trade war closing European ports to United States trade while opening them to King Cotton. The blockade would be hard to maintain, Confederates reasoned, in the face of British naval power, and the resulting flow of military goods would enhance the Confederacy’s ability to fend off Union advances on land: should the British see fit to open up a new front of operations by deploying ground forces in Canada, so much the better. In pursuing these objectives, Confederate leadership relied on several assumptions. First was the notion that it would benefit British and French interests to see a weakened United States emerge from the conflict. Second was the belief that the dependence of the British and French economies (especially the former) on a continuous supply of raw cotton grown in the American South would eventually force their hand when it came to the questions of recognition and intervention. Such was the thinking behind the 1861 decision of the Confederate government to cease cotton exports to Europe to make the world understand its dependence on Confederate cotton. That this decision did not consider the fact that a booming cotton trade in the years prior to the war meant that European warehouses were already filled with a surplus of bales seemed at the moment a minor obstacle; that the decision to halt cotton exports came at the very time that the Union blockade was ill-prepared to intercept such trade (and would be better-prepared as time passed) proved unfortunate.14 However, the best service performed by Confederate diplomats in 1861 was when its ministers to England and France were seized by a Union naval vessel under the command of Captain Charles Wilkes. That John Slidell, who was headed to France, and James Mason, who looked forward to arriving in London, were aboard a British mail packet, the Trent, when Wilkes seized the vessel proved fortunate for their cause, for an outraged Great Britain chose to confront the United States over the issue. It did not help matters that Americans initially celebrated the capture of the Confederate diplomats: Britain dispatched troops to Canada and considered preparing for war. Only the decision of Lincoln and Seward to back down in the face of a British ultimatum by asserting that Wilkes acted on his own and not under orders defused the situation. During 1862, as Confederate military fortunes in the eastern theater improved with the elevation of Robert E. Lee to command the Army of Northern Virginia, prospects improved for some form of British intervention. French leaders seemed content to follow Britain’s lead, suggesting that their bark was worse than their bite. However, despite apparent sympathy for the Confederate cause among several British leaders, led by William Gladstone, it soon became clear that recognition and an offer to mediate would follow concrete evidence of Confederate triumph – in short, the British would not tip 238

WAG I N G WA R , C ON DUC T I NG D I PL O M AC Y

the scales but wait until they were tipped in favor of Confederate independence. Although Confederate offensive operations in the summer and fall of 1862, notably Lee’s decision to invade Maryland, were undertaken in part as an effort to persuade the British of imminent Confederate success, setbacks in Maryland, Kentucky, and Mississippi deterred British authorities from escalating the conflict. Even predictions that the Emancipation Proclamation would inspire slave rebellions, thus giving grounds for Britain to intervene on humanitarian grounds to prevent a bloody race war, proved more impassioned than practical. Although there would be renewed calls for recognition, mediation, and intervention in the late spring and early summer of 1863, Union military victories soon dampened whatever enthusiasm remained to undertake such provocative measures. In truth, British interests were not necessarily well-served by efforts to support the Confederacy. After all, while importing southern cotton was important to the English economy, so was trade for foodstuffs and finished items with the northern United States. War would necessarily disrupt that trade: better to seek alternative sources of cotton, including Egypt, as well as secure through trade some of the increasing amounts of cotton that had fallen into Union hands. Moreover, by 1864 European affairs began to look more challenging, enough so to demand one’s closer attention. It would not do to continue to bicker with the United States when there were events closer to home that demanded immediate attention. Thus, United States minister Charles Francis Adams warned British authorities that the so-called Laird rams being constructed in Liverpool should never make it to Confederate hands, for otherwise the United States would be entitled to treat it as an act of war. Union diplomats in Paris, led by John Bigelow, also proved successful in reminding the French that the Confederacy should not be allowed to secure vessels built in French ports. Aside from Duncan Kenner’s desperate mission during the last months of the war that offered emancipation in exchange for European support, the Confederacy soon realized that to anticipate European intervention in the absence of decisive battlefield triumphs was to engage in wishful thinking. Kenner learned that whatever enthusiasm the French displayed for the idea was tempered by the determination that France would follow England’s lead, one shaped by more pragmatic considerations, including the realization that Confederate defeat was imminent. Kenner’s last gasp came on the eve of the triumph of Union military arms. That success took form in the surrender of the Confederacy’s major field armies, commencing with Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at Appomattox Court House on a Sunday afternoon in April. After four long years of fighting, the Union was restored, although without the institution of slavery that had done so much to rend the republic in the first place. How that came about can be understood if we look more carefully at the leadership of both sides as they battled each other for victory on the battlefield, on the water, and at the negotiating table.

Notes 1 T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Knopf, 1952); James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin, 2008); David Work, Lincoln’s Political Generals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); and Thomas J. Goss, The War within the Union High Command: Politics and Generalship during the Civil War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003).

239

BRO O K S D. S I M PS O N

2 William Marvel, Lincoln’s Autocrat: The Life of Edwin M. Stanton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 3 Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Carol Reardon, With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 4 See William B. Skelton, An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784–1861 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), and James L. Morrison, Jr., “The Best School in the World”: West Point, the Pre-Civil War Years, 1833–1866 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986). 5 On Lee, see Joseph L. Harsh, Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Southern Strategy, 1861–1862 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998); and Ethan S. Rafuse, Robert E. Lee and the Fall of the Confederacy, 1863–1865 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). 6 See R. Steven Jones, The Right Hand of Command: Use and Disuse of Personal Staffs in the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000). 7 For a suggestive study that touches on organization and supply, see Edward Hagerman, The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, Organization, and Field Command (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 8 See Stephen R. Taaffe, Commanding the Army of the Potomac (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Ethan S. Rafuse, ed., Corps Commanders in Blue: Union Major Generals in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014); Steven E. Woodworth, ed., Grant’s Lieutenants: From Cairo to Vicksburg (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); and Steven E. Woodworth, ed., Grant’s Lieutenants: From Chattanooga to Appomattox (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). 9 Joseph T. Glatthaar, Partners in Command: The Relationship between Leaders in the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1994) remains the standard overview of how generals, admirals, and civilian leaders worked together; see also Steven E. Woodworth, Lee and Davis at War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); Steven E. Woodworth, Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990); and Brooks D. Simpson, Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 10 Ethan S. Rafuse, McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 11 On combined operations, see Rowena Reed, Combined Operations in the Civil War (Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1978); and Craig L. Symonds, ed., Union Combined Operations in the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); William H. Roberts, Now for the Contest: Coastal and Oceanic Naval Operations in the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); James M. McPherson, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 12 Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 13 Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) is the current standard synthesis; Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015) takes a broader view of the international struggle. 14 Charles M. Hubbard, The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998).

240

15 AFRIC AN AMER I C A N S AND E MANCI P A T I ON IN THE C IV I L W A R Aaron Sheehan-Dean Prelude Barely a month into the Civil War, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend transformed a war for Union into a war for emancipation. Baker, Mallory, and Townsend, all enslaved men, abandoned the Confederate fortifications for which their labor had been requisitioned, and presented themselves to Union officials at Fort Monroe. The United States army remained, as it had been at Harper’s Ferry in 1859, a defender of the proslavery status quo, but the Union commander at Fort Monroe, Benjamin Butler, saw an opportunity to weaken his enemy. He accepted the men into his camp and refused to surrender them when a Confederate official appeared the following day. Butler labeled the men “contraband of war” – a legal definition that applied to property seized from an enemy that could be put to military use – and created the term of art used by Union commanders who refused to send escaping slaves back to their masters.1 Butler was no saint. He frankly admitted that his order allowed him to “take all that property which constituted the wealth of that state, and furnished the means by which the war is prosecuted.” By continuing to regard enslaved people as “property” Butler appeared to do little on behalf of slaves themselves, but he also recognized that if by his order “human beings were brought to the free enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, such objection might not require much consideration.”2 Butler’s decision and the ensuing history of how the U.S. army treated escaping slaves has generated a huge amount of new writing on the end of slavery in America. For many decades, research on emancipation in the U.S. focused on the efforts made by abolitionists (largely white).3 When historians concerned themselves with the moment of emancipation itself, they usually ascribed determinative power to Abraham Lincoln, embodied physically in the memorials of Lincoln breaking the shackles of kneeling slaves.4 Thanks largely to the work generated by Ira Berlin and his colleagues and students at the University of Maryland’s “Freedmen and Southern Society Project” (FSSP), that historical gaze is now focused on enslaved people and the U.S. army with whose assistance they made emancipation a reality during the Civil War.5 Although historians of the Abolitionist Movement and scholars of comparative emancipation tend to frame the story over decades, this essay will follow the lead of the FSSP and Civil War scholars by concentrating largely on the wartime processes that led to the final end of slavery in the U.S.

241

A A RO N S HEEH A N- D E A N

Regardless of Butler’s intentions, the motives of Baker, Mallory, and Townsend appear quite clear. They risked their lives fleeing a fort filled with armed Confederate soldiers dedicated to defending slavery and they entered an uncertain situation within Union lines. Only after January 1, 1863 was the Union army officially committed to emancipation. Before that, the reactions of commanders varied by region, time, place, and individual temperament. But the inconsistency and sometimes outright hostility of Union forces failed to deter enslaved people. Alone, in families, or in small groups, slaves seized opportunities to pursue their freedom. By the end of the war, nearly one-seventh of all the slaves in the South (about 500,000 people) had fled their masters in search of freedom. Compared to antebellum slave rebellions, the largest of which involved a few hundred people, this was a tidal wave for liberty, overwhelming slavery’s defenses in communities across the South.6 W. E. B. Du Bois first advanced this interpretation, referring to the actions of enslaved people during the Civil War as the “General Strike.” The idea of the Civil War as a slave rebellion had been advanced most forcefully in recent years by Steven Hahn and Stephanie McCurry. Regardless of how it is characterized, the exodus of this many people as well as the general pressures of war destabilized slavery for all of those who remained behind. This was precisely the situation that white southerners had seceded to avert. Instead of the slow death of slavery at the hands of a Republican president, the Civil War shattered the institution with a speed and thoroughness that shocked Americans and others around the world. Given the scale of the change involved – slavery had been the norm in British North America since the early seventeenth century and a century earlier if Spanish America is included – it should come as little surprise that historians do not agree about how to explain the end of slavery. They disagree about why, where, and how it happened. They disagree about who ended slavery and they disagree about the results. This essay proposes answers to these questions – why emancipation became a Union war policy, how the process unfolded across the South, and what happened as a result – and, in the process, addresses the contrasting explanations historians offer for each of them.

Why Did Slavery End? Given the nearly universal sanction against slavery in the modern world, it may be tempting to imagine that slavery’s end was inevitable. As late as 1860, white southerners (and slaveholders in Brazil and Cuba) did not think so. Instead, their public and private correspondence reflected confidence that they enjoyed the favor of God, presiding over an institution that brought social order, economic success, and political stability. That position of confidence – derived from what historians call the “pro-slavery defense” – emerged in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s in response to the critique of slavery issued by abolitionists and the continuous resistance to slavery manifested by enslaved people.7 Given the investment that white southerners had in slavery it should not surprise us that they rallied to defend the institution. More puzzling for many modern readers is that many white northerners shared, if not the pro-slavery defense, a thorough agnosticism on the issue. With few African Americans in their communities and often with deep economic reliance on slave-labor-produced goods, most white northerners entered the Civil War with no intention of disrupting slavery. For them, 242

A F R I CA N A MER I CA N S A N D E M A NC I PAT I O N

restoring the Union was the only cause for war.8 This position prevailed in the North for at least the first year and a half of the conflict. Enslaved people faced the physical challenge of escaping their bondage and the political challenge of changing white northern attitudes about the practice. The political conflict and flux of antebellum America produced deep divisions within the public about the relationship of slavery to the war. As Eric Foner and others have shown, the new Republican Party had built itself, in significant measure, on opposition to the expansion of slavery in the western territories.9 But opposing slavery’s growth into new space was not the same as supporting its abolition in existing states. Conservatives in the Republican Party, many of whom had recently abandoned the Democratic Party, may have supported abolishing slavery eventually but they expected southern states to take the lead, as northern states had done after the Revolution. Many of them also hoped some scheme of colonization would accompany the end of slavery to ensure that black labor did not corrupt the mostly white North or West. A substantial body of moderate Republicans believed slavery did not belong anywhere in the United States but they too wanted the process to follow constitutional procedures. This important swing group tilted toward conservatives early in the war and radicals later. This latter caucus – a minority of Republicans at the war’s start – were outright abolitionists. Men like Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House of Representatives collaborated with a well-organized abolitionist movement to steer policy toward emancipation from the war’s opening moments. Members of this wing of the party were much less concerned with constitutional protection of southern states during the war and sanctioned an increasingly hard stance against slavery and the South. James Oakes has worked in recent years to resuscitate the reputation of this group, arguing that their influence on the course of the war was decisive.10 Democrats, who in the North maintained an active political opposition, adamantly opposed emancipation and obstructed abolitionist officers whenever they could. Making emancipation a Union policy required hard work. As the next section will show, U.S. policy evolved over time in response to the persistent efforts of enslaved people, such as those described above. The short answer to why the North endorsed emancipation is that it had to. Despite tremendous military efforts in 1861 and 1862, Confederate resistance continued. In order to defeat the Confederacy, Lincoln recognized that he needed to incapacitate the economic foundation of the South. Ending Confederates’ ability to fight meant disrupting the slave economy and a policy that empowered enslaved people to seek their freedom did exactly that. The manpower balance could be further tipped to the Union’s advantage if those enslaved men who escaped fought in northern armies. As difficult as it has been to explain why the Union army endorsed emancipation (and historians remain conflicted about the reasons), this is not the same thing as explaining the end of slavery in the U.S. That process involved much more than military policy. It drew, first and foremost, on the actions of enslaved people themselves who disrupted slaveholders’ power during the war. It also drew on the efforts of abolitionists in the North who convinced a majority of the public to support this sea change in American life. No one waged a stronger rhetorical campaign toward this end than Frederick Douglass, the leading black abolitionist in the U.S., and a newspaper editor. From the war’s beginning, he argued that the Union cause required emancipation. To accomplish this, he 243

A A RO N S HEEH A N- D E A N

framed the country’s enemy as “slaveholders and their rebel minions” and celebrated the loyalty of enslaved people. “Fire must be met with water,” Douglass wrote, “darkness with light, and war for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery.”11 Many northerners, Lincoln among them, believed that secession did destroy liberty but they believed that was because it denied the outcome of a lawful election. Douglass’s challenge was to convince white northerners that slavery by itself corrupted American liberty.12 Although Douglass helped shift northern attitudes toward slavery and African Americans over the course of the war, he failed in his larger campaign. White northerners’ support for emancipation relied on its strategic advantages not the philosophical incompatibility of slavery and democracy. Even when finally enacted, northern war policy emancipated individual slaves, it did not abolish slavery as a practice in the U.S. The full abolition of slavery required a Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed in January 1865.13

How Did Slavery End? One way to answer the question of how slavery ended in the United States is to track where it ended. That end arrived unevenly, coming first in those places where Union and Confederate armies met and extending out in unpredictable ripples. The older interpretation that emancipation was essentially delivered as a gift by benevolent Union army officers has given way to a more dynamic vision that emphasizes the agency of enslaved people who pursued their freedom.14 As some reluctant secessionists had feared, slavery survived longer in the Union than out of it. Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware (three of the four slaveholding states that remained in the Union through the war) took independent state action outlawing slavery late in the war, but Kentucky refused and slaves there only enjoyed freedom after the Thirteenth Amendment took effect in late 1865. Slavery in the Confederate South proved more vulnerable. As Benjamin Butler recognized during his time at Fort Monroe, enslaved people represented a resource that the Confederacy desperately needed if it was to win the war. The population disparity between North and South produced a manpower advantage of five to two for the North. In order for the Confederacy to field armies large enough to resist the United States, every slave would need to be mobilized, either producing food and supplies for the war effort or in more active roles supporting the army itself. This necessity transformed enslaved people into a fifth column within the Confederacy and they exploited that position, aiding the Union effort and seizing opportunities for freedom wherever they appeared. Butler’s “contraband order” inaugurated the Union’s use of emancipation as a war measure, but few Union commanders followed his revolutionary precedent. Many of the Union’s general officers in 1861 were regular army men, conservative Democrats like Irvin McDowell and George McClellan, who opposed emancipation and tried to avoid interfering with southern property, human or otherwise. Confederate officers did not have that luxury and they initiated a policy of impressing slaves that surprised and angered southern slaveholders. As Jaime Martinez persuasively shows, despite the complaints of slaveholders, the Confederate state succeeded in mobilizing the labor of thousands of enslaved people.15 This finding presses on readers one of the many ironies of the conflict – that slavery served as both an asset and a vulnerability for the Confederacy. When McClellan’s Army of the Potomac arrived in April of 1862 at Fort Monroe, Confederate 244

A F R I CA N A MER I CA N S A N D E M A NC I PAT I O N

General John Bankhead Magruder impressed 1,300 slaves from plantations along the York-James peninsula. These slaves were pressed into service building a line of fortifications to retard McClellan’s advance toward Richmond. The slaves labored within sight of Union positions and every night during the campaign some of them fled to the safety of northern lines. As Glenn Brasher has shown in his recent study, McClellan refused to sanction anything like Butler’s expansive proclamation but his army nonetheless became an emancipation machine.16 Southern slavery relied on violence and vigilance.17 Every night across the antebellum South slave patrols fanned out to catch or deter runaways. With 100,000 Union soldiers advancing through the Virginia countryside, the physical apparatus sustaining slavery collapsed, and thousands of enslaved Virginians seized the chance to escape. This was emancipation by friction. Without intending to, the Union army eroded the infrastructure that made slavery possible. This process repeated itself along the Mississippi and other southern rivers wherever Union troops appeared in 1862. The 500,000 enslaved people who gained their freedom during the war by seeking refuge with Union armies represented the spearhead in the killing stroke against slavery. What happened to the three and a half million enslaved people who remained trapped behind Confederate lines? In a handful of places, slaveowners were able to maintain control as they had before the war. But because of the multi-pronged Union invasion of the South, it was hard to find places untouched by the impact of the war. Union gunboats traversed the rivers of the region while armies marched down its roads. After the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation, Union officers sent detachments of men off the main army to liberate enslaved people.18 In 1864, many of these raids were led by recently enslaved men who escaped, enlisted in the Union army, and guided squads through their old neighborhoods. Even if Union soldiers never appeared, news of the war did. Slaveholders tried to keep information from slaves, and whites at all levels spread misinformation about what invading Yankees would do to enslaved people, but the reality found its way through regardless. Enslaved people understood that Confederates wanted to perpetuate slavery and the Union wanted to end it. This knowledge gave them an incentive to help Union soldiers when they appeared in their midst. It also transformed the landscape within households and on farms and in factories. Wherever slaves labored in the South they did so under less supervision than in the antebellum era. This gave them the confidence to take actions they could not have before the war.19 Sometimes this new environment created more uncertainty and more danger. Thavolia Glymph shows how plantation mistresses resisted every effort made by the enslaved women who worked under them to achieve independence.20 But throughout the South, enslaved people upset the traditional dynamic of slavery, asserting their new power by breaking tools, work stoppages, planting food crops instead of cotton, demanding wages, driving out violent overseers, and leading outright insurrections. The many important volumes produced by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, especially The Destruction of Slavery, detail this process in all its drama, contingency, and hope.21 Abolitionists in the North rejoiced when they read reports of slaves escaping slavery. Some moved south to aid the process, usually operating within the newly established “Freemen’s Aid Societies” that followed in the wake of the army’s movement. Black and white abolitionists moved into abandoned plantation homes or army tents and advocated fair treatment for the freedpeople.22 Probably the most important task they undertook was 245

A A RO N S HEEH A N- D E A N

teaching literacy, the demand for which was insatiable among freedpeople.23 Even moderate Republicans were moved by the efforts enslaved people took to free themselves and to aid the Union cause. As a result, Congress inched toward emancipation, passing two Confiscation Acts that gave army commanders the right to seize slaves belonging to disloyal and then even loyal slaveholders. Both acts sanctioned what was already underway in the South as Union officers refused to return runaway slaves. Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia and outlawed it in federal territories, acts impossible to take if southern Democrats had remained in their seats. White northerners accepted and sometimes celebrated these new policies, which promised to help end the war, punish the slaveholders who had started it, and remake the South. The pressure put upon the administration by the relentless exodus of enslaved people forced the administration to act. By the summer of 1862, Lincoln decided to support emancipation, in part to assert some control over the process. To the dismay of radicals and abolitionists, at first he encouraged only moderate measures – hoping state governments would lead the way, offering compensation to owners, encouraging a slow process, and, most perniciously, advocating the old idea of colonization.24 Slaveholding Unionists in Missouri and Kentucky (the largest slaveholding states that remained in the Union) refused to budge and, after the Union’s victory at Antietam in September, Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation. He asserted the measure was an “act of justice” “authorized under the constitution” and “upon military necessity.” Although it applied only to those places in active rebellion (exempting both Union states and places occupied by the northern army), it freed the slaves of all owners, regardless of their national loyalty. Ever since September 22, 1862, people have disputed why Lincoln issued the proclamation that he did. Historians of diplomacy argue that Lincoln’s main motive was blocking Britain and France from recognizing the Confederacy.25 Historians of Lincoln and presidential power emphasize his own words and compelling military necessity.26 Historians of slavery emphasize the active role taken by enslaved people who made emancipation a pressing issue in the first place.27 All these explanations contain an element of truth, but, as this essay has tried to suggest, the sequence of those causes came at different times. Notwithstanding abolitionists’ important calls to end slavery, enslaved people were the ones who seized the initiative and made emancipation something that the administration could not ignore. Despite the wealth of studies over the last two decades, research into the process of American emancipation shows no signs of slowing down. New areas to investigate and new ways of framing studies appear continuously. For instance, because Union army planners targeted southern cities for conquest and occupation, these spaces actually experienced less disruption than the Confederate countryside.28 The haphazard Union experiment with emancipation meant that slavery’s end in rural places was less consistent and deliberately managed and this diversity has drawn the attention of scholars.29 Urban places have drawn less study, an oversight that has diminished our understanding of the process and meaning of emancipation.30 Of greater concern, from a historiographical perspective, is that too many emancipation studies grew out of the literature on slavery and as a result remain divorced from the war itself, though recent work shows the possibility of integrating these fields. Perhaps the most exciting new work in emancipation concerns scholars’ efforts to situate the end of slavery in the U.S. in relation to other slave powers in the 246

A F R I CA N A MER I CA N S A N D E M A NC I PAT I O N

hemisphere and around the world. Brazil and Cuba were the only other slave republics in the West and residents of both countries watched the U.S. Civil War with great interest. As historians of these countries have shown, emancipation in the U.S. required that Brazilians and Cubans follow suit, but slaveholders there hoped to avoid the fate of American southerners.31 The precedents to American emancipation in the British and French Caribbean informed how participants in the Civil War perceived their own experiences and have provided historians with important points of comparison.32 Older studies by Peter Kolchin and Shearer Davis Bowman emphasized comparative slavery more than comparative emancipation but they pointed the way toward the modern movement to assess the similarities and differences between the U.S. experience and other places.33

What Happened as a Result of Emancipation? Those people who freed themselves by fleeing to Union lines met an uncertain fate. In the early days of the war, some found themselves returned as soon as someone entered camp to claim them. Even if those masters could not afford to lose the labor they still imposed the harsh penalties meted out to runaways in the antebellum era – whippings, disfigurement, and other bodily mutilations intended to humiliate and prevent another escape attempt. Abolitionist-leaning officers refused to turn over runaways precisely to avoid such outcomes, but until the Confiscation Acts and Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, different commanders adopted different strategies. Adding to the uncertainty, Confederates spread rumors that Union armies killed or enslaved the black people who reached their lines. All this inconsistency only complicated the calculus faced by enslaved people when deciding to stay or flee. And when runaways reached Union lines that offered them sanctuary the longterm treatment was often little better than their previous life on plantations. Because the army was intended to be mobile, commanders did not want to carry refugees with them, especially the women and children who often fled slavery together.34 The improvised response by the Union army was to establish what came to be called “contraband camps,” usually along the line of march near major urban centers around the South. Like other refugee institutions, these camps were intended to be temporary. They were poorly built, underfunded, and compromised by the paternalistic and racist attitudes of their managers. Housing, food, and medical care were substandard at best.35 Although the material conditions may have been atrocious and their status as citizens uncertain, enslaved people kept coming. The variety of impediments failed to deter people. By 1864, for instance, 31,654 freedpeople lived in camps in northeastern North Carolina and southeastern Virginia.36 Contraband camps have recently come under more scrutiny, with forthcoming work by Chandra Manning and Amy Murrell Taylor that promises to expand how we understand the process of emancipation as it happened in these places.37 The effects of emancipation on black communities and people across the South varied enormously, particularly because of the complicating effects of gender. While African American women and children filled the contraband camps, African American men increasingly joined the military. The Second Confiscation Act first authorized the enlistment of black men into the U.S. army and, in conjunction with the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln committed to drawing these men into military service. Organized 247

A A RO N S HEEH A N- D E A N

separately from white recruits in a new branch, the United States Colored Troops (USCT), by war’s end 180,000 black men had worn the Union blue. There is a long history of writing on these men, beginning with the efforts of black historians in the nineteenth century such as Joseph Wilson and George Washington Williams.38 Modern scholarship has broadened and deepened our understanding of their service. Many of these soldiers were free men of color residing in the North who volunteered, while others were former slaves who, having detached themselves from their southern masters, saw military service as a route to full citizenship.39 Just as military leaders hampered their own interests by mistreating black people in contraband camps, they alienated USCT soldiers with poor treatment and poor management.40 Black soldiers were paid less than whites, received worse equipment, were poorly officered, and too often sent into dangerous positions without full support. Nonetheless, just as with wartime escapes from slavery, black men kept enlisting and kept performing admirably in military service. The 166 USCT regiment composed almost 10 percent of the total Union forces. Importantly, these men enlisted in 1863 and 1864 when Union recruits were scarce in northern communities. They were also exceptionally committed to winning the war for the Union with both reunion and emancipation intact as war policies. By examining the complex and often unintended consequences of tying black manhood to martial violence, Carole Emberton has issued one of the strongest dissenting notes against the longstanding idea that military service enabled black men to claim a place of citizenship.41 While few would deny that full meaningful citizenship remained elusive for African Americans after the Civil War, historians have shifted away from the skeptical position adopted by some historians of the New South who stress continuities between the two eras.42 Instead, historians now view emancipation as a monumental yet contingent process that created a new world with new expectations and possibilities albeit within the political and economic parameters of the old. Positive and negative outcomes existed simultaneously. The geographic diffusion of black soldiers around the South disrupted family lives (because black soldiers enlisted later in the war they remained in uniform after most white soldiers had returned to homes in the North) but that experience gave them a worldliness that few people of any race had before the Civil War. Their movement began the process of building a truly national African American community. In order for freedpeople to securely start their new lives, emancipation had to be made permanent. Lincoln understood this when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which, because it was an executive order, never carried the approval of Congress and could, some claimed, expire at the end of the war. To ensure the final end of slavery, Lincoln and other Republicans aggressively promoted a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery in the U.S.43 While wartime emancipation operated piecemeal by freeing those enslaved people who came within the purview of the Union army, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished the institution of slavery itself. Michael Vorenberg has clearly analyzed the amendment’s history, especially the crucial issues of what authority Congress claimed to revise the Constitution and what the meaning of that revision would be, both for the freedpeople and the Constitution itself. The radical Republican Charles Sumner, for instance, proposed a Thirteenth Amendment that “declared all people ‘equal before the law.’”44 Moderate Republicans and Democrats rejected that broad language and forced a narrower compromise measure. Even this revision failed to 248

A F R I CA N A MER I CA N S A N D E M A NC I PAT I O N

satisfy border state conservatives who opposed the measure, but northern public opinion had turned so completely against slavery that the amendment passed Congress in early 1865. Ratification took longer. Most northern states moved quickly but the seceded states had to be pressured into ratifying the measure. Kentucky, the last remaining Union slave state, refused. As a result, slavery ended officially in the U.S. only on December 18, when Secretary of State William Seward confirmed its ratification. Partly as a result of the compromises adopted to secure its passage, the Thirteenth Amendment proved insufficient to protect the rights of freedpeople, necessitating two more amendments that together form one of the war’s most important legacies in American life. In previous decades, the constitutional debate over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments was largely the purview of Reconstruction and legal historians, but these measures, which granted full citizenship to African Americans and the franchise to black men, clearly belong to the history of emancipation as well. For a long time, studies of emancipation, like studies of the Civil War, possessed clear chronological boundaries. That phase is over. Influenced by the prolonged American wars of the early twenty-first century and by a recognition that emancipation’s military, constitutional, and social dimensions unfolded over decades not years, historians have turned their attention to the problem of how people transition from wartime to peacetime. Recent studies of emancipation usually start in the antebellum era and continue into Reconstruction.45 Most scholars regard this as an analytical improvement – we have abandoned artificial boundaries between “eras” that once made sense to historians but would have baffled historical actors. Such an approach does run the risk of flattening out the momentous change and the contingency of the era. One reason for this shift lies in the influence of the Maryland School, where scholars working under the direction of Ira Berlin and others have emphasized class concerns. These scholars emphasize that black men and women remained laborers, whether by force under slavery or necessity under the poverty of the postwar South.46 This emphasis on work is undeniably important but it has obscured research on the cultural experience of the war for blacks, although that too is being remedied with studies of religion, family life, and education that all root themselves in the process of emancipation.47

Assessing Emancipation The terrible crimes of the Jim Crow era and the long half-life of violent and institutionalized racism in the U.S. offer a counterpoint to the nineteenth-century historians’ insistence that the Civil War and emancipation changed the world irrevocably. But for historians writing in the full flush of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1970s and 1980s and seeking the roots of a positive history of the African American community, the Civil War era was a logical period to study. Even with their emphasis on the continuing injustices of the black working experience in the U.S., authors of the Maryland School celebrate the autonomy that emancipation granted black people over their lives. Nearly all of the many excellent histories of black life in the postwar era ground their analysis in the forces unleashed by emancipation.48 Even though those histories are, by necessity, southern history (a significant majority of black Americans continued to live in southern states until well into the twentieth century), they are also written as American history. In his 249

A A RO N S HEEH A N- D E A N

second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke of “American slavery [as] one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.” Lincoln knew, as historians now show in their work, that slavery and emancipation were American experiences.

Notes 1 Kate Masur, “‘A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation’: The Word ‘Contraband’ and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States,” Journal of American History 93 (March 2007): 1050–1084. 2 Benjamin Butler to Simon Cameron, July 30, 1861, in Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin Butler, Vol. 1, ed. Jessie Ames Marshall (Norwood, MA: Plimpton Press, 1917), 188. 3 Albert Bushnell Hart, Slavery and Abolition 1831–1841 (1906; New York: Haskell House, 1968; Dwight L. Dumond, Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States (1939; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959); Gilbert H. Barnes, The Anti-Slavery Impulse 1830–44 (1933; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973). 4 The revisionist approach includes new and more critical interpretations of the statuary surrounding slavery and emancipation and how these have informed modern views of the experience. Kirk Sandage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 5 The FSSP publishing project began with Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861–1867, Series II (Book 1): The Black Military Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and has continued through many volumes. 6 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (repr. Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Stephanie McCurry Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 7 Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (repr. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); and Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). 8 Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 9 Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); William Gienapp, The Origins of the Republic Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 10 James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Norton, 2014); and James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: Norton, 2013). 11 Douglass’ Monthly, May 1861. 12 David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). 13 The best single history of the adoption of the amendment is Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 14 Edward L. Ayers and Scott Nesbitt, “Seeing Emancipation: Scale and Freedom in the American South,” Journal of the Civil War Era (January 2001): 3–22. 15 Jaime Martinez, Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

250

A F R I CA N A MER I CA N S A N D E M A NC I PAT I O N

16 Glenn D. Brasher, The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); James Marten, “A Feeling of Restless Anxiety: Loyalty and Race in the Peninsula Campaign and Beyond,” in The Richmond Campaign, ed. Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 121–152. 17 Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 18 Stephen V. Ash, Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments That Changed the Course of the Civil War (New York: Norton, 2008). 19 Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005); David Williams, I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 20 Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 21 Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, Series I, Volume I: The Destruction of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 22 James McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964); Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964). 23 Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 24 Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010). 25 Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 26 Philip Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994). 27 William A. Blair and Karen Fisher Younger, eds., Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 28 Stephen Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 29 Susan E. O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 30 Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); William Link, Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War’s Aftermath (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); and Michael Fitzgerald, Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860–1890 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002). 31 Robert E. Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Brent Toplin, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (New York: Atheneum, 1972); and Rebecca Jarvis Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860– 1899 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 32 Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); Matthew P. Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 33 Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Shearer Davis Bowman, Masters and Lords: Mid-19th Century US Planters and Prussian Junkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Enrico del Lago, William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini: Abolition, Democracy, and Radical Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Peter Kolchin, “Reexamining Southern Emancipation in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Southern History 81 (Feb. 2015): 7–40. 34 Yael A. Sternhell, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

251

A A RO N S HEEH A N- D E A N

35 Jim Down, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 36 Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy toward Southern Blacks, 1861–1865 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973). 37 Chandra Manning, “Working for Citizenship in Civil War Contraband Camps,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4 (June 2014): 172–204. 38 Joseph T. Wilson The Black Phalanx (1887; Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1890); George Washington Williams, A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (1887; New York: Harper, 1888). 39 Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (1956; repr. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1987); John David Smith, Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Richard Reid, Freedom for Themselves: North Carolina’s Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995). 40 Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Free Press, 1990). 41 Carole Emberton, “Only Murder Makes Men: Reconsidering the Black Military Experience,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (June 2012): 369–393; and Carole Emberton, Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 42 Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); and Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863– 1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). 43 Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010), 312. 44 Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 51. 45 O’Donovan, Becoming Free; Masur, An Example for All the Land; John Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 1862–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001). 46 O’Donovan, Becoming Free; Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields. 47 Daniel W. Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863–1877 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Williams, Self-Taught; Sharon Ann Holt, Making Freedom Pay: North Carolina Freedpeople Working for Themselves, 1865–1900 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 39–40, 51; Nancy D. Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of Household in the Delta, 1861–1875 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). 48 Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Freedpeople in the Tobacco South: Virginia: 1860–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

252

16 LAW, THE SUPR EME C OUR T , AND THE C ONS T I T UT I ON , 1840–1 8 8 0 Timothy S. Huebner

The history of law and the Constitution during the middle decades of the nineteenth century mirrored the extraordinary changes of the era. Economic expansion, war and emancipation, and postwar reconstruction shaped and responded to constitutional developments brought about by all three branches of the national government. During the antebellum era, the U.S. Supreme Court promoted economic growth and solidified slaveholders’ rights. During wartime President Abraham Lincoln exercised extraordinary executive power in order to preserve the Union and initiate emancipation. And after the war, Congress took the lead in amending the Constitution to end slavery, guarantee black citizenship and civil rights, and protect against discrimination in voting. All of these revolutionary changes occurred within the context of the American Constitution’s unique commitment to the separation of powers, federalism, and popular participation in government. Ultimately, although the enforcement of these new constitutional guarantees proved uneven, the period witnessed a stunning transformation in the nation’s constitutional discourse, from upholding the rights of slaveholders to protecting the rights of the formerly enslaved. This essay traces the broad outlines of the history of American constitutionalism during the era of sectional conflict, while also laying out possibilities for further historical investigation.1

The Antebellum Era During the pre-Civil War era, the U.S. Supreme Court figured prominently in the nation’s constitutional development. The work of the Court reflected the jurisprudential substance and style of the chief justice, Roger B. Taney of Maryland. A controversial political figure, who, as acting secretary of the treasury under President Andrew Jackson, had carried out the task of removing the deposits from the Second Bank of the United States, Taney took his seat on the Court in 1837 and soon shed his reputation as a political hack. He emerged as a moderate jurist, who took the constitutional text, legal precedent, and social consequences carefully into account when deciding cases.2 An “instrumentalist” who possessed an “awareness that the impact of a decision extended far beyond the case before” him, Taney embodied the style of antebellum American judges, who often formulated new legal doctrines in order to accommodate changing social conditions.3 Remarkably, despite being one of the Court’s most significant figures, Taney remains one of its least studied.4 253

T I MOT HY S. H U E B NE R

In three substantive areas – contracts, commerce, and admiralty law – the Taney Court issued significant rulings that both shaped and responded to the nation’s expanding economy. On the matter of contracts, Taney wrote the landmark opinion in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837), in which he resolved the question of whether a corporation charter issued by a state contained an implied monopoly. The majority rejected the notion of an implied monopoly and held in favor of the new (and toll-free) Warren Bridge, which threatened the business of the established (and toll-operated) Charles River Bridge.5 Were the Court to decide otherwise, Taney believed, economic progress would come to a halt. Railroad companies that had been established along the same lines as turnpikes would have been subjected to lawsuits challenging their right to interfere with these supposedly implied contracts. The opinion thus exhibited Jacksonian opposition to monopoly power, support for new investment and technological advancement, and a commitment to promoting the welfare of “the community,” a common refrain among state judges at the time. Although Justice Joseph Story dissented, arguing for the protection of the implied rights of property owners, Taney’s opinion reflected the spirit of the age. If Charles River Bridge had a Jacksonian cast, the Taney Court’s decisions on commercial regulation were more overtly pragmatic. As the nation’s economy expanded, Taney and his colleagues struggled to define the specific parameters of national and state regulatory authority. In New York v. Miln (1837), the Court upheld a law requiring information about income and occupation on passengers entering the port of New York as a valid exercise of a state’s police power. But deference to state legislation did not thereafter necessarily become the rule. In the License Cases (1847), a series of disputes involving taxation and regulation of spirituous liquor, the Court again upheld the legislation in question, but two years later in the Passenger Cases (1849) the justices invalidated laws enacted by New York and Massachusetts that would have taxed incoming passengers.6 Deeply divided on the question of how much authority states possessed over commercial regulation – in part because of the implications that these cases might have held for the regulation of slavery – the justices formulated no coherent doctrine in these decisions. Not until Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1852), in an opinion by Justice Benjamin Curtis, did the Taney Court agree that areas requiring national uniformity would be the exclusive domain of Congress, while other matters of commercial regulation would be the purview of states.7 The Court, meanwhile, provided a more nationalistic solution to the question of the admiralty jurisdiction of federal courts. For many years the Court had operated under a Marshall-era precedent that restricted federal jurisdiction to those waters within the ebb and flow of the tide.8 But by the 1840s, the completion of the Erie Canal triggered a rapid expansion of steamboat traffic on the Great Lakes and the nation’s rivers, so that half the total tonnage of steamboat cargo was in this western traffic, rather than along the eastern seaboard. With increasing numbers of cases burdening state courts, in 1845 Congress extended admiralty jurisdiction to federally-licensed vessels employed in interstate commerce on the Great Lakes and connecting waterways. In Genesee Chief v. Fitzhugh (1851), in an opinion written by Taney, the Court upheld the 1845 statute, overturned precedent, and held that all public navigable waters came within the admiralty and maritime jurisdiction of the federal courts.9 The Taney Court thus proved Jacksonian 254

LAW, T HE S UP R EME C OURT, AND T H E C O NS T I T U T I O N

in some decisions, nationalistic in others, and for the most part steered a moderate – and popular – course on matters pertaining to economic development. All of these decisions reflected the Taney Court’s sensitivity to political realities and changing social conditions.10 Slavery cases posed a more difficult political challenge. Initially, the Taney Court treaded more cautiously in a series of cases involving slavery – consistently upholding the rights of slaveholders, but issuing relatively narrow decisions that promoted unity among the justices. In Groves v. Slaughter (1841), for example, the Court avoided constitutional questions pertaining to the commerce power and slavery and ruled only on the 1832 provision of the Mississippi constitution that was being challenged. In Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), moreover, the Court attempted to focus upon that which all could agree – that the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act was constitutional – a point which the Court reiterated in Jones v. Van Zandt (1847) and again in Moore v. Illinois (1852). In Strader v. Graham (1851), finally, the Court denied that it had any jurisdiction to hear the case of a group of sojourning slave musicians, who claimed that their time in Ohio had caused them to be free men. Although differences existed among the justices on the question of the implications that the commerce power had for slavery, in general the justices agreed that states retained tremendous latitude in dealing with slavery and that the one major federal law dealing with the institution – the Fugitive Slave Act – lay clearly within the bounds of the Constitution. In contrast to its decisions on economic development, the justices reached near unanimity in slavery cases, as the votes among the justices were 5–2 (Groves), 8–1 (Prigg), 9–0 (Van Zandt), 8–1 (Moore), and 9–0 (Strader). In these “minimalist” opinions, the Court – sensitive to the larger questions and perhaps to unintended consequences – refrained from addressing broad issues or issuing sweeping decisions.11 Still, the Court affirmed the rights of slaveholders in the South, as well as the right to reclaim fugitives in the North. None of these decisions generated much public controversy or opposition, as most Americans at the time – North and South – recognized state control over slavery in the South and accepted the premise that the Constitution protected slaveholders’ rights to reclaim fugitive slaves in the North. By the mid-1850s, in fact, the Taney Court possessed a reputation for moderation and fairness. As R. Kent Newmyer puts it, “Had the Taney Court rested on its laurels in 1856, it would have surely gone down as one of the most popular and effective courts in our history.”12 The Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) represented a watershed in the history of American constitutional law and politics.13 Taney and his colleagues had a choice: to follow their pattern in slavery cases and exercise caution, or to follow their pattern in other decisions and attempt to resolve the larger constitutional and social question. After an initial consensus in favor of a minimalist ruling broke down, Taney opted for the latter course. For more than a decade, the nation’s political leaders had debated the scope of the rights of slaveholders, including the extent of the right to reclaim fugitive slaves in the North and the right to take slaves into federal territories in the West. Anti-slavery constitutionalists, led by Salmon P. Chase and, later, Frederick Douglass, contended that the Constitution, because it had never actually used the word “slavery,” did not lend itself to the pro-slavery interpretation that southerners (and Garrisonian abolitionists) asserted.14 The growing intensity of these debates during the 1850s – as well as a real or perceived pressure to “resolve” these questions, once and for all – surely contributed to the Court’s approach in the Dred Scott case.15 255

T I MOT HY S. H U E B NE R

Taney’s opinion, widely regarded as the “opinion of the Court,” contained two significant points of law. First, Taney held that African Americans, whether slave or free, had not been included in the political community at the time of the founding; therefore, he reasoned, neither they nor their descendants were citizens of a state within the meaning of the Constitution. Taney claimed, in the most infamous lines in Supreme Court history, that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” These words, Mark Graber shows, remained within the antebellum constitutional mainstream and in keeping with most state courts’ pronouncements on black citizenship.16 More significant within the context of the political and constitutional debate of the time was Taney’s other holding: that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in federal territories. This conclusion rested, first, on a narrow view of congressional power under the Territories Clause. Based on this clause, Congress had enacted a series of measures pertaining to slavery in territories, including the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Taney put forth an unorthodox and dubious interpretation of the clause, arguing that it applied only to those territories that were part of the United States at the time of the drafting of the Constitution. Having restricted congressional power, Taney held that slaveholding in federal territories was a constitutional right. In order to make this point, Taney claimed that the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause prohibited Congress from interfering with slavery in the territories, because to do so violated the property rights of slaveholders who settled there. An act of Congress that attempted to restrict this right, he asserted, “could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law.”17 By making this argument, Taney not only relied on the Fifth Amendment, he also seemed to inject higher law principles into the Constitution – in effect, holding that certain fundamental rights lay beyond the reach of congressional regulation. Slaves were no different than any other form of property, Taney concluded, and the rights of such property holders required constitutional protection. Taney also relied upon both the Slave Trade Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause. The former established “the right to traffic in [slave property], like an ordinary article of merchandise and property,” while the latter also affirmed slaveholders’ rights.18 In Taney’s estimation, Congress could do nothing to interfere with the rights of slaveholders in federal territories, and because slaveholding was constitutionally protected, neither could a territorial legislature. One line succinctly captured Taney’s view: “[T]he right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.”19 Taney’s opinion was a pro-slavery tour de force. Dismissing the advocates of anti-slavery constitutionalism, Taney held that blacks lacked citizenship and possessed “no rights.” At the same time, Taney affirmed the idea that slaveholders had a right to take their slave property into the territories. Taney’s opinion was thus as definitive as it was allencompassing: “no rights” for blacks, whether slave or free, absolute rights for white slaveholders in the territories. It is worth noting that in its nearly seventy-year history to that point, the Supreme Court had never struck down a federal law as violating a constitutional right. The Dred Scott case was the first time that it did so – in order to protect the property rights of slaveholders. In the ongoing political dispute over the extension of slavery, Taney’s opinion constituted a clear victory for the South. Although one scholar, Austin Allen, has shown that a variety of doctrinal disputes among the justices, some of which had nothing to do with slavery, helped to produce the decision, the end 256

LAW, T HE S UP R EME C OURT, AND T H E C O NS T I T U T I O N

result remained the same: the Court stood unabashedly with slaveholders, and given the politics of the late 1850s this was what mattered.20 Six other justices, although they differed in some respects in their reasoning, agreed with most of Taney’s conclusions.21 Justices John McLean and Benjamin Curtis, two anti-slavery northerners, dissented. Both argued for the constitutionality of congressional legislation on slavery in the territories and attacked Taney’s rejection of black citizenship. Curtis’s dissent made the compelling point that, before the adoption of the Constitution, five states recognized blacks as citizens and even granted them the right of suffrage, evidence that contradicted Taney’s claim that blacks could not be counted as members of the political community at the time of the founding. Soon after the announcement of the decision, a disagreement between Taney and Curtis over the timing of the release of the dissent prompted Curtis’s resignation. It was a bitter postscript to a deeply polarizing legal dispute, both for the Court and the country.22 Rather than resolving the sectional political debate over slavery, the Court’s decision demonstrated the dangers of an overbearing judiciary while eliminating the possibility of political compromise. Taney’s opinion struck at the heart of the Republican Party, which had been founded during the mid-1850s to oppose the extension of slavery, and former congressman Abraham Lincoln soon made his name in Illinois politics by opposing the decision. His debates with Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas in 1858 allowed for a thorough consideration of the constitutional issues in the northern states, while simultaneously boosting Lincoln’s national political fortunes. The Supreme Court doubled-down on its pro-slavery stance the following year, when in Ableman v. Booth (1859) the justices unanimously ruled that the Wisconsin Supreme Court could not hinder the enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act in that state. In 1860, attacking the Court for what he believed was its misinterpretation of the founders’ Constitution, Lincoln won the nomination of the Republican Party for president. He then defeated Douglas and two other candidates in the general election, after having won every northern free state. With southern slave states united behind the Court’s decisions protecting slaveholders’ rights, and an incoming president who seemed to oppose those rights (in the territories, at least), southerners turned to secession. Clearly, the Court played a key role in the national political debate culminating in secession. Despite its significance, the Taney Court has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. We still have few studies of the Court’s major decisions pertaining to economic development and only a handful of biographical studies of the justices from this era.23 In the past forty years, almost all of the scholarship on the Taney Court has focused on slavery and the Dred Scott decision. While Allen traces a doctrinal connection between the Taney Court’s decisions on the slavery issue and corporations, his important study downplays the crucial political context of the 1850s.24 Building on Allen’s insights, we need more studies of the Court’s constitutional record with regard to economic issues, as well as more research that links doctrinal developments to political context – and that does so by taking a long view of the Court’s work. Examining how the Taney Court defined and understood such broad concepts as the Bill of Rights, executive power, and the judicial role, for example, will not only open new avenues of investigation, it will also help historians make more sense of its rulings regarding antebellum slaves and slaveholders, as well as its place in the sectional conflict and Civil War. 257

T I MOT HY S. H U E B NE R

The Civil War War raised a host of legal and constitutional questions, starting with secession itself. Most white southerners viewed disunion as an appropriate legal response, in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, against possible threats to slaveholders’ rights. Lincoln and most northerners, in contrast, believed they had compelling reasons to oppose secession and, acting in the tradition of Andrew Jackson during the crisis over the tariff and nullification, Lincoln vowed to preserve the Union. Describing secession in his first inaugural address as “the essence of anarchy,” the new president appealed to established traditions of constitutionalism and the rule of law.25 Lincoln, as a lawyer who had thought deeply about the Constitution and his oath to preserve it, believed he had no choice but to take an uncompromising stance against the rebellion.26 Most northerners agreed with him. On the day after the fall of Fort Sumter, Lincoln took immediate steps to raise an army and blockade southern ports, and in the weeks to follow, the president authorized the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus along a military line between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. If Taney and the Supreme Court proved the most important constitutional actors of the antebellum era, President Lincoln would dominate the nation’s constitutional development in wartime. Lincoln’s suspension of the writ became the first major constitutional dispute of his presidency. No precedent existed in American history for a president to take such action. Originating in English common law centuries before, habeas corpus literally meant “you have the body,” and the writ served as a legal order to bring a person before a court. In practical terms, the writ ensured that no one could be detained without cause. Suspension of the writ meant that one would not have protection against detention. Because of the fundamental nature of this right, the American founders had exalted habeas corpus by placing it in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, in the list of restrictions on the powers of Congress.27 Within a month of the order, a legal challenge to Lincoln’s actions came to Taney. Despite his overt sympathy for the Confederate cause, after the outbreak of war the aging chief justice remained on the bench, and he heard the case in his capacity as a federal circuit judge in Maryland.28 John Merryman, a Baltimore County farmer, had allegedly burned bridges and cut telegraph wires in the aftermath of the riots. Arrested at his home and detained at Fort McHenry, Merryman petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus. Taney responded in a twenty-page opinion, blasting Lincoln’s suspension of the writ. Drawing upon history, precedent, common law, and the constitutional text, Taney argued that the president lacked the authority to take such action. Only Congress had the power to do so, he contended, and any person arrested by a military officer should be turned over to civil authorities, rather than be subject to military trial. In the chief justice’s view, the president possessed the power neither to suspend the writ nor to authorize arrests. Individual liberty, in Taney’s view, was paramount. “The fifth article of the amendments to the Constitution expressly provides that no person ‘shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law’ – that is, judicial process,” Taney wrote.29 Emphasizing this idea, Taney mentioned the Fifth Amendment four times in the opinion, nearly as often as he did the portion of the constitutional text that specifically dealt with habeas corpus. Initially ignoring the opinion, Lincoln eventually responded by framing the suspension not as a “rights” question but as a matter of national 258

LAW, T HE S UP R EME C OURT, AND T H E C O NS T I T U T I O N

survival. “Are all the laws but one [habeas corpus] to go unexecuted,” he famously asked, “and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” The confrontation between the president and the chief justice captured the longstanding American tension over the relationship between liberty and power.30 Taney attempted to protect individual rights, while Lincoln used executive power to preserve the republic in order to, in his view, advance the larger cause of liberty.31 A few years later, as the president’s northern Democratic opponents leveled heavy criticism at the president for suspending the writ of habeas corpus and imprisoning draft evaders, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of Lincoln’s blockade of Confederate ports. Under the 1861 order, later affirmed by Congress, a variety of suits involving naval seizures of contraband came before the Court. The disputes raised the issue of the powers of the president and Congress during wartime, as well as the nature of the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy. Because these matters were very much intertwined, the Prize Cases, as the cases were known collectively, posed a potential political minefield for the president. Existing rules of international and prize law implied that Lincoln’s authority to wage war as commander-in-chief of the nation’s armed forces depended upon the sovereignty of the Confederacy, which the Lincoln Administration refused to recognize. Conversely, a ruling that the war constituted a mere domestic insurrection threatened the president’s power under law to blockade southern ports. By this time, Lincoln had appointed three justices to the Court, and in March 1863 – with all three of Lincoln’s appointees voting with the majority – the Court upheld the blockade in a 5–4 decision.32 Justice Robert Grier held that the existence of war constituted a matter of fact rather than law, and the fact of war gave tremendous latitude to the president when it came to exercising his powers.33 As commander-in-chief, the president could legitimately exercise those powers in the face of a crisis like the one that the nation confronted after Fort Sumter. Although acknowledging that only Congress could declare war, the majority concluded that a president had no choice in such a situation but to take measures such as those taken by Lincoln. The decision in the Prize Cases constituted an important victory for Lincoln and a pivotal ruling in the development of presidential war powers. By granting the executive wide authority to act as commander-in-chief and by refusing to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Confederacy, the outcome could not have been more favorable to the Lincoln Administration.34 The most important constitutional question of the age – emancipation – never came before the Supreme Court. Instead, responding to Republican rumblings in Congress and black activism on the ground, Lincoln again exercised extraordinary executive power. At the outset of the war, the Court’s ruling in Dred Scott, the Constitution’s ambiguity about regulating slavery in general, and the northern public’s general belief in white supremacy seemed to make any interference with slavery extremely unlikely. But wartime developments – including some African Americans’ attempts to seek freedom behind Union military lines – changed the political situation while also offering a constitutional rationale for emancipation. In May 1861, just after the war began, Union General Benjamin Butler had refused to return escaped slaves seeking haven at Fortress Monroe in Virginia to their owner. General Butler, who was also a lawyer, claimed the slaves as “contraband of war.” The idea stuck. In the ensuing weeks, escaping slaves streamed into U.S. forts and camps, and in July the administration seemed to express support for this “contraband” policy. 259

T I MOT HY S. H U E B NE R

In August, Congress passed the Confiscation Act, which provided that any slaves being used by the Confederate military were liable to federal seizure, just like vessels on the high seas. In essence, Congress attempted to apply the principles of international law to America’s civil war.35 Although Lincoln expressed doubts about both the constitutional and political soundness of the legislation, the president signed the bill into law. Major strides toward emancipation followed in early 1862, when Union military successes in the West coincided with legislation abolishing slavery in the nation’s capital and in federal territories, areas over which Congress believed it had unquestioned authority to regulate slavery. In abolishing slavery in the territories, Congress and the president for the first time directly challenged the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott. While Lincoln and his fellow Republicans agreed that they possessed legal authority over slavery in the District of Columbia and the territories, they did not see eye-to-eye on the issue of confiscating slaves held by Confederates. Radical Republicans asserted congressional authority in the area by passing the Second Confiscation Act, which held that all slaves held by Confederates and their supporters – whether having escaped to Union lines or found in newly occupied Union territory – “shall be deemed captives of war, and shall be forever free of their servitude and not again held as slaves.”36 It also explicitly repealed the fugitive slave law for all slaveowners engaged in rebellion and authorized the president to employ black troops. These were significant steps, and although Lincoln agreed with the spirit behind the legislation, he questioned its constitutionality and feared that it would not survive a challenge before Taney’s Supreme Court. Again, the president signed the Second Confiscation Act into law, but only reluctantly. Lincoln became convinced that only a presidential proclamation could legally liberate slaves in the Confederacy. Presenting the idea of a presidential proclamation on emancipation to his cabinet in July, Lincoln delayed until the Union had achieved a military victory. On September 22, 1862, after the bloody Union triumph at the battle of Antietam, the president issued a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.37 Legalistic in tone, the language was clear and direct. The document asserted Lincoln’s constitutional authority as commander-in-chief during a time of rebellion against the government, and it proclaimed freedom 100 days hence for enslaved African Americans in areas “the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States.” Perhaps the most striking passage of the proclamation was the pledge to use military power to “recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons” and to “do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”38 In essence, this provision signaled to enslaved African Americans that the military would support any attempt that they themselves made to throw off the yoke of slavery. The decisive move against slavery came in the final Emancipation Proclamation, issued January 1, 1863. Describing emancipation as a “fit and necessary war measure,” the final version listed all of the areas still in rebellion against the United States and announced that, in these places, slaves were “henceforth and forever free.” The four slaveholding Border States that had remained loyal to the Union were exempt, as were all of the parishes surrounding New Orleans that were under federal occupation, as well as the entire state of Tennessee. This fact led many at the time to charge that Lincoln had freed only those slaves over whom he had no direct control. In legal terms, though, Lincoln conceived of the situation in precisely the opposite way: he believed he only had authority over those 260

LAW, T HE S UP R EME C OURT, AND T H E C O NS T I T U T I O N

slaves in areas in rebellion, meaning still controlled by the Rebels. Moreover, just because these areas were exempted from the Proclamation did not mean that slavery remained undisturbed there, for slavery had already begun disintegrating in these areas at the first sign of Union military incursion. Lincoln’s Proclamation put the Confederacy on notice that the Union army would act as a liberating force, as it repeated the Preliminary Proclamation’s promise “to recognize and maintain the freedom” of all enslaved persons in the Confederate states. From this point on, as James Oakes shows, the Union military adopted the policy of “enticement,” the idea that Union troops could deliberately entice enslaved African Americans to Union lines in order to emancipate them.39 The final Proclamation also provided for the use of black soldiers in the United States army and navy. This too proved a revolutionary step, as it signaled to southern slaves that leaving their masters could result in a direct opportunity to engage in the fight against slavery. In a broader sense, the Emancipation Proclamation ended discussion of compensation and colonization as conditions for emancipation, and it undermined the Court’s pro-slavery jurisprudence, thus transforming the decades-old debate over slavery. Although Lincoln remained concerned about a constitutional challenge to the Proclamation and wondered whether the measure could apply in peacetime, the boldness of the Proclamation – combined with Union military victories – meant that forces seemed to be working inexorably toward the total abolition of slavery.40 Clearly, Lincoln pushed executive power to its limits. The suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the blockade of Confederate ports, and the emancipation of the enslaved were unprecedented executive actions, igniting criticism from both Lincoln’s contemporaries and, to a lesser extent, from subsequent constitutional scholars. But in all three instances the president had an institutional accomplice in a Republican Congress that approved of executive actions, a fact not lost on historians. While scholars concede that Taney made valid constitutional arguments in the Merryman case, for example, they are quick to point to congressional approval, as well as the nature of the crisis Lincoln faced, in justifying the president’s actions.41 To be sure, an anti-Lincoln tradition in American historiography remains alive. Some African American scholars have argued that Lincoln ought to be viewed more as the white supremacist-in-chief than as the “Great Emancipator,” while libertarians have criticized the sixteenth president for excesses in exercising executive power and in creating a national regulatory state.42 Nevertheless, the vast majority of historians still consider Lincoln America’s greatest president, one who acted with moral – and constitutional – authority to preserve the Union and emancipate the enslaved.43 The fact that Lincoln allowed a presidential election to occur in 1864, in the midst of a civil war, moreover, Herman Belz convincingly concludes, should put to rest any charge that Lincoln acted as a “dictator.”44 Ironically, while historians have long debated Lincoln’s exercise of executive power, recent trends in the study of emancipation downplay the president’s role. Most new studies emphasize African American agency in bringing about the end of slavery, while Oakes’s examination of congressional Republicans portrays the legislative branch as the driving force behind the advent of freedom. Still, the Constitution and the constraints that it imposed upon the president and Congress remain a vital part of the story of emancipation, and historians should consider investigating further the extent to which the black activism of the era also reflected American constitutional values and practices.45 261

T I MOT HY S. H U E B NE R

The Reconstruction Era The constitutional significance of the Reconstruction Era surpassed that of the Civil War. Three constitutional amendments passed in less than four and a half years, making Reconstruction the most creative era of constitution making in American history, apart from the founding. The first of these amendments, the Thirteenth, ended slavery. Lincoln had justified the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure, and once the war had concluded Lincoln could not be certain of its legal status. Even if the Proclamation continued in force, it had exempted areas already under Union occupation and had excluded the loyal Border States. Believing an amendment absolutely necessary, Lincoln assumed a key role in its passage in the House of Representatives, and in January 1865 the amendment secured the necessary two-thirds majority by just two votes. Succinctly written and patterned after the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that had banned slavery north of the Ohio River, the first section of the amendment prohibited slavery. The second section added an enforcement clause, which, in effect, for the first time added a new enumerated power to those possessed by Congress.46 After Lincoln’s death in April 1865, President Andrew Johnson, a Unionist Democrat from Tennessee, proclaimed the Thirteenth Amendment the centerpiece of his reconstruction policy and in December 1865 presided over its final ratification.47 Despite his enthusiasm for the abolition amendment, Johnson subsequently became embroiled in a deep dispute with the Republican Congress over the country’s postabolition future. With the southern states having acceded to the end of slavery, Johnson believed that a revolution had been accomplished – that the southern rebellion had failed and the root cause of the rebellion, slavery, had been destroyed. But Republicans favored the ratification of another constitutional amendment that would reform the South by disabling the southern “Slave Power” and protecting blacks’ civil rights. In summer 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment passed both houses of Congress, but southern states, with Johnson leading the charge, refused to ratify the measure.48 The stalemate set off a two-year-long constitutional struggle. The Republican Congress enacted a series of Reconstruction Acts that placed the former Confederate states under military rule and mandated the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as the drafting of new state constitutions, as preconditions for readmission to the Union. At the same time, Congress impeached Johnson for attempting to thwart its reconstruction plans. When it eventually passed in summer 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment held potentially revolutionary implications. Writing into the Constitution the principle that all born on American soil are “citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside,” the amendment represented a profound shift from antebellum notions of citizenship. Under Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment, citizenship now bestowed rights. “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” Section One read. Representative John Bingham of Ohio, one of the drafters of the amendment, argued that “privileges and immunities” included all of the guarantees of the Bill of Rights.49 However these rights would be defined, the key to the Fourteenth Amendment was that it protected rights 262

LAW, T HE S UP R EME C OURT, AND T H E C O NS T I T U T I O N

against infringement by the states, thus overturning the black codes that southern states had enacted after the war and forever altering the relationship between the national government and the states. Other sections of the amendment dealt more specifically with reconstruction. Section Two overturned the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Clause and indirectly ordered states to allow black males of age to vote. If the states did not do so, their numbers of representatives would be reduced proportionally.50 Section Three banned Rebel officeholders from again holding office, while Section Four provided that no debts incurred in support of the rebellion would be paid and that “no claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave” would be recognized. Finally, like the Thirteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment included an enforcement clause. The Fifteenth Amendment soon followed. From the conventions of free blacks who had assembled in the antebellum North to Frederick Douglass’s 1865 admonition that “slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot,” African Americans had long argued for full political rights, and they continued to agitate on the question during the postwar period.51 White violence against newly-enfranchised black voters in the 1868 elections, moreover, made ensuring the right of black suffrage in the southern states a top Republican priority. Still, congressional Republicans were divided about pushing for black suffrage outside of the South, as many northern states had rejected the idea in state referendums immediately after the war, and adherence to traditional notions of federalism worked against national interference in an area that had always been the purview of states. Humanitarian and political considerations converged in 1869, though, when Republicans agreed on language for an amendment that fell short of guaranteeing an affirmative right to vote: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”52 With the support of the incoming president, Ulysses S. Grant, the amendment won ratification in March 1870, thus capping an extraordinary period of constitutional change. Afterward, Congress enacted far-reaching legislation to enforce the postwar amendments and meet the challenge of southern violence. If Congress had taken the lead in amending the Constitution, it would take executive and judicial action to ensure the protection of the rights of African Americans. Beginning in 1871, the Grant Administration engaged in a sincere and at times successful six-yearlong effort to prosecute perpetrators of white violence. Often with the aid of cavalry, the federal government rounded up suspects, gathered evidence, issued indictments, and brought cases to trial in federal courts. During 1871, the federal courts handled 314 criminal cases brought by the Department of Justice under the Enforcement Acts, with 128 resulting in convictions, and by 1873 the number of cases rose to 1,304 with 469 convictions. In South Carolina, the trials of Ku Klux Klansmen resulted in a highly publicized round of prosecutions, while nationwide the 1872 elections were largely free of violence.53 The Supreme Court, meanwhile, issued an opinion in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), which, while offering a relatively narrow interpretation of federally protected privileges and immunities, nevertheless affirmed that the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to protect the rights of the formerly enslaved. Despite the progress made in enforcement, white violence against African Americans continued. The worst episode came on Easter Sunday in April 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where white terrorists fought to take control of the local government, murdering and burning perhaps as many as 263

T I MOT HY S. H U E B NE R

150 African Americans in a two-hour battle on the courthouse grounds. While the Grant Administration moved ahead to prosecute the perpetrators, a financial depression hit that year, making the costs of continued federal intervention in southern affairs – financial and political – increasingly apparent. Subsequent years witnessed an uneven record of executive enforcement of these constitutional guarantees, along with a series of Supreme Court decisions that reflected the tension between protecting African Americans’ hard-won rights and respecting state authority. In the Colfax case, United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court avoided the question of whether the rights in question were federally protected under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and instead issued a narrow ruling that focused on flaws in the indictments of the defendants. In United States v. Reese (1876), a case involving municipal election inspectors in Lexington, Kentucky, who had allegedly refused to accept the vote of an African American, the Court focused on invalidating two sections of the Enforcement Act that it deemed too broad. In both instances, the defendants went free.54 The role of the Supreme Court in Reconstruction has been a favorite topic among constitutional historians. Decades ago, Michael Les Benedict argued that the Court under Chief Justice Morrison Waite adhered to a state-centered nationalism that allowed for some judicial protection of blacks’ rights. More recently, Pamela Brandwein builds on Benedict’s insights. In contrast to those who posit a simple declension narrative – that the Court abandoned African Americans – Brandwein shows that the Court’s record during the late nineteenth century was far more nuanced and accommodating of black rights, particularly political and civil rights.55 If the justices at times engaged in formalistic reasoning and deferred to state power, as in Cruikshank and Reese, federal enforcement did not come to an abrupt end. The Justice Department under Republican presidents James A. Garfield and Chester Arthur during the 1880s sought more convictions on average under the Enforcement Act than Grant had during the last two years of his presidency, and the Supreme Court issued important decisions striking down a state law prohibiting black jury service, upholding congressional control over federal elections, and affirming the constitutionality of the Enforcement Act.56 If black political rights – voting, jury service, officeholding – depended on federal enforcement through the courts, black “social rights,” as they were called at the time, quickly faded. Always the most controversial and the least secure, the right of African Americans to associate in society with whites had been written into the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Supreme Court overturned the law, holding that Congress did not have the power to enact such legislation, the first clear and unequivocal defeat for the rights of African Americans in the Supreme Court.57 Even if the Supreme Court did not always affirm the rights of African Americans, taking the long view shows the profound change that occurred in American constitutional and political discourse. During the antebellum era, the Supreme Court promoted economic development while affirming the rights of slaveholders. But the Court’s Dred Scott decision, by attempting to resolve the national debate over slavery through an absolute affirmation of slaveholders’ rights, brought about a constitutional crisis. The election of a Republican president, the secession of most of the southern slaveholding states, and a bloody civil war transformed the American constitutional order. Lincoln exercised 264

LAW, T HE S UP R EME C OURT, AND T H E C O NS T I T U T I O N

unprecedented power in wartime, especially in bringing about the end of slavery. Emancipation then brought to the forefront the rights claims of African Americans, whose lives witnessed a constitutional revolution in the form of the ratification of three constitutional amendments.58 One scholar, Laura F. Edwards, takes the idea of a revolutionized popular notion of rights even further, arguing that war changed the relationship between the people and their government. As the federal government expanded rights during Reconstruction, in Edwards’s telling, African Americans, women, and working people all attempted to give their own meaning to the rights revolution, as they sought to expand the meanings of the Reconstruction amendments into a broad new vision for society.59 Ultimately, although the enforcement of these new constitutional guarantees proved uneven, the post-Civil War era realized a stunning transformation in the nation’s constitutional and political discourse, from upholding the rights of slaveholders to offering new visions of constitutional equality.

Notes 1 In general, the legal and constitutional development of the United States have been treated as separate fields of inquiry, as only a handful of important synthetic works, such as Kermit L. Hall, The Magic Mirror: Law in American History (New York, 1989) and Laura F. Edwards, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (New York, 2015), attempt to consider these subjects together. This essay focuses on U.S. constitutional history, a field that includes the interaction among the various branches of government as well as popular understandings of constitutional values. For a fuller exploration of the themes outlined in this essay, as well as a description of the nineteenth century as exemplifying a “culture of constitutionalism,” see Timothy S. Huebner, Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism (Lawrence, KS, 2016). 2 President Jackson initially appointed Taney to a vacancy on the Court in 1835, but the Senate killed the nomination by indefinitely postponing it and even tried to reduce the Court’s size, in order to eliminate the vacancy altogether. But when Chief Justice John Marshall died at the end of 1835, the determined Jackson nominated Taney for the chief position. By March 1836 when the Senate took up the nomination, the make-up of the Senate had changed, and Taney won confirmation, 29 to 15. On Taney’s nomination, see Henry J. Abraham, Justices, Presidents, and Senators: A History of the U.S. Supreme Court Appointments from Washington to Clinton (Lanham, MD, 1999), 74–76; Timothy S. Huebner, Taney Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy (Santa Barbara, CA, 2003), 8–9. 3 Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 2. 4 There has not been a solid biographical treatment of Taney since Carl B. Swisher’s Roger B. Taney (New York, 1936). James F. Simon’s dual biography, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney (New York, 2006), is the closest thing we have to a recent biographical study of the chief justice. 5 Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, 36 U.S. 420 (1837). 6 License Cases, 46 U.S. 504, 579. 7 Cooley v. Board of Wardens of the Port of Philadelphia, 53 U.S. 299 (1852). 8 The Thomas Jefferson, 23 U.S. 428 (1825). 9 Genesee Chief v. Fitzhugh, 53 U.S. 443, 454 (1851). Taney proceeded to demonstrate how the distinction had been formulated in the first place. In England, he explained, nearly every navigable stream and river fell within the ebb and flow of the tide. Because tidewaters and navigable waters were synonymous, English admiralty jurisdiction was confined to “public navigable waters,” rather than private waters. The same applied to the United States at the time

265

T I MOT HY S. H U E B NE R

10

11

12

13

14

15 16

of the founding. But years of legal debate about the nature of admiralty law only confused the issue. “[T]he public character of the river was in process of time lost sight of, and the jurisdiction of the admiralty treated as if it was limited by the tide,” he wrote. “The description of a public navigable river was substituted in the place of the thing intended to be described.” Surprisingly little has been written about the Taney Court and economic issues. See Stanley I. Kutler, Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case (Philadelphia, 1971); and, more recently, Tony Allan Freyer, The Passenger Cases and the Commerce Clause: Immigrants, Blacks, and States’ Rights in Antebellum America (Lawrence, KS, 2014). See also Huebner, Taney Court, 115–128, 142–155; R. Kent Newmyer, The Supreme Court under Marshall and Taney, 2nd ed. (Wheeling, IL, 2006), 89–117. For a classic interpretation, see Felix Frankfurter, The Commerce Clause under Marshall, Taney, and Waite (Chapel Hill, NC, 1937). Cass R. Sunstein, One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Groves v. Slaughter, 40 U.S. 449 (1841); Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 41 U.S. 539 (1842); Jones v. Van Zandt, 46 U.S. 215 (1847); Moore v. Illinois, 55 U.S. 13 (1852); Strader v. Graham, 51 U.S. 82 (1851). On slavery and the Taney Court, see Earl M. Maltz, Slavery and the Supreme Court, 1825–1861 (Lawrence, KS, 2009); and H. Robert Baker, Prigg v. Pennsylvania: Slavery, the Supreme Court, and the Ambivalent Constitution (Lawrence, KS, 2012). One biographical sketch at the time described Taney as having “a reputation beyond reproach or the breath of calumny, a purity of life that no man can assail, a frank, independent, manly uprightness of conduct which knows no guile.” George Van Santvoord, Sketches of the Lives and Judicial Services of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States (New York, 1854), 533. The Monthly Law Reporter, which included a review of Van Santvoord’s book, agreed with this laudatory assessment of Taney. See “The Chief Justices of the United States,” The Monthly Law Reporter (Nov. 1854), 370–372. Newmyer, The Supreme Court under Marshall and Taney, 118. The literature on Dred Scott v. Sandford is enormous, but the most important works are Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York, 1978); Paul Finkelman, Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents (New York, 1997); Earl M. Maltz, Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery (Lawrence, KS, 2007); Mark A. Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (Cambridge, 2006); Austin Allen, The Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857 (Athens, GA, 2006). For Dred Scott as a watershed in the broader context of American constitutional politics, see, in particular, Huebner, Liberty and Union, 88–96. Contemporary scholars have continued this debate, with most historians, interestingly, arguing that the Constitution was an unquestionably pro-slavery pact. See especially Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (Armonk, NY, 2001), 3–36; and David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York, 2010). Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York, 2001), 15–48, argues that the Constitution was neutral on the subject of slavery. An older tradition took a more favorable view of the founders. See William Freehling “The Founding Fathers and Slavery,” American Historical Review 77 (1972), 81–93. Recently, Sean Wilentz has begun reviving this traditional interpretation of the anti-slavery founding fathers. For a short summary of his view, see Wilentz, “Lincoln and Douglass Had It Right,” New York Times, September 16, 2015, A27. Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney, 100. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 407 (1857); Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil, 28–30. Lincoln made clear that he “never ha[d] complained especially of the Dred Scott decision because it held that a negro could not be a citizen,” in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 3 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1953), 299, 179, as quoted in Graber, Dred Scott, 32. Strikingly absent from the mainstream national debate over slavery was a discussion of the rights of black people. Few argued for absolute racial equality under the Constitution or the law. Lincoln, in fact, stayed away from this issue as much as he could in his debates with Stephen Douglas and referred only to the basic right – which he believed lay in

266

LAW, T HE S UP R EME C OURT, AND T H E C O NS T I T U T I O N

17 18 19

20 21

22 23

24 25 26

27

the Declaration of Independence – that a person could not be owned by another person. Even as late as March 1861 in his first inaugural address, Lincoln encapsulated the sectional conflict neither in terms of black rights, the existence of slavery in the South, nor even the enforcement of the fugitive slave law. Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address – Final Text, March 4, 1861,” in Basler, Collected Works, vol. 4, 263–265. 60 U.S. 393, 450. The Fifth Amendment states that no person could “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” 60 U.S. 393, 450, 451. 60 U.S. 393, 451. Taney’s point about territorial legislatures was a significant one, for this was the supposed compromise position articulated in Congress by Democrats led by Stephen Douglas. Taney’s holding put Douglas in an awkward position in his debates with Lincoln, as Taney’s opinion represented pro-slavery extremism. See Allen, Origins of the Dred Scott Case; and Austin Allen, “Rethinking Dred Scott: New Context for an Old Case,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 82 (2007), 141–176. One justice, the firebrand Virginian Peter V. Daniel, went farther than Taney, even arguing that “the property of the master in his slave” held an exalted position, as “the only private property which the Constitution has specifically recognized.” 60 U.S. 393, 490. The decision represented a significant change in Taney’s own opinions on the subject. As a young lawyer in Maryland nearly four decades before, Taney had expressed anti-slavery sentiments, opposed a pro-slavery resolution in the state senate during the Missouri crisis, and liberated nearly all of his own slaves. But by 1857, Taney’s view had changed dramatically. See Timothy S. Huebner, “Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue: Looking Beyond – and Before – Dred Scott,” Journal of American History 97 (2010), 1–22. For a brilliant explanation of the significance of the Dred Scott dissents in Supreme Court history, see Melvin I. Urofsky, Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court’s History and the Nation’s Constitutional Dialogue (New York, 2015), 69–81. On the Taney Court in general, see Huebner, Taney Court; Newmyer, Supreme Court under Marshall and Taney. Apart from Joseph Story, we still know relatively little about the other justices on the Taney Court. Stuart Streichler offers a compelling examination of Curtis, Justice Curtis and the Civil War Era: At the Crossroads of American Constitutionalism (Charlottesville, VA, 2005), and biographies of Justices John McKinley and Phillip Barbour have recently appeared, but there have been no major studies of McLean, James Wayne, or John Catron for decades. See Steven P. Brown, John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court: Circuit Riding in the Old Southwest (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2012); William S. Belko, Phillip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew’s Court (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2016). Allen, Origins of the Dred Scott Case. Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address – Final Text,” 269. See Phillip S. Paludan’s classic essay, “The American Civil War Considered as a Crisis in Law and Order,” American Historical Review 77 (1972), 1013–1034. On Lincoln’s constitutionalism, see especially Mackubin Thomas Owens, “Abraham Lincoln as Practical Constitutional Lawyer,” in Roger Billings and Frank J. Williams, eds., Abraham Lincoln, Esq.: The Legal Career of America’s Greatest President (Lexington, KY, 2010), 205–227; and Herman Belz, Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era (New York, 1998), 72–100. In essence, it was one of the few “rights” written into the original Constitution, before the addition of the Bill of Rights. “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended,” the text reads, “unless in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” Only under specific circumstances, “rebellion or invasion,” could Congress take such a step, and at the time that Lincoln asked his attorney general to look into the matter, Congress had never before done so. A president had certainly never done so. The leading constitutional scholar of the early nineteenth century, Justice Joseph Story, had concluded that only Congress possessed any power relative to suspension of the writ.

267

T I MOT HY S. H U E B NE R

28 Although there has been some confusion among scholars about whether it was a federal circuit court opinion or a Supreme Court decision written “in chambers,” Jonathan W. White convincingly concludes that Taney wrote the opinion as a circuit judge, but that he attempted to lend more weight to the opinion by indicating that he wrote it as chief justice. See White, Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman (Baton Rouge, LA, 2011), 40–42. 29 Ex parte Merryman, 17 F. Cas. 144, 149. 30 Lincoln, “Message to Congress,” July 4, 1861, in Basler, Collected Works, vol. 4, 430. Although Merrryman was indicted for treason, the charges against him were later dropped and he was eventually released. The case has generated a fair amount of recent scholarship. See White, Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War; Brian McGinty, The Body of John Merryman: Abraham Lincoln and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus (Cambridge, MA, 2011); James A. Dueholm, “Lincoln’s Suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus: An Historical and Constitutional Analysis,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 29 (2008), 47–66; Arthur T. Downey, “The Conflict between the Chief Justice and the Chief Executive: Ex Parte Merryman,” Journal of Supreme Court History 31 (2006), 262–278. See also, for the showdown as an example of the divergent constitutional visions of Lincoln and Taney, Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney, 177–198; and Timothy S. Huebner, “Lincoln versus Taney: Liberty, Power, and the Clash of the Constitutional Titans,” Albany Government Law Review 3 (2010), 615–643. For a discussion of this dispute in the larger context of the history of the federal courts of the time, see Peter Charles Hoffer, Williamjames Hull Hoffer, and N. E. H. Hull, The Federal Courts: An Essential History (New York, 2016), 148–166. 31 Lincoln believed that the suspension served the greater purpose of preserving the Union, and in the same message he described the Union cause as synonymous with the larger cause of liberty. “On the side of the Union,” he argued “it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men – to lift artificial weights from all shoulders – to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all – to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.” “Message to Congress,” 430, 438. 32 A few months into his presidency, Lincoln confronted three vacancies on the high court. One existed before he took office, another resulted from the death of Justice John McLean in March 1861, and a third seat opened up after the April resignation of Justice John A. Campbell, who after secession returned to Alabama. Republicans saw a prime opportunity to reshape the judiciary, and most supported a reorganization of the federal circuits as a means of achieving this goal. Because members of the Supreme Court also served as federal circuit court judges, rearrangement of the circuits would affect the make-up of the Court, as justices typically came from the circuits that they represented. Proposals to redraw circuit lines focused on redistributing the nation’s population into nine relatively equal circuits based on the results of the census. Such a plan would also, not coincidentally, increase the number of northern circuits and reduce the number in the South. In January 1862 Lincoln appointed Noah H. Swayne of Ohio to take the seat that had been held by the deceased McLean (another Ohio native), and in July, Congress enacted legislation regarding the circuits. Under the new law, the first three circuits remained the same as before. The other six circuits, however, looked vastly different, with all of the slaveholding states consolidated into three circuits, rather than five. Two circuits that had been composed entirely of slave states thus disappeared, allowing Lincoln to appoint an Iowan, Justice Samuel Miller, for one seat, and an Illinois native, Lincoln’s old friend David Davis, for the other. With these appointments, the Supreme Court again was composed of nine justices, three of whom were Republicans who owed their seats to Lincoln. Congress added a tenth justice in March 1863 to serve the western circuit that included California and Oregon, to which Lincoln appointed Stephen J. Field, a leading California jurist. This marked the first of three adjustments to the size of the Court enacted by Congress between 1863 and 1869. In 1866, just after the war ended, Congress enacted legislation reducing the Court’s size by attrition to seven, thereby preventing President Johnson from nominating any justices. Three

268

LAW, T HE S UP R EME C OURT, AND T H E C O NS T I T U T I O N

33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40

41

42

43

44 45

46

years later, with Johnson out of office, Congress returned the size of the Court to nine justices. See Brian McGinty, Lincoln and the Court (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 92–117; Huebner, Taney Court, 23–29. Grier had been appointed by Democratic President James K. Polk in 1846. Prize Cases, 67 U.S. 635 (1863). The Prize Cases have generated little recent historical scholarship, but see McGinty, Lincoln and the Court, 118–143. See, on the constitutional and legal rationale for emancipation, Edwards, Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, 64–89; and Kate Masur, “‘Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation’: The Word ‘Contraband’ and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States,” Journal of American History 93 (2007), 1050–1084. Act of July 17, 1862, ch. 195, 12 Stat. 591. Paul Finkelman, “Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Limits of Constitutional Change,” Supreme Court Review (2008), 349–387, makes the point that Lincoln needed a constitutional framework, political support, and a military victory in order to move ahead with a proclamation. By September 1862, Lincoln had all three. Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, September 22, 1862, in Basler, Collected Works, vol. 5, 435. James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York, 2014), 367–376. The Lincoln Administration went beyond emancipation, taking subtle aim at white supremacy. A November 1862 opinion written by Attorney General Bates argued for the citizenship of free black men born in the United States, and the1863 Lieber Code, a list of rules of warfare, included a color-blind clause with regard to prisoners of war. On the Lieber Code, see John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York, 2012). Simon, for example, finds “much to admire” in Taney’s opinion, but he ends up criticizing Taney for ignoring the immediate circumstances of the rebellion. Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney, 193. Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago, 2000); Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (New York, 2002); Jeffrey Rogers Hummell, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War (Chicago, 1996). See also Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York, 1962). Recent studies include Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York, 1992); Daniel Farber, Lincoln’s Constitution (Chicago, 2004); and Dennis Bowman, Lincoln and Citizens’ Rights in Civil War Missouri: Balancing Freedom and Security (Baton Rouge, LA, 2011), all of which, in the final analysis, exonerate Lincoln of charges of executive overreach. For the most compelling defenses of Lincoln on emancipation and the expansion of national power, respectively, see Phillip Shaw Paludan, “Lincoln and Negro Slavery: I Haven’t Got Time for the Pain,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 27 (2006), 1–23; and James M. McPherson, “Liberty and Power in the Second American Revolution,” in Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York, 1991), 131–152. Although not discussed in this essay, it should be noted the Confederate President Jefferson Davis confronted similar issues. On the Confederacy, see Mark E. Neely, Jr., Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism (Charlottesville, VA, 1999); and Huebner, Liberty and Union, 249–284. Belz, Abraham Lincoln, 17–43. Huebner portrays African American activism as a form of constitutionalism – “black constitutionalism” – that played a critical role in overthrowing the antebellum pro-slavery order. See Huebner, Liberty and Union, 297–305, 320–324. Section One of the amendment reads as follows: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist in the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” On the Thirteenth Amendment,

269

T I MOT HY S. H U E B NE R

47

48 49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56 57

see Leonard L. Richards, Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment (Chicago, 2015); and Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (New York, 2001). “The adoption of the amendment reunites us beyond all power of disruption,” Johnson wrote. “It heals the wound that is still imperfectly closed: it removes slavery, the element which has so long perplexed and divided the country; it makes of us once more a united people, renewed and strengthened, bound more than ever to mutual affection and support.” “Message of the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress at the Commencement of the First Session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress,” December 4, 1865, in Paul H. Bergeron, ed., The Papers of Andrew Johnson (Knoxville, TN, 1991), vol. 9, 472. Ironically, Johnson’s home state of Tennessee, where Radical Governor William G. Brownlow held sway, was the one exception. Tennessee ratified the amendment in July 1866. In making this argument, Bingham in effect hoped to overturn Barron v. Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243 (1833), a Supreme Court decision that had held that the guarantees of the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. From the perspective of northern Republicans, black voting had to be written into this portion of the Fourteenth Amendment. By abolishing the Three-Fifths Clause, the amendment increased the South’s political representation in Congress. In order to thwart the old Slave Power that had long held sway in the South, Section Two thus conditioned this increase in representatives in Congress on the extension of suffrage to black men. Frederick Douglass, “The Need for Continued Anti-Slavery Work, Speech at the ThirtySecond Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, May 10, 1865,” in Phillip S. Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (1950; repr. Chicago, 1999), 578. A second section repeated word-for-word the enforcement clauses that had been included in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Particularly because Republicans on the East and the West coasts wanted to allow states to continue to limit the voting rights of groups such as the Irish and the Chinese, the most far-reaching proposal for the Fifteenth Amendment – an affirmatively-worded version – was practically doomed from the start. William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore, 1965), remains the best account of this story. Huebner, Liberty and Union, 389–398. Grant and enforcement is an understudied topic, but see Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens, GA, 1997); Robert Kaczorowski, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, the Department of Justice, and Civil Rights, 1866–1876 (New York, 1985); Everett Swinney, “Enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment, 1870–1877,” Journal of Southern History 28 (1962), 202– 218; and Lou Falkner Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871–1872 (Athens, GA, 1996). Timothy S. Huebner, “Emory Speer and Federal Enforcement of the Rights of African Americans, 1880–1910,” American Journal of Legal History 55 (2015), 34–63, takes the story beyond the traditional boundaries of Reconstruction. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 545 (1876); United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1876). See also Robert M. Goldman, Reconstruction and Black Suffrage: Losing the Vote in Reese & Cruikshank (Lawrence, KS, 2001). Michael Les Benedict, “Preserving Federalism: Reconstruction and the Waite Court,” Supreme Court Review (1978), 39–79; Pamela Brandwein, Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction (Ann Arbor, MI, 2014). See also Paul Kens, The Supreme Court under Morrison R. Waite, 1874– 1888 (Columbia, SC, 2010); Ronald M. Labbe and Jonathan Lurie, The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment (Lawrence, KS, 2003); Michael A. Ross, Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court during the Reconstruction Era (Baton Rouge, LA, 2003). Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880); Ex parte Siebold 100 U.S. 371 (1880); Ex parte Yarbrough 110 U.S. 651 (1884). Historians need to know more about all of these cases. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).

270

LAW, T HE S UP R EME C OURT, AND T H E C O NS T I T U T I O N

58 For decades, beginning in the late eighteenth century, free blacks in the North had asserted their rights as men and as Americans, and African Americans continually advocated an agenda of freedom – not just emancipation, but the full panoply of rights under the Declaration of Independence. When emancipation came, it came largely because of their persistent efforts in pushing this agenda. These continued attempts to claim America’s heritage of liberty – I call it “black constitutionalism” – helped to create a new discourse of rights. For an elaboration of this argument, see Huebner, Liberty and Union. 59 Edwards, Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

271

Part IV AMERICA IN THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES

17 WOMEN’S RIGHTS A N D G EN DER IDEOLOGY, 1 8 4 8 – 1 8 9 0 Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz

The image of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention has long dominated understanding of the emergence of an official women’s rights movement in the United States. The sentimental story of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – having met eight years prior at a world antislavery convention in which antislavery men barred antislavery women from the main floor – collaborating to launch a movement offers a coherent, even poetic, origins narrative. Stanton herself solidified it in her History of Woman Suffrage: As Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wended their way arm in arm down Great Queen Street that night . . . a missionary work for the emancipation of woman in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ was then and there inaugurated.”1 In her foundational 1959 work, Eleanor Flexner complicated this narrative, describing the reform work of the 1820s and 1830s. But Seneca Falls still loomed large. The way had been opened, and there were workers here and there hewing away at prejudice and law; but they were scattered and isolated from one another . . . What was needed now was a sharp impetus – leadership and, above all, a program. These were to be the achievement of the Seneca Falls convention . . . from which the inception of the woman’s rights movement in the United States is commonly dated.2 The resulting “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,” a clever repurposing of the Declaration of Independence, declared women – like men – created equal. Though suffrage would come to dominate post-Civil War women’s rights activism, in 1848 its denial was just one (admittedly, the most controversial) of eighteen grievances. Appealing for both story and simplicity, this narrative still dominates our understanding of women’s rights in the years after 1848.3 In recent decades historians have moved away from it, instead describing a multifaceted women’s rights movement. Nancy Hewitt argues that we should think of the 1848 moment not as a beginning but as a culmination, a “critical moment when certain strains of women’s rights ideology and activism crystallized.”4 Describing alternate visions by African American women focused on ownership of body, Irish immigrant women focused on employment, and American Indian loss of matrilineal heritage, she writes, “Clearly, woman’s rights were born in multiple arenas, 275

BO N N I E L AUG HL I N- S C H U LT Z

defined in myriad ways, and advocated by diverse groups of ‘American’ women.”5 Her work and that of others challenges historians at the present to displace middle-class and elite white women as the story of women’s rights. Lori Ginzberg’s work on an 1846 petition for women’s rights also challenges an easy, one-convention origins story.6 All of this marks the present as an exciting moment in women’s history. This essay offers historical and historiographical coverage of women’s rights after 1848.7 Against a backdrop of nineteenth-century gender ideology, antebellum and Civil War-era women’s rights work culminated in debate over the Fifteenth Amendment. Out of it, two sometimes-competing women’s national rights organizations emerged, with a vision tightly focused on suffrage. In addition, myriad groups of women envisioned a “woman’s rights” that was not solely defined by gaining the franchise.

From Seneca Falls to the Civil War In a “stunning” text, the Declaration of Sentiments offered eighteen grievances, ranging from franchise to civil and legal position to lack of education to male claims to “the prerogative of Jehovah himself . . . [and] his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.”8 After women’s rights enthusiasts convened the first National Convention for Women’s Rights in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, national meetings were annually convened. In 1851, Lucy Stone outlined her vision of women’s rights. “The present state of things,” she noted, “grows out of the idea that woman is to live solely as a companion for man.”9 Ernestine Rose seconded, “Let us first obtain ourselves . . . Give us ourselves and all that belongs to us will follow.”10 At conventions, reformers spoke on such topics as dress reform, marriage laws, suffrage, education, and the lack of economic opportunity for women.11 The press paid attention to the small movement, Sylvia Hoffert notes: even negative press depicting reformers as crowing hens allowed “a movement with little money, no permanent organization, and no official newspaper of its own out of obscurity by bringing it to the attention of a national audience and thereby inadvertently helped to incorporate women more completely into public life.”12 Scholars emphasize the transatlantic nature of the development of women’s rights ideology. Reformers’ shared antislavery heritage provided a link between emerging suffrage movements in Britain and the United States.13 Additionally, they shared ideas. Both Mott and Martha Wright kept a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman on prominent display in their homes, with Wright saying it was “to shock guests.”14 Bonnie Anderson has examined how women in the United States, France, Great Britain, and Germany advocated for revisions to marriage and divorce laws; in them she has found a “loosely knit, international women’s movement, the first ever created.”15 Early on, African American women challenged white activists to broaden their understanding of who their nascent movement served and to look beyond the “decidedly middle-class version of women’s grievances” they had offered in 1848.16 At Akron in 1851, former slave and activist Sojourner Truth had proclaimed, “ar’n’t I a woman?”17 Martha Jones traces how debate over the “woman question” – what rights women should enjoy, especially public ones – was ever-present in African American public culture from 1832 until the turn of the century.18 African American suffragists such as Harriet Forten Purvis 276

WO MEN ’S R I G HT S A N D G EN D E R I D E O L O G Y, 1 8 4 8 – 1 8 9 0

and Sarah Redmond participated in 1850s conventions, with Purvis and her sister Margarette Forten partially responsible for organizing the 1854 convention in Philadelphia.19 By the mid-1850s, Stanton had joined forces with Susan B. Anthony. Their partnership was one of the most important of the nineteenth century. Lisa Tetrault writes, “Anthony not only helped Stanton carve out time to write; she pushed her to do so. Stanton penned the manifestoes and, together, with Anthony’s consummate organizing skill, they delivered them.”20 In 1854 Stanton addressed the New York legislature, and in 1860, the Second New York State Married Women’s Property Act passed, giving wives the right to sell and own property, control wages, and have access to children after separation or divorce.21 Stanton spoke in 1860 at the tenth annual Women’s Rights Convention and went further, calling for liberalization of divorce law and describing marriage as “a mere legal contract.”22 Much agitation at the convention resulted, and the press was equally scandalized, with the New York Tribune calling the idea “‘simply shocking.’”23

The Nineteenth-Century Gender Ideological Context for Women’s Rights In 1860, abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared, “She is either exactly like man, – exactly like him, teetotally like him, – and if she is, then a ballot-box based upon brains belongs to her as well as him: or she is different, and then I do not know how to vote for her.”24 While Phillips’s audience may have been sympathetic, the majority of the American public was not. Nancy Isenberg flatly states, “Equality remained a concept that somehow did not apply to women.”25 The notion of an independent female citizen had been fraught with danger since the Revolution, with both Rosemarie Zagarri and Lori Ginzberg describing a process in which “the exclusion of women, as women, from formal political life was made explicit.”26 In the nineteenth century, a prescriptive (if not lived) separate spheres ideology evolved, proclaiming that men and women were fundamentally different and thus naturally suited for different domains of life: men lived in the public sphere, one made of work and politics, while naturally maternal women belonged to the private sphere of home and family. Barbara Welter’s seminal 1966 article described the four pillars of what she termed “the cult of true womanhood”: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.27 Godey’s Lady’s Book, begun in 1830, reflected antebellum understanding of women’s domestic realm. One story from a January 1851 issue featured the story of Catherine Grant, a woman whose “moral strength of character” and “unvarying love and constancy” helped domesticate her husband Willis. Along with the story went an illustrated plate, titled “The Constant,” which showed domestic scenes. At the center was pictured a young wife and mother next to a cradle, with husband looking fondly upon both wife and baby.28 Such stories like this showed the domestic power of wives and mothers. Historian Sara Evans reports, “The problem of female citizenship was solved by endowing domesticity itself with political meaning.”29 Scholars concur that domestic ideology did provide some opportunities, both through rhetorical exaltation of women’s ability to be moral arbiters and through real access to education, work as schoolteachers, and to quasi-public work as reformers.30 Christine Stansell notes, “In the North, though, the fight against slavery gave cover to feminist organizing, giving women space to gather in the interstices of antislavery clamor, away from withering scrutiny.”31 At the same time, separate spheres doctrine and the 277

BO N N I E L AUG HL I N- S C H U LT Z

nineteenth-century glorification of the home were clearly, and fundamentally, restrictive to American women.32 African American, Mexican American, and Native American women could not access the privileges that domestic ideology afforded and instead were, as the century went on, increasingly judged upon their ability to make homes. Domesticity, Jane Simonsen has noted, was “used by the white middle class to uphold its power in a diversifying and expansionist nation.”33 Additionally, if women attempted to navigate a world outside the private sphere they were denounced as “unnatural”: acts of independence were not seen as legitimate or valid unless they were couched from a stance of dependency. The way in which Amelia Bloomer and other dress reformers were mocked for abandoning long dresses for pantaloons is just one example.34 At the same time, ideas about the family and marriage were changing, too, offering new norms particularly for middle-class, white women. In the early nineteenth century, scholars concur that new romantic ideals of companionate marriage and marital choice emerged and that marriage became “a union of love, based on the attraction of opposites.”35 Antislavery and women’s rights reformers in particular became concerned about creating families in line with their values, with Lucy Stone taking the bold stance of keeping her name upon her marriage.36 Some pushed even more radical notions. Mary Gove Nichols published a book in 1854 that “argued forcefully against traditional monogamy and in favor of freedom of affections in love relations.”37 Communitarian and utopian experiments such as the Shakers and Oneida Community also offered new visions of marriage and sexuality. Ann Braude has argued that Spiritualism, too, provided a radical foundation for suffrage.38 These radicals were by definition outliers. But ideas of companionate marriage took hold and shaped conversations about the rights of women – as did new access to contraception. Paulina Wright and a handful of others lectured on women’s health and reproductive anatomy, while Nichols advocated that women deserved the right “to decide whether she will have children and to choose the time for having them.”39 Antebellum speakers advised on the use of abstinence and rhythm as well as douching, using a sponge, condoms, and abortion, while remedies for “blocked menses” doubled as abortifacients. But contraception was not necessarily envisioned as part of “women’s rights.” Stanton and other reformers advocated what they came to call voluntary motherhood, which to them did not rely on contraception but instead a woman’s right to refuse sex to her husband. Though when we hear Matilda Jocelyn Gage’s proclamation that “Woman must first of all be held as having a right to herself” we might assume she advocated contraception, instead she meant voluntary motherhood.40 Due to a combination of voluntary motherhood, changing notions of marriage, and what Linda Gordon describes as a “thriving” market in birth control (despite the rhetoric of voluntary motherhood), the century saw a remarkable decline in fertility, from 7.04 children on average in 1800 to 3.56 children on average in 1900.41

The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender, and a Crisis for Women’s Rights Activists The Civil War was a watershed moment for women. For African Americans, it offered the opportunity for self-emancipation, and southern slaves fled to Union lines. For white women, the Civil War demanded new roles. Women in both North and South took part 278

WO MEN ’S R I G HT S A N D G EN D E R I D E O L O G Y, 1 8 4 8 – 1 8 9 0

in voluntary associations. In the North, Sanitary Commission workers moved outside of the private sphere, and by war’s end, Mary Walker, clad in jacket and slacks, served as a surgeon to soldiers.42 Women’s association work, in turn, helped create a new postwar vision of what women could be and do, giving way to new benevolent and moral reform work, such as the re-invigorated temperance movement.43 Anti-abolitionist northerners and proslavery southerners alike had conflated fears of abolition and women’s rights reformers in the decade prior to the war. Describing the war’s many disruptions, historian LeeAnn Whites refers to a “crisis in gender,” particularly in the South.44 Stephanie McCurry argues that during the war, white women, like slaves, became a political force to be reckoned with, “a salient new constituency in Confederate political life.”45 This said, for the most part the war’s end brought what Elizabeth Leonard describes as “the predictable return of prewar notions about gender and proper behavior.”46 Elite white women in the South – never at the forefront of women’s rights agitation to begin with – retreated to prewar gender conventions, seeing this as critical to maintaining white supremacy.47 Thavolia Glymph powerfully describes elite women’s “horrified glimpses of the new order” and a world upside down.48 But the world remained a new one, one in which African American women sought to carve out life on their own terms.49 During the war itself, women’s rights activists had been politically active, hoping to shape Union war aims. Stanton, Anthony, and Stone had formed the Women’s National Loyal League, ultimately submitting over 250,000 signatures to Congress to urge Lincoln to adopt abolition of slavery as a war aim.50 The year after the war – with much discussion of black suffrage in the air – Mott, Stone, Stanton, and Anthony formed the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) in order to support voting rights for both blacks and women. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper had urged members of its 1866 founding convention to remember that the rights of black men, black women, and white women were all “bound up together.”51 At war’s end, though, white activists were more than disappointed: the Civil War amendments consciously drew a “sharp line” between race and sex, with the proposed Fifteenth Amendment extending the franchise to African American men but not to women. Amy Dru Stanley reports, “Emancipation turned the slaveholders’ world upside down, but the bonds of marriage remained intact.”52 Expectations of apolitical domesticity remained the standard, north and south. Although some such as Lucy Stone urged passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, others – notably, Stanton and Anthony – lobbied against it. Ellen Dubois explains their viewpoint: “From a feminist perspective . . . this exclusively masculine definition of democracy was a step backward for freedom.”53 Ultimately, white women’s rights leaders reached an impasse, splitting over whether to support the Fifteenth Amendment despite its omission of woman suffrage. Events in Kansas furthered tensions. In 1867, the Kansas legislature put forward two referendums, one for woman suffrage and one for African American suffrage. Lack of Republican support for the former led Stanton and Anthony to travel to Kansas, and to the shock of many they aligned themselves with George Train, a racist, race-baiting Democrat who favored woman suffrage. In 1869, Frederick Douglass publicly rebuked the pair, and scholars since have debated the role of racism in their mindset and opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment. Often, scholars divide postbellum suffragists into two camps: those who were principled and fought only for justice and those who compromised their pursuit of justice with racism 279

BO N N I E L AUG HL I N- S C H U LT Z

and nativism in the name of expediency.54 Rebecca Mead cautions us against a “falsely reductive,” too-neat dichotomy, saying that many activists acted in the name of both expediency and justice.55 The justice-expediency argument also overlooks the very personal nature of some of the racism – that is, that personal viewpoints were expressed because they were believed, not just because they were expedient means to win supporters to the cause. Christine Stansell argues that “it was the caste system of sexual privilege that was appalling, not black manhood suffrage per se: the replacement of the white man’s democracy with an ‘aristocracy of sex.’” Yet Stansell concedes the ugliness of the fight: “it is also true that this was the moment when Elizabeth Cady Stanton exploded with racist and nativist gibes, inveighing in public and private against ignorant degraded Negro and foreign men who got to vote instead of noble ‘Anglo-Saxon’ educated women.”56 The issue remains heavily contested. Ann Gordon, editor of the magisterial Stanton and Anthony papers project at Rutgers, argues that Stanton’s “luster as an advocate of women’s voting rights is dimming under the close scrutiny of intellectual and cultural historians focused on her racial constructions.”57 Universal suffrage, she argues, remained critical to Stanton. Faye Dudden is more critical, opening her recent monograph not with Seneca Falls but with a description of a Revolution piece in which Stanton “dipped her pen into a tincture of white racism and sketched a reference to a nightmarish figure, the black racist.”58 Stanton biographer Lori Ginzberg, too, notes that Stanton drew upon a powerful sense of her own class and cultural superiority. And she seems to have been deaf to how her rhetoric – as well as her assertion, contrary to evidence, that women faced “the hostility everywhere of black men themselves,” – both undermined her most principled claims and deepened the coming schism with old colleagues and friends.59

A Divided, Multifaceted Movement, 1869–1890 Due in large part to the fight over the Fifteenth Amendment, the American Equal Rights Association collapsed. Two competing associations formed in the wake of its demise. Stanton and Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), while Stone and husband Henry Blackwell formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and founded the Woman’s Journal. The AWSA focused on campaigns for suffrage at the state level, while the NWSA pushed for a national amendment: in less than two years, Anthony lectured 148 times (in 140 towns) on what they described as the Sixteenth Amendment.60 Despite their differences, Jean Baker notes, if its support of the Fifteenth Amendment, its inclusion of men, and its base in Boston differentiated the American from its rival, the National, in its approach to getting the vote, the American depended on the same techniques. Outsiders often had trouble distinguishing between the two.61 Both organizations, too, Baker acknowledges, were largely middle-class and white, and as time went on, neither made an effort to appeal to black and working-class women. Both lobbied the legislative committees in state and territorial 280

WO MEN ’S R I G HT S A N D G EN D E R I D E O L O G Y, 1 8 4 8 – 1 8 9 0

legislatures. Both organized public meetings, county conventions, and lectures; both held money-raising festivals and bazaars. And for twenty-two years both resisted a merger.62 This was costly, Baker and others assert, due to resulting duplication of efforts and the lack of efficiency, particularly given that the movement was “numerically small and organizationally limited.”63 As part of their factional struggle, suffragists turned to their own history. In a compelling work, Lisa Tetrault traces the memory-creation of the late nineteenth century: it was only then, she asserts, that Seneca Falls emerged as an origins story.64 As late as 1870, Stanton had dated the origins of the American movement to the 1850 national convention, but now, a new origins story was adopted, with Stanton’s demand for suffrage (rather than the other resolutions in the “Declaration of Sentiments”) at its forefront. Like Nancy Isenberg, Tetrault places Stanton and Anthony, particularly through their authorship of History of Woman Suffrage, at the center of this myth-making. “They built the Seneca Falls mythology piece by piece – sometimes unconsciously, if nevertheless deliberately – to market their particular agenda for women’s rights and also to insist upon women’s place in national memory.”65 Narrowed focus on suffrage marked much of the movement from 1870 onward.66 Carol Faulkner describes how in January 1869, Lucretia Mott “presided over the first women’s suffrage (as opposed to women’s rights) convention.”67 Though publications like the Woman’s Journal and Anthony’s speeches would highlight multiplicity of aims, the overall institutional push was towards suffrage.68 From 1869 until 1920, Jean Baker argues, “the expansive intentions of nineteenth-century feminists disappeared into narrower, mostly local service projects that had little impact on the status of women . . . the timeconsuming work of suffrage campaigns made attention to other causes impossible.”69 Out of Stanton and Anthony’s NWSA and the focus on suffrage came the “New Departure,” a strategy based upon a novel argument: women did not need to argue that the vote be given to them because they already had it. The citizenship, equal protection, and due process guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment were given to all citizens, and women as people were citizens, entitled to the franchise. Victoria Woodhull appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to make the case.70 Adopting the strategy, women – ranging from two elderly sisters in Connecticut to the Grimkés and fifty others in Boston to 200 black women dressed in men’s clothing in North Carolina – attempted to vote in the years leading up to the 1872 presidential election.71 Mary Olney Brown wrote to Frederick Douglass to argue specifically that African American women, too, were included, this time in the Fifteenth Amendment.72 Ellen Dubois notes the radical nature of this strategy: like the upstate New York petitioners of 1846, the New Departurists boldly claimed a right they insisted was already – naturally – theirs.73 Two court cases quickly dashed their hopes. In Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), the Supreme Court rejected Illinois lawyer Myra Bradwell’s application for admission to the bar, denying that the Constitution gave married women the right to employment. Two years later, the justices turned down Virginia Minor’s claim that voting was a right of citizenship. Two years after Susan B. Anthony had been put on trial for voting in a presidential election – a “signal that Republicans were ready to dispose of the New 281

BO N N I E L AUG HL I N- S C H U LT Z

Departure” – Minor v. Happersett (1875) marked its end, though Belva Lockwood would run for president in 1884 and 1888.74 In response, suffragists protested the next year, the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. Lucy Stone urged women to celebrate the 4th of July as a “chance for moral protest . . . for before another hundred years it must surely be that the growth of public sentiment will sweep away all distinctions based solely on sex.”75 Anthony and others “pirated press passes to gain entry to the main events and to present a Declaration of Rights of Women,” signed by hundreds of women.76 Suffragists found some solace by looking west. After the Civil War, suffrage referendums had been held in five states, and by 1892 four western states – Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, and Utah – had approved universal suffrage.77 A founding generation of western suffragists made some gains in what Rebecca Mead describes as its frontier period; concerned about their lacking political and economic rights, western activists established regional networks.78 Summer 1871 saw Anthony and Stanton traveling west to witness suffrage in action in Wyoming and Utah. The West was no feminist utopia, however. Mead acknowledges that, as in the East, racism marred the movement’s ideals. She describes how California suffragist Anna Ferry Smith, a labor radical, invoked anti-Chinese sentiment to bolster support. As much as the national institutional histories matter, there was not a singular woman’s rights, or even a singular women’s suffrage, movement in the late nineteenth century. Lisa Tetrault writes, “It was, however, more accurately a collection of movements, goals, strategies, and leaders,” and she describes postwar suffrage as “a diverse and uncontrollable social movement.”79 Rebecca Mead draws attention to working-class women’s place in postwar suffrage. “In the past, historians neglected working-class support for woman suffrage,” she writes, “because middle-class suffragists perpetuated the false assumption that urban, immigrant populations were consistently hostile.”80 Leonora Barry’s work to organize female workers with the Knights of Labor offers a useful example of working-class suffrage work.81 In Breadwinners, Lara Vapnek suggests that scholars need to look at efforts to win economic equality alongside suffrage, writing that working women engaged in an “equally intense, if less well-documented struggle to win full economic equality.”82 African American women, too, laid out a postwar definition of women’s rights. In 1876 women in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church effectively gained the right to vote and hold office.83 And such change was also recognized by those focusing on white women’s political power: at an 1874 NWSA convention, Anthony and Stanton proposed that the rights of churchwomen be included in their list of demands.84 Though the majority of African American women did not have much opportunity to participate in organized suffrage activities, Mary Ann Cary, Frances Harper, and others did.85 Harper argued at the AWSA convention in 1873 that women of color needed the vote even more than white women.86 In 1880, Cary organized the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise Association in Washington, D.C.87 At times African American groups could work in interracial alliance with white women, but this was far from always the case. Bettye Collier-Thomas describes how Harper – an educated, refined woman in positions of leadership – was “in some ways disturbing” to women such as Stanton and Mott.88 And while Truth was courted by some white suffragists, Harper, whose rhetoric was more “barbed,” was not.89 282

WO MEN ’S R I G HT S A N D G EN D E R I D E O L O G Y, 1 8 4 8 – 1 8 9 0

For many feminist historians, there is a disappointment with the late nineteenth-century shift, not only with its racist and nativist bent, but with the movement towards a more conservative suffrage fight. This proves especially true once woman suffrage received an endorsement from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and Frances Willard in 1884.90 Dubois chalks up suffragists’ acquiescence to sheer defeat: during the New Departure, women attempted to “march into power directly” – and were soundly defeated.91 Christine Stansell describes how “temperance softened and domesticated women’s suffrage by ladening the issue with religiosity and maternal moralism. It was not because of women’s natural rights but because of their motherly virtues that they deserved political rights.”92 She continues, “The suffrage movement did, unquestionably, incorporate a broader spectrum of opinion than it did before the Civil War. Such is the definition of coalition, but such is also the stuff of frustration for intellectuals.”93 To early women’s rights activists like Stanton, suffrage was never intended to be conservative or based upon women’s special gender proclivities. Dubois notes that early suffrage radicals saw it as “the capstone of women’s emancipation,” and Ginzberg reminds readers that for Stanton, the vote was never “a sufficient end in itself.”94 Instead, it stood for her broader vision of a “world that no one, then or now, could truly imagine: one that separated sex from reproduction, that saw women in positions of power, that denied biblical teachings about women’s subordination to men, and that challenged men’s rule of their households.”95 Nancy Isenberg, too, argues that early conventions’ pursuit of entitlement to rights, national citizenship, and equality under the law were radical in nature: they were “contest[ing] the meaning of ‘consent of the governed’” and making claims that were nothing less than “revolutionary.”96

Conclusions, New Directions, and Possibilities By the time temperance adherents adopted the cause of woman suffrage, the Stanton/ Anthony and Stone factions were nearly reconciled. In 1890, they came together in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and a new generation of women’s rights activists (including Stanton’s daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch) would soon take the helm. In many (often frustrating) ways, our knowledge of that generation’s achievement – the Nineteenth Amendment – has continued to shape our search for women’s rights in the nineteenth century. Is there a way to incorporate broader conceptions of what women’s rights entailed? Re-imagining history, Nancy Hewitt reminds us, is no easy task. But she challenges historians to “recast” the narrative nonetheless, by better including the meaning of women’s rights for African American, American Indian, Mexican American, immigrant, and white working-class women; by highlighting the entire range of issues addressed by early women’s rights advocates, whatever their background; by recognizing the ways that international events – the Mexican-American War, revolutions in Europe, the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, and the Wars of 1898 – shaped the early U.S. women’s movement; and by reframing the suffrage movement through the lens of racial, ethnic, class, regional, and ideological differences at the local and state as well as national level.97 283

BO N N I E L AUG HL I N- S C H U LT Z

Alison Sneider’s recent Suffragists in an Imperial Age is a perfect example of the kind of work Hewitt advocates.98 The biographical turn in women’s history also offers new arenas and ways in which women’s rights histories can be reimagined.99 The list of biographies of figures, famous and otherwise, is ever-growing, with one winning a recent Pulitzer.100 And historians are completing more biographical projects. Patricia Cline Cohen’s forthcoming work on Mary Nichols Gove, for instance, promises to correct how women such as Gove were marginalized from the mainstream women’s rights movement – in their own day and in our recasting of that day in the historical record. To Gove, Cohen argues, the right of self-ownership was the salient aspect of women’s rights.101 New study of figures such as Gove might offer new ways to search for discussion of self-ownership, personhood, and citizenship claims across the field as a whole, and offer perhaps a way to integrate various women’s rights constituencies. In a recent work, Alison Parker looks at the shared beliefs of such reformers as Fanny Wright, Harper, Willard, and Mary Church Terrell, particularly their belief in the obligation of the federal government “to legislate for women’s political and social reform goals.”102 Are there “more complicated, racially egalitarian” histories of early feminism such as Carol Faulkner has found in the biography of Lucretia Mott?103 What kind of women’s rights were imaginable, to reformers and radicals as well as the broader population? And where do ideas of citizenship and nation fit in? I am still awed by Lori Ginzberg’s 1846 upstate New York petitioners, ordinary women who did the astounding work of claiming rights for women as “natural rights.”

Notes 1 Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. I (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881), 61–62. 2 Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, rev. ed. (1959; Cambridge: Belknap, 1975), 71. Keith Melder also emphasizes the importance of this moment in The Beginnings of Sisterhood: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1800–1850 (New York: Schocken, 1977). 3 Sally McMillen’s recent Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) was the first book on women’s history in a series on pivotal moments in American history. Seneca Falls also looms large in Flexner, Century of Struggle; Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). For another consideration of Seneca Falls, see Vivian Rose et al., “Seneca Falls Remembered: A Roundtable on Commemorating the Sesquicentennial of the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention,” Public Historian 21 (Spring 1999): 11–47. 4 Nancy Hewitt, “From Seneca Falls to Suffrage? Reimagining a ‘Master’ Narrative in U.S. Women’s History,” in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 21. In a new preface to her pathbreaking Feminism and Suffrage (1978), Ellen Dubois notes, “Decisions about where to start and where to stop are crucial in giving shape to the history one chooses to examine and interpret” (7). 5 Hewitt, “From Seneca Falls to Suffrage?” 25. 6 Lori Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Women’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 7 Many prominent women’s rights activists (most especially, Stanton and Anthony) are the subject of a host of biographies. It is not possible in the constraints of this essay to discuss

284

WO MEN ’S R I G HT S A N D G EN D E R I D E O L O G Y, 1 8 4 8 – 1 8 9 0

8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15

16 17

18 19

20

21

the rich historiographical field, but I encourage interested readers to seek out these historiographies as well. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins, 58. “Declaration of Sentiments,” as quoted in McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement, 237–239. “Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention, held at Worcester, October Fifteenth and 16th, 1851” (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1852). Quoted in Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 64. Not all women’s rights reformers had the same priorities. Ginzberg notes, “For Anthony, economic opportunity and true independence required political equality and the rest would follow. The issues of marriage, divorce, child rearing, and religion, all of which would increasingly absorb Stanton’s time and attention, struck her friend as secondary and certainly irrelevant to her own experience.” Ginzberg, Untidy Origins, 79. Sylvia Hoffert, When Hens Crow: The Woman’s Rights Movement in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 94. Eileen Hunt Botting and Christine Carey, “Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights Advocates,” American Journal of Political Science 48 (Oct. 2004), 707–722; Sandra Stanley Holton, “‘To Educate Women into Rebellion’: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Creation of a Transatlantic Network of Radical Suffragists,” American Historical Review 99 (Oct. 1994), 1112–1137; Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart, eds., Sisterhood and Slavery: Transatlantic Perspectives on Abolition and Woman’s Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Sherry H. Penney and James D. Livingston, A Very Dangerous Woman: Martha Wright and Women’s Rights (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 68. Bonnie Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2. See also Maggie McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014); Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Ginzberg, Untidy Origins, 65. Mrs. F. D. Gage, “Sojourner Truth,” Herald of Progress (New York), May 16, 1863: 3. On Truth, see Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009). Rosalyn Terborg-Penn notes that Truth spoke over the objections of some white women at the meeting. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 16. Martha Jones, All Bound up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 71. Terborg-Penn notes, “African Americans may not all have been driven to attend the gathering because they identified chiefly with the white feminist agenda. Perhaps people of color came to the convention as abolitionists with an agenda focused on helping Black people, including Black females.” Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 17. See also Willi Coleman, “Architects of a Vision: Black Women and Their Antebellum Quest for Political and Social Equality,” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, ed. Ann Gordon (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 8. The indefatigable Ann Gordon has worked to gather and make accessible the papers of Anthony and Stanton, allowing us to chronicle their incredible partnership. For her reflections on this project, see Ann Gordon, “Who Replaces Stanton, Anthony, and Stone?” Public Historian 21 (Spring 1999): 35–40. For broad history, see Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). By 1860, fourteen states had passed property rights law. Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage, 41.

285

BO N N I E L AUG HL I N- S C H U LT Z

22 Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 159. See also Ellen Dubois, “‘The Pivot of the Marriage Relation’: Stanton’s Analysis of Women’s Subordination in Marriage,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker, ed. Ellen Dubois and Richard Cándida Smith (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 89. 23 Vivian Gornick, The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 67. 24 As quoted in Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), xi. 25 Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America, xii. 26 Ginzberg, Untidy Origins, 31. Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 27 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–174. In recent years, scholars have challenged the concept of separate spheres. See, for example, Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place,” Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9–39; Alison Parker and Stephanie Cole, eds., Women and the Unstable State in Nineteenth-Century America (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000); Carol Lasser, “Beyond Separate Spheres: The Power of Public Opinion,” Journal of the Early Republic 21 (Spring 2001): 115–123; Mary Kelley, “Beyond the Boundaries,” Journal of the Early Republic 21 (Spring 2001): 73–78; Julie Roy Jeffrey, “Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist Women and Separate Spheres,” Journal of the Early Republic 21 (Spring 2001): 79–93; Cathy Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds., No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 28 Alice B. Neal, “The Constant, or the Anniversary Present,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 42 (1851): 65. 29 Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1997), 57. See also Jodi Vandenberg-Daves, Modern Motherhood: An American History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 31. 30 Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the NineteenthCentury United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 31 Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise, 1792 to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 72. On women and politics, see Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Melanie Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924 (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 32 Wendy Gamber refers to the mid-nineteenth century as the golden age of the home. Wendy Gamber, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 2. See also Amy Schrager Lang, The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in NineteenthCentury America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 33 Jane Simonsen, Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860–1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 3. See also Melissa Ryan, “Others and Origins: Nineteenth Century Suffragists and the ‘Indian Problem,’” in Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights, ed. Christine Ridarsky and Mary Huth (Rochester: University of Rochester, 2012), 117–144. 34 Gayle V. Fischer, Pantaloons and Power: Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001). Vivian Gornick chronicles the anguish that mockery inspired in Lucy Stone and others. Gornick, Solitude of Self, 72–74. 35 E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 4. 36 Chris Dixon, Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in 19th Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). Faye Dudden describes the Stone-Blackwell marriage as “a highly publicized experiment in the new, more equal marital relationship that the women’s movement promoted.” Faye Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6.

286

WO MEN ’S R I G HT S A N D G EN D E R I D E O L O G Y, 1 8 4 8 – 1 8 9 0

37 Patricia Cline Cohen, “The ‘Anti-Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols: A Radical Critique of Monogamy in the 1850s,” Journal of the Early Republic (Spring 2014) 34:1. 38 Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 39 Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 127. 40 Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 74. Linda Gordon identifies it as the first of three major movements in the development of modern reproductive politics, and cautions that we should not dismiss it. “It expressed exactly the emphasis on choice, freedom, and autonomy for women around which the women’s rights movement was unified.” Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Woman: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 4. 41 Gordon, Moral Property of Woman, 22. She adds that “the right of the wife unilaterally to refuse her husband” was “at the heart of voluntary motherhood.” It was a key substantive demand in the mid-19th-century, when both law and practice made sexual submission to her husband a wife’s duty. A woman’s right to refuse was the fundamental condition of birth control – and of her independence and personal integrity” (61). See also Nancy Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1860,” Signs 4 (Winter 1978): 219–236. 42 For more on the effects of the Civil War upon American women, see, for example, Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Drew Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Judith Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Judith Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Wendy Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1991). 43 Elizabeth Leonard, “Mary Walker, Mary Surratt, and Some Thoughts on Gender in the Civil War,” in Clinton and Silber, Battle Scars, 110. 44 LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters: The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), esp. ch. 1. 45 Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 151. 46 Leonard, “Mary Walker, Mary Surratt, and Some Thoughts on Gender in the Civil War,” 107. 47 Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). 48 Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 215. See also Peter Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 49 Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage; Tera Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 50 Stansell, Feminist Promise, 82; Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets. 51 Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls, 22. See also C. C. O’Brien, “‘The White Women All Go for Sex’: Frances Harper on Suffrage, Citizenship, and the Reconstruction South,” African American Review 43 (Winter 2009): 605–620; Nell Irvin Painter, “Voices of Suffrage: Sojourner Truth, Frances Watkins Harper, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, ed. Jean Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 42–55.

287

BO N N I E L AUG HL I N- S C H U LT Z

52 Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 57–58, 59. 53 Ellen Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 175. 54 Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981). 55 Rebecca Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868– 1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 5. 56 Stansell, Feminist Promise, 92. Importantly, Stansell criticizes Stanton for her inability to dwell in the “region of facts” of postwar anti-black violence instead of abstract principle (91). Though at the heart of her work is a story of the achievement of an independent women’s movement, Ellen Dubois, too, concedes, “The position Stanton and Anthony took against the Fifteenth Amendment reveals . . . [that] their objections to the amendment were simultaneously feminist and racist.” Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage, 174. For another take on the split, see Andrea Kerr, “White Women’s Rights, Black Men’s Wrongs: Free Love, Blackmail, and the Formation of the American Woman Suffrage Association,” in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press, 1995), 61–79. For Stanton’s relationship with black reformers, see Elisabeth Griffin, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). For a provocative examination of the nature of the original feminist project and the racial legacy it has bestowed to American women, see Louise Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For a helpful discussion of citizenship and exclusionary rhetoric and practices, see Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), esp. 18–55. 57 Ann Gordon, “Stanton and the Right to Vote: On Account of Race or Sex,” in Dubois and Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker, 111–127. 58 Dudden, Fighting Chance, 3. Dudden argues, though, that we need to take seriously Stanton and Anthony’s belief that they had a “fighting chance” to win suffrage and not just assume they were ahead of their time, as she says Eleanor Flexner did. For a very useful historiographic overview, see Fighting Chance, 3–12. For another take on the postwar, in which expansionism was brought in, see also Alison Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. 3–18. 59 Lori Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009), 122. 60 Gornick, Solitude of Self, 105. 61 Jean Baker, Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists (New York: Macmillan, 2006), 42. Other scholars see more distinction, positioning the AWSA as more conservative than its counterpart. Ann Gordon argues, “The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) swam with the political tide, rarely working directly for passage of the sixteenth amendment after 1871 when to do so required opposing the new respectability of states’ rights. Founded at the instigation of Lucy Stone a few months later in 1869 than the National, the American pursued an idea that local and partial suffrage victories would build popular support for women’s political participation and enable women to pyramid their power from school district to township to municipality to state and, eventually, to gain full voting rights. Political equality for women need not disturb constitutional relations or upset local political practice.” Ann Gordon, “Woman Suffrage (Not Universal Suffrage) by Federal Amendment,” in Votes for Women! The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 11. 62 Baker, Sisters, 42. 63 Baker, Sisters, 43. 64 Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls, 4 65 Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls, 9. See also Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America. In the History, the AWSA was largely overlooked, and Anthony famously referred to the “narrow

288

WO MEN ’S R I G HT S A N D G EN D E R I D E O L O G Y, 1 8 4 8 – 1 8 9 0

66 67

68

69 70 71 72

73 74

75 76

77

78 79 80 81

82

83

pig-headedness” of Stone for not responding to her requests for information. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement, 223. See also Sally McMillen, Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 222; Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 153–158. For a good overview, see Gordon, “Woman Suffrage by Federal Amendment,” 3–24. Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 195. Faulkner also describes Stanton’s polemical eulogies for Mott, where she argued both for suffrage and to uphold NWSA as chief guarantor of it (215). Jean Baker describes how Anthony’s 1877 lecture, “Homes of Single Women,” “articulated the radical position that marriage must not define the female existence.” Baker, Sisters, 62. For discussion of contents of the Woman’s Journal, see McMillen, Lucy Stone, 192–193. Jean Baker, “Getting Right with Woman’s Suffrage.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 (Jan. 2006), 7. Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Stansell, Feminist Promise, 101. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “African American Women and the Woman Suffrage Movement,” in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press, 1995), 141. Ellen Dubois, “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Bradwell, Minor, and Suffrage Militance in the 1870s,” in Wheeler, One Woman, One Vote, 81–98. Dubois, “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands,” 94. See also Norma Basch, “Reconstructing Female Citizenship: Minor v. Happersett,” in The Constitution, Law, and American Life: Critical Aspects of the Nineteenth-Century Experience, ed. Donald Nieman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 52–66. For broad context, see Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). On Lockwood, see Jill Norgren, Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (New York: New York University Press, 2007). Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. II, 1861–1876 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1882), 830. Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Women’s Rights Convention (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 227. Her final chapter, “The Road from Seneca Falls, 1848–1982,” is especially useful. Scholars debate the reasons why suffrage succeeded faster in the West. Rebecca Mead ascribes it to “the unsettled state of regional politics, the complex nature of western race relations, broad alliances between suffragists and farmer-labor-progressive reformers, and sophisticated activism by western women.” Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 1. For another perspective, see Beverly Beeton, Women Vote in the West: The Woman Suffrage Movement, 1869–1896 (New York: Garland, 1986). Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 34. Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls, 47, 53. Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 9. On Barry, see Susan Levine, “Labor’s True Woman: Domesticity and Equal Rights in the Knights of Labor,” Journal of American History 70, no. 2 (1983): 323–339. See also Flexner, Century of Struggle. Lara Vapnek, Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 1. See also Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ann Schofield, “Rebel Girls and Union Maids: The Woman Question in the Journals of the AFL and IWW, 1905– 1920,” Feminist Studies 9 (Summer 1983): 335–358. Jones, All Bound up Together, 135.

289

BO N N I E L AUG HL I N- S C H U LT Z

84 Jones, All Bound up Together, 141. This is not to say that Jones portrays white and black women as in any sort of easy alliance. African American women, she writes, “insisted that an intersectional analysis, one that simultaneously took up race and gender, was required.” 85 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn finds evidence of women of color in both the AWSA and NWSA. She adds, too, that not all black women agreed with a single goal of suffrage. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 42, 48–49. 86 Bettye Collier-Thomas, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, ed. Ann Gordon (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 54–55. 87 Terborg-Penn, “African American Women and the Suffrage Movement,” 142. See also Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 88 Collier-Thomas, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,” 57. See also Alison Parker, “Frances Watkins Harper and the Search for Women’s Interracial Alliances,” in Ridarsky and Huth, Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights, 145–171. 89 Nell Irvin Painter, “Voices of Suffrage: Sojourner Truth, Frances Watkins Harper, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, ed. Jean Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 42–55. Painter describes the creation of a “new symbolic Truth – the Stanton-Anthony suffragist. The Stanton-Anthony Truth tended first and last toward women . . . Since . . . Harper would not separate the woman in her identity from the black, she disappeared from the Stanton-Anthony history” (53). 90 For a discussion of how Willard substituted a “feminism of fear” for one based on equal rights, see Suzanne Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). See also Carolyn de Swarte Gifford, “Frances Willard and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s Conversion to Woman Suffrage,” in Wheeler, One Woman, One Vote, 117–133. 91 Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage, 83. She also equates it to modern feminism: “Here in the postCivil War years, we can see proponents of women’s rights as they move from universal to particularistic arguments, providing us with the Gilded Age equivalent of the shift from ‘equality’ to ‘difference’ in the feminism of our own time.” Dubois, “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands,” 82. See also Ellen Dubois, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution,” Journal of American History 74 (Dec. 1987): 836–862. 92 Stansell, Feminist Promise, 114. For an intriguing discussion of temperance as “maternal feminism” (in comparison to “equal rights feminism”), see Janet Giele, Two Paths to Women’s Equality: Temperance, Suffrage, and the Origins of Modern Feminism (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995). See also Holly Berkley Fletcher, Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2008); Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981). 93 Stansell, Feminist Promise, 117. 94 Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage, 40; Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 64. 95 Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 67. 96 Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America, 21. 97 Hewitt, “From Seneca Falls to Suffrage?” 16. 98 Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age. She argues that “the story of woman suffrage is at once a history of women, but also one of racial conflict, states’ rights, federal power, and the meaning of citizenship in the new Union” (5). 99 See, for example, the excellent roundtable in the American Historical Review from June 2009, especially articles by women’s historians Lois Banner and Alice Kessler-Harris. Alice KesslerHarris, “Why Biography?” American Historical Review 114 (June 2009): 625–630; Lois Banner, “Biography as History,” American Historical Review 114 (June 2009): 579–586. 100 Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (New York: Mariner Books, 2014). While biographies of famous figures such as Stanton, Stone, and Anthony continue to appear,

290

WO MEN ’S R I G HT S A N D G EN D E R I D E O L O G Y, 1 8 4 8 – 1 8 9 0

other biographies will help uncover less-known women – and perhaps recast our understanding of how early reformers defined “women’s rights.” See, for example, Marilyn Blackwell and Kristen Oertel, Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols and the Politics of Motherhood (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010). 101 Cohen, “‘Anti-Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols,” 6. 102 Alison Parker, Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 8. 103 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 216.

291

18 R ACE, C RIME , AND S EG R EG A T I O N Vivien Miller

During the late hours of July 23, 1900, an altercation between three white police officers and a well-dressed but armed black man named Robert Charles took place in New Orleans. Charles shot at these officers, and more of their colleagues a few hours later. By dawn on July 24, he had killed two police officers, including the local precinct captain, and wounded at least one other. He evaded capture for four days as mobs of “Negro hating” whites repeatedly sought violent and bloody revenge, killing at least six African Americans and wounding seventy. Tipped off as to Charles’s whereabouts on July 27, police officers, state militia, and thousands of mainly white armed citizens and onlookers quickly surrounded the building. With his back against the wall and no possibility of survival, Charles continued to fire from the besieged building in an “intentionally symbolic act of violent resistance,” shooting twenty-four people before he was killed.1 The wider context for this extraordinary spree killing of twenty-seven whites, including seven police officers, by a lone black gunman was the 1898 codification of black disfranchisement and racial segregation in Louisiana; economic unrest and growing racial animosity in the city over jobs; white criticisms of African American behavior, specifically a lack of deference to whites, particularly in public spaces; the pervasiveness of racial violence in late nineteenth-century southern society; and the failure of increasingly lilywhite police forces and courts to protect African Americans. Charles’s disillusionment with these conditions led him and many others to the black homeland messages of the International Migration Society and African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Henry M. Turner of Atlanta.2 Yet, in July 1900 he also embodied the powerlessness, alienation, and resentments of a generation of young black men across the South, born out of slavery but condemned to second-class citizenship, and who were frequently harassed by police, criticized by politicians, and demonized in white newspapers. Many routinely carried cheap and readily available handguns for self-defense, and were prepared to use them.3 Not only did the granting of civil and political rights to former slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War fundamentally alter the relationship between the individual and the state, but newly-freed men and women exercised their new rights to bring complaints against whites and other blacks to the Freedman’s Bureau and local courts. The steady flow of domestic, divorce, and sexual violence charges from black and lower-class white women in the late 1860s and early 1870s for example shows their willingness to seek redress, even where the courts were generally unsympathetic or passed lenient sentences.4 Further, during Reconstruction, black police, jurors, and legislators, and a select number of black 292

R AC E, C R I ME, A N D S E G R E G AT I O N

attorneys, served in jurisdictions across the southern region, and the last restrictions on African American testimony in court were removed.5 However, control of criminal justice – Justices of the Peace or magistrates, police and sheriffs, juries and judges – remained at the center of post-emancipation social, political, and economic conflicts, particularly as the end of Reconstruction brought changes to the composition of courts, and as black lawmakers and law enforcers were voted out of office.6 Crime and punishment were also important components of the wider political economy of the late nineteenth-century South, especially as instruments of racial, gender, and labor control.7 And, from the late 1860s to the early 1900s, the defeat of Republican governments, the disfranchisement, segregation, and exclusion of African Americans, and the restoration then maintenance of Democratic Party political power were to be achieved by violence, fraud, and intimidation as well as the expansion of criminal penalties for African Americans and lower-class whites.8 By the late 1890s, acts of resistance to disfranchisement and segregation, such as refusing to sit in a “colored-only” railroad car, were also criminal acts.9 This chapter explores the incidence of crimes against the person and property, including homicide, rape, larceny, and arson, the creation of new miscegenation and sexual violence offenses, and summary justice in the South during the last third of the nineteenth century. The laws governing criminal offenses were generally written in raceneutral terms but offenders encountered systems of laws and punishments that were increasingly subjective in their application, particularly following the reestablishment of white Democratic political dominance. One historian of the period notes that while urban lower-class blacks were subject to the kinds of discrimination faced by poor people in general, they also suffered because of racial bias. A higher percentage were arrested and convicted of crimes and their sentences were more severe than those of whites charged with comparable offenses. At no time during the interval from arrest to punishment was it forgotten that the individual was black.10 Nevertheless, local and state criminal justice systems continued to evolve, from Presidential then Radical Reconstruction to the economic and political crises of the late 1880s and early 1890s. We find therefore that there was no single timetable for customary or de jure disfranchisement and racial segregation, but considerable variation across counties, towns, and cities in the sixteen states within the southern region. The motivations for black and white criminal actions, as well as popular and legislative responses towards these, also continued to shift throughout the postwar decades.11 At the same time, the exclusion of African Americans, from police forces and juries for example, was becoming the regional norm by the turn of the century. In the 1870s African American men had served as police officers in many cities across the South, and continued to do so in Memphis, Jacksonville, and New Orleans for example even after the end of Reconstruction. They did so amid growing white hostility to their presence and powers. Virtually all black police officers had disappeared by 1910.12 Consequently, this discussion moves across and between several different historiographical debates, including: the emergence of the New South, the origins and timing of de jure racial segregation, the role of local and state, and federal appellate criminal justice systems in sanctioning segregation and a two-tier system of crime and punishment for 293

V I V I EN MI L L E R

white and non-white southerners, the development of the “modern” police, the explosion of vigilante violence and lynching aimed primarily at African Americans in the late 1880s and 1890s, and causation theories for southern violence and criminal activity.13 The discussion also draws on important broad-brush analyses such as Roth’s work on homicide patterns as well as local or micro studies that reveal more of the complexities of the incidence and treatment of crimes against persons and property and the roles of the courts and prison systems to discipline and punish. Traditionally, crimes against the person and property were subsumed within the larger category of “southern violence” along with lynching, vigilantism, and riots. By the early 1970s, cultural influences such as enduring frontier conditions, elevated rates of gun ownership, a persistent tradition of honor, and high levels of religiosity, as well as white southerners’ inability to come to terms with their mid-nineteenth-century history of defeat and occupation, and sectional suspicion of national government, were often used to explain the region’s violent past and present. Social scientists also highlighted the impact of structural factors such as poverty, educational inequality, and political exclusion.14 A gradual uncoupling of law and order, policing, and de jure criminal activity from extra-legal forms occurred from the late 1970s. In his bold analysis of urban conditions and race relations in five state capitals undergoing tremendous population growth and economic development in the post-emancipation decades, Rabinowitz charted the burgeoning and vibrant black urban communities but also the early evolution of the color line.15 In his seminal study of nineteenth-century crime and justice, anchored in case studies of one urban and two rural Georgia counties, Ayers explored the impact of the national market economy on southern crime, control, and punishment, particularly the rise of predominately black prison populations and the adoption of convict leasing.16 Yet, as these works also show, the symbiotic relationship between the expanding criminal and penal apparatus in every southern state in the decades after the Civil War and continued support from individuals and communities for nightriding, vigilantism, lynching, and other extra-legal methods remains central to our historical understanding of race, gender, class, and injustice in the late nineteenth century.17 Over the past twenty-five years the expanding scholarship on southern crime and punishment, including local and state as well as regional studies, has provided more nuanced understandings of criminal activity, victimization, and social order. At the same time, overall knowledge of “ordinary” crimes of murder, robbery, burglary, and assault in different states, of the work of police, sheriffs, and constables, and even of lynching still remains rather patchy.18 We do know that definitions of crime and regimes of punishment in different jurisdictions were also being shaped by black resistance to and lower-class white disregard for state-imposed segregation and disfranchisement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as elite white concerns. In addition, prosecutions and punishments were intrinsically gendered. Women were victims, witnesses, and defendants; they did not preside over trials, serve on juries, or police their neighborhoods. Further, the law was a masculine, public profession, and legal elites generally comprised middle- or upper-middle-class, educated white men, as there were few African American practitioners.19 Using local and state studies to make regional generalizations can be very problematic, but it is possible to discern important changes to homicide patterns in the post-emancipation 294

R AC E, C R I ME, A N D S E G R E G AT I O N

decades. By the turn of the century, the South had surpassed the Southwest as the most homicidal region in the United States, although it was not as homicidal as it had been in the wake of Confederate defeat.20 In a period of widespread disorder, vigilante terror, and legal uncertainties, bands of white men roamed rural areas attacking African Americans as they worked, and in their homes at night. They stole food, clothing, weapons, and land, prevented night-time travel and black assembly, and deliberately assaulted freedwomen. Rosen views the rape of black women as part of an orchestrated campaign of sexual aggression in the South in the 1860s and 1870s, to undermine patriarchal power and bring dishonor to black families.21 The aggressive and homicidal activities of the Klan and other groups in the late 1860s before rigorous federal enforcement legislation came into force in the spring of 1871, and as white public support declined, were fueled by political impotence, racial prejudice, economic desperation, and claims of honor.22 The decline in regional homicide rates from the mid-1870s to the late 1880s in both urban and rural areas paralleled the defeat of Radical Reconstruction and resumption of conservative white male Democratic Party rule.23 For example, the post-1877 mean homicide rate in Louisiana’s rural counties fell from 89 to 35 people per 100,000 of population, and from 35 to 25 per 100,000 in New Orleans; in Georgia’s post-1872 mountain counties the rate fell from 53 to 12 per 100,000, and from 24 to 16 per 100,000 in plantation counties. Whites were killing fewer African Americans as well as fewer fellow whites, but black homicide rates did not fall as dramatically. In fact, in New Orleans, the black homicide rate increased from 11 to 30 per 100,000 as the toxic combination of anger, powerlessness, hyper-masculinity, and honor (defined in terms of self-respect, selfworth, and reputation) spurred violent intra-racial responses to slights, insults, and disparaging comments, as well as domestic killings.24 Similarly, of the forty-two homicides recorded by the Savannah coroner between 1895 and 1898, twenty-eight of the victims were black and fourteen were white, all but four of the whites had been killed by other whites, and all but five of the blacks by other blacks.25 At the same time, southern cities continued to experience high levels of personal violence that included numerous riots and massacres, as in Savannah, Georgia (1868), Danville, Virginia (1884), and Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), as well as other forms of communal action.26 For example, around 200 African Americans in Atlanta fought police officers after they had clubbed a black man accused of pushing a white woman off the sidewalk in 1881.27 Nieman’s rural and small-town case study of Washington County, Texas, from 1868 to 1884 demonstrates that Republican political success ensured black electoral influence that in turn made juries and judges more responsive and justice less inequitable. For example, one-quarter of the deputies appointed by the four white Republican sheriffs elected between 1870 and 1884 were freedmen, black participation on juries was common, intra-racial crimes were taken seriously, and African American defendants were generally “less likely to be subject to capricious indictment.”28 Nevertheless, more blacks than whites were charged with crimes against the person, and nearly 80 percent of African Americans charged “had allegedly attacked members of their own race.”29 In murder cases, African Americans were convicted at a higher rate than for whites (59 percent compared to 35 percent) and received severer sentences. In cases of assault with intent to kill, whites were more likely to be convicted of a lesser offence (especially if the victim was black) and to receive a fine rather than a prison term.30 Similarly, in Warren County, 295

V I V I EN MI L L E R

Mississippi, African American participation in the legal system during Reconstruction also ensured some degree of fairness for a very limited period. At least 50 percent of grand jurors were black between 1870 and 1873. In these years, over 70 percent of prosecutions for murder involved white victims and white defendants, while black-on-black crimes accounted for 8 percent of all cases, but grand juries were still twice as likely to indict when the murder victims were white.31 As Democratic rule was reestablished in both counties, African American participation and indictments against whites both declined noticeably.32 Even so, southern white homicide rates were still higher than in other regions, because of partisan violence between Republicans and Democrats, honor conflicts (linked to the preservation of rank and the respect of others, and concern for reputation and community standing), and labor and domestic disputes. Further, when the federal government determined to collect excise taxes from liquor distillers in the 1880s and 1890s, informers and revenue agents were often targeted by bands of nightriders and whitecaps. Holmes notes that informers, often other moonshiners who hoped to avoid prosecution, were paid to reveal the location of their neighbor’s stills, “thereby contributing to a sense of distrust within communities and giving rise to deadly feuds and vendettas.” In addition, under the banner of “moral authoritarianism,” nightriders dispensed summary justice to prostitutes, petty thieves, and wife-beaters in several coordinated raids on Dalton, Georgia, for example, but also targeted local blacks who were deemed to have challenged white supremacy. The involvement of law officers in these secret societies and participation in their activities underscored the blurring of formal law and justice and illegal but community-approved sanctions, while the impossibility of securing convictions from terrorized or sympathetic jurors highlighted the limitations of the formal justice system.33 The revenue wars continued to fuel white lawlessness, community feuds, and revenge killings in northwestern Georgia and neighboring states in the 1890s and 1900s.34 Most historians agree that while African American thieves, burglars and other property offenders were more readily pursued through the courts, incidence of black property crime was increasing in the 1860s and early 1870s. The inability and/or unwillingness of planters to pay wages to black workers and a reduction in plantation rations left freed families destitute in the immediate aftermath of the war. Poverty and desperation encouraged theft and landowners sought to deter stealing through rigorous prosecution and punishment.35 In his study of the Klan as “an instrument of agrarian repression” in 1868– 1871 Alabama, Fitzgerald suggests that because petty theft affected a wide cross-section of the community, small-scale white farmers were key actors in the Klan crackdowns on black thieves rather than this being a predominately planter-led labor-control exercise.36 On one occasion in 1868 Klansmen “held a crossroads trial of several suspected thieves and gave one of them two hundred lashes.”37 In Louisiana, whites also avoided the courts and used lynching to counter “African American criminality and resistance.”38 There is evidence of black resistance. Smith’s study of two Black Belt counties in Georgia pits arson as a “violent interracial protest, or form of revenge for the racism and poverty that defined the region’s race relations,” particularly in the 1870s and 1880s. Black arsonists attacked white-owned cotton gins, barns, stables, and storehouses, usually during the fall and winter months after the harvest and as new sharecropping contracts were being negotiated.39 296

R AC E, C R I ME, A N D S E G R E G AT I O N

Arson accounted for a small percentage of black and white conviction rates in these years. For example, in Florida, the majority of the prison population in the 1890s and 1900s had been convicted of breaking and entering, larceny, assault with intent to murder, grand larceny, or murder.40 Across the region, larceny complaints reaching the courts came from white planters as well as black offenders’ neighbors and workmates, and involved a wide array of goods. Nieman found that three times as many blacks as whites were indicted for property offences in Washington County, and the gap widened again from the mid-1870s.41 Ayers found that seventeen times as many blacks as whites were indicted for property offenses in Greensboro County, Georgia, between 1866 and 1879. However, prosecution rates still fluctuated. Ayers attributed higher numbers of prosecutions of African Americans for property crime in Chatham County, Georgia between 1872 and 1875 and increases in custodial sentences to larger changes in the urban economy as jobs and wages contracted after the Panic of 1873. Similarly, Myers found that Georgia penitentiary admissions rose and punishments increased in severity between 1873 and 1879 as cotton prices fell.42 Theft of crops and livestock was particularly acute, as such articles could be readily converted into cash. Horse theft, for example, accounted for 20 percent of all property crime indictments in Washington County, and freedmen accounted for 80 percent of those charged.43 However, the “Negro chicken thief” remains the enduring racial trope of the period. For white Democrats, he was evidence of the “failed masculinity” of the freedman who could not provide for his family and was therefore unworthy of citizenship, and of the inability of Republican governments to preserve law and order.44 One white South Carolinian observed in 1877, “Whenever larceny, burglary, arson and similar crimes are committed in the South, no one is suspected save negroes.”45 Curtain notes that in the Black Belt, the association between African Americans and theft “grew so strong as to damn an entire race.”46 Property laws were used to discipline and punish offenders but also to curtail black political and economic independence and stymie consumer competition. White merchants and landowners in Alabama secured legislation in 1874 that criminalized the blackoperated informal roadside markets and “deadfalls” or small stores patronized by black agricultural workers and which offered better prices and credit arrangements than whiteowned counterparts.47 This lends support to Rabinowitz’s view that, “Rather than functioning as a protector of Negroes, laws existed throughout most of the period to discipline them.”48 Holloway identifies a region-wide push between 1874 and 1882 (preceded by Florida in 1868) to use disfranchisement for minor property crimes to reduce African American voting and restore Democratic Party dominance. Legislators in Mississippi and Arkansas adjusted their penal codes so that misdemeanor property offenses were upgraded to felonies, while state constitutions in Alabama and Virginia were amended so that grand and petit larceny were included in expanded lists of dis-franchisable offenses.49 In Alabama, for example, stealing part of a corn or cotton crop was defined as grand larceny (a felony) and offenders could receive up to five years’ imprisonment at hard labor.50 In 1882 the South Carolina legislature added burglary, larceny, perjury, and forgery to the list of felonies that would result in disfranchisement.51 The best known example is Mississippi’s 1876 “Pig Law” under which the value of goods stolen for the offense of grand larceny was reduced from 25 to 10 dollars, and 297

V I V I EN MI L L E R

the theft of certain livestock valued at less than 10 dollars (including hogs and pigs) was also grand rather than petit larceny, and thus conviction would result in a prison sentence and felon disfranchisement.52 The laws were written in race-neutral terms but their implementation was not, and on election days Democratic Party leaders worked with local police and judges to ensure that the disfranchised, along with other African American men who were deliberately and falsely accused of having criminal records, could not vote.53 Several historians have identified vigorous prosecution of larceny and other property offenses as a key driver of post-Reconstruction rising prison populations and the expanding convict lease system. In the 1940s Wharton explicitly linked the “Pig Law” to prisoner increases in Mississippi from the late 1870s, and subsequent studies have repeated this.54 Oshinsky reports that, “Arrests shot up dramatically and numbers of state convicts quadrupled from 272 in 1874 to 1,072 by 1877.”55 However, Mancini has questioned both Wharton’s figures – which do not tally with the official published prisoner counts – and the linear connection between the legislation and the perceived outcome, particularly as the state prison population declined between 1877 and 1889.56 The leasing of convicts to private railroad companies, naval stores and turpentine operators, farmers, and coal and later phosphate mining companies quickly became embedded in the penal and disciplinary apparatus by the 1880s and 1890s, as well as the political economies of most southern states. The labor of county and state prisoners was sold to private contractors, and these men, women, and children were enslaved in vicious and degrading conditions. Early exposés often highlighted the importance of race and climate to explain the peculiarities of “backward” southern penal practices; later studies have emphasized the similarities between antebellum slavery and convict leasing, and the links between the emergence of the lease and the need for post-emancipation racial control. Yet, convict leasing was more than just a functional replacement for antebellum slavery; it was a key component in a wider network of unfree labor and debt peonage systems. However, leasing enabled southern governments and private entrepreneurs to embrace industrial transformation and infrastructural modernization at minimal cost while perpetuating white supremacy and ensuring black (and to a lesser extent lower-class white) labor control.57 Leased convicts were generally lower-class unskilled laborers, and they had been convicted of a wide range of offenses from murder and robbery to lewd and lascivious behavior, bigamy, and fornication. In the last third of the nineteenth century, sexual and social relations increasingly came under popular and judicial surveillance. The 1865 South Carolina “Black Code” contained the first state law barring marriage between whites and blacks, but additional state prohibitions appeared with the end of Radical Reconstruction.58 Intimate contacts between people of different races were still evident. For example, the daughter of a wealthy Port Gibson (Mississippi) planter married Haskins Smith in July 1873, who was a state senator but also one of her father’s former slaves.59 Miscegenation convictions were usually affirmed by state supreme courts, but not always because laws prohibiting racial intermarriage necessitated clear statutory definitions of “Negro” and other racial categories. One woman’s conviction for miscegenation was overturned by the Virginia Supreme Court in 1877 because she did not have at least one-quarter of “Negro blood” and therefore was not a “Negro” person.60 298

R AC E, C R I ME, A N D S E G R E G AT I O N

There was strong opposition to interracial sex and marriage from both blacks and whites. The former resented the abuse of black women by white men who continued to exercise customary rights that had disappeared when slavery ended, and the perpetuation of stereotypes of the inherently licentious black woman. White fears of “racial amalgamation” or “miscegenation,” and of widespread venereal disease among non-whites, the popularity of pseudo-scientific theories and calls for the preservation of white racial purity, and growing hysteria over black male sexuality, spurred new sanctions.61 The State of Alabama criminalized adultery and fornication in 1881; first-time offenders could expect a fine of up to one hundred dollars and a six-month custodial sentence. The penalties increased with each additional conviction. The same law also criminalized interracial marriage, adultery, and fornication, offenses which were punishable by up to seven years in prison. African American Tony Pace and Mary J. Cox, who was white, were convicted of fornication and adultery in November 1881. Two years later the US Supreme Court ruled that these laws did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment and their convictions were upheld. Other southern states followed Alabama’s lead. Maximum terms of imprisonment in their anti-miscegenation statutes ranged from six months in Georgia to ten years in Florida, Mississippi, and North Carolina.62 Again, these laws were ostensibly gender- and race-neutral but unions between black men and white women were primarily targeted.63 The growing hysteria over black male sexuality also drove the lynching epidemic of the early 1890s, where the murders of blacks by whites were routinely dismissed as justifiable homicides, or committed “by persons unknown” despite evidence to the contrary. However, Hill notes that in the early 1880s African Americans had yet to become the primary targets of lynch mob violence, and that black mobs in the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta occasionally engaged in intra-racial vigilantism in response to violent crimes, often involving the murder and/or rape of young women and children by young black male farm laborers, because the “white” criminal justice system failed to provide redress for black victims and complainants.64 Between 1882 and 1930, at least 3,400 African Americans were killed by lynch mobs in the United States. Roth found that lynching claimed the lives of at least 0.24 whites and 2.4 blacks per 100,000 adults per year across the South in the 1890s.65 Again, the failures of the formal criminal justice system were used to justify community actions. Whites criticized the formal legal system for its inability to provide appropriate sanctions for black rapists or redress for white female victims, but refused to acknowledge that those who participated in extra-legal actions were lawbreakers and common criminals. The 1890s saw the rise of “spectacle lynchings” where thousands watched the torture and execution of African Americans accused of committing murder and/or rape against white victims. These dramatic displays of white supremacist power were calculated to reinforce black terror and submission.66 In April 1899, an itinerant black laborer, Sam Hose, who had admitted killing a wealthy white resident of Newnan, Georgia with an axe following a dispute over unpaid wages, but who was also accused of raping the man’s wife, was killed, mutilated, and burned in front of approximately 2,000 whites.67 In the same way that Robert Charles was characterized as the black monster in New Orleans’s midst, Sam Hose epitomized the black beast rapist of the fin-de-siècle Deep South. United States Senator and former governor of South Carolina, Benjamin Tillman, told his 299

V I V I EN MI L L E R

Washington colleagues, “When stern and sad-faced white men put to death a creature in human form who has deflowered a white woman, they have avenged the greatest wrong, the blackest crime.”68 Rape stereotypes were used to justify extra-legal violence as well as unfair treatment within the legal system. Court records show that women were most likely to be raped by a man from the same race and class background, and often by people they knew including family members, neighbors, and employers. The refusal to take intra-racial rape as seriously as black-on-white rape impacted on the reporting of offenses, as well as prosecution and conviction rates. Edwards found that the race of the victim and attacker was critical in determining the outcome of sexual assault cases in Granville County. African Americans were more likely to be arrested and harsher sentences including capital punishment were more likely to be imposed on black males if the victim was white.69 Thirty years later, racial discrepancies in arrest and prosecution rates were still very evident. Between 1899 and 1905, Savannah police arrested fifteen black males for attempted rape, compared to three white men, and 446 African Americans for “licentious conduct” compared to nine whites.70 In sheriff’s offices and police stations, black female rape complainants faced an uphill battle to have their claims taken seriously because it was assumed they were lying or had consented to sexual violence, and if they did get to court, they were routinely subject to vitriolic character assassinations. Further, black men who were convicted of raping black women were usually given lesser sentences and had a greater chance of successful clemency appeals.71 Newspaper reports reinforced popular views that there was a growing crime problem from the late 1880s and 1890s.72 Many white southerners believed that “bad niggers” including gangs, vagrants, and drunkards were responsible, and supported crackdowns on black vagrants and public disorder. There were genuine offenders, and even some famed black outlaws or “bad men” such as Harmon Murray of the “north Florida gang,” but urban blacks found themselves targeted by police and Justices of the Peace.73 However, Hair attributed much of the disorder in 1890s New Orleans to gangs of “white ruffians” who provided muscle for the local Democratic Party machine.74 Regional homicide rates had increased during the economically turbulent years as cotton prices fell, and as the political power of conservative Democrats was threatened by agricultural protest movements such as the Farmers’ and Colored Farmers’ Alliances, as well as Republican and Populist Party challenges.75 For example, in the 1890s to early 1900s homicide rates rose from 12 to 23 per 100,000 in the Georgia mountain counties and from 16 to 30 per 100,000 in the Piedmont plantation counties, from 27 to 71 per 100,000 in South Carolina, and from 125 to 800 per 100,000 in the upper Cumberland of Kentucky and Tennessee.76 By the late 1880s and early 1890s, control of criminal justice was once again at the center of larger political battles.77 For example, in Orange County, east Texas, Populists and Republicans controlled the courts, the sheriff’s office, and the county commissions in the 1890s, then in 1899–1900 “Democrats used every means at their disposal, including arson, lynching, assassination, and armed assaults, to cripple the Populist and Republican leadership, to drive blacks out of the county, and restore white rule.”78 Yet, black intra-racial murder rates continued to rise too, which Roth attributes not to slavery or the failures of Reconstruction, but to “the hopelessness and rage that the political disaster of the 1890s and 1900s engendered.”79 One black Nashville resident complained, 300

R AC E, C R I ME, A N D S E G R E G AT I O N

We cannot see why we should be watched more vigilantly by the police, apprehended for smaller offenses, and condemned with less hesitation than are the whites; why we are excluded almost invariably from serving on juries; why we are subjected to the awful lynch law, a visitation so seldom happening to a white man.80 The late nineteenth century was an important period of racial, legal, and penal transition between the end of civil war and slavery and the completion of black disfranchisement and racial segregation in communities across the South, but the end results were deeply problematic for lower-class whites and particularly African Americans. These included the use of racialized categories of offending, automatic presumptions of guilt when the accused was non-white, the lack of equal protection under the laws for black men, women, and children, and the use of punitive regimes of punishment to discipline petty as well as serious offenses, all of which would endure through much of the twentieth century also.

Notes 1 Five white police officers were dismissed from the New Orleans police force for cowardice because of their conduct during this episode. For a full account of the case and a compelling portrait of Mississippi-born Robert Charles, see William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (1976; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), quote at 150; Herbert Shapiro, White Violence, Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 63; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Foreword” to Carnival of Fury, xviii; Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 2 Randolph A. Roth, American Homicide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 432; Dennis C. Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805–1889 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 194. 3 The hardening of racial attitudes in the late nineteenth century was clear in newspaper reporting on Charles as a black monster. See excerpt from “Making of a Monster,” New Orleans TimesDemocrat, July 29, 1900, quoted in the opening credits of Hair, Carnival of Fury, vii. On handguns, see also Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 155. 4 Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the NineteenthCentury South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 124–126; Christopher Waldrep, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–1880 (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 120–145; Laura F. Edwards, “Sexual Violence, Gender, Reconstruction, and the Extension of Patriarchy in Granville County, North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 68 (1991): 237–260. 5 Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 36–37. 6 Mary Frances Berry, “Judging Morality: Sexual Behavior and Legal Consequences in the Nineteenth-Century South,” Journal of American History 78.3 (Dec. 1991): 835–856, at 836. 7 Recent historical studies of southern prisons in the nineteenth century include: Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York: Verso, 1996); Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Prentice Hall, 1997); Karen A. Shapiro, A New South Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor

301

V I V I EN MI L L E R

8 9

10 11

12 13

14

in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871–1896 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Martha A. Myers, Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998); Vivien M. L. Miller, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency: Florida’s Pardon Board and Penal System in the Progressive Era (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); Mary Ellen Curtain, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000); Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Random House, 2008); Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010); Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). For analysis of how this earlier period connects to the contemporary penal situation, see Alex Lichtenstein, “Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration: Toward a New Political Economy of the Postwar Carceral State,” Journal of American History 102.1 (June 2015), 114. See, for example, Waldrep, Roots of Disorder, 157–159, 166–169. Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 (1896) began with an arrest in 1892 for a breach of Louisiana’s law mandating racial segregation on its trains. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 144–145. But black challenges to segregated transport date back further. See, for example, Waldrep, Roots of Disorder, 148–149. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 43. See, for example, Gilles Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post-Civil War Louisiana, 1866–1884 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000); Jane Dailey, “Deference and Violence in the Postbellum Urban South: Manners and Massacres in Danville, Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 63.3 (Aug. 1997): 553–590. W. Marvin Dulaney, Black Police in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 14–18. Pioneering studies in the longstanding historiography on the origins and timing of customary and legal segregation, fluidity in early post-Reconstruction race relations, racial separation and racial exclusion, and black and lower-class white disfranchisement, include: C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951, 1971); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955, 1966, 1974); C. Vann Woodward, American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880– 1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Howard N. Rabinowitz, “From Exclusion to Segregation: Southern Race Relations, 1865–1890,” Journal of American History 63 (Sept. 1976): 325–350; Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South; Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Ethnic Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Ayers, The Promise of the New South; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), especially chs. 1 and 2. See also C. Vann Woodward, “Review of Race Relations in the Urban South,” Journal of Southern History 44.3 (Aug. 1978): 476–478; Howard N. Rabinowitz, “More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing the Strange Career of Jim Crow,” Journal of American History 75.3 (Dec. 1988): 842–856; C. Vann Woodward, “Strange Career Critics: Long May They Persevere,” Journal of American History 75.3 (Dec. 1988): 857–868; Howard N. Rabinowitz, “The Origins of a Poststructural New South: A Review of Edward L. Ayers’s The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction,” Journal of Southern History 59.3 (Aug. 1993): 505–515. Classic works on “southern violence” include H. C. Brearley, “The Pattern of Violence,” in Culture in the South, ed. W. T. Couch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 678–692; W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1941); Sheldon Hackney, “Southern Violence,” in The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (New York: Praeger, 1969), 505–527; Raymond

302

R AC E, C R I ME, A N D S E G R E G AT I O N

15 16 17

18

19

20 21

22

D. Gastil, “Homicide and a Regional Culture of Violence,” American Sociological Review 36 (June 1971): 412–427; John S. Reed, “To Live – and Die – in Dixie: A Contribution to the Study of Southern Violence,” Political Science Quarterly 86 (Sept. 1971): 429–443; John Shelton Reed, The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1972); Colin Loftin and Robert H. Hill, “Regional Subculture and Homicide: An Examination of the Gastil-Hackney Thesis,” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 714–724; Richard Maxwell Brown, “Southern Violence – Regional Problem or National Nemesis? Legal Attitudes Toward Southern Homicide in Historical Perspective,” Vanderbilt Law Review 32 (1979): 219– 233; M. Dwayne Smith and Robert N. Parker, “Types of Homicide and Variation in Regional Rates,” Social Forces 59 (1980): 136–147; Steven F. Messner, “Regional and Racial Effects on the Urban Homicide Rate: The Subculture of Violence Revisited,” American Journal of Sociology 88 (1983): 997–999. Later studies include Christopher G. Ellison, “An Eye for an Eye? A Note on the Southern Subculture of Violence Thesis,” Social Forces 69 (1991): 1223–1239; Richard E. Nesbitt and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder: Colorado State University Press, 1996); Matthew R. Lee, William B. Bankston, Timothy C. Hayes, and Shaun A. Thomas, “Revisiting the Southern Culture of Violence,” The Sociological Quarterly 48.2 (Spring 2007): 253–275. See Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, especially ch. 3 on “Justice.” The five state capitals are Atlanta, Montgomery, Nashville, Raleigh, and Richmond. Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). See, for example, George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rules, and ‘Legal Lynching’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). See Michael J. Pfeifer, “The Origins of Postbellum Lynching: Collective Violence in Reconstruction Louisiana,” Louisiana History 50.2 (Spring 2009): 189–201. The main study of police in the South in the nineteenth century remains Dennis C. Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805–1889 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). Historians have also rather neglected southern sheriffs. The only single state study is William Warren Rogers and James M. Denham, Florida Sheriffs: A History, 1821–1945 (Tallahassee, FL: Sentry Press, 2001). Additional sources for African American police, sheriffs, and other criminal justice personnel during the Reconstruction period include: Dulaney, Black Police in America; Howard N. Rabinowitz, ed., Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Matthew Lynch, Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era Politicians, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012). Berry, “Judging Morality,” 835–836; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 176; Laura F. Edwards, “Women and the Law: Domestic Discord in North Carolina after the Civil War,” in Local Matters: Race, Crime, and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South, ed. Christopher Waldrep and Donald G. Nieman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 125–154; Miller, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency, 79–80. Roth, American Homicide, 387, 421. Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 179–230. See also Martha Hodes, “The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and Black Men in the South after the Civil War,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1993): 402–417. See also Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971); George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984).

303

V I V I EN MI L L E R

23 There is an ongoing debate among criminologists, historians, geographers, and law academics over the reliability of sources (such as police arrest records, coroner’s reports, county and city death registers, and newspapers, which frequently use different recording criteria), how to quantify and measure incidents of murder, manslaughter, vehicular homicide and so on, and how to draw meaningful comparisons between different jurisdictions. See, for example, Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Douglas Lee Eckberg, “Estimates of Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Homicide Rates: An Econometric Forecasting Approach,” Demography 32.1 (Feb. 1995): 1–16; Eric H. Monkkonen, “Estimating the Accuracy of Historical Homicide Rates: New York City and Los Angeles,” Social Science History 25.1 (2001): 53–66; Eric H. Monkkonen, “Homicide in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 92.3 (Spring 2002); Pieter Spierenberg, “American Homicide, What Does Evidence Mean for Theories of Violence and Society,” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies 15.2 (2011); Randolph Roth, “Yes We Can: Working Together Toward a History of Homicide That is Empirically, Mathematically, and Theoretically Sound,” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies 15.2 (2011). Roth’s seminal study of four centuries of homicide in British North America and the United States skillfully confronts many of these challenges, but much work remains to be done in examining homicide – and other offences – in counties and states across the region. 24 Roth, American Homicide, 411–414, 411n54, 414n61, 416, 432. 25 Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 336n16. 26 Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 162–163; Dailey, “Deference and Violence in the Postbellum Urban South”; David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 27 Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 337; Dailey, “Deference and Violence in the Postbellum Urban South,” 571. 28 Donald G. Nieman, “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice: Washington County, Texas, 1868–1884,” Journal of Southern History 55.3 (Aug. 1989): 391–420, quote at 419. 29 Nieman, “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice,” 407–408; Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 45; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 231. 30 Nieman, “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice,” 414. 31 Waldrep, Roots of Disorder, 143; Karlos K. Hill, “Black Vigilantism: The Rise and Decline of African American Lynch Mob Activity in the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta, 1883–1923,” Journal of African American History 95.1 (Winter 2010): 32–33. 32 A useful summary of southern law enforcement during Reconstruction is in James Campbell, Crime and Punishment in African American History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 60–83. 33 William F. Holmes, “Moonshining and Collective Violence: Georgia, 1889–1895,” Journal of American History 67.3 (Dec. 1980): 589–611. 34 Roth, American Homicide, 413, 422. See also Wilbur R. Miller, Revenuers and Moonshiners: Enforcing Federal Liquor Law in the Mountain South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 35 Nieman, “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice,” 405; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 161– 164, 169; Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 154; Mary Ellen Curtain, “‘Negro Thieves’ or Enterprising Farmers? Markets, the Law and African American Community Regulation in Alabama, 1866–1877,” Agricultural History 74.1 (Winter 2000): 23–24; Pippa Holloway, “‘A Chicken-Stealer Shall Lose His Vote’: Disfranchisement for Larceny in the South, 1874–1890,” Journal of Southern History 75.4 (Nov. 2009): 943, 956. 36 Michael W. Fitzgerald, “The Ku Klux Klan: Property Crime and the Plantation System in Reconstruction Alabama,” Agricultural History 71.2 (Spring 1997): 186–206. 37 Fitzgerald, “The Ku Klux Klan,” 192. 38 Pfeifer, “The Origins of Postbellum Lynching,” 201. 39 Albert C. Smith, “‘Southern Violence’ Reconsidered: Arson as Protest in Black-Belt Georgia, 1865–1910,” Journal of Southern History 51.4 (Nov. 1985): 527–564.

304

R AC E, C R I ME, A N D S E G R E G AT I O N

40 Miller, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency, 126. 41 Nieman, “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice,” 402. 42 Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 172; Myers, Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South, especially ch. 5, “Admissions to the Penitentiary,” 81–120. 43 Nieman, “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice,” 405. 44 Holloway, “‘A Chicken-Stealer Shall Lose His Vote,’” 940, 958. 45 Quoted in Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 176. 46 Curtain, “‘Negro Thieves’ or Enterprising Farmers?” 33. 47 Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 242–244. 48 Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 31. See also Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South,” Radical History Review 26 (Oct. 1982): 37–64. 49 Holloway, “‘A Chicken-Stealer Shall Lose His Vote,’” 931. 50 Perman, The Road to Redemption, 259–260. 51 Holloway, “‘A Chicken-Stealer Shall Lose His Vote,’” 945. 52 Pippa Holloway, Living in Infamy: Felon Disfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 57–58; Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 390. 53 Holloway, “‘A Chicken-Stealer Shall Lose His Vote,’” 961. 54 See, for example, Vernon Lane Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 234–242; Perman, The Road to Redemption, 243; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 104; Stephen Cresswell, Rednecks, Redeemers, and Race: Mississippi after Reconstruction, 1877–1917 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 46, 108. 55 David M. Oshinsky, ‘Worse Than Slavery’: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996), 40–41, 40n22. 56 The official figures are 375 convicts in 1874 rising to 1,003 in 1877; see Mancini, One Dies, Get Another, 135–136. 57 Campbell, Crime and Punishment in African American History, 87–112; Vivien Miller, “‘A Perfect Hell of Misery’: Real and Imagined Prison Lives in an ‘American Siberia,’” in Transnational Penal Cultures: New Perspectives on Discipline, Punishment and Desistance, ed. Vivien Miller and James Campbell (London: Routledge, 2015), 144–161. 58 Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 179. Not surprisingly, interracial intimate and sexual relations had been a fact for centuries. For earlier observations on this, see, for example, Carter G. Woodson, “The Beginnings of the Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks,” Journal of Negro History 3.4 (Oct. 1918): 335–353. 59 Waldrep, Roots of Disorder, 154. 60 Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 181. 61 Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 152; Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 177–185. 62 Pace v. State, 69 Ala. 231 (1881); Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 (1883). In Pace and Cox v. State (1881), the Alabama appellate court affirmed the legality of imposing stricter penalties on interracial fornication or adultery than on illicit intercourse between members of the same race, pointing out that the penalties were applied equally to both races. See Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 185. 63 Anti-miscegenation laws were not exclusive to the South but integral to the national story of racial lawmaking. See Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 64 Hill, “Black Vigilantism,” 27–28, 36–37. Hill notes that in 1884, for example, there were 160 white and 51 black lynch victims, but in 1892, 160 African Americans and 69 whites were

305

V I V I EN MI L L E R

65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72

73

74 75 76 77

78 79 80

lynched. He also estimates that 36 individuals were executed by black lynch mobs between the 1880s and 1920s. Roth, American Homicide, 420, 426n85: “From 1889 to 1903, lynchings claimed the lives of 0.3 per 100,000 adults per year in Virginia, 0.7 per 100,000 in Kentucky, at least 0.8 per 100,000 in Texas, and 1 per 100,000 in the rest of the South.” Hill, “Black Vigilantism,” 38–39. For discussion of the Hose lynching see Shapiro, White Violence, Black Response, 63; Jennet Kirkpatrick, Uncivil Disobedience: Studies in Violence and Democratic Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Cultures and Police Power after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Edwin T. Arnold, What Virtue There Is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009). Quoted in Mary E. Odem, “Cultural Representations and Social Contexts of Rape in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, ed. Michael Bellesiles (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 364. Edwards, “Sexual Violence, Gender, Reconstruction,” 237–260. Leslie K. Dunlap, “The Reform of Rape Law and the Problem of White Men: Age-ofConsent Campaigns in the South, 1885–1910,” in Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha E. Hodes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 357n38. Miller, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency, 175–216. By the late nineteenth century, African Americans were considered more likely to commit certain types of offenses compared to whites, including rape, burglary, theft, and arson. The “Negro’s known tendency to crime” was also remarked upon, in large part because arrest and prison data seemed to confirm these stereotypes. See Ratliff v. Beale, 74 Miss. 247 (1896); Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898); Roland P. Falkner, “Prison Statistics of the United States for 1888,” Publications of the American Statistical Association 1.7 (Sept. 1889): 7. Billy Jaynes Chandler, “Harmon Murray: Black Desperado in Late Nineteenth-Century Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 73.2 (Oct. 1994): 184–199. See also Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). Hair, Carnival of Fury, 83–84. Roth, American Homicide, 418–420; Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 34–54; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 150–174. Roth, American Homicide, 420. White rates then began to decline modestly after 1900. There is an extensive literature on lynching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that examines changing patterns in relation to numbers of victims, geography or location, economic and political challenges to Democratic Party rule, and particular triggers or catalysts. See, for example, Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York, 1892); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “‘The Mind That Burns Each Body’: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Powers of Desire, ed. Ann Snitow (New York: Monthly Press, 1983), 328–349; E. M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay, “The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Markets for Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks, 1882–1930,” American Sociological Review 55 (Aug. 1990): 526–539; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Bruce E. Baker, This Mob Will Surely Take My Life: Lynchings in the Carolinas, 1871–1947 (London: Continuum, 2009); Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay, Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Roth, American Homicide, 427. Roth, American Homicide, 434. Quoted in Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 59.

306

19 THE PARADO X OF T HE BUSINE SS AND P O L I T I C A L ECONOMY OF THE N EW S OUT H Natalie J. Ring

When the Civil War ended, the nation faced many questions in the wake of region-wide economic devastation, the collapse of the Confederacy as a governing body, and the emancipation of four million former slaves. What sort of reconstruction process would the South and the nation undergo? Who would run this new South? Would the plantation system remain in effect even though slavery had been abolished? What was the status of African Americans going to be and what rights would they enjoy? The executive and legislative branches battled with each other over these issues until Congress seized control through passage of the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, an action that divided the South into five military districts and in many ways treated the region as a conquered land. Congressional Reconstruction marked the nation’s first commitment to interracial democracy. The subsequent passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the flourishing of an indigenous black grassroots political movement, and the oversight of Union troops turned southern politics inside out. Yet these revolutionary changes were fleeting, owing to the incredible escalation of violence initiated by southern whites against African Americans and their supporters, the lack of sustained commitment on the part of the Republican Party, and the Compromise of 1876 which invariably led to the last federal troops being pulled from the South. White southerners in control quickly redoubled their efforts through continued violence, rewrote their state constitutions, instituted an oppressive system of sharecropping rooted in the use of the crop lien, and passed local and state laws mandating segregation. This period, which southern whites referred to as Redemption, ushered in a wave of white supremacy that did not begin to erode until the middle of the twentieth century. Of central concern to historians of the post-Civil War era has been the degree to which the political economy of the South differed from the North during this period, the nature of the rupture caused by the war and emancipation, and the distribution of political power to shape the economy. The field of southern history, particularly as it pertains to the region’s political economy, has long been concerned with questions of regional distinctiveness, incorporating debates about continuity and discontinuity in the subtext. This essay will engage with several aspects of the political economy of the New South, with a particular focus on cotton. First, I begin by outlining the nature of the debate over southern distinctiveness, in particular the role it played in setting the terms for discussion about the region’s economy. I describe how academic interest in continuity or 307

N ATA L I E J. R I NG

discontinuity between the political economy of the Old South and the New South has been intrinsically tied to the question of distinctiveness. The concept of distinctiveness, however, did not depend on the idea of continuity nor preclude one from arguing that the Civil War marked a sharp break with what came before. Thus historians could argue for both distinctiveness and discontinuity. Second, I explain how a late nineteenthcentury belief in what I call the paradox of poverty and progress – that the South paradoxically seemed to be moving toward modernization while simultaneously remaining in a state of backwardness – shaped historiography on the political economy of the South with its fixation on the continuity–discontinuity and North–South binary. Indeed the historical actors themselves struggled with this enigma as well. Third, I explain how there are two ways to break free from the propensity to frame the history of the political economy in the South in terms of the region’s agrarian rural characteristics as contrasted with the North’s industrial modern features. One is to embrace the paradox itself, settling for the idea that the New South displayed features of continuity and discontinuity. The other option is to adopt a global perspective. Rather than looking at the relationship between the South and the nation on a regional and national scale it is more fruitful to expand the units of analysis. Locating southern history in a complex web of intersecting regional, national, and global discourse, practices, and designs will illuminate more about the postbellum political economy and return to the important work suggested by an earlier group of scholars whose work has seemingly been forgotten. The idea of southern difference in contrast with the North is a relatively old one. As early as the eighteenth century both northerners and southerners drew attention to the inherent differences between North and South. Thomas Jefferson made the celebrated observation that the North could be described as “cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties and just to those of others, interested, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion” and the South as “fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.”1 During the antebellum period countless American and foreign travelers to the South perceived the region as a foreign land apart from the rest of the nation and wrote extensively about southern decadence, backwardness, and indolence.2 In his work Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, Eric Foner demonstrates how in the 1850s the free labor ideology of the Republican Party drew contrasts between the independent enterprising middle class of the North and the impoverished lazy poor whites of the South.3 Reports of stagnancy and backwardness in the South lent credence to Republican assertions that slavery impeded the development of democracy and posed a tremendous obstacle to national growth. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries growing numbers of Progressive reformers began to focus on the distinctive economic problems plaguing the South, struggling to reconcile what they saw as the paradox of poverty and progress – the persistence of southern regionalism in the face of national modernization.4 Questions about southern distinctiveness paralleled the professionalization of the discipline of history with the founding of the American Historical Association and the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (which later became the Organization of American Historians). As they drew the boundaries of the discipline, historians embraced the nationalizing forces of cultural reunion between North and South, eager to move away from the sectionalism of the past that had contributed to the Civil War and 308

TH E PA R A DOX OF T HE EC ON O M Y O F T H E NE W S O U T H

Reconstruction.5 But the question of southern distinctiveness as an explanation for the past still had relevance in some quarters. For example, historians Charles and Mary Beard, in The Rise of American Civilization (1927), described the Civil War as a conflict rooted in contrasting economic systems and called it a “social cataclysm in which the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy in the South,” making it an “irrepressible conflict.”6 Indeed, the North–South binary – identification of a conflict between a rural, agrarian South and the industrial, urban North – was a powerful construct that shaped the discipline of southern history for generations to come. In addition, the belief in southern distinctiveness influenced how historians understood the question of continuity and change in the post-Civil War South. Charles and Mary Beard argued for the existence of southern economic difference and underscored the significance of discontinuity in the past. They were part of a group known as the “New Historians” or “Progressive Historians,” who resisted the profession’s earlier commitment to steadiness and continuity.7 Discontinuity, with its focus on class conflict and the existence of antagonistic economic systems, was the operative framework for Progressive historians who saw the Civil War and Reconstruction as a monumental historical moment. Yet it was possible to believe in southern distinctiveness and also embrace the idea of continuity in the South over the course of the nineteenth century. The search for the “central theme” in southern history led scholars such as U. B. Phillips (1928) to assert that what made the South different was the conviction that the region “shall be and remain a white man’s country,” and W. J. Cash (1941) to declare that the South differed from “the general American norm” because of its continuity and homogeneity in thought across time, particularly in its allegiance to what Cash called the “Savage Ideal.” Cash also noted that despite evidence of industrialization, the ethos of the New South was no different than the Old South and the region was “not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it.”8 In Phillips’s and Cash’s accounts, southern distinctiveness was presumed to be the engine of continuity. The argument for continuity between the Old South and the New South represented a dominant consensus view of history that was not thoroughly challenged until C. Vann Woodward wrote Origins of the New South (1951). Woodward adopted a Beardian analysis and framed his argument around the northern industrial–southern agrarian binary. Woodward argued that not only did the war mark a sharp rupture from what came before but even in the postbellum era the South retained its distinctiveness. Thus discontinuity and distinctiveness were not mutually exclusive. Woodward maintained that the Reconstruction governments were pro-business from the beginning. When Reconstruction ended in 1877 those in power retained their commercial focus. In fact, the process by which southern white Democrats took control of their region was swift and set “the lasting foundations in matters of race politics, economics, and law” in the modernizing South. “Redemption was not a return of an old system nor the restoration of an old ruling class,” Woodward insisted. “It was rather a new phase of the revolutionary process begun in 1865.”9 A new group of southern middle-class industrialists reestablished power decisively and reached out to northern capitalists in an effort to establish a unified economic order. Woodward argued that the old planter class lost its political and economic status in the postbellum South as an industrial bourgeoisie rose to the top. 309

N ATA L I E J. R I NG

Yet this new group of industrialists in the postbellum South could not compete with the wealth and power of northern industrialists. Indeed they found themselves, as Woodward described, acting as “agents, retainers, and executives – rarely as principals.”10 Southern industrialists were committed to commercial progress but they were always subordinate to northern finance. For example, Woodward showed how the railway system in the South was consolidated by northern robber barons. J. Pierpont Morgan initiated the railway grab when he assumed control of 4,500 miles of rail under the Southern Railway and then rapidly expanded to 7,500 miles.11 Other northerners took over the region’s coalfields and the southern iron and steel industries. Northern textile mill operators expanded their operations in the South, attracted by the region’s lower taxes, cheap labor, and proximity to raw materials. In short, Woodward argued that the postbellum South was a colonial economy, entirely separate from and completely subordinate to the national economy.12 Thus although a new class of rising industrialists contributed to manufacturing and industrial progress and the former planter aristocracy lost control, the South still suffered from poverty and remained largely rural. Part of the Woodward narrative about discontinuity and distinctiveness included a description of how workers and farmers challenged the power of this new southern commercially oriented class in the face of rising destitution. The South may have been making industrial gains but the yeoman farmer’s status was in decline. Rather quickly the merchant and the planter merged into one class and instituted a system that broke up large parcels of land into smaller farms. Woodward explained how the crop lien system “was no respecter of race or class” and operated as “the new evil” in the postbellum South.13 In order to subsist, farmers raised cotton principally because it was a cash crop that would draw the highest price on the market. In exchange for foodstuffs, farming implements, fertilizer, and seed, landowners and merchants would issue crop liens whereby farmers’ future harvests served as guaranteed collateral. If the market price of cotton was low or the yearly harvest meager, farmers found themselves coming out of “settling time” owing more than their crop was worth. Overproduction of the crop might satisfy the demand of manufacturers since it lowered market prices and insured a steady supply. But low prices left the farmer struggling to survive; thus the crop lien system carried the fundamental seeds of poverty and debt. Because of the declining advancement of the agrarian class, one could make the case that the South in 1900 was hardly different from the South on the eve of the war. In 1860 scarcely 10 percent of the South’s population lived in urban areas, the region’s manufacturing output amounted to 10 percent, and the South held only 11 percent of the United States’ manufacturing capital.14 New Orleans was the only southern city in the top largest cities in the United States.15 Most of the South’s wealth came from land, slaves, and export agriculture. The Northeast, however, was far more industrialized, with 36 percent of the population residing in urban areas. The West followed with 16 percent and the Midwest with 14 percent. In 1900, thirty-five years after the end of the war, seemingly not much had changed. The region was only 18 percent urban with 10 percent of the population laboring in manufacturing. The North, in comparison, had an urban population of 40 percent and 25 percent of its people in manufacturing jobs.16 At the turn of the twentieth century the South still relied on a plantation system based on one-crop agriculture and suffered from underdevelopment, rural poverty, and weak state governments with 310

TH E PA R A DOX OF T HE EC ON O M Y O F T H E NE W S O U T H

minimal central authority. The plight of the cotton grower looked bleak. A series of depressions in the last decade of the nineteenth century hit southern farmers exceptionally hard; combined with exorbitant interest rates and declining cotton prices they led to heavy indebtedness and loss of land. Political agitation in the farmer class reached a zenith with the development of the Populist Party which criticized a system that had produced a large class of farmers powerless to extricate themselves from debt and unable to achieve independent ownership. The new system of sharecropping and tenancy defined the South’s distinctiveness for decades to come.17 Woodward’s book has done more than any other book to shape the ensuing debate about the political economy of the New South, particularly deliberation over how backward and impoverished the New South was in comparison to the industrial modernizing North and whether this distinction implied continuity or not with the antebellum period. Woodward’s story about class conflict and discontinuity was a challenge to the standard consensus narrative that guided much of the history of the South as well as American history up until that point. His thesis that the planter elite was replaced by a new southern bourgeoisie that made an alliance with northern capitalists suggested a break with the Old South, but Origins also explored the reasons why the New South remained impoverished in spite of rapid industrialization. Economic historians took a particular interest in what Woodward called “colonial agrarianism.”18 Gavin Wright agreed that southern backwardness and poverty were a defining feature of the New South in spite of the rise of a new class of postwar landlords. However, Wright paid closer attention to the function of the labor market than Woodward. Slaveholders’ wealth derived more from slaves than it did from land, and after the war these planter-landlords invested their money in property to be worked by cheap labor. Thus what made the South unique, Wright insisted, was the development of a “separate regional labor market” isolated from the national and global labor markets. In short, Wright explained, “the South was a low-wage region in a highwage country,” a system that insured “‘southern backwardness’ and ‘black poverty’” would persist until the 1940s.19 Like Wright, economists Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch sought to explain why the postbellum southern economy did so poorly in relation to the rest of the nation, but they were also interested in focusing explicitly on the experience of African American farmers. Ransom and Sutch demonstrated through quantitative methods that although newly emancipated black farmers had the power as free agents to make contracts with landowners, the system of sharecropping and tenancy was incredibly exploitative because merchants created “territorial monopolies.” For example, interest rates in the 1880s ranged from 51.7 to 74.6 percent.20 The “one kind of freedom” that Ransom and Sutch documented in their book was not much of a freedom at all, as black farmers evolved into a landless peasantry kept in check by violence, lack of access to education, and southern whites’ belief in the inferiority of the black race which was part of the “legacy of slavery.” The economists, however, pointed out that emancipation was a source of conflict “not because blacks were incapable of establishing their independence, but because they asserted their independence and insisted upon institutional arrangements more to their liking than those envisioned for them by whites.”21 One did not need to rely on an argument about discontinuity coupled with distinctiveness, however, to explain why the South’s agrarian economy remained in a state of backwardness and racial exploitation. Jonathan Weiner, Dwight Billings, and Jay R. 311

N ATA L I E J. R I NG

Mandle made the case for the persistence of the planter class and the weakness of the commercial class in the post-Civil War period, challenging Woodward’s assertion that a new bourgeoisie assumed control in the New South. Although sharecropping and tenancy replaced slavery, this group of historians declared planters had managed to hang on to their capital, land, and political hegemony despite the turmoil of the Civil War. Moreover, Weiner, Billings, and Mandle took a comparative approach and argued that the southern postbellum political economy followed the “Prussian Road” model undertaken in the German empire (a term coined by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin) whereby the agricultural elite exercised power in a closed world reliant on the exploitation of new forms of bound labor.22 As Weiner explains in his study of Alabama, the fact that laborers remained tied to the land because of the crop lien system meant there were “reduced incentives for the planters to mechanize agricultural production and modernize their techniques.” The “reactionary agrarian elite” fostered a repressive and racially exploitative system that was the antithesis of free-market capitalism as seen in the North.23 Much like in the Prusso-German context, southern planters used the political system to their advantage, keeping industrialization limited to undeveloped textile mills in marginal rural towns. A belief in the continuity of the political economy meant that very little had changed between Reconstruction and the period that followed, known as Redemption, when white Democrats resumed control of their state legislatures. Historians who embraced this perspective argued, first, that immediately after the war Radical Republicans encouraged a free labor economy bound by the production of a single crop in a plantation setting. This system entailed the use of intimidation and coercion. And second, Redemption returned the planter elite to power and control of the political economy wherein they established a system of sharecropping and debt peonage that exploited disproportionately the former slaves. As a result, the merchant class did not thrive and industrial wealth remained limited. A decade after the studies arguing for planter persistence, another group of historians entered the fray and came to Woodward’s defense, embracing his claims that the rupture engendered by the Civil War led to the subsequent rise of a new bourgeoisie in the South. David L. Carlton’s study of South Carolina textile mill towns explored how these merchants and professionals “were but minor adjuncts to an economic structure dominated by the slave plantation” until after the war when these boosters seized the opportunity to build mills and viewed towns as “their corporate property.”24 Lacy K. Ford found a similar situation in South Carolina and argued that although the planter-elite had not been entirely wiped out, their power was “circumscribed” in the face of the “rise of a dynamic merchant class that turned Upcountry towns into pulsating nodules of economic activity.”25 Don H. Doyle described parallel examples of significant industrialization initiated by “new men” in larger cities such as Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, and Mobile, and Ronald Eller saw evidence of a strong merchant class in Appalachia.26 This group of historians fell squarely in the camp advocating for discontinuity between the Old South and the New South. In some ways, C. Vann Woodward’s understanding of the New South captured certain aspects of the philosophy of Henry W. Grady, an Atlanta journalist, who first used the phrase “The New South” in 1873 in an editorial penned for the Atlanta Daily Herald. New South ideologues championed industrialization, celebrated a gospel of progress, 312

TH E PA R A DOX OF T HE EC ON O M Y O F T H E NE W S O U T H

called for reconciliation between North and South, and propagated the myth that goodwill existed between the black and white races. They saw a clear break between the Old South and the New South. In a speech given before the New England Club in New York in 1886, Grady proclaimed, “the old South rested everything on slavery, agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth.” The New South, on the other hand, whose “soul is stirred with the breath of a new life . . . She is thrilling with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity.”27 Grady’s overwhelming optimism about the progress of the South presaged Woodward’s argument that the new industrial ethos of the South marked a break with the past. Woodward was not, however, the first historian to borrow Henry Grady’s phrase the “New South.” Holland Thompson, born in North Carolina the year before Grady issued his call in New York for recognition of the New South, wrote a history of the region and period he came of age in. His first manuscript traced the economic shift from “the cotton fields to the cotton mills” in his home state and the new state of mind that accompanied rapid industrialization of the South.28 In his second book Thompson described a “new South, marked by a spirit of hopefulness, a belief in the future, and a desire to take a fuller part in the life of the nation.”29 Despite his optimistic proclamation that a new and different South was on the horizon Thompson also found himself questioning what, if anything, had remained the same. Shortly before he published his optimistic manifesto on the industrializing South, Thompson contributed to a collection honoring his advisor William A. Dunning at Columbia University, and puzzled over the real nature of the New South. The history professor at the City University of New York claimed that “much nonsense had been written of the new South” and that although the New South was different in tone and ideals, it appeared to be more of an outgrowth of the Old South and “not a new and different civilization imposed from without.”30 Thompson argued that many had misused the phrase the “New South,” and had written it as if it was “utterly unlike anything that had existed before and involving a sharp break with the history and tradition of the past.” Thompson stated that nothing could be more false because people did not easily rid themselves of characteristics that had been developing for centuries.31 In his work he strove to acknowledge the existence of a new industrial South but also highlight the existence of a region that had managed to retain the temperament of the aristocratic Old South. Thompson wrestled with the question of continuity versus discontinuity and the fact the South could be industrializing rapidly while retaining the vestiges of a planter aristocracy. Woodward later described this as “the divided mind of the New South,” noting that the new industrial class developed a nostalgic longing for the Old South, particularly in the way it idealized the past through an allegiance to the Lost Cause.32 Thompson’s confidence in the New South’s ability to make great economic strides was also destabilized by what he perceived to be the paradoxical nature of the New South. In a festschrift for William A. Dunning, Thompson noted that the South “still insists upon regarding itself as a distinct country.” Its insistence on clinging to the idea that it might be what Cash later called a “nation within a nation” meant it was “a puzzling region, full of contradictions and sharp contrasts.” As Thompson explained, The population is predominantly rural, and yet industrialism is growing with marvelous rapidity. The people are religious – for there is more Puritanism 313

N ATA L I E J. R I NG

surviving in the South than anywhere else – and yet instances of lawlessness are frequent. They are kindly, but occasional manifestations of cruelty shock the world. They believe in race purity, and yet we see the mulatto. They are individualists and yet, on occasion, they sink all considerations of personal comfort and advantage.33 Thompson’s understanding of the paradoxical South – both modernizing at a rapid pace while remaining in a state of backwardness – reflected the way in which historical observers at the time could believe the South was both regionally distinctive and universally national. On one level, Thompson argued for both continuity and discontinuity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social scientists, progressive reformers, northern philanthropists, southern liberals, academicians, and self-proclaimed experts writing about the “southern problem” also worked to address the paradox. To resolve the contradiction of the simultaneous existence of progress and poverty, they focused on the process of southern development and described the South as existing in a state of conversion, moving through a prolonged period of readjustment.34 Perhaps the most pressing economic question that emerged out of the wreckage of the Civil War was how the southern economy would evolve and maintain continued production of cotton, the chief export of the United States. Whether cotton was the South’s salvation or curse in the postbellum period could not easily be discerned. In their study The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy (1935), social scientists Charles S. Johnson, Edwin R. Embree, and W. W. Alexander noted, For more than a century, this greatest of economic assets has been also our greatest social humiliation . . . Although adding a billion dollars annually to the wealth of the world, the cotton farmers themselves are the most impoverished and backward of any large group of producers in America.35 These incongruities in the paradox of cotton reflected a concern about the political economy of the postbellum South and whether persistent poverty and economic backwardness went hand-in-hand with progress and the development of national ideals. The contradiction underscored the effort to determine whether the South was largely agrarian or more industrial in nature and how easily the region could be pulled in line with the nation’s capitalist principles. The idea of southern readjustment permitted room for antithetical descriptions of the South since it incorporated the idea that the region could be in a state of backwardness yet be improving simultaneously and moving along the path of modernization. On the one hand, New South ideologues and northern investors were highly enthusiastic about the South’s prospects and celebrated the region’s abundant resources, rapid industrial progress, and future growth. They often talked about the South’s domination of the cotton market and the insatiable world demand for the crop; cotton was viewed as indispensable to the financial well-being of the nation. Buoyant forecasts also touted the cotton plant as the South’s greatest prospect for regional success and economic greatness. Edwin Alderman, a reformer who was the president of the University of Virginia, Tulane University, and the University of North Carolina, referred to cotton 314

TH E PA R A DOX OF T HE EC ON O M Y O F T H E NE W S O U T H

as a “stupendous God-made monopoly.”36 Henry W. Grady deemed cotton “gold from the instant it puts forth its tiny shoot.”37 Arthur W. Page, the son of North Carolina reformer Walter Hines Page, insisted that the cotton grower in the South was destined to become the most prosperous farmer in the world and declared that the new cotton kingdom growing over the ruins of the Old South would reach a level of wealth never achieved before.38 Boosters viewed cotton as a civilizing agent given its ability to clothe the world. Charles William Burkett and Clarence Hamilton Poe declared the plant “the Handmaiden of Civilization” because while savage men and animals only searched for food, more evolved men insisted on the symbols of civilization such as “clothing and ornament.”39 On the other hand, economists, reformers, and social critics in the late nineteenth century were apprehensive about the economic health of the region and wondered whether New South cotton production would compare with that of the Old South. They had reason to worry. In the 1890s a series of severe economic depressions, the arrival of the boll weevil, and the ultimate failure of the Populist Party to make substantial agricultural reforms began to undermine optimism. This group feared that regional economic problems might ultimately weaken the national economy in its competition for world markets because of the South’s connection to the international cotton market. Some questioned the speculative nature of the cotton exchanges and the dangers of bargaining in “fictional” cotton. The crop lien system posed another problem. In his book, The Ills of the South, Charles H. Otken described the system as “vindictive in its subtile [sic] sophistry” because it had “crushed out all independence and reduced its victims to a coarse species of servile slavery.”40 Professor D. D. Wallace of Woford College in South Carolina simply called it the “vampire lien system.”41 Given the late nineteenth-century recognition of the paradox surrounding the political economy of the postbellum South, the debate over continuity versus discontinuity is more than just a historiographical tussle between competing camps of historians. Postbellum Americans’ belief that the New South could simultaneously be making great strides toward modernization yet remain in a state of economic backwardness – what I call the paradox of progress and poverty – contributed to the historiographical tendency to repeatedly seek a solution to the puzzle. Was the New South merely an extension of the Old South? Was the New South agrarian or industrial in outlook? How backward and impoverished was the New South in comparison to the industrial modernizing North? More than one hundred years later these questions now feel misguided, or at the very least stale.42 Like Holland Thompson, the first historian of the New South, perhaps we should embrace the contradictions and declare that the political economy of the New South exhibited simultaneous evidence of continuity and discontinuity. It is not an easy resolution, however, if the historian’s inclination to want an answer to “either this or that” often supersedes the flexibility of alternative frameworks. In addition, we are conditioned to think about the South’s economic distinctiveness only when it is compared to the North, or as Peter Kolchin labels it, the “un-South.”43 Another solution which frees us from the eternal agrarian-industrial and North-South dichotomy is to consider postbellum southern economic development in a global context. In recent years a new group of scholars have underscored the importance of examining the 315

N ATA L I E J. R I NG

South’s political economy in a transnational context, particularly situating it in the longue durée of the history of world capitalism or more generally in a global circulation of peoples, reform practices, patterns of governance, and ideas such as social scientific theories and racial ideologies.44 In his 2014 history of cotton Sven Beckert reminds us that previous studies of the plant tend to focus on the local, state, and national level, but in point of fact the development of a worldwide web of cotton, or what he refers to as the “empire of cotton,” drew “seeming opposites together, turning them almost by alchemy into wealth: slavery and free labor, states and markets, colonialism and free trade, industrialization and deindustrialization.”45 The history of the crop is integral to understanding of the dawn of capitalism and the South was merely one small part of this “global empire of cotton.” Andrew Zimmerman uses the story of Booker T. Washington’s collaboration with German imperialists to establish a cotton program in Togo, Africa to explain how it evolved into and reflected what he calls a “colonial political economy of the global South.”46 The Germans were attracted to Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of industrial education because both Germany and the United States underwent a shift from bonded labor to free labor over the course of the nineteenth century – in 1807 with the end of serfdom and in 1865 with the abolition of slavery. It is fashionable in some quarters to consider this historiographical shift as “new” and claim that previous work on the political economy of the nineteenth-century South has been too narrowly focused on the regional or national level (particularly when compared to the North). Yet I would argue that the latest attention to the political economy of the global South is not so much a radical “new turn,” but a “U-turn,” reviving academic interest in comparative work on the nineteenth-century South initiated by a handful of historians as early as the 1960s. Over the years the historiography on the political economy of the New South has been occasionally punctuated by a more expansive view that adopts an international lens. For example, the group of historians who argued for the persistence of the planter class in the post-Civil War period situated their work in the context of Prussia. At various moments some scholars situated the process of emancipation in a transnational context by engaging in comparative economic analyses between different post-emancipation societies such as those in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Russia.47 Over the course of the entire nineteenth century a small cadre of scholars studying slavery, race relations, and segregation has drawn attention to the similarities and differences between the South and such places as Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Historians made comparisons between slaves in the western hemisphere and Russian serfs, untangled the tentacles of the transatlantic slave trade, juxtaposed American planters with international planters, explored the links between various post-emancipation societies, and equated South African apartheid with Jim Crow.48 Early comparative scholarship in the post-consensus period left a lasting imprint on the field of southern history and challenged significantly the traditional nation-state orientation of the history of the United States. Thus, current scholarship addressing the global reach of the southern political economy has merely reinvigorated an earlier academic interest in the transnational dimensions of southern history. Indeed, C. Vann Woodward, whose scholarship had more influence on the debate over the nature of the postbellum southern political economy than any other book, must be given credit for an international tip of the hat as well. He pushed historians of the South 316

TH E PA R A DOX OF T HE EC ON O M Y O F T H E NE W S O U T H

toward a transnational framework long before the first or second generation of “Global South” scholars appeared. In his legendary collection of essays in The Burden of Southern History, Woodward explained how southern history could be distinguished by the region’s extended “un-American experience with poverty” and was distinctive precisely because it “included large components of frustration, failure, and defeat.” Most important, he asserted, that the region’s peculiar experience with poverty and ruin had more in common with other places around the globe than it did with American tradition. “For from a broader point of view,” Woodward reasoned, “it is not the South but America that is unique among the peoples of the world.”49 Woodward’s assertion that the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction constituted a watershed moment in the political economy of the New South sparked decades of scholarship focusing on the question of continuity or discontinuity and southern distinctiveness. It appears the majority of historians found the allure of regionalism and nationalism irresistible historical subjects. The paradox of progress and poverty often confined historians to limited paths. But we must remember Woodward had shown interest in studying the South from a comparative and global perspective as early as the late 1950s. And a few adventurous scholars studying the postbellum southern political economy periodically followed his path. For a time, it suggested a new direction for the field of southern history. Recent historians who focus on what has been referred to as the Global South often view themselves as forerunners of a new model for thinking about southern history, one that is critical of the traditional historiography. They have seemingly forgotten about this earlier body of scholarship, bottling old wine in new bottles for consumption by a new generation. These historians of the political economy of the Global South have implied their focus is groundbreaking since the discipline of history has been bound up with the creation of the nation-state from the very beginning, circumscribing historians in a nationalist frame that considered the South as a distinctive region in an exceptional nation. But we must remember that historians of the South did not entirely neglect the international context advocated by Woodward almost sixty years ago. Future scholars studying the political economy of the New South might find the global perspective a compelling framework that is likely useful beyond its contemporary focus on cotton.

Notes 1 Thomas Jefferson to Marquis de Chastellux, September 2, 1785, Letters of Thomas Jefferson, Avalon Project at Yale Law School, www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/jefflett/let34.htm. 2 Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); John D. Cox, Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); David Bertelson, The Lazy South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); and William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: G. Braziller, 1961). 3 See Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 40–72. 4 See Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 5 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Crisis and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 72–73.

317

N ATA L I E J. R I NG

6 Novick, That Noble Dram, 235. 7 Novick, That Noble Dram, 93. 8 Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, “The Central Theme in Southern History,” American Historical Review 34 (Oct. 1928): 30–43; W. J. Cash, with a new introduction by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), vii–viii, xlvii–xlviii. More than three decades later Carl Degler published Place over Time: The Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977) in which he argued that the region’s racism, poverty, agricultural economy, paucity of immigration, conservative religious outlook, and violent proclivities all contributed to the continuity of southern difference. Degler linked the antebellum South with the present-day South, sketching one unbroken linear historical path. Thus, the historical legacy of continuity persisted. 9 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 21–22. 10 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 292 11 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 292. Also see Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeomen Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), for an explanation of how yeoman farmers were drawn into the market and increasingly lost control of their land. 12 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 306. 13 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 179–180, 182, 184. 14 David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 20–21. 15 William A. Link, Southern Crucible: The Making of an American Region, combined volume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 319. 16 Carlton and Coclanis, The South, the Nation, and the World, 22. 17 The historiography on the rise of sharecropping and tenancy as well as how these agricultural changes inspired the Populist Party is vast. For examples see Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Harold Woodman, New South, New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in the Cotton Culture of Central Texas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism. 18 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 194. 19 Gavin Wright, Old South New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 7, 11; and Gavin Wright, “The Strange Career of the New Southern Economic History,” Reviews in American History 10 (Dec. 1982), 176. 20 Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 130. 21 Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 22–39 (quotation at 39). 22 See Jonathan M. Weiner, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860–1885 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Dwight B. Billings, Planters and the Making of a “New South”: Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); and Jay R. Mandle, Not Slave, Not Free: The African American Experience since the Civil War (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979). The term the “Prussian Road” has often been misattributed to Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). Other historians who have argued for continuity in the political economy are Degler, Place over Time; Howard Rabinowitz, The First New South (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1992). 23 Weiner, Social Origins of the New South, 108. 24 David L. Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina 1880–1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 8–9.

318

TH E PA R A DOX OF T HE EC ON O M Y O F T H E NE W S O U T H

25 Lacy K. Ford, “Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1865–1900,” Journal of American History 71 (Sept. 1984): 317. 26 Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860– 1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982). 27 William A. Link and Susannah J. Link, eds., The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: A Documentary Reader (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 22. 28 Holland Thompson, From the Cotton Field to the Cotton Mill: A Study of the Industrial Transition in North Carolina (New York: Macmillan, 1906). This first book was based on his dissertation. 29 Holland Thompson, The New South: A Chronicle of Social and Industrial Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), 8. 30 Holland Thompson, “The New South, Economic and Social,” in J. W. Gardner, ed., Studies in Southern History and Politics: Inscribed to William Archibald Dunning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914), 291, 293. 31 Thompson, New South, 1. 32 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 154–157. 33 Thompson, “The New South, Economic and Social,” 315. 34 For a history of this discourse see Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 35 Charles S. Johnson, Edwin R. Embree, and W. W. Alexander, The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935). 36 Edwin A. Alderman, The Growing South: An Address Delivered before the Civic Forum in Carnegie Hall, New York City, March 22, 1908 (New York: Civic Forum, 1908), 18. 37 Cited in Gilbert H. Collings, The Production of Cotton (New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1926), frontispiece. 38 Arthur W. Page, “The Cotton Growers,” World’s Work 11 (Jan. 1906): 7051, 7056, 7059. Also see Walter Hines Page, “Cotton Again King,” World’s Work 8 (May 1904): 4793, for another example about the South’s remarkable advancement. 39 Charles William Burkett and Clarence Hamilton Poe, Cotton: In Cultivation, Marketing, Manufacture, and the Problems of the Cotton World (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908), 8. 40 Charles H. Otken, The Ills of the South; or Related Causes Hostile to the General Prosperity of the Southern People (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), 10–11. 41 D. D. Wallace, “Southern Agriculture: Its Condition and Needs,” Popular Science Monthly 64 (Jan. 1904): 260. 42 I am not the first historian to suggest the continuity-discontinuity debate may no longer be useful if thinking in strictly binary terms. Gavin Wright once said, “we know in advance that we are not going to get satisfying answers.” See Wright, “The Strange Career of the New Southern Economic History,” 165. 43 Peter Kolchin, “The South and the Un-South,” in A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 7–38. 44 For examples of recent work on the global South, which tends to focus extensively on cotton, see Andrew Zimmerman, “A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers,” American Historical Review 110 (Dec. 2005): 1362–1389; Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Sven Beckert, “From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton,” Journal of American History 92 (Sept. 2005): 498–526; Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109 (Dec. 2004): 1405–1438; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Random House, 2014); Annette Cox, “Imperial Illusions: The New South’s Campaign for Cotton Cloth,” Journal of Southern History

319

N ATA L I E J. R I NG

45 46 47

48

49

80 (Aug. 2014): 605–650; Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005); Erin Elizabeth Clune, “From Light Copper to the Blackest and Lowest Type: Daniel Tompkins and the Racial Order of the Global New South,” Journal of Southern History 76 (May 2010): 275–314; Ring, The Problem South. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, xix. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, 1. See Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy, with a new introduction by Steven Hahn (1983; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); Barbara J. Fields, “The Advent of Capitalist Agriculture: The New South in a Bourgeois World,” in Thavolia Glymph et al., eds., Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy (College Station: Texas University Press, 1985); Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 95 (Feb. 1990): 75–98; and Kolchin, A Sphinx on the American Land. Some significant titles include David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967); Eugene D. Genovese, “The Treatment of Slaves in Different Countries: Problems in the Application of the Comparative Method,” in Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese, eds., Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969); Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971); Richard S. Dunn, “A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799 to 1828,” William and Mary Quarterly 34 (Jan. 1977): 40–64; Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies”; Stanley Engerman, “Economic Adjustments to Emancipation in the United States and British West Indies,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13 (Autumn 1982): 191–220; George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); John Whitson Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). C. Vann Woodward, “The Search for Southern Identity,” in The Burden of Southern History, 3rd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 17–19, 188.

320

20 AMERIC AN LITER A R Y A N D C ULTURAL H I S T O R Y I N THE POST-C IVI L W A R ER A Sarah E. Gardner

On October 30, 2010, The New York Times ran the first post in what would become its enormously popular Disunion series. “It’s a bottomless treasure, this Civil War,” journalist Tony Horowitz enthused, “much of it encrusted in myth or still unexplored. Which is why,” he concluded, “it still claims our attention and remembrance.” The Times’s series editors banked on Horowitz’s reading of the national zeitgeist. They were smart. Disunion became “the most active series” in the paper’s Opinion section and its website received “more than 35 million unique monthly visitors” during its run. Times’s editors designed the series to offer “a multiplicity of perspectives,” calling upon esteemed scholars, journalists, and Civil War buffs to contribute new perspectives, commentary, and assessment of the war. Moreover, posts from readers in the comments section “added to the chorus of new voices and brought to life, for hundreds of thousands of people, the catalytic, near-catastrophic historic events that shaped our nation.”1 Coinciding with The Times’s Disunion series was a reinvigorated exploration by historians of the war’s influence on postbellum literary and cultural production. This scholarly attention makes sense, not simply because of the war’s sesquicentennial. As historian K. Stephen Prince has observed, questions about the defeated South – both as a region and as a constitutive part of postwar America – dominated discussions in the late nineteenth century.2 These recent studies tell us a great deal about preferred genres, the contours of the arguments, and new developments in American letters and other forms of cultural production. They also contribute to our understanding of the ways in which vested postwar interests used narratives (of victory or defeat, of reunion or reconciliation, of violence and recalcitrance) to frame the meanings and lessons of the war to distinct interpretive communities. These postwar discussions on the meaning of U.S. victory and Confederate defeat would not have been possible without the tremendous expansion of print culture in the late nineteenth century. In recent years, literary scholars and historians of the book have documented the ways in which postbellum industrialization altered modes of production and distribution, the influence of professionalization of the publishing industry, and the role of print in advancing “a set of values that centered on [. . .] the middling classes, at once explaining and manifesting what it meant to live in a bourgeois world.”3 Increasingly, literary and cultural historians have begun to examine audience, moving away from the text at the center and focusing instead on the reader or viewer. These works in particular 321

S A R A H E. G A R D NE R

help explain what texts and images carried cultural currency during the late nineteenth century. Finally, scholars have turned their attention to the ways in which the marginalized, disfranchised, and disparaged – both as producers and as consumers – turned to print culture to challenge attempts at constructing a dominant narrative that championed a certain set of values as it reviled others. This outpouring of scholarship in literary and cultural history signals the health and vibrancy of the field. Scholars are asking new questions of old sources, branching out from traditional methodologies and modes of inquiry, and drawing on other disciplines to work through these issues. Taken together, these new directions move us away from binaries that have long held us hostage and raise questions that warrant continued exploration. In the summer of 1865, American author John Trowbridge set out on the first of two tours of the defeated Confederacy. “I saw the most noted battle-fields of the war,” he prefaced his travelogue, published the following year. Cataloguing his broad and diverse source base as well as his extensive and varied travels, Trowbridge articulated for his readers a kind of objectivity that he professed informed his investigation. “I made acquaintance with officers and soldiers of both sides,” he wrote. I followed in the track of the destroying armies. I traveled by railroad, by steamboat, by stage-coach, and by private conveyance; meeting and conversing with all sorts of people, from high State officials to “low-down” whites and negroes; endeavoring, at all times and at all places, to receive correct impressions of the country, of its inhabitants, of the great contest of arms just closed, and of the still greater contest of principles not yet terminated. His account, he promised, would be free from “fictitious coloring,” exaggerations, and embellishments, for the times demanded sober reflection. “[W]hat is now most desirable, is not hypothesis or declamation,” Trowbridge had determined, “but the light of plain facts upon the momentous question of the hour, which must be settled not according to any political or sectional bias, but upon broad grounds of Truth and Eternal Right.”4 Trowbridge’s “question of the hour” has animated much of the literary and cultural scholarship of the past decade. Indeed, the publication of David Blight’s influential study Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory has encouraged a generation of scholars interested in the ways in which postwar imperatives – racial justice and sectional healing – often worked at cross-purposes. Challenging the argument, most forcefully articulated by Paul Buck at the war’s seventy-fifth anniversary, that the swiftness of political reunification was an unequivocal good, Blight reminded readers that “sometimes reconciliations have terrible costs.” Reunion, he observed, demanded the rejection of the emancipatory implications of Confederate defeat. Only the “resubjugation of [. . .] those [. . .] whom the war had freed from centuries of bondage” could guarantee a quick and painless reintegration of the former Confederate states back into the national fold. And that resubjugation could take place only if certain memories of the war’s meaning trumped others. As Blight concluded, Race and Reunion tells “a story of how in American culture romance triumphed over reality, sentimental remembrance won over ideological memory.”5 In recent years, Blight’s analytical framework has come under scrutiny. In particular, scholars have challenged his reading of the erasure of the emancipationist vision from the 322

LI T ER A RY A N D C ULT UR A L HI S TO RY PO S T- C I VI L WA R

national understanding of the war’s meaning. In a study of the culture of commemoration among Civil War veterans, historian M. Keith Harris has warned against assuming shared “racist sensibilities” led inexorably to Union veterans’ embracing a “white only” version of U.S. victory. Rather, according to Harris, Union commemorations throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “resonated with tributes to emancipation.” “’Never forget,’ one veteran reminded his former comrades-in-arms, “that we fought for Freedom and Union, and they for Slavery and Disunion; and that we stood for the right, and they for the wrong.’” This sentiment was hardly exceptional, Harris has argued. At meeting halls across the country, “triumphalist” accounts of Union victory similarly emphasized the “disruption” of southern slavery. Equally important, Harris found little to suggest that Union veterans changed their rhetoric when speaking in public or in private. Harris thus concluded that Union veterans genuinely saw the war as not one merely to preserve the Union but as one that made “‘the Union worth saving.’”6 According to historian Barbara A. Gannon, much of our misreading of the central place emancipation occupied in Union veterans’ understanding of the war’s meaning stems from hastily formed conclusions about the Grand Army of the Republic’s (GAR) membership. To be sure, scholars have acknowledged African American veterans’ participation in the GAR, but have noted ruefully that they were treated poorly by their erstwhile comradesin-arms, arguing “that this treatment was somehow connected to the national retreat from black civil rights in the late nineteenth century.” Gannon has found this formulation sloppy. Whatever we can say about the conflicts engendered by the creation of an interracial fraternal organization in postbellum America, and we can say much, the erasure of the emancipationist legacy of Union victory from veterans’ memory was not among them. “The men who had paid the price,” Gannon has written, “the survivors of this horrific struggle who later joined the GAR, did not forget the bondsmen and the blood they shed at their side. Black and white veterans,” she continued, “were able to create and sustain an interracial organization in a society rigidly divided on the color line because the northerners who fought and lived remembered African Americans’ service in a war against slavery.”7 In making this point, Gannon stressed not only shared physical and psychological suffering of white and African American Union veterans, but also their shared “spiritual crisis,” namely, “the struggle to find some larger meaning for their suffering.” What emerged was the articulation of a shared memory of the Civil War that Gannon terms the “Won Cause,” an understanding of the war’s twin goals of Liberty and Union that explicitly embraced emancipation. As she concludes, GAR members “interpreted the horrific price paid by their generation as part of God’s plan to end slavery, quite literally echoing the refrain: ‘As he died to make men holy, let me die to make men free.’” The neo-Confederate vision of the “Lost Cause” might have gained ascendency at the turn of the twentieth century, but the “Won Cause” dominated northern understanding of the war’s meaning in the first few decades following Appomattox.8 Gannon, then, suggests the importance of timing. The triumph of the “Lost Cause” narrative was never assured, but our understanding of the ways in which it operated in the twentieth century has encouraged us to read it back in time. The result, she suggests, greatly distorts the cultural landscape of the decades immediately following Appomattox. More than Blight’s reading of the erasure of the emancipationist vision of the Civil War’s legacy has come under attack, however. Scholars have increasingly questioned 323

S A R A H E. G A R D NE R

Blight’s emphasis on reconciliation. Indeed, much of the recent literature has emphasized the ways in which former combatants rejected the “bonds of fraternalism and mutual glory.” Harris, for example, finds little evidence of Civil War veterans buying into the reconciliation line, pithily summarized by Blight, that devotion to cause “made everyone right, and no one truly wrong.”9 Historian Caroline E. Janney has argued a similar point. Images that figured so prominently in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary The Civil War, of “white-bearded veterans of both sides happily shaking hands, marching alongside each other,” powerfully suggest that the nation had reconciled. “Forgetting their past differences,” Janney has written of the cultural work done by these photographs, former combatants “agreed that there was no North, no South, only a United States of America.”10 Yet much in the written record works against such a reading. Surveying regimental histories, personal memoirs and reminiscences, postwar prison narratives, and veterans’ magazines and newspapers, both Harris and Janney see instead implacable enemies who refused in the decades following the war to acknowledge the legitimacy of the enemy’s cause. Veterans did not oppose reconciliation but their willingness to “reach across the bloody chasm” had strings attached. As Harris explained, their memories of the war shaped the “terms of reconciliation.” Sectional healing could take place only if erstwhile enemies “accepted their respective arguments – a scenario that seldom transpired.” In their refusal to forget, Harris asserted, “veterans from both sides of the Potomac undermined the broader reconciliatory message tacitly – often explicitly – endorsed by a nation.”11 For former Confederates, reconciliation hinged on northern recognition of the principles that undergirded secession, namely the right to resist federal authority. Moreover, they continued to insist they were the true inheritors of the founding fathers’ legacy. Harris readily concedes that most former Confederates “remained silent on the war and returned to their peacetime pursuits.” But those who did enter the conversation about the war’s meaning generally “accepted reunion and embraced reconciliation” but nonetheless (and perhaps paradoxically) remained “unrepentant and unwilling to dismiss the issues that had sustained their four-year Confederate war.” Equally important, they belonged to a powerful network that wielded tremendous influence both in and out of the South. In local, regional, and national venues former Confederates vindicated their position. They might have suffered military defeat, but the ideological war continued.12 Not surprisingly, the Civil War veteran figured prominently in Gilded Age literature, as recent studies have pointed out. Much has been made about the ways in which these stories, sketches, and novels promote reconciliationist themes. A story that appeared in The Atlantic at the turn of the twentieth century aptly illustrates this point. In “The Little Faded Flag,” by Edward L. White, a narrator from the appropriately named town of “Middleville” escorts a French visitor, impressing upon him the strengths that distinguish the United States from other nations. He forces his visitor to admit that the descendants of a revolt in western France during the French Revolution hold on to century-old animosity. “You don’t comprehend,” his visitor tries to explain, “how fierce, how implacable, how ferocious was the fighting in the war.” To the visitor, their lingering acrimony is justified. “They still smart under the reciprocal wrongs inflicted, they still recall the gloating fiendishness of their foes, and apart from any recollections of outrage, they rather make a point of honor their inflexibility.” The visitor assumes those words could be equally true of former Confederates and Unionists. But a trip to the town’s cemetery disabuses him of that 324

LI T ER A RY A N D C ULT UR A L HI S TO RY PO S T- C I VI L WA R

notion, for there he sees a Confederate grave decorated with a Union Flag. The narrator then recounts a recent reunion of Confederate and Union veterans that revealed their shared sense of war’s horror and destruction had tempered their animosity. “‘All that volcano of hatred is burned out of me,’” one veteran had confessed. The trip’s purpose becomes patently clear to the French visitor, if not White’s readers. “I agree with you,” the visitor admits. “I have seen nothing in America as wonderful as that little faded flag.” The great European nations have art galleries and court balls, the narrator concludes, “[b]ut that flag stands for the most wonderful thing the world has ever produced yet. Not for talk about brotherhood, but for the real thing.”13 Yet cultural work wrought by fictional accounts of veterans in Gilded Age America is more vexed than “The Little Faded Flag” might suggest. In a brief survey of novels and short stories that comment explicitly on the reabsorption of Union veterans in postwar society, Civil War historian James Marten has identified four recurring themes, each suggesting the nation’s uncertainty about the proper place of these erstwhile combatants in peacetime. In this sense, Marten has argued, the literature comments on lingering debates “about the nature of volunteerism, the definition of ‘worthy’ veterans, and the role of old soldiers in the nation’s politics.” This ambivalence might be “surprising,” Marten has suggested, but not its persistence in American fiction, for authors presented veterans as “civilians perceived them.” Seeing literature as a mirror that reflects abiding and pressing cultural concerns, Marten thus finds the popularity of the veteran in Gilded Age fiction as wholly expected and appropriate.14 The literature Marten examines presents the veteran as a problematic and contested figure in late nineteenth-century America. Penned by prominent realists, local colorists, and sentimentalists, including William Dean Howells, Thomas Nelson Page, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Louisa May Alcott – all noncombatants – these tales “chronicle some of the war’s negative long-term effects on veterans’ lives and hint at some of the friction that emerged between civilians and veterans.” In some stories, former combatants emerge as dependent, “pitiful creatures,” worthy perhaps of private charity “but not respect.” The amputee who barely ekes out a living, the addict unable to cope with war’s traumas, Confederate defeat, or peace all point to the difficulties veterans faced integrating into postwar society.15 But even those who seemed physically and psychologically well bore burdens. As Marten writes, “one does not have to be maimed or psychologically traumatized to be haunted by despair, unfocused dissatisfaction, and uneasy relationships with civilians and civilian life.” But because they manifested no outward signs of damage, these characters were ignored, deemed irrelevant, their sacrifices and sufferings “almost immediately forgotten by their communities.” Finally, Marten has noted the use of veterans as a source of humor or parody, a point that remains largely undeveloped.16 The central cultural concern addressed by each of these stories, then, is the crisis of masculinity. As the nation’s economy shifted away from a producerist to a corporatist economy, from independent yeoman farmers to large-scale agribusinesses, definitions of masculinity evolved as well. As Marten has pointed out, veterans’ service records did not necessarily shield them from accusations of unmanliness. “Indeed,” Marten has written, “the public discourse about crippled veterans, veteran tramps, and beggars, and pension advocates who seemed to be demanding government handouts offered examples of how not to be a man.” Much of the literature penned during the last two decades of the 325

S A R A H E. G A R D NE R

nineteenth century, then, offers examples of veterans who “fail to measure up.” Marten concludes by suggesting that the Gilded Age’s evolving gender conventions “helped articulate what was wrong with veterans.”17 Marten’s essay focuses almost exclusively on the post-Reconstruction era, when the questions about veterans’ dependency on the state, fraud, and political corruption loomed large.18 Literary scholar John A. Casey, Jr.’s broader examination of veteran literature reveals additional tensions that confronted postwar America. Interested in the ways veterans “understood themselves and their war experiences,” Casey has argued that their postwar writings reveal a shift in the ways in which Americans viewed former combatants. Until the Civil War, Casey has maintained, the term veteran simply connoted past military service. What distinguished soldier from civilian then was “technical expertise”; what distinguished one veteran from another was length of service. Antebellum readers and writers therefore thought it possible for noncombatants to write convincingly about veterans in the antebellum era, Casey argues, citing Washington Irving and Herman Melville as two notable examples.19 The Civil War changed everything. Wartime service was no longer an event in a combatant’s life; it was the defining event. Simply put, veterans saw the world differently than noncombatants. Because veterans entered the postbellum literary marketplace vigorously and in unprecedented numbers, the Civil War signaled a “dividing point between two distinct ways of writing about war.” Their belief that the status of veteran carried a unique perspective on war meant that their concerns about the role of former combatants in peacetime society often conflicted with those of civilians.20 Casey charts three phases of veteran reintegration, highlighting in each the particularities of veterans’ concerns. The first chronicles army demobilization in the immediate postwar period. In an effort to combat the “widespread belief circulating in newspapers and popular periodicals [. . .] that former soldiers were victims of war in need of civilian caretakers to nurse them back to health and normalcy,” writers such as John William DeForest and John Esten Cooke display a kind of optimism about soldiers’ ability to rejoin civilian society. Yet postwar realities challenge that optimism, exposing fault lines. Underneath much of this writing, Casey has observed, is a sense of “growing [. . .] disillusionment with the post-Civil War nation.”21 When self-defense failed, veterans turned increasingly to memory. Unable to find a place in the postwar world, they retreated to memories of an idealized youth, an earlier time that esteemed producerist values of independence, hard work, and thrift. With visions of a prewar Eden, however, came memories of war’s traumas. “While searching for succor in the past,” Casey has contended, “veterans dredged up long-buried psychic wounds that threatened their health and, in some cases, their public legacies.” In this sense, nostalgia failed veterans. War encourages soldiers to do bad things: killing, pillaging, burning, drinking, whoring, and lying. War’s myriad traumas, then, were manifest. “The visions of death and suffering, and of guilt at having violating strictly established social norms and mores, threatened to both overshadow their idyllic images of the past as well as harm their health and sanity.” Much of the literature published in the 1870s and 1880s, such as Sherman’s Memoirs, Confederate Private Sam Watkins’s personal narrative Company Aytch, and Union veteran Ambrose Bierce’s short stories, reveals the contested and vexing nature of memory. More important, these works assert that war changes a 326

LI T ER A RY A N D C ULT UR A L HI S TO RY PO S T- C I VI L WA R

soldier. To varying degrees, they stress that a gulf existed between civilian and veteran that could not be bridged. In this sense, Confederate and Union veterans shared more in common with one another than they did with their civilian countrymen and women.22 Veterans’ new claims and definitions of in-group status did not go unnoticed by non-combatants. This third phase of literature concerned with veteran reintegration, then, centers on social and cultural efforts to come to terms with veterans’ self-assertiveness. As Casey has discovered, this literature exposes “the growing resentment among members of succeeding generations of middle-class white men toward the exclusionary language espoused by Civil War veterans, and the burdens their unique self-conception placed on American society.” Here, Casey’s and Marten’s analyses dovetail, for both highlight controversy over pensions and the accusations of fraud and corruption. But Casey also finds “figurative” burdens as well, noting “the constraints placed on young men’s maturation by the rhetoric of singularity and sacredness attached to military service in the Civil War.” According to Casey, understanding how an exclusionary rhetoric that asserted “war made men” at the same time “denied young men a chance to find manhood through a war of their own” gives us a new way to read Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, “the quintessential work of Civil War fiction.”23 “The question of what the living owe the dead,” Casey has argued, “is central to the healing process for any culture following war.”24 The more vexing question, this literature suggests, is what to do with the living. And with that question, everyone – civilian and former combatant, Unionist and former Confederate – had to come to terms. For this reason, then, veterans were not alone in their refusal to abandon the principles that undergirded the war efforts. Reconciliation’s resisters came from all quarters. Perhaps not surprisingly, women’s organizations were even more resistant than veterans’ organizations. As Janney has observed, “without the fraternal bonds of soldiering or political and financial incentives,” members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Ladies’ Memorial Association, and a host of other organizations “found little reason to commiserate with their counterparts across the Mason-Dixon Line.” Southern white women in particular proved to be especially recalcitrant “in resisting the reconciliationist gush.” Even Edward L. White, author of “The Little Faded Flag,” claimed as much. “There is rancor yet,” his narrator explained to the French visitor, “mostly among the Southern women, particularly those born since the war, or those whose families really suffered least or whose men did not fight at all.” But White, who imagined shared suffering erased sectional animosity, saw white southern women’s recalcitrance as a “cult of artificial rancor.” As Janney and others have pointed out, however, there was nothing artificial about it. And, by the turn of the twentieth century, white southern women had wielded tremendous influence over Civil War memory. “Under their watch,” Janney has concluded, “the Lost Cause was ever so slowly beginning to overshadow the Union Cause.”25 Together, these works stand as an important corrective. More emphatically than Blight’s work, they remind readers that reunion and reconciliation are not coterminous and that in the case of the post-Civil War era, the former did not depend on the latter. Moreover, they highlight the ways in which the reconciliationist view has distorted how we view the late nineteenth century. Jim Crow violence, disfranchisement, and segregation might have coincided with a reconciliationist agenda, Harris reminds us, 327

S A R A H E. G A R D NE R

but the latter was never as total as Blight has suggested. The “powerful” yet comfortable narrative that has emerged – one that pits “one-dimensional reconciliationists” against the few hold-outs, the unreconstructed rebels and the bloody-shirt-waving Yankees – lends itself to an easy acceptance of historical inevitability. The popularity of the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Burns’s Civil War documentary suggests, at least in part, the comfort audiences take from this narrative. It also provides “a vantage point from which to define and lament a moment forgotten in historical memory – a lost chance for the nation to capitalize on Union victory.” But the past is rarely so neat and tidy. What gets lost in this version, Harris contends, is the “tense, often vituperative negotiation process of a nation’s formerly warring sections suddenly thrust back together, each staking a claim to a reconciliationist spirit.”26 These works also remind us that memory and sentimentality are not coterminous. Indeed, the two often work against each other. Recent studies on the ways in which the Civil War transformed American literature make this point clear. As Randall Fuller has cogently and elegantly demonstrated, the war destabilized the romantic worldview of the nation’s most well-known writers, challenging their ability to pen stories, novels, and poems as they had in the prewar era. Hawthorne, by way of example, had always been able “to transmute history into romance, action into narrative.” The Civil War, however, had shaken his confidence, threatened his resolve. To his editor, James T. Fields, “he complained midway through the war that he found it impossible to write a ‘sunshiney’ book.”27 Although the leading figures of the American Renaissance might have found it difficult to write in an earlier literary tradition, readers still craved the comfortably familiar. As Fuller has noted, the “runaway bestseller” of 1868 was written by an unknown author, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, titled The Gates Ajar. Like Melville, Whitman, and Bierce, Phelps forced her readers to confront the war’s “wasting carnage.” Rather than write about battlefields and hospitals, however, Phelps wrote about Heaven. In Phelps’s hands, Heaven looks a lot like Earth. “The dead live in houses, in towns, amid forests of lindens and elms,” Fuller has summarized, “just as they had while they were alive. In heaven,” he continued, “there is no alteration of personalities, no changes in bodily form, no annihilation of memory.” Phelps thus sensed, according to Fuller, “that her readers required words of assurance, quiet discussion, conversation instead of conflict.”28 Phelps raised similar questions to those asked by the literati – “what could so much death possibly mean? What did it say about humans that they could kill so profligately? And how could a nation of wounded survivors regain its health and begin to live again?” Phelps’s work resonated with American readers, Fuller explained, because it answered “these thorny questions with a simple promise: the nation would be reunited one day – if not in this world, then certainly in the next. It encouraged hope in a people,” he continued, “who had been forced to forsake it.” Significantly, The Gates Ajar was second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the number of copies sold during the nineteenth century. “If Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel had helped to start the war,” Fuller quipped, “The Gates Ajar helped its audience cope with the bewildering grief created by so much destruction.”29 Finally, recent scholarship demonstrates that different interpretive communities had different and competing interests in the stories they told. The question is not whether 328

LI T ER A RY A N D C ULT UR A L HI S TO RY PO S T- C I VI L WA R

reconciliation trumped recalcitrance or to what degree did erstwhile foes embrace a reunion sentiment. Rather, the more important question asks what purpose did these narratives that people told serve? To greater or lesser degrees, all of the works discussed raise this issue, but none quite as fully or skillfully as Anne Sarah Rubin’s study of the stories of Sherman’s March and K. Stephen Prince’s exploration of the reconstruction of southern identity in the five decades after the Civil War. As Rubin points out, stories of Sherman’s March “overlapped or contradicted each other.”30 The same certainly holds true for stories about the South that circulated in the late nineteenth century. Rubin examines different interpretive communities – Confederate civilians, Sherman’s soldiers, African Americans, northern reporters – and the stories they told, each emphasizing and advancing particular strands of the narrative. She is uninterested in analyzing which sets of stories were true or accurate. Nor is she interested in marshaling these stories to demonstrate the ascendancy or limits of a reconciliationist spirit in the postwar era. Instead, she highlights purposes the stories served, noting that even a single interpretive community might have competing needs. Rubin has noted that southern stories, for example, “tend to fall into one of two genres, emphasizing either victimization at the hands of evil Yankees or the cleverness of Southern whites in protecting themselves and their property from harm.” The first genre “served the Lost Cause well,” Rubin points out, “allowing southern whites to feel a sense of moral superiority toward their conquerors.” The second offered a kind of “salvation story,” allowing white southerners to “recast the March from a story of domination and devastation” to one that displayed their cunning, resourcefulness, and defiance against Yankee invaders.31 Northern reporters, such as John Trowbridge, who toured the fallen Confederacy in the immediate postwar period, had a different agenda. Rubin has observed that their dispatches “minimize[d] the destruction that had been wreaked, as a way perhaps to absolve Union soldiers of their guilt or make the March seem more justifiable and less abjectly cruel.” Interested in the plight of the freedmen and women, these northern travelers also used their narratives to “galvanize Northerners and perhaps the government into taking action on the freedmen’s behalf.”32 Rubin’s approach points to a way out of the false binary set up by questions that focus on reconciliation. Taken together, the important work of David Blight and Nina Silber on the one hand and the newer scholarship that emphasizes the limits of the reunion framework on the other suggest the coexistence of reconciliationist and anti-reconciliationist sentiment in the late nineteenth century. They also suggest the impossibility of measuring the degree to which either of these sentiments predominated. After all, “The Little Faded Flag” appeared at the same time as the first published iteration of Mary Chesnut’s Civil War diary. Which carried greater cultural currency? Rubin’s work, then, offers a different way to examine the culture of the late nineteenth century. By looking at the purposes advanced by various interpretive communities we can better appreciate the intersections of shared interests as well as the fault lines that laid bare the very real divisions that continued to threaten the nation at the close of the century. Similarly, Prince examined the ways in which various northern interests crafted stories about the postwar South in order to serve particular ends. Some stories, like those told by northern travel writers who toured the region in the months immediately 329

S A R A H E. G A R D NE R

following Confederate surrender, highlighted the ways in which the South fell short of northern ideals and expectations. Armed with all of the cultural baggage of the antebellum era that exoticized and pathologized the South, these travelers entered the defeated South with a powerful set of preconceived notions that emphasized southern exceptionalism. “If the North was orderly, industrious, and dynamic,” Prince wrote, “the South must be untidy, lazy, and static. Since the South was violent, ignorant, and backward,” he continued, “it stands to reason that the North represented enlightenment, education, and progress.” Their dispatches, according to Prince, emphasized that political reunification must be predicated on Yankeefying the South. Yet stories about Klan violence that circulated in northern newspapers and pamphlets during the late 1860s and early 1870s suggested just how difficult that Yankeefication would be. As Prince has noted, these stories about the Bloody South certainly reinforced “the case for a thorough – and thoroughly northern – Reconstruction of the region.” But they also raised troubling questions about whether that enterprise were even possible. Did persistent Klan violence signal the region was, in fact, “unreconstructable?” Ultimately, Prince concludes, a particular version of the postwar South – one backed by New South boosters, southern sentimentalists, and by northerners who increasingly doubted Reconstruction’s efficacy, viability, and even desirability – triumphed. The political work of unraveling Reconstruction, he argued, could not have occurred “without a contemporaneous cultural retreat from Reconstruction.”33 Interpretive communities did not merely produce, however. They also consumed. As Prince reminds us, audience matters. Readers, theater goers, lecture attendees, and members of veteran and memorial associations were often part of different, at times conflicting and at other times overlapping, interpretive communities. What they read in The Atlantic might work against what they had heard at the local lyceum. The cultural productions that Prince draws on were largely produced for and consumed by a northern audience, for example. Yet, as Prince clarifies, that group was hardly monolithic. “Working class Bostonians attending a minstrel show saw one depiction of the South; patrician New Yorkers experienced another; Union veterans at a regimental reunion witnessed a third.” A number of factors, then, including “class, geography, and political affiliation shaped both the frequency with which northerners considered the South and the cultural forms in which they encountered it.”34 Prince and Rubin both raise important questions that go largely unaddressed in their works. Although sensitive to the production and dissemination of overlapping, competing, conflicting, and reinforcing narratives, they are less attuned to the ways in which disparate audiences received these stories. When Prince writes of a “popular” travelogue by Edward King, The Great South (1875), for example, he pays particular attention to the unflattering portrait King offers of the carpetbagger. “Such a characterization is entirely out of keeping with the majority of King’s text,” Prince informs his readers. “This overdrawn, rather unbelievable image [. . .] is culled straight from the southern conservative anticarpetbagger playbook, and yet there it sits, presented as the gospel truth for millions of curious Yankees to read.”35 What we do not know from reading Prince’s book, however, is whether those Yankees did, in fact, read King, and, if so, what they made of this editorializing that seemed so out of place with the rest of the narrative. Those who work in reader response theory and reception studies, such as James L. 330

LI T ER A RY A N D C ULT UR A L HI S TO RY PO S T- C I VI L WA R

Machor, offer valuable models for tackling these sorts of questions. At the very least, we would do well to remember that nineteenth-century readers interpreted texts differently than we do. Reviewers, to whom Prince turns when discussing the literature of Thomas Nelson Page, George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, and Charles Chesnutt, provide part of the answer, but not a complete or definitive one.36 A little more than four and a half years after The New York Times began its Disunion series, it ended as it began, with a panel discussion between David Blight, Ken Burns, Adam Goodheart, and Jamie Malanowski, on the war’s meaning, consequences, and legacies. One of the questions posed asked panelists to imagine the war’s bicentennial commemoration. Burns offered the shortest and perhaps most noncommittal response of the participants. “I believe that the Civil War’s centrality will never diminish as long as the United States survives,” he opined. “Fifty years from now at the bicentennial, both the academy and the wider public will marvel at how important the Civil War was and is to almost every aspect of American life.” Goodheart was a bit more expansive but essentially reached the same conclusion. The stories, of 1861–65 will continue to enthrall and infuriate us, unite and divide us. Certain episodes in history are like great books: They can be endlessly read, reread, retold and reinterpreted. The ancient Greeks’ Iliad hasn’t gone stale after more than a hundred generations, and there’s no reason to expect that our “American Iliad” will do so after just another two.37 If their predictions prove accurate, we can expect a continuation of the exploration of the war’s influence in the literary and cultural landscape of the late nineteenth century. If the current scholarly trajectory holds, we can expect increased interest in the intersections of production, dissemination, and consumption of literary and cultural artifacts. Greater attention to the workings of the literary marketplace and the ways in which disparate audiences interpreted this outpouring of literary and cultural production promises to enrich these discussions and illuminate new ways of understanding the late nineteenth century.

Notes 1 The Times ran two editorials on October 30, 2010, that commented on the war’s sesquicentennial: Tony Horowitz, “The 150-Year War,” www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31Horwitz. html; and Jamie Malanowski, “Will Lincoln Prevail,” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes. com/2010/10/30/will-lincoln-prevail/?_r=0, the first post in the Disunion series. See also Press Release, Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, “Coinciding with the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War,” no date. 2 K. Stephen Prince, Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865– 1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 3. 3 Scott E. Casper, “Introduction,” in A History of the Book in America: The Industrial Book, 1840– 1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 4–5. 4 John T. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities, A Journey through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People (Hartford, CT: L. Stebbins, 1866), iii. 5 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3–4; Paul S. Buck, The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900 (Boston:

331

S A R A H E. G A R D NE R

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Little, Brown and Company, 1937). See, too, Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South: 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). M. Keith Harris, Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration Among Civil War Veterans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 90–91, 111–112. Barbara A. Gannon, The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 3, 5. Gannon, The Won Cause, 7–8. Blight, Race and Reunion, 4. Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 3. Harris, Across the Bloody Chasm, 6, 1. Harris, Across the Bloody Chasm, 67–69, 71. Edward L. White, “The Little Faded Flag,” The Atlantic Monthly 101 (May 1908): 637–638, 641, 644. James Marten, “A Running Fight Against Their Fellow Men: Civil War Veterans in Gilded Age Literature,” Journal of the Civil War Era 5 (Dec. 2015): 504–527, quotation at 504–505, 509. Marten, “A Running Fight,” 510, 513. Marten, “A Running Fight,” 515, 509. Marten, “A Running Fight,” 510. See also Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 160–227. John A. Casey, Jr., New Men: Reconstructing the Image of the Veteran in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 1–16. Casey, New Men, 5. Casey, New Men, 12–13, 17–73. Casey, New Men, 74–103, quotations at 13, 74. Casey, New Men, 104–129, quotations at 14, 114. Casey, New Men, 1. Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 232–265, quotations at 7, 233, 235; White, “Little Faded Flag,” 638. Harris, Across the Bloody Chasm, 5. Randall Fuller, From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 168. See also Stephen Cushman, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Fuller, From Battlefields, 207–208. Fuller, From Battlefields, 207, 209. Anne Sarah Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 5. Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie, 46–47. Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie, 155–156. Prince, Stories of the South, 30–31, 67–78, 3. Prince, Stories of the South, 4. Prince, Stories of the South, 81. See, for example, James L. Machor, Reading Fiction in Antebellum America: Informed Response and Reception Histories, 1820–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). “Disunion: The Final Q&A,” The New York Times, 10 June 2015, http://opinionator.blogs. nytimes.com/2015/06/10/disunion-the-final-q-a/#more-157330http://opinionator.blogs. nytimes.com/2015/06/10/disunion-the-final-q-a/#more-157330.

332

21 INDUSTRIAL EMP I R E The American Conquest of the West, 1845–1900 Andrew C. Isenberg

In 1845, the United States had only a tenuous hold on its western territories. Washington asserted its sovereignty over the lands that it had acquired from France in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, but its effective control over much of that region was limited. Between 1812 and 1836, the United States had admitted into the Union three states from the eastern margin of the Louisiana Purchase: Louisiana, Missouri, and Arkansas. To the west and northwest of that tier of states, however, was a vast region that in 1845 was titled – unglamorously but accurately – the Unorganized Territory. Powerful, largely autonomous native groups, notably the mounted, bison-hunting nomads of the Great Plains, held sway in the region. To the south, Mexico controlled the territory between the Great Plains and California, including the strategically important San Francisco Bay (although, like the United States, Mexico ceded effective control over much of the interior to native groups). To the northwest, the United States shared sovereignty over the Puget Sound and Columbia River region with Great Britain, but the British were truly in control. “If we ever did occupy Oregon,” one member of the House of Representatives said in January 1845, “it is certain we do not occupy it now.”1 Beginning in 1845, however, the United States lurched into the North American West, extending and solidifying its control across much of the continent. In short order, the United States annexed the independent Republic of Texas (where expatriate American settlers had earlier revolted and gained independence from Mexico) in 1845; agreed to a treaty with Great Britain dividing the Oregon country in 1846; and, after provoking a war with Mexico over the southern border of the newly-annexed Texas, forced Mexico to cede the territory between Texas and the Pacific coast in 1848. For good measure, the United States bullied Mexico into selling another slice of territory in 1853 and purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867. Altogether, between 1845 and 1867, the United States more than doubled its territory. While before 1845 American control over its western territories had been insubstantial, in the second half of the nineteenth century the United States forcefully asserted its dominion over the West. The exploitation of natural resources – particularly precious minerals – was the engine that drove the assertion of United States control over the West. Beginning with the discovery of gold in California in 1848, a boom-and-bust pattern in these newly-acquired territories rapidly emerged: mineral rushes spurred the in-migration

333

A N DR EW C. I S E NB E R G

of prospectors; the exploitation of other resources such as timber and pasturelands; urbanization; industrial enterprise; and clashes between settlers and natives. That pattern, established in California, was repeated in Colorado in the late 1850s and early 1860s; Montana in the 1860s; and the Black Hills in the 1870s. To consolidate its hold on the West, the United States Army followed in the wake of these mineral rushes, prosecuting wars against the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Lakota, Blackfeet, Modocs, and Nez Perce, among others. In the last years of the century, the federal government sided with mining companies in quashing labor radicalism at the mines. Altogether, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the United States transformed itself from a moderately-sized republic to a continental empire.2 The rise of the American empire in the West corresponded with the emergence of the American industrial economy. At mid-century, the United States economy was a laggard in industrial production, but by the end of the century it was the most productive industrial nation in the world. In 1850, the United States produced 8.4 million short tons of coal; by 1900 it produced 270 million, almost one-third of the coal in the world. In 1850, there were 9,000 miles of railroad track in the entire United States. By 1900, there were over 180,000 miles, or more than 37 percent of the world’s rails. Altogether, the United States’ relative share of world manufacturing output rose from 7 percent in 1860 (when it ranked behind Britain, France, China, and India), to 14 percent in 1880 (when it was second only to Britain), to 24 percent in 1900 (by which time it had become the world leader).3 The emergence of the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century as both a continental empire and an industrial giant was not coincidental. The United States’ conquest of the West consisted of a series of state-sponsored spasms of industrial expansion. Following the Civil War, the federal government, possessed of a Whiggish pro-development economic philosophy, encouraged the exploitation of natural resources in the West, enacting a series of laws liberalizing access to minerals, timberlands, and ranchlands. Capitalists rushed to exploit minerals: gold in California, Colorado, Montana, and South Dakota; silver in Nevada and Arizona; coal in Colorado; and copper in a long belt from Montana south through Utah to Arizona. Railroads, over-capitalized, mismanaged, inefficient, and liberally subsidized by the federal government, facilitated the exploitation of minerals as well as timber and cattle ranges in the West. Between 1866 and 1884, roughly five million Texas cattle were herded to railheads in Kansas to be shipped to Chicago. Railroads helped to shift the center of the American timber industry from the Upper Midwest to the Pacific Northwest. Seizing these resources provoked violent conflicts between Indians and the U.S. Army. In short, the West between 1850 and 1900 was a federally-sponsored industrial empire.4 The industrial West had multiple origins. One starting point was in 1850, in Watertown, New York, where Horace Greeley witnessed a portable steam engine in operation. “Threshing will cease to be a manual and become a mechanized operation,” Greeley wrote, “and this engine will be running on wheels and driving a scythe before it, or drawing a plow behind it, in five years.”5 Greeley’s sense of the importance of the machine was accurate, but it was not until the 1880s that the steam-powered thresher entered wide use in the wheat fields of the West.6 Another beginning was in 1852, in St. Louis, Missouri, where the first six miles of the Pacific Railroad, one of the first railroads west of the Mississippi River, opened. Two years later, in Humboldt County, California, a lumber company 334

A MER I CA N C O N QUES T O F T H E W E S T, 1 8 4 5 – 1 9 0 0

constructed a twenty-mile-long rail line to haul redwood logs from the forest to its mill. By 1869, a transcontinental railroad linked Missouri and California. Though there was no single technological origin to the industrial West, a primary impetus to western industrialization came from the gold country of California. Within a few years of James Marshall’s discovery of gold on the South Fork of the American River in California in January 1848, prospectors had extracted the easiest and most obvious gold deposits using pans, picks, and shovels. In 1852, to search more deeply for gold, the engineer Edward Mattison used pressurized water in a canvas hose to flush gold-bearing gravel into a long wooden sluice box.7 These technologies – hydraulic mining cannons, steam-power threshers, and railroads – shared important similarities. They facilitated the shift away from independent producers, with their scythes, drays, and shovels, and toward an economy dominated by capital and characterized by industrial technology and wage-workers. “The machine, which is the starting point of the industrial revolution,” Karl Marx wrote of this crucial transition, “supersedes the workman, who handles a single tool.”8 Just as importantly, all of these technologies facilitated the exploitation of natural resources. American industrialization was heavily dependent on the exploitation of cheap natural resources. In all nineteenthcentury industrial economies, growth depended on the three so-called “factors of production”: capital, labor, and natural resources. One of the remarkable aspects of the rapid American industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century was that it was accomplished despite a chronic shortage of the first two of these three ingredients of industrial growth. Capital was notoriously scarce in nineteenth-century America; until World War I, American industry depended largely on foreign investment. At the end of the nineteenth century approximately one-third of American investment capital came from Europe. Likewise, labor was in short supply – a condition that largely accounts for the relatively high wages and high levels of immigration to the U.S. in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1900, one-fifth of American wage-earners were immigrants. The U.S. had an abundance of natural resources, however, particularly minerals and timber. Plentiful resources combined with a chronic shortage of capital and labor to create a peculiar imbalance in American industrial development: a heavy dependence on resource exploitation. Beginning in the 1860s, American policy-makers enacted legislation that opened the natural resources of the West to industrial use: a series of industrial versions of the infamous Homestead Act, the 1862 law that made 160 acres of land available to settlers for a small fee. Land grants to railroad companies beginning with the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 (enacted just six weeks after the Homestead Act) and continuing into the 1870s donated 131 million acres – 10 percent of the public domain – to railroad companies. Those companies sold the land or exploited the resources on it in order to finance construction. The Mineral Resources Act of 1866 made available mining lands for $5 per acre. It was followed by the General Mining Law of 1872, which opened up the public domain to mining claims for nominal fees. The Timber and Stone Act of 1878 opened up forests and further mining lands on the public domain for $2.50 per acre. Through these and other industrial versions of the Homestead Act, the federal government from the early 1860s until the last decade of the nineteenth century funneled natural resources in the West into the private sector at well below the market rate. Until the last decade of the nineteenth century, according to the legal historian Charles Wilkinson, federal timber, minerals, and rangelands were “effectively open for the taking.”9 335

A N DR EW C. I S E NB E R G

The first intensive industrial exploitation of resources was in the gold country of California. In the mid-1850s, industrialists developed hydraulic mining technologies to take advantage of the minerals that state and federal laws made available to them. Highpressure water cannons washed hillsides into sluices constructed to trap gold but let soil and gravel wash away. Industrial technologies ordinarily require a substantial capital investment, but the technology of hydraulic mining was relatively inexpensive: mining companies impounded a river to create a reservoir; brought water from the reservoir to the mines via ditches and flumes; and used gravity and a narrowing hose to create water pressure.10 However inexpensive, hydraulic mining technology created extensive industrial pollution. Hydraulic miners moved tons of earth and gravel to extract just a few ounces of gold. They flushed those tons of debris into the streams that flowed out of the Sierra Nevada. By the mid-1860s, debris from hydraulic gold mining had befouled numerous rivers that drained into the Sacramento River, and ultimately into San Francisco Bay, destroying both fish and farmland. By one estimate, between the mid-1850s and the early 1880s, hydraulic mining deposited 885 million cubic yards of debris in California rivers – over three times the amount of earth moved to make way for the Panama Canal. Debris piled up so high in the Bear and Yuba rivers that all but the tops of pine trees on the banks were submerged. On the Yuba, debris piled up beneath twenty-foot-high telegraph poles until only the top four to six feet remained above the surface. Downstream, debris filled river channels; the channel of the Yuba was filled so completely that by the 1870s the stream ran a mile away from its original course. Debris raised riverbeds, causing spring floods to inundate farmlands with a watery mixture of sand and gravel that farmers called “slickens.” The mixture was poisonous to humans, other animals, and soil. In order to confine the waters of the spring floods, farmers raised levees alongside the rivers. As new deposits of sediment accreted on the riverbeds, they raised the levees further. By 1878, stretches of the Bear River’s bed were actually higher than the surrounding countryside: the waters of the river were held in place only by the artificial levee. Sediment poured all the way to the mouth of the Sacramento River and beyond. Mining sediment discolored the water of San Francisco Bay so extensively that in the 1870s it was visible in the Golden Gate.11 Much of the debris that mining companies flushed downstream contained large amounts of mercury. By the 1870s, California had become not only a leading producer of gold, but mined one-third of the mercury in the world. Hydraulic miners coveted mercury because it amalgamated with gold; adding large amounts of mercury to their sluices allowed hydraulic miners to extract greater amounts of gold. (Hydraulic mining was cheap and fast, but it was wasteful: before the introduction of mercury to the process, about 20 percent of the gold that entered the top of a sluice was flushed out the bottom with the rest of the debris.) Tons of mercury, a potent neurotoxin, found its way into water supplies, fisheries, and human bodies in California in the nineteenth century.12 Gold and mercury mining transformed California into an industrial place. Industrial capitalism has a greater demand for labor than other economic systems; a population surge usually accompanies industrialization. Within a year of the discovery of gold in California in 1848, 100,000 argonauts flooded into the gold country; by 1860 the population of the state was 400,000. San Francisco grew from fewer than 1,000 inhabitants in 1848 to over 336

A MER I CA N C O N QUES T O F T H E W E S T, 1 8 4 5 – 1 9 0 0

50,000 by 1860, by which time it had become the fifteenth-largest city in the United States. (For comparison’s sake, it had taken New York City almost two hundred years to reach a population of 50,000.) Industry percolated into the agricultural sector: by the 1880s, heavily mechanized California wheat farms led the nation in production and California’s profitable fruit farms were dependent on chemical pesticides.13 California produced almost $1 billion in gold between 1849 and 1874. Though most of that bullion was exported from California, enough of it remained to spur other industry in the state; California manufacturing excluding gold mining rose from a value of under $4 million in 1850 to $116 million in 1880.14 Between the 1860s and 1890s, hydraulic mining technology spread from California to Idaho, Montana, Colorado, and the Black Hills of South Dakota. Hydraulic miners also took the technology abroad, to Australia and British Columbia.15 Other mining technologies diffused throughout the West. Lode mining, unlike placer mining, required heavy stamp machinery to crush rock. Railroads were largely responsible for expanding lode mining throughout the interior West. Before the railroads, only the most valuable mines could be profitably exploited. It was too expensive to ship heavy lode-mining machinery to the mines, or to ship ore from the mines to smelters or stamp mills to process it. With the expansion of railroads, however, lode mining spread from the Comstock region of Nevada throughout the interior West. Likewise, the arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad to Butte, Montana, in 1881, made possible a shift from the exploitation of the dwindling silver mines to copper.16 While the rise of electricity increased America’s appetite for copper, demand for wood remained high through the end of the nineteenth century. The lumber industry, the leading manufacturing sector in the United States in 1850, consumed hundreds of millions of acres of forests in the nineteenth century, in an arc across the northern tier of the United States. Before the Civil War, most of this lumbering took place in the hardwood and white pine forests of the Northeast. In 1849, although New York remained the leading lumber producer in the United States, production had started to shift west to the white pines of the Great Lakes. Much of the lumber extracted from the upper Great Lakes region after the Civil War found its way, by rail, to settlements in the treeless Great Plains. Between 1860 and 1900, approximately ten million dwellings were constructed in the United States, many of them in the prairies and plains. Railroads, which needed wood for ties, bridges, and fuel, were another major consumer of timber. In 1870, the American railroad industry consumed 195,000 acres of timber. That level of consumption continued to rise, to 290,000 acres in 1880, 445,00 in 1890, 455,000 in 1900, and 620,000 in 1910, when the railroads consumed 10 percent of the lumber produced in the United States.17 By the end of the nineteenth century, lumber production had shifted again, to the Far West. In the 1850s, there were already dozens of mills in the Sierra Nevada, providing lumber to the California gold country, the silver mines of Nevada, and to Salt Lake City. By 1870, one-third of the trees in California had been cut. Even the most pessimistic observers of this rapid deforestation assumed that the Coast Redwood – the tallest tree species in the world that in 1850 covered two million acres along the Pacific between San Francisco and the California–Oregon border – would be immune to logging. One forester wrote in 1882, “The continual timber supply capacity of a redwood forest, under judicious 337

A N DR EW C. I S E NB E R G

care, is so prodigious as to be simply incalculable; none but a suicidal and utterly abandoned infanticidal policy, wantonly and untiringly practical, can ever blot them out.”18 Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, one-third of the redwoods – some as old as two thousand years – had been destroyed.19 Initially, the redwoods were so large that they overawed existing logging technologies. Just as hydraulic technology transformed gold mining into an industrial enterprise, steam technology transformed logging. Steam engines that powered railroads to haul logs to the mills and the saws at the mills vastly increased the productivity of redwood lumber production. By 1874, Mendocino and Humboldt counties in the heart of the redwood belt together produced over 40 percent of the lumber in California. The most important technological innovation in the redwood forests, however, was the “donkey engine.” A steam engine mounted on wooden skids, powering a winch with a long cable, the donkey engine allowed loggers to snake logs from valleys and ravines; it made previously inaccessible timber readily accessible. From California, the donkey engine moved north to the Douglas fir forests of Oregon and California.20 In 1849, California produced 5,000 million board feet of lumber per year, Oregon about 17,000, and Washington about 4,000. By 1899, California and Oregon each produced over 700,000 million board feet; Washington produced as much as Oregon and California combined. Profligacy characterized the consumption of timber. Between 1860 and 1910, over 150 million acres of forestlands in the United States were cleared.21 As Americans lurched into the West to exploit minerals, timber, grazing lands, and other resources, they came into conflict with Indians who sought to protect the natural resources upon which they relied for subsistence. Violence between Indians and Americans in the nineteenth-century West was, more often than not, a conflict over access to resources. Some of the most extensive violence was in California. Before Spanish colonization of California in the late eighteenth century, California had been one of the most densely-populated regions of North America, with roughly 300,000 native inhabitants. The mission system reduced the native population precipitously, but at the time of the discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in 1848, at least 150,000 Indians remained in California. Indians’ subsistence strategies centered on harvesting migrating salmon from the Sacramento-San Joaquin and Klamath-Trinity river systems. After 1848, those river systems were also where gold mining concentrated: in the gravel along the banks and in the bottoms of shallow rivers where prospectors were able to pan for gold. Hydraulic miners both diverted water from streams and flushed their debris into the channels. Within a few years, diversion and pollution ruined many rivers for salmon. In 1878, the California Commissioners of Fisheries reported that mining had destroyed half of the salmon habitat in the state.22 With both miners and Indians vying for control of the resources of the river valleys, conflict often ensued. Some of the worst violence was in northern California, where the natives, unlike those in the Central Valley, had little direct experience with colonists prior to the gold rush. As early as 1851, Karoks clashed with miners on the Klamath River. In 1852, northern miners formally adopted a code of reprisal against local Indians that called for the destruction of villages in retaliation for theft, and the destruction of the village and its inhabitants in retaliation for murder. If miners could not determine who 338

A MER I CA N C O N QUES T O F T H E W E S T, 1 8 4 5 – 1 9 0 0

had committed the alleged crimes, then they resolved to visit their vengeance upon the closest Indian village. Miners’ violence against Indians in northern California culminated in February 1860 with the massacre of more than eighty Wiyots at their village on Indian Island in Humboldt Bay. The overall effect of this violence, in combination with disease and famine, was the reduction of the Indian population of California from 150,000 in 1848 to roughly 30,000 by the end of the 1850s.23 To reach the gold country of California and settlements in Oregon and Utah, about 300,000 people traveled westward on the Platte River Trail between 1848 and 1860. As in California, where conflicts over access to resources centered on river valleys, conflict in the Great Plains between Indians and migrants began on the banks of the Platte River. As they passed through the region, emigrants cut down most of the trees growing along the Platte River. In the Great Plains, trees are present primarily in river valleys, which comprise only about 7 percent of the region; the banks of the Platte were a source of timber for Plains Indians as well as sites of winter camps. Emigrants also trailed about half a million cattle and an equal number of sheep along the Platte River. The animals consumed most of the grass within twenty miles of the Platte; as a result, neither bison nor the horses that Plains Indians herded could find forage in the area.24 Beginning in 1859, numerous prospectors traveling along the Platte Road veered south toward the Colorado Front Range. Gold discoveries in Colorado in early 1859 spurred the influx of roughly 40,000 prospectors and settlers into the territory. Hostilities between settlers and the Kiowas, Arapahos, and Southern Cheyennes, who relied primarily on hunting bison, quickly ensued. Prospecting and settlement degraded the habitats of the bison along the South Platte, Republican, and Arkansas rivers. By the spring of 1861, Indians, no longer able to subsist by hunting bison, were raiding ranches and stealing livestock in the Denver hinterlands. In response, the governor of Colorado Territory, John Evans, precipitated a war with the Indians. The conflict’s bloodiest moment was a massacre, perpetrated by Colorado militiamen led by Colonel John Chivington, upon an encampment of noncombatant Southern Cheyennes. The Cheyennes’ leader, Black Kettle, had met with Colorado authorities in September 1864 and sued for peace before returning to an encampment at Sand Creek on lands guaranteed to the Cheyennes by treaty. Black Kettle’s efforts toward peace were for naught: on November 29, 1864, Chivington’s militia attacked Black Kettle’s encampment, killing about 150 people, two-thirds of whom were women and children.25 Chivington’s massacre was part of a larger conflict with the Indians of the western plains, as hostilities between settlers and natives in the short-grass plains along the Colorado Front Range bled into Indian-white conflict in the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. Prospectors had discovered gold in Montana in 1862, and by the time of the Sand Creek massacre the situation in the northern plains was beginning to resemble that in Colorado. The U.S. Army built a road between Fort Laramie on the old Platte River trail and the new gold mines near Bozeman, Montana. The Bozeman Trail cut right through the northern plains nomads’ best remaining bison-hunting areas. Unwilling to see what had happened along the Platte River or in Colorado happen in the northern plains, the Lakota, led by Red Cloud, the leader of a Lakota sub-group, and joined by the Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho, went to war. The Red Cloud War consisted largely of Indians besieging three forts that the army had built along the 339

A N DR EW C. I S E NB E R G

Bozeman Trail. The Indians were not so foolish as to attempt a direct assault on the forts, but they harassed any soldiers entering or leaving them and emigrants traveling between them. From August to December 1866, the Lakota, led in many instances by Red Cloud’s lieutenant, Crazy Horse, killed 154 soldiers and travelers, captured 700 livestock, and made 50 brief attacks on the Fort Phil Kearney. On December 21, 1866, the Lakota lured eighty cavalrymen out of Fort Phil Kearney and into an ambush in a narrow canyon, killing all of them. Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Sherman demanded reprisals, urging Congress “to provide means and troops to carry on formidable hostilities against the Indians, until all the Indians or all the whites on the great plains, and between the settlements on the Missouri and the Pacific, are exterminated.” Civilian authorities, however, sued for peace. In the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, the United States agreed to abandon the forts along the Bozeman Trail and granted the Lakota an enormous reservation north of the Platte and west of the Missouri River. Yet the treaty with the Lakota in 1868, like similar agreements made with other groups in the plains around the same time, stipulated that the Indian reserves would last only “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.” Sherman, a member of the negotiating committee, wrote to his brother, a U.S. senator from Ohio, that within a few years the agreements would be mooted, as “it will not be long before all of the buffaloes are extinct.” Indeed, in the 1870s and early 1880s, thousands of Americans streamed into the plains to hunt bison to satisfy an increasing demand for leather in industrializing America: nineteenth-century mills relied on heavy leather belting to power their machinery. The hunters were terrifically wasteful: poor hunters wounded two or three bison for every one they killed; the crippled animals later fell to wolves. Skinners ruined hides as they flayed them, or failed to stretch and stake them to dry properly. Combined with environmental factors – a blizzard in the northern plains, bovine disease introduced by cattle in the southern plains, and the crowding of the range by cattle throughout – the bison population, which might have been as high as 25 or 30 million at the outset of the nineteenth century, collapsed within a few years, exactly as Sherman had predicted. Political and military leaders followed Sherman in applauding the destruction by commercial hunters. One officer in the plains put it to a hunter succinctly: “Kill every buffalo you can . . . every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”26 Though hunger forced most Indians to submit to the reservation system, violence punctuated the 1870s. In the summer of 1874, General George Custer led a scientific expedition to the Black Hills, in the center of the territory that had been guaranteed to the Lakota at the conclusion of the Red Cloud War in 1868. Custer’s reports, printed in eastern newspapers, trumpeted the easy availability of gold in the Black Hills. In a reprise of the pattern that had started in California, Custer’s reports caused a gold rush into the Black Hills, and a new round of violence between Indians and prospectors each seeking stewardship of different natural resources. To put an end to the violence, in the summer of 1876, the army dispatched three columns to force the Lakotas, Northern Cheyennes, and Arapahoes, led by the Lakotas Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, back to recognized reservation agencies. Crazy Horse defeated one column, led by General George Crook, at Rosebud Creek, and destroyed most of Custer’s command in a battle on the Little Big Horn River a few weeks later. By the winter of 1876–77, however, the Indians had 340

A MER I CA N C O N QUES T O F T H E W E S T, 1 8 4 5 – 1 9 0 0

divided into hunting camps in search of the dispersed bison; army pressure on the winter camps forced most of the Indians to surrender. In short, in the thirty years between the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and the surrender of most of the Lakotas to the reservation system in 1877, Americans lurched successively into the goldfields of California, Colorado, Montana, and the Black Hills, prompting violent conflicts with Indians who sought to protect their resources – salmon in California and bison in the Great Plains – from the intrusions of settlers. In the wake of the collapse of their resource strategies, natives adapted to new economic and ecological realities and shifted into wage work.27 The proletarianization of Indian labor was particularly rapid in gold rush California. Indians had worked in the goldfields in the late 1840s and early 1850s; a decade later they were primarily agricultural workers.28 The equestrian nomads of the Great Plains made a rapid transition from hunting bison to herding cattle. Members of the two largest Lakota reservations – Pine Ridge and Rosebud – worked as cowboys on numerous ranches in the Dakotas and Nebraska.29 Likewise, in the sparsely-populated plateau in northeastern California, local natives, the Modocs, had by the early 1870s largely accommodated to the local ranching economy; Modoc men worked as ranch-hands and women in domestic service. Ironically, when U.S. authorities tried to remove the Modocs to a reservation in Oregon in the early 1870s, the natives enjoyed the support of local ranchers, who petitioned federal authorities to allow the Modocs to remain in northeastern California because of their utility as laborers. A brief conflict erupted in 1872–73 – the Modoc War – when the Modocs resisted removal. The Modocs fought to remain in California not to pursue their traditional resource strategies but to remain in proximity to wage work.30 Natives were not the only people to shift into wage work in the West. Mining and logging industries attracted thousands of industrial workers to the West – particularly to mining towns – by the end of the nineteenth century. Workers arrived in the West from the eastern United States, Europe, East Asia, and Latin America.31 Miners organized unions in the Comstock region in the 1860s, and when the Comstock silver mines declined, those miners dispersed, taking their experience at union organization with them. That experience was essential: organized labor faced numerous obstacles in the nineteenth century. The federal government could issue an injunction against a laborer to keep him or her from promoting a strike or a union. Large employers not infrequently called in local police, federal troops, or private forces to break up strikes. National Guardsmen and Pinkertons in Colorado, the Rangers in Texas, and the Mounties in Canada used force to break strikes.32 Violent suppression of union efforts only fostered further labor radicalism and repeated rounds of violence. After mine owners called in federal troops to put an end to a strike in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 1892, frustrated strike leaders formed the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). During its first years the WFM saw its mission as like that of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a union that limited its membership only to skilled laborers. Indeed, the WFM affiliated with the AFL for a year beginning in 1896. Yet by that time, the WFM had fewer members than when it was founded in 1893. The organization’s leaders thus took the union in an increasingly radical direction, shifting to include unskilled workers in its ranks. In 1900 the WFM endorsed the Socialist Party; within a few years even the Socialists found the WFM too radical and disavowed their 341

A N DR EW C. I S E NB E R G

endorsement. It was the WFM’s predilection for violence – notably violent strikes at Coeur d’Alene in 1899 and Cripple Creek, Colorado, in 1904 – that caused potential allies such as the Socialists to recoil. At Cripple Creek, a union member, Harry Orchard, detonated a bomb at a railroad station, killing thirteen strikebreakers; the mine owners responded with violence of their own. In the end, the strike crushed the WFM, which had about 9,000 members in Colorado in 1902 but almost none after the strike. Yet the conflict did not sate the appetite of the most radical elements of the WFM for violence. In 1905, Orchard planted another bomb that killed the anti-labor Idaho governor, Frank Steunenberg.33 In 1904, the WFM was subsumed into the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which like the WFM was a syndicalist organization that advocated the control of industrial production and the state by a federation of workers. The IWW organized thousands of loggers and itinerant agricultural workers in the West in the years before World War I. The hyper-patriotism that accompanied the United States’ participation in World War I, however, was deadly to the IWW and radical labor in general. Between 1920 and 1923, the state governments of California, Oregon, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Idaho arrested 5,000 IWW members on various laws which had been passed in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution criminalizing syndicalism. By the mid-1920s, the IWW was finished. In 1926, the WFM changed its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, dropped its emphasis on class struggle, and focused on better hours, wages, and working conditions.34 Thinking of the West in the second half of the nineteenth century as an industrial empire contradicts some of Americans’ most cherished notions about the region during that period. At least since 1893, with the publication of the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s enduringly influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” many Americans have thought of the West as a place characterized by agricultural settlement.35 Conflict with natives, according to this idea, was incidental to the main thrust of settlement, and those natives, once relegated to reservations, seemingly vanished. Moreover, the frontier, as Turner and many of his followers maintained, drew settlers away from the influence of the federal government and of the industrializing, urbanizing East. These notions persist among many mainstream American historians: in American history textbooks, the nineteenth-century West is almost universally depicted as an agrarian, indeed almost backward, place; there is little mention of Indians after their submission to the reservation system; and little acknowledgement of the central role of the federal government in the making of the western empire. Yet an empire it was, predicated on funneling natural resources on government land into the hands of entrepreneurs as rapidly as possible, and on quashing resistance first by natives and later by industrial workers.

Notes 1 Congressional Globe, 28th Cong. 2nd Sess. (January 27, 1845), 199. For the tenuousness of the American hold on the West before the Mexican-American War, see the essays in a special issue of Pacific Historical Review, edited by Andrew C. Isenberg, “Alternative Wests: Rethinking Manifest Destiny,” Pacific Historical Review 86 (Feb. 2017), 1–152. See also Isenberg, “Between Mexico and the United States: From Indios to Vaqueros in the Pastoral Borderlands,” in John

342

A MER I CA N C O N QUES T O F T H E W E S T, 1 8 4 5 – 1 9 0 0

2

3 4

5 6 7

Tutino, ed., Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 85–109; Isenberg, “The Market Revolution in the Borderlands: George Champlin Sibley in Missouri and New Mexico, 1808–1826,” Journal of the Early Republic 26 (Fall 2001), 445–465; Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For Texas independence, see Andrés Reséndéz, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); for the MexicanAmerican War, see Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Knopf, 2012); Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); for California, see Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); for the conquest of Indians, see Brendan Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin, 2008); Isenberg, Destruction of the Bison; Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); James O. Gump, The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage, 1987), 149; “The Railroads of the World,” Railroad Gazette, May 30, 1902, 300. For railroads in the West, see Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011); see also Carroll Van West, Capitalism on the Frontier: Billings and the Yellowstone Valley in the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). For the post-Civil War West see Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). For the nineteenth-century West as an industrial place, see Andrew C. Isenberg, Mining California: An Ecological History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005); Isenberg, “Environment and the Nineteenth-Century West, or, Process Encounters Place,” and David Igler, “Engineering the Elephant: Industrialism and the Environment in the Greater West,” in William Deverell, ed., A Companion to the American West (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 77–111; Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Igler, “The Industrial Far West: Region and Nation in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Pacific Historical Review 69 (May 2000), 159–192; Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Robert Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast: Environment and Culture in an American Eden, 1778–1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997); William F. Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991); Mark Wyman, Hard Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Rodman Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947). The Ohio Cultivator, 6 (November 15, 1850). California was the leading wheat-producing state in the country in 1884 with 57 million bushels. See Isenberg. Mining California, 163. Isenberg, Mining California, 34, 84.

343

A N DR EW C. I S E NB E R G

8 Karl Marx, Capital. Volume One: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 355. For a discussion of the place of technology in labor history, see Donald MacKenzie, “Marx and the Machine,” Technology and Culture 25 (July 1984), 473–502. 9 Charles F. Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1992), 120. For “industrial versions of the Homestead Act,” see Isenberg, Mining California, 14. 10 For Americans’ preference for relatively cheap technologies, see Alexander James Field, “Land Abundance, Interest/Profit Rates, and Nineteenth-Century British and American Technology,” Journal of Economic History 43 (June 1983), 405–431. 11 Isenberg, Mining California, 39–47. 12 Isenberg, Mining California, 47–50. 13 Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 94–123. 14 David J. St. Clair, “The Gold Rush and the Beginnings of California Industry,” in James J. Rawls and Richard J. Orsi, eds., A Golden State: Mining and Economic Development in Gold Rush California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 185–208; Mark A. Eifler, Gold Rush Capitalists: Greed and Growth in Sacramento (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002). 15 Randall E. Rohe, “Hydraulicking in the American West: The Development and Diffusion of a Mining Technique,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History (1985), 18–35. For British Columbia, see General Review of Mining in British Columbia (Victoria: Richard Wolfenden, 1904), 42–43; Peter R. Mulvihill, William R. Morison, and Sherry MacIntyre, “Water, Gold, and Obscurity: British Columbia’s Bullion Pit,” The Northern Review 25/26 (Summer 2005), 197–210. For Australia, see Barry McGowan, “Mullock Heaps and Tailing Mounds: Environmental Effects of Alluvial Goldmining,” in Iain McCalman, Alexander Cook, and Andrew Reeves, eds., Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 85–99. 16 Wyman, Hard Rock Epic, 158. See also Timothy LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 17 For the use of timber to support construction in the treeless grasslands, see Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 148–206; for the impact of railroads on forests, see Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 344–352. Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 55, viewed railroads as “decisive” to the American industrial “take-off into sustained growth.” Robert Fogel qualified that view, seeing railroads as significant but not “crucial.” See Fogel, “A Quantitative Approach to the Study of Railroads in American Economic Growth: A Report of Some Preliminary Findings,” Journal of Economic History 22 (June 1962), 163–197. 18 A. Kellogg, Forest Trees of California (Sacramento: J.D. Young, 1882), 24–26. 19 Reed F. Noss, ed., The Redwood Forest: History, Ecology, and Conservation of the Coast Redwoods (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000), xxi, 39; Raymond F. Dasmann, California’s Changing Environment (San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser, 1981), 29–38; Isenberg, Mining California, 75–79. 20 Isenberg, Mining California, 75–98. 21 Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 289–330. See also Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History (New York: Norton, 2013); Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast; Donald Pisani, “Forests and Conservation, 1865–1890,” Journal of American History 72 (1985), 340–359; Richard White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980), 77–93; Thomas R. Cox, Mills and Markets: A History of the Pacific Coast Lumber Industry to 1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974). For the Douglas fir in the early twentieth century, see Emily K. Brock, Money Trees: The Douglas Fir and American Forestry, 1900–1944 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015).

344

A MER I CA N C O N QUES T O F T H E W E S T, 1 8 4 5 – 1 9 0 0

22 Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850– 1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 47; Isenberg, Mining California, 46. 23 Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, 100–124; Lindsay, Murder State; Madley, American Genocide. 24 Elliott West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 51–84. 25 Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre, 1–44; West, Contested Plains, 271–316. 26 Sir William Butler: An Autobiography (New York: Scribner, 1913), 97. For the bison, see Isenberg, Destruction of the Bison, 123–163. 27 Louis Warren, “Wage Work in the Sacred Circle: The Ghost Dance as Modern Religion,” Western Historical Quarterly 46 (Summer 2015), 142–168; William J. Bauer, Jr., We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Community and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Brian C. Hosmer, American Indians and the Marketplace: Persistence and Innovation Among the Menominees and Metlakatlans, 1870–1920 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999); Alice Littlefield and Martha Knack, eds., Native Americans and Wage Labor: Ethnohistorical Perspectives (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). 28 Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 75–81; Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, 169–192. 29 Peter Iverson, When Indians Became Cowboys: Native Peoples and Cattle Ranching in the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 70–79. 30 Isenberg, Mining California, 131–162; Isenberg, “Between Mexico and the United States,” 100–101. 31 Mae Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in Nineteenth-Century California and Victoria,” Journal of American History 101 (March 2015), 1082–1105; Eric V. Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989). 32 Andrew Graybill, Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875–1910 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 158–200; Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 33 Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969), 28–96. 34 Mark Wyman, Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010); Dubofsy, We Shall Be All, 423–470; David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 35 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” American Historical Association Annual Report (1893), 199–227.

345

22 CRISIS, PROTEST, AN D R EF OR M I N INDUSTRIALIZIN G A MER I C A William A. Link

Contradictory trends characterized the period between Reconstruction and World War I – what historians called the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The Civil War’s horrific bloodletting was over, but its aftermath cast a long shadow. Efforts to rebuild dominated the political scene, but these efforts led to doubt about social and political institutions. Americans still had to deal with the war’s political, cultural, and psychological implications, and to do so during years of intense, transformative change evident in industrialization, market capitalism, and urbanization. Between the late 1870s and early 1890s, the railroad network rapidly spread – so rapidly that few communities now lacked access to modern transportation. Most communities greeted the railroad’s arrival enthusiastically, seeing it as a measure of progress and as a promise of future prosperity. But railroads also brought subtle and not-so-subtle changes: the rush of store-bought items whose prices usually were better than local goods; the incorporation of farm products into a commercial nexus; the new dependence on a cash economy; and the overall supremacy of an unrelenting and unforgiving market. In good times, these seemed like blessings, but in hard times, the crunch fell heavily. Economic expansion remade the United States into a global industrial power, but wrenching changes left many other Americans on the sidelines of prosperity.1 The nineteenth century’s social structure and stability eroded in other areas. Labor conflict grew acute with major strikes such as the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886 and the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892; labor unions such as the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor attempted to represent workers and to make their voices heard with the large economic organizations that were dominating life. Cities grew more important, with the expansion of major metropolitan centers such as New York City and Chicago. Urbanization during the post-Civil War era affected Americans outside of metropolitan centers, with the growth of interior towns and cities whose expansion was tied to railroads.2 The generation after Reconstruction came to terms with the post-Civil War social transformation in different ways. Americans attempted to benefit from the expansion of commercial markets, but they also sought the reassurance that these forces could be contained. This essay explores three instances of responses to the Gilded Age through the experience of freed slaves, farmers, and women during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Although very different examples, each was based upon uncertainty about the future in an age of dizzying changes – and ordinary Americans’ desire to determine their future. 346

C R I S I S, P ROT ES T, A ND R E F O R M

The End of Reconstruction On November 7, 1876, Americans went to the polls to elect a president. The result was one of the closest presidential elections in American history, in which Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden outpolled Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by about 250,000 votes. In three states which federal troops still occupied – Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina – the results remained uncertain and unreported. As a result, neither Tilden nor Hayes possessed the necessary majority of electoral votes. Up until March 1877, the election remained contested, only resolved after an electoral commission proposed a solution in which Hayes won. The disputed election of 1876 was resolved by what historian C. Vann Woodward called the Compromise of 1877. According to its terms, the white South acquiesced in Hayes’s election in exchange for the withdrawal of the last remaining northern troops that occupied these three states, the last that Republican governments ruled. More importantly, the Compromise marked a formal end to Reconstruction. After 1877, the North no longer mounted any further military intervention in southern affairs.3 For the next generation, the “redeemed” South – that is, governments captured by antiReconstruction forces – prevailed, as the governments employed extraordinary means to maintain power. Using a rhetoric combining race and sex, Redeemers urged white voters to support them as a matter of social solidarity. Finally, in close elections Redeemers resorted to other methods to win elections, including violence designed to intimidate black voters into staying away from the polls, as well as redistricting, gerrymandering, and ballot manipulation. Redeemer political control solidified the grip of white supremacy. Most African Americans found little recourse to the revitalized plantation system, which assured the control of white planters over black labor.4 The end of Reconstruction meant the end of any national efforts to protect freed slaves from white oppression. During the spring of 1879, thousands of African Americans from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas – 6,000 that year, followed by 15,000 a year later – traveled up the Mississippi River. Meanwhile, perhaps 2,500 refugees fled the plantation regions of eastern North Carolina for what they hoped were more hospitable communities in Indiana and the Midwest. The departure of the migrants, known as Exodusters, seemed an alarming development, to both southern white and black leaders. Frederick Douglass denounced the migration, as did black leaders such as leading North Carolina Republicans. “We cannot but regard the present agitation of an African Exodus from the South as ill timed, and in some respects hurtful,” Douglass declared. We stand today at the beginning of a grand and beneficent reaction. There is growing recognition of the duty and obligation of the American people to guard, protect, and defend the personal and political rights of all the people of the States . . . At a time like this, so full of hope and courage, it is unfortunate that a cry of despair should be raised in behalf of the colored people of the South.5 Other established black politicians agreed with Douglass. North Carolina Republican James Harris denounced the exodus as the result of efforts of a “class of colored men who may be very appropriately described as deadbeats and paupers.” Harris, a founder of the state Republican party who was elected to the legislature, warned of false black leaders who 347

W I L L I A M A . L I NK

were the “self-styled and self-appointed leaders of their race, and with unblushing effrontery assumed it as their peculiar prerogative to represent the colored people of the whole South.” Harris saw migrants as “enemies of their people,” and he wanted “no intermeddling from such a source in their affairs.”6 In December 1879, the US Senate established a five-member committee to investigate the causes of black migration. It held hearings in early 1880, interviewing 153 witnesses.7 Their testimony provides a powerful statement about the condition of freed people at the end of Reconstruction. The failure of Reconstruction, which formally ended during the winter of 1877, only after the disputed presidential election of the previous November, motivated many to leave. Exodusters came to believe that a Promised Land lay outside the South. The end of Reconstruction did not end African Americans’ search for freedom, however. Lacking political and economic power, during the late 1870s Exodusters voted with their feet, fleeing white supremacy in hopes of finding better conditions elsewhere. In terms of absolute numbers, the later, post-World War I departure of African Americans to northern states dwarfed the Exodusters’ migration. However, the migration of the late 1870s was nonetheless significant. First, it charted out future routes of escape; the Mississippi River became a path for later generations, as did the railroads of the Atlantic Seaboard. Second, the Exodusters made a decisive commentary about declining conditions for African Americans, how Reconstruction’s promise of civil and political equality had failed. A new era in the South’s post-emancipation years was inaugurated, but it contained dark augurs for the future. Black people were keenly aware what the end of Reconstruction meant for their economic status, citizenship, and political power. “If you want to educate your children to be men, to imitate the white race, to own property, to become successful in life in any respect,” said one promoter of emigration in North Carolina, “you must leave this poor, God-forsaken country.”8 There were “no words which can fully express or explain the real condition of my people through the south,” wrote one black leader, “nor how deeply and keenly they feel the necessity of fleeing from the wrath and long pent-up hatred of their old masters which they feel assured will ere long burst loose like the pent-up fires of a volcano and crush them if they remain here many years longer.”9 One migrant, James Stokes, who traveled from Rocky Mount, in eastern North Carolina, to Indiana, told his story in January 1880. He had thought of leaving a decade earlier, but he had no idea how to move. Underpaid by white planters, Stokes found himself the victim of white merchants’ price gouging. Working all the time, he could not escape debt. Economic repression fed political inferiority: black people were “constantly compelled to submit to insolence and insult, besides being robbed of the just reward of their labor.” In North Carolina, Redeemer control of the legislature resulted in new laws imposing white control on black-majority counties. Stokes saw no alternative. He believed that Indiana was the right place “for the thousands of colored people, living in darkness and under intolerable oppression in the South.”10 In Louisiana, ex-slave, Union veteran, and Republican activist Henry Adams established the Colonization Council, while another ex-slave in Tennessee, Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, organized emigration efforts independent of Adams. Still another leader, Orindatus Simon Bolivar Wall – known as O. S. B. Wall – helped to organize emigrants from North Carolina. Adams, Singleton, and Wall shared common characteristics. Active 348

C R I S I S, P ROT ES T, A ND R E F O R M

in resisting slavery before the war, Singleton, a self-educated carpenter, escaped from slavery and lived in Canada. Returning to Tennessee after the Civil War, he relied on an underground network of information and support among postwar African Americans. As early as 1869, Singleton, using that network, began efforts to sponsor migration to Kansas. The son of a white planter and an enslaved woman who was born in Richmond County, North Carolina, Wall was freed by his father and, in 1839, was sent to study in a Quaker school outside Cincinnati. Attending Oberlin College, Wall read law under noted black leader (and Oberlin graduate) John Mercer Langston, who became his brother-inlaw when he married Wall’s sister. In 1858, Wall was indicted for participating in an antislavery mob thwarting Kentucky slave catchers in Ohio. Light-skinned (his subsequent descendants eventually passed for white), Wall remained acutely race-conscious. Asked about racial classifications of black people, Wall once quipped that whites saw them as “black, blacker, and blackest.” Late in the Civil War, Wall became a very successful recruiter for the United States Colored Troops in Ohio. In March 1865, he became among the earliest African American commissioned officers, serving as a captain and seeing duty in occupied Charleston. During Reconstruction, Wall served as a Freedmen’s Bureau agent. Returning to Washington in 1867, he became the first African American magistrate in the District of Columbia, a position that he held for about nine years. Wall became president of the Emigrant Aid Society, founded in the 1870s to encourage black emigration from the South. While Wall worked with Henry Adams in recruiting, Adams’s organization, the Colonization Council, became fantastically successful, eventually enrolling 98,000 African Americans, with most of them in Louisiana and Mississippi. Adams traveled around these states and Texas, carefully documenting widespread violence against black people. Adams found 683 instances in which black men had been whipped, maimed, or killed in the 1870s. The turning point for Adams came in 1877, with the end of northern military presence in the Deep South. Writing to President Hayes, Adams’s group appealed to Congress “for a territory to which we might go and live with our families.” Failing that, Adams sought transportation to West Africa, “somewhere where we could live in peace and quiet.” When these appeals fell on deaf ears, Adams considered urging foreign governments to provide refuge “to help us get away from the United States and go and live there under their flag.”11

The Farmers’ Uprising Unease about what the Gilded Age held for the future also affected rural Americans, many of whom expressed increasing unease about the post-1877 economic and social transformation. American agriculture underwent a major transformation during the Gilded Age. Industrialization and urbanization meant that centers of wealth and prosperity were concentrated outside the traditional heartland communities. Railroads proved a mixed blessing, opening up rural communities to outside goods but exposing farmers to the unforgiving realities of a global economic system. For farmers, railroads, seemingly possessing a stranglehold on their livelihood, became a frequent object of their ire. Increases in rates were greeted with complaints about monopoly power. Railroads symbolized the domination of the market and its controlling effect on their lives and livelihood. 349

W I L L I A M A . L I NK

As early as the 1870s, farmers organized to express grievances. The Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, spread across much of rural America, but its leadership and constituency generally represented elite farmers rather than the rural masses. A much more radical movement emerged during the early 1880s. Founded in 1879 in eastern Texas, the Farmers’ Alliance included mostly small farmers opposing large cattle operations. Unlike the Grange, the Alliance attracted farmers lacking many resources. The order especially appealed to cotton farmers because of its deep suspicion of railroads and its willingness to criticize the credit system oppressing small farmers. By 1886, when the Alliance decided to expand beyond Texas, it had become a vehicle for mass protest. Historians have differed about the origins, organization, and impact of the Alliance and, later, the Populist Party. The earliest historian, John David Hicks, portrayed their rise as a result of the closing of the frontier and economic opportunities. Others, such as Richard Hofstadter, have seen Populists as reactionary nationalists, while Lawrence Goodwyn portrayed them as a last outpost of grassroots democracy. More recent historians such as Michael Kazin and Charles Postel have portrayed them as possessing a new vision of revitalized American democracy.12 Few scholars would disagree, however, about the Alliance’s and Populists’ significance as the largest political uprising in American history. In August 1886, the Texas Alliance met outside Dallas, in Cleburne, and, after much infighting, committed to a program of political action. The meeting adopted a manifesto of seventeen “demands” urging action to secure “to our people freedom from the onerous and shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations.”13 The Cleburne Demands authorized the establishment of Alliance cooperative stores and a national bureau of labor statistics, while they also called for an end to the convict-lease system. Bitterly anti-railroad, the Texas Alliance endorsed the national regulation of railroad rates and practices. Criticizing the inadequacies of the national finance and currency system, the Alliance also called for a federal national bank to manage the currency. In early 1887, the group reached another crucial decision to recruit new members beyond Texas. With 200,000 members in Texas, the Alliance was poised for significant expansion.14 Under President Charles W. Macune, the Texas Alliance dispatched lecturer-organizers across the cotton South. Organizers promised to overcome the credit and debt problems of farmers by establishing centralized buying and selling in cooperatives, and by extending credit in advance of the cotton crop. Alliance cooperative exchanges were established at the county, district, and state level – with a powerful grassroots appeal. The lecturer-organizers were Texans, but they were often sent back to the states from which they had migrated. Nominally nonpolitical, the Alliance articulated a besieged rural culture. The organization specified that its membership was only open to farmers, laborers, mechanics, teachers, physicians, ministers, and editors of agricultural journals. Specifically excluded were those associated with the market economy and corporate bullying – lawyers, bankers, railroad men, cotton merchants, warehousers, and storekeepers. The Alliance also formed coalitions with existing protest groups. In early 1887, it merged with the Louisiana Farmers’ Union, adopting the name of National Farmers’ Alliance and Co-operative Union of America. In Arkansas, the Agricultural Wheel, which claimed a region-wide membership of 500,000, also joined forces in December 1888. 350

C R I S I S, P ROT ES T, A ND R E F O R M

By 1889, the Alliance claimed a peak membership of several million. With headquarters established in Washington, the organization maintained a network of stores, exchanges, and warehouses that attracted new members. Adopting a revival-style approach to organizing, the Alliance maintained 35,000 lecturers whose main purpose was to beat the bushes for new members and to promote an “education” program preaching “cooperation” to the rank-and-file. The cooperative exchanges became wildly popular, and they drove much of the order’s rapid growth. Part of the Alliance’s rapid expansion lay in its militancy, its willingness to slay the dragon of “monopoly” that seemingly oppressed rural Americans. In one of the organization’s more spectacular successes, in 1888 it took on the so-called jute bagging trust. The manufacturers of jute, a fabric used for cotton bagging, conspired to raise unilaterally the price of jute from seven to eleven cents per yard. The Alliance, organizing in Birmingham, mounted a boycott in the spring of 1889 against the trust. They instructed Alliancemen to use cotton fabric for bagging instead. The state Alliances agreed to make arrangements with cotton mills cooperatively; the membership avidly embraced this cause. “The Standard of Revolt is up,” declared Georgia editor Tom Watson, “Let us keep it up and speed it on.” By 1890, the jute trust had collapsed.15 Despite these successes, the Alliance confronted many obstacles. Some farmers remained discouraged and dispirited. Organizing in Alabama, Alliance lecturer J. M. Perdue complained that farmers were often “so crushed under the crop mortgage system that they have lost almost all hope of bettering their condition.” Many depended for their livelihood on local merchants, who intimidated the farmers into apathy.16 Henry W. Grady, the boosterish editor of the Atlanta Constitution, called the Alliance “deluded brothers” with socialist tendencies whose principles, “if carried out, would revolutionize our entire system of government, shutting out all competition, placing the commerce, the producer and manufacturer in the hands of one man, closing up all stores save their own.”17 In truth, the Alliance was an unwieldy organization with divisions of geography, class, and politics. Its sudden expansion, which brought in members from the Plains and Upper Midwest grain belt, made these differences even more obvious. In some sense the cooperative movement papered over internal tensions. Alliance leader Charles W. Macune realized this, but from the beginning the market pressures to succeed worked against the exchange system. In late 1889, Macune used the pages of the national Alliance journal, the National Economist, to outline a new effort to seek to overcome the credit problems of cotton farmers. Macune proposed a nationally established system of subtreasuries, or warehouses, where farmers could store their crops and receive currency in advance of the sale of their crops. Subtreasury certificates of deposit would serve, the Alliance’s 1889 platform stated, as “full legal tender for all debts, public and private.” The certificates would provide the basis of legal notes up to 80 percent of the crop’s value. The subtreasuries would also try to stem the endemic price deflation that characterized the American economy during the last third of the nineteenth century.18 Ultimately, the Alliance found its experiences in politics disheartening. The subtreasury plan quickly stalled in Congress, and its sponsor, North Carolina senator Zebulon Vance – who had endorsed the Alliance yardstick – voted against it, saying that he could not support this “great and radical departure.”19 Regular Democrats consistently outmaneuvered 351

W I L L I A M A . L I NK

Alliance Democrats, and in numerous states the agrarian legislatures accomplished little. In states such as Georgia, where the “Farmers’ Legislature” elected conservative Democrat Joseph Gordon to the U.S. Senate, the “silk-hat bosses” remained in charge.20 Despite majorities elsewhere, important Alliance proposals were frustrated. In Texas and South Carolina, respectively, Democrats James Hogg and Benjamin Tillman used the Alliance to build up their machine organizations to elect themselves governor and to seize control of the state Democratic parties. The failure of the subtreasury plan during 1891–92 spurred a movement to organize a third party – eventually known as the People’s or Populist Party. Radicals in the Alliance used the issue to point out their divergence from Democrats. The most popular advocate of a third party, North Carolinian Leonidas L. Polk, became active in the North Carolina Grange, served as state agriculture commissioner, and then became the well-respected editor of the North Carolina Progressive Farmer. Polk had much to do with building one of the strongest state Alliance organizations. Although hardly a radical by disposition, Polk felt that Democratic leaders had abandoned the subtreasury plan, “so near to the heart” of the mass of rural North Carolinians.21 Like other Alliance leaders, Polk favored the organization of a third party. Elected president of the National Alliance in 1889, Polk announced his position at a meeting of the Confederation of Industrial Organizations in February 1892. The time had come, he declared, for the “great West, the great South and the great Northwest, to link their hands and hearts together and march to the ballot box and take possession of the government, restore it to the principles of our fathers, and run it in the interest of the people.” This new mass movement intended to rectify the political system, “if we have to wipe the two old parties from the face of the earth!”22 The St. Louis meeting essentially verified the exodus of large numbers of Alliance members into a new third party, the People’s Party, or Populists. At the same time, other members of the Alliance could not stomach deserting white supremacy, sentiments which Democrats worked hard to encourage. Elias Carr, president of the North Carolina Alliance, was elected governor as a Democrat. In other states, Democrats also tried to retain the agrarian vote. On the other hand, a large portion of the order supported the Populists, though deserting the Democrats was not easy. When a Virginian cast a Populist ballot, he said it was “like cutting off the right hand or putting out the right eye.”23 In June 1892, Populists suffered a grievous blow when Polk died suddenly at age fifty-five, only a month before the new third party was scheduled to meet in Omaha, Nebraska. The Omaha convention endorsed Alliance principles but also attempted to appeal to an urban-industrial workforce. The convention’s nomination of James B. Weaver, an Iowan and former Union general, for the presidency, had little appeal in the South. Weaver did not carry any southern states. Populists, however, assembled state tickets, which, in some states, challenged Democratic hegemony. In Alabama, Reuben Kolb ran for governor under a Jeffersonian Democratic banner, but he was defeated by the regular Democratic candidate after massive fraud and what one Democratic newspaper admitted was “trickery and corruption.” In Georgia, Tom Watson lost his reelection campaign for Congress after ballot chicanery and political violence tilted the election to his Democratic opponent.24 In other states, Populists composed a significant minority, 352

C R I S I S, P ROT ES T, A ND R E F O R M

though they still faced the determined opposition of the political establishment. South Carolina’s Benjamin Tillman maintained a stranglehold over the farmers’ movement, but he was determined to undermine its influence. With Tillman in charge, the Alliance collapsed. In other states such as Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, and Virginia, the Alliance for various reasons did not convert to Populism.

The Origins of Progressivism The advent of the Progressive Era, beginning in the 1890s, represented a third attempt to come to grips with the changing world of industrializing America. A worldwide financial collapse in 1893 brought on a long depression and high industrial unemployment, collapsing agricultural prices, and widespread distress. In part in response to the economic crisis of the 1890s, a disparate and loosely connected movement sought to institute reforms that strengthened the ability of the state to intervene to regulate the economy and stabilize the social system. Involving various efforts as diverse as public health and the regulation of the workplace, these early progressive reformers were motivated to try to perfect society through purposeful intervention. Collectively, the reformers, who enjoyed a peak of popularity and political success between the late 1890s and World War I, were known as progressives.25 The Progressive Era also marked a coming of age for middle-class women, who played a large role in shaping and directing reform, especially social reforms such as public schools and the anti-saloon movement. During the early years of the twentieth century, women exerted unprecedented public involvement in leadership by claiming their position as mothers and protectors of the family. In literature, and as journalists, as well as in social movements, such as prohibition, women burst on the public scene in twentieth-century America.26 During the generation after the Civil War, the status of women slowly changed. Although Victorian taboos restricted women’s ability to work outside of the home, women became involved in activism in the public sphere. New opportunities for work opened up, as a handful of women were able to become physicians and lawyers. Scores of other women joined the workforce in the burgeoning industries. At the same time, women became a powerful force behind early twentieth-century reform, and their involvement coincided with their expanded public presence. In the post-Civil War era, women became more active in missionary societies, women’s clubs, and reform-minded organizations designed to protect the home. Home and foreign missions attracted Protestant women as churches organized women’s boards of missions. Mission activities often involved charity work with the poor. Laura Askew Haygood, graduating from the all-women’s Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, became active in Methodist home missions. She helped to create the Trinity Home Mission in Atlanta in 1882, the goals of which included the “physical, mental and moral elevation of the poor of the city.”27 The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874, became one of the most important women’s organizations of the Gilded Age. Its appeal lay in expressing women’s moral power and its assertion over the primarily male world of saloons and drinking. In addition to pressing for temperance and prohibition, some 353

W I L L I A M A . L I NK

WCTU activists became involved in causes such as education, child labor, prison reform, and anti-lynching campaigns. The group became an organizational training ground for female leadership. Another setting for activism was women’s clubs, which grew in popularity after the mid-1880s. As Anne Firor Scott shows in her pioneering The Southern Lady (1970), early women’s clubs were historical and literary, often reading groups of women in a singlesex setting. Soon clubwomen became involved in social concerns related to traditional female spheres of influence – children, education, and the home. The “improvement of health, the betterment of morals, the modernizing of education and humanizing of penology are perhaps the most vital matters in which . . . women have interested themselves,” declared a North Carolina clubwoman.28 The women’s club movement became a national mania, with most states participating in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs by 1910. Black women also used women’s clubs as an outlet for public activism. Much of the ugly racism of the Progressive Era – lynching, disfranchisement, and segregation – was focused on black men and the threat that they presented. Black women found a niche under Jim Crow that had not previously existed. Ida Wells Barnett, a vocal critic of lynching, was a leading organizer of black women’s clubs, and these in many ways mirrored the activities of white women’s clubs – activism in children’s issues, neighborhood improvement, education, and health. Black women’s clubs focused especially on racial uplift in the age of Jim Crow. In 1896, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs was organized, with Mary Church Terrell serving as its first president. Born in Memphis in 1863, Terrell graduated from Oberlin College and moved to Washington, D.C. A suffragist, Terrell participated in the National American Woman Suffrage Association.29 Local black women’s clubs were also active in reform efforts. In Atlanta, Lugenia Burns Hope helped to organize the Neighborhood Union in 1908. The Neighborhood Union proved one of the most effective of the black women’s clubs in its emphasis on racial uplift, education improvement, sanitation and health, arts and recreation facilities, and antiprostitution efforts. The wife of Morehouse president John Hope, Lugenia enjoyed the relative autonomy of a larger city and the security of marriage to a prominent black leader. But she became one of the most important black women leaders of the Progressive Era. Most of black and white women’s activities occurred in isolation from each other. Not until after World War I were there efforts to cross the racial divide.30 Middle-class white women’s missionary and club activities often led them toward projects in public health, education, city beautification, parks and playgrounds development, poor relief, and anti-prostitution efforts. Clubwomen became especially involved in improving the physical environment of cities. Many of them became involved in efforts at conservation, for example by organizing local Audubon societies in order to prevent the wholesale slaughter of birds by plume hunters (who used the popular feathers for women’s hats) and sportsmen, often to the verge of extinction. Clubwomen were also especially interested in urban schools, creating orphanages and establishing kindergartens. Settlement houses became centers of social improvement, with women running their operation. Founded in 1896 by Episcopalian rector Beverley Warner, the Kingsley House in New Orleans became a leading settlement house. A Princeton graduate and New Jersey 354

C R I S I S, P ROT ES T, A ND R E F O R M

native, Warner was deeply influenced by the Social Gospel, the movement of liberal evangelicals to use Christianity to solve social problems.”31 Kingsley House’s fortunes depended on a group of women who soon came to run its affairs. Jean Gordon, active in anti-child-labor campaigns in New Orleans, started a day nursery. Eleanor Laura McMain, a native Louisianan, moved to New Orleans in the 1890s to work in the Free Kindergarten Association. In 1900, McMain became head of Kingsley House. She studied leading settlement houses elsewhere, such as Hull House in Chicago, in search of useful models. Kingsley House, which soon became nonsectarian, focused its activities on health, education, and social betterment of the New Orleans poor. Operating a health clinic, the settlement house also ran a kindergarten, adult education, a library, athletics programs, and playgrounds. McMain became a key figure in the creation of the Woman’s League in New Orleans, the leading social reform organization in the city. Woman suffrage became a natural consequence of activism. Suffragists had existed since the Civil War, as part of a larger national movement to achieve votes for women. Yet the energizing impact of club, missionary, and temperance campaigning, along with Progressive Era reforms, created momentum as a new generation saw suffrage as the culmination of social reform. Nellie Nugent Somerville was a Methodist woman who became active in church missions, women’s clubs, and the WCTU. In 1894, she became the corresponding secretary of the WCTU. In 1897, Somerville joined the suffrage movement, helping to found the Mississippi Woman Suffrage Association. In 1915, she became vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. All-male legislatures elected by all-male electorates were responsible for moral ills such as the age of consent for sexual intercourse, which was kept typically very low in the South by modern standards. In many states, children as young as twelve years old could legally marry. Reformers favored raising the legal age to protect children and provide a higher moral standard. Children needed protection, reformers claimed, against parents who wanted them to work rather than be educated. Children were not responsible for their existence, but they were often robbed of their childhood, deprived of an education and of youth for money. Providing the franchise to women, suffragists argued, would result in an electorate more inclined to reforms such as an eight-hour labor law for women, widows’ and mothers’ pensions, child-labor regulation, and more purity. The generation after Reconstruction witnessed a transformation of American life. Mark Twain parodied what he saw as the decline of political culture in his satiric novel, The Gilded Age. Twain’s depiction of poor and generally corrupt political leadership in Washington and elsewhere – which has become a prevailing popular image about the era – obscures the importance of this period, surely one of the most tumultuous in American history. The end of slavery created great uncertainty about the status of African Americans, who saw the end of Reconstruction as part of the reestablishment of a new form of white supremacy. They responded by leaving the South, and, although comprising only a small minority, they made a strong statement about race and freedom. Farmers, whose livelihood completely changed as a result of the arrival of railroads and market capitalism, sought to speak out against their declining status and apparent impoverishment by organizing the Farmers’ Alliance. Finally, in the totally different settings of the early Progressive Era, middle-class women carved out a role in reforming American institutions in an era of intense change. 355

W I L L I A M A . L I NK

Notes 1 Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012). For more about the post-Civil War expansion of capitalism, see Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 2 On the growth of corporations, the classic work is Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977). On the process of urbanization, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). On labor, see David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); and Thomas G. Andrew, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 3 C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (New York: Doubleday, 1956); Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); and Michael F. Holt, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). 4 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014); Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 5 http://ctah.binghamton.edu/exodusters.html. 6 Report and Testimony of the Select Committee of the United States Senate to Investigate the Causes of the Removal of the Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern States, 46th Congress, 2nd session, Report no. 693, Part I, 106–107. 7 On the Exodusters, see Nell Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976); Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), ch. 7. 8 Testimony of O. S. B. Wall, January 21, 1880, Report and Testimony of the Select Committee, Part I, 26. 9 Painter, Exodusters, 184. 10 Stokes to the Greencastle, Indiana Banner, letter dated January 5, 1880, appearing in the edition of January 8, 1880, in Report and Testimony of the Select Committee, Part I, 26. 11 Report and Testimony of the Select Committee, xxi. 12 John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931); Robert McMath, Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers Alliance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955); Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: FarmerLabor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007). 13 Samuel Proctor, “The National Farmers’ Alliance Convention of 1890 and Its ‘Ocala Demands,’” Florida Historical Quarterly 28, no. 3 (Jan. 1950), 161–181. 14 Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 47–50. 15 Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 88. 16 Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 59.

356

C R I S I S, P ROT ES T, A ND R E F O R M

17 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 198. 18 Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 92. 19 Stuart Noblin, Leonidas LaFayette Polk: Agrarian Crusader (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949), 242. 20 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 237. 21 Noblin, Polk, 246. 22 Noblin, Polk, 273–274. 23 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 244. 24 Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 188. 25 On the Progressive Era, see Robert F. Weibe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1966); Michael F. McGirr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America (New York: Harper, 2010). 26 Jonathan Daniel Wells, Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth Century South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Nancy Hewitt, Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s to 1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 27 Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 142–143; Glenda E. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 28 Scott, Southern Lady, 159. 29 Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (New York: Harper, 2009); Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill & Wang, 2010). Also see Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999); Crystal Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 30 Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989). 31 Beverley Ellison Warner, Troubled Waters: A Problem of To-Day (Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott, 1885), 323.

357

INDE X

Ableman v. Booth (1859) 257 abolition: and Age of Revolution 14; challenging gender identities 57; and disunion 24; northern states 14–15; ratification 249; rhetorical discourse 140 abolitionist movements 69–70, 243 abolitionists: foreign influence 98, 99; keeping slave states 178–9; Lincoln Administration 219; northern politics 121; reactions to slaves escaping 245–6 absenteeism 211 Abzug, Robert 68–9 accommodationists 78 accounting technologies 156 Adams, Abigail 50–1 Adams, Charles Francis 239 Adams, Henry 348, 349 Adams, John Quincy 89, 95 Adams, Sean 151, 195 Adelman, Jeremy 76 Adger, John 98 admiralty law 254–5 adultery laws 299 Adventures and Missionary Travels (Livingstone) 100 Africa 98, 99, 100 African-American literature 136–7, 141 African-American politics 118 African-American Protestantism 63 African Americans: abolitionists 98; challenging white supremacy 296; citizenship 52, 248; controlled in South 293; dis-franchisable offenses 297–8; education 52; electoral influence 295; farmers 311; fate of Confederacy 206–8; homicide rates 295, 300; homicides 295; incapable of self-government 49–50; male franchise 279; male sexuality 299; migration 348; political rights 118, 264; property offenders 296; Reconstruction period 295–6; sexual behavior 52–3; as

soldiers 208–9, 247–8, 261; “spectacle lynchings” 299; suffrage/suffragists 263, 276–7; Supreme Court decisions 264; veterans 208, 323; wartime medical care 193; white violence 263–4 African American women: clubs 354; discrete gender 49; domestic ideology 278; gender identity 56; ideals of gender 53; raping 295; Republican Motherhood 52; rights 275–6, 282; self-determination 56 African-American writers 136, 140–1 African Exodus 347, 348 African Methodist Episcopal Church 63 African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church 282 Age of Jackson (Schlesinger) 3 Age of Reason (Paine) 64 Agricultural Wheel (Arkansas) 350 agriculture 150, 212, 337 Alabama 297, 299 Alabama (Confederate ship) 237 Alaska 333 alcohol consumption 65–6 Alderman, Edwin 314–15 Alexander, Thomas B. 203 Alexander, W. W. 314 Allen, Richard 52, 63 Allgor, Catherine 53 Alliance Democrats 351–2 all-male legislatures 355 Altschuler, Glenn 113 American and Foreign Antislavery Society 69 American Anti-Slavery Society 57, 69, 98 American Bible Society 67 American Colonization Society 25, 98, 99 American empire 334 American Equal Rights Association (AERA) 58, 279 American Federation of Labor (AFL) 341, 346 American Historical Association 308

358

I N DEX

American Law of Slavery (Tushnet) 161 American Literary History (journal) 133 American Notes for General Circulation (Dickens) 97 American Reformers (Walters) 68 American Renaissance 131–43, 328; artistic assessment 139; cultural development 138–9; cultural history 133–4; literary art 138–9; messiness of history 141–2; promise of democracy 137, 138, 142 see also cultural history American Renaissance (Matthiessen) 131–2 “American-Renaissance Renaissance” (Colacurcio) 132 American Revolution 12, 16, 95–6 “American School” of ethnology 99 American Studies Association 136 American Sunday School Union 65, 70 Amistad captives 100 amputees 193 Anderson, Bonnie 276 Andrews, Williams 141 Anglo-African Magazine 135 Anglophobia 90 antebellum period: antislavery movement 69; election riots 114–15; financial crises 151; gender conventions 279; global influences 89–101; partisan worldview 111; reform movements 68; southern elites 149; Supreme Court decisions 253–7; taxation policies 42; “weak state” 115 antebellum slavery 2, 150, 298 “antebellum spiritual hothouse” (Butler) 62 antebellum voting 111, 115 antebellum women 47–58, 117, 277 Anthony, Susan B. 47, 277, 281–2 anti-abolitionist northerners 279 anti-Catholicism 68 antidissenter historiography 226–7 anti-establishment frustration 176 Anti-Federalists 23, 24 anti-Lincoln traditions 261 anti-miscegenation statutes 299 antipartyism 113–14, 116 anti-reconciliationist sentiments 329 antislavery movements 16, 57, 69 antislavery politics 21–3, 122 antislavery promulgations 149 apartheid 316 Arapahos 339, 340 aristocrats 94 see also elites Arkansas 77, 297 Army of the Potomac 234, 244–5 Aron, Stephen 76 arson 297 “artisan” model of class development 41

Ash, Stephen 205, 206 Astor Place Riots (1849) 94 Atlantic, The (magazine) 324–5, 330 Ayers, Edward L. 122, 181, 294, 297 Baker, Frank 241, 242 Baker, Jean 174, 280–1 Baker, Paula 116–17 Bancroft, George 67 banking 38, 42, 150 Banner, James 173 Baptist, Edward 153, 160 Baptists 64 Barlow, Joel 90 Barnum, P. T. 113 Barreyre, Nicholas 196 Barry, Leonora 282 battlefield leadership 233 Battle of Nashville 233–4 Beard, Charles 147, 149, 309 Beard, Mary 149, 309 Bear river (California) 336 Beauregard. P. G. T. 211 Beckert, Sven 161–2, 163, 195, 316 Beecher, Catherine 48 Beecher, Lyman 65, 66, 68 Bell, John 173 Belmont, August 225 Belz, Herman 261 Beneath the American Renaissance (Reynolds) 133 Benedict, Michael Les 264 benevolent empire 68 “benevolent” societies 64–5 Bennett, Judith 51 Bensel, Richard 114 Benson, Lee 109, 110 Beringer, Richard E. 203 Berkhofer, Jr., Robert 75, 78 Berkin, Carol 51 Berlin, Ira 208, 241 Bible 67 Biddle, Richard 90 Bierce, Ambrose 326 Bigelow, John 239 Billings, Dwight 311–12 bills of exchange 38, 154 Biracial Creeks 80 birth control 278 bison 340, 341 black civil rights movement 56, 57–8 “Black Code” (South Carolina 1865) 298 Blackhawk, Ned 77, 81 Black Hills 334, 337, 340 black-on-white rape 300 “black poverty” (Wright) 311

359

I N DEX

“black protest ideology” (Rael) 118–19 Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois) 177 Blair, William 205, 222–3, 227 Blassingame, John 2 Blight, David 322, 323–4, 328, 329, 331 Bloody South 330 Bloomer, Amelia 278 Blue Jacket (Shawnee chief ) 79 Blumin, Stuart 113 Boldizzoni, Francesco 153 bonded labor 316 bondswomen 53 Bonner, Michael 194 book-keeping 156 Boorstin, Daniel 115 borderlands see frontiers and borderlands Border South states 180–1 Boudinot, Elias 67 Bowen, Thomas Jefferson 98 Bowman, Davis Shearer 247 Bozeman Trail 339–40 Bradwell, Myra 281 Bradwell v. Illinois (1873) 281 Brady, Lisa 192 Bragg, Braxton 234 Brandwein, Pamela 264 Brasher, Glenn 245 Braude, Anne 67 Braund, Kathryn 79 Breadwinners (Vapnek) 282 Brewer, James 206 British North America 15 see also Great Britain Brooke, John 114 Brooks, James 81 Brown, Elsa Barkley 47, 49 Brown, John 135, 173 Brown, Joseph 204, 206 Brown, Louise Fargo 1 Brown, Mary Olney 281 Brown, William Wells 136, 141, 142 Bruegel, Martin 39–40 Buchanan, James 174–5 Buck, Paul 322 Burden of Southern History (Woodward) 317 Burkett, Charles William 315 Burnham, Walter Dean 111 Burnside, Ambrose 219, 223 Burns, Ken 324, 328, 331 Bushnell, Horace 33 “Businessman’s Revival” 63 Butler, Benjamin 241, 244, 259 Butler, Jon 62 Butler, Pierce 97 butternuts (dissenters) 222

Caires, Michael 196 Calhoun, Floride 54 Calhoun, John C. 203 California: exploitation of resources 333–4; gold 333–4, 336, 337; Indian and American violence 338–9; lumber 334–5, 338; missions 81–2; population 336–7; rejecting slavery 121–2; wheat 337 California Commissioners of Fisheries 338 Calloway, Colin 79 Calvinism 64 Cameron, Simon 232 Campbell, Alexander 63 Camp, Stephanie 57 Cane Ridge (Kentucky) 62–3 capital (finance) 36, 335 capitalism and slavery 2, 37, 42, 120, 146–63 see also slavery Capitalism and Slavery (Williams) 148 capitalist expansion 115–16 Captives and Cousins (Brooks) 81 Carlton, David L. 312 carpetbaggers 330 Carr, Elias 352 Carson, James 80–1 Cary, Mary Ann 282 Casey, Jr., John A. 326, 327 Cashin, Joan 192 Cash, W. J. 309 Cayton, Andrew 76 celebrity travelers 90–1 census decennial population reports 113 central government 116, 203 “ceremonial of punishment” (Foucault) 159 Chancellorsville 234 Channing, William Ellery 160 Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837) 254 Charles, Robert 292, 299 Charleston 40 Chase, Salmon P. 255 Chatham County (Georgia) 297 chattel slavery 97 Cherokees 37, 80, 119 Chesapeake 17–18, 20 Chesnut, James 211 Chesnut, Mary Boykin 204, 329 Cheyennes 339 Chickamauga 234 Chickasaws (Gibson) 78 children 65, 355 Chivington, John 339 Chivington’s massacre (1864) 339 Choctaw 37, 80–1 Christianity 62–6, 99 citizenship 248

360

I N DEX

“citizenship of the heart” (Kantrowitz) 118 civil-military operations 236 Civil Rights Act (1875) 264 Civil Rights Cases (1883) 264 Civil War: battles 233–5; business history 195–6; causation 96, 120, 171; “crisis in gender” 118; deaths 193; environmental histories 192–3; innovation and intellectual property 193; labor history 196; leadership 231–9; literary legacy 331; logistical challenges 235; medicine and health care 193; nineteenth-century changes 5; railroads 192; “Second American Revolution” 149; as a slave rebellion 242; technology 196; twentieth-century analysis 2; women’s rights 278–80 see also veterans Civil War diary (Chestnut) 329 Civil War documentary (Burns) 324, 328 Clarkson, Thomas 97 class divisions 35 see also elite privilege; planter class Cleburne Demands (1886) 350 clerkships 41 cliometrics 152 Clotel (Brown) 136, 141 clubs 353–4 coal 334 coastal slave societies 19 Coast Redwood 337–8 coercion and free labor 159 Coeur d’Alene (Idaho) 342 Cohen, Benjamin 36 Cohen, Patricia Cline 284 Colacurcio, Michael J. 132 Cold War 115 Colfax (Louisiana) 263–4 Collapse of Cotton Tenancy (Johnson, Embree and Alexander) 314 Collier-Thomas, Bettye 282 “colonial agrarianism” (Woodward) 311 Colonization Council 348, 349 colonizationists 99 Colorado 334, 339 Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise Association 282 Comanche Empire (Hämäläinen) 77 Comanches 77, 119 Committee of Thirteen 175 Committee of Thirty-Three 175 commoditization of territory 38 “communications revolution” (Howe) 34 Communitarian experiments 278 community organizations 117 Company Aytch (Watkins) 326 comparative emancipation 247 comparative histories 121, 197

comparative slavery 247 competition, and corruption 151 Compromise (1850) 134–5 Compromise (1877) 347 Comstock silver mines 341 Confederacy 202–13; absenteeism 211; Black population 206–8; Civil War and slave economy 243; Congress 202–3; Constitution 177; control over citizens 203; departmental system 210; diplomacy 238; disaffection 204–6; environmental history 211–13; food supply 212; frontier conditions 205; independence 204; Middle South joining 180; military strategies 208–11; mobilization 194, 244; morale 205, 232; naval operations 237; reconciliation 324; slaves’ resistance 207; war economies 194; war finance 195 Confederate Negro (Brewer) 206 Confederation Congress 25 Confiscation Acts 219, 246, 247, 260 Connelly, Thomas 211 conscription 226 Constitution: amendments 262–3; ratification 23–4; sectional compact 22; and slavery 23–4, 42, 255–6 see also named amendments Constitutional Convention (1787) 11, 23–5, 120 consumerism 64 “consumer revolution” 34, 42 Contact Points (Cayton and Teute) 76 contraband camps 211–12, 247 “contraband of war” (Butler) 241, 244, 259 contraception 278 conviction rates 297 convict lease system 298 Cooke, John Esten 326 Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1852) 254 cooperationists 176 Cooper, James Fenimore 92, 142 copper 334, 337 Copperheads (dissenters) 222 corruption 151 Cosmos Crumbling (Abzug) 68 Cott, Nancy 55 cotton: dependence of Britain and France 238; nineteenth-century depressions 311; post-Civil War southern economy 314; productivity 152; real price 153; slave labor and land speculation 155; subtreasury certificates of deposit 351 Coventry, William 36 cowboys 341 Cox, Mary J. 299 craft production 39

361

I N DEX

Crane, Stephen 327 Crazy Horse 340 Creek Country (Ethridge) 80 Creeks 79–80 Crews, Frederick C. 133 crime 292–300; “failed masculinity” 297; intra-racial 295–6; newspaper reports 300; political economy 293; and poverty 296; against property 297; rape 295, 300; “southern violence” 294; summary justice 296; white violence 263–4 see also lynchings criminal justice system 293–4 Cripple Creek (Colorado) 342 “crisis in gender” (Whites) 279 crisis of masculinity 325 “Crittenden Compromise” 175 Crook, George 340 crop lien system 310, 351 Cuba 162–3 cultural history 133–4, 321–2 see also American Renaissance cultural turn 1–3, 6 culture: exceptionalism and embeddedness 92; foreign influences 93–4; independence 100–1; Native American life 78; romance and reality 322 see also literature culture of commemoration 323 Curtis, Justice Benjamin 254, 257 Custer, George 340 Dalton (Georgia) 296 Davis, David Brion 12 Davis, Jefferson 149, 177, 203, 209–10, 232 debt peonage 312 Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions (Seneca Falls Convention) 70, 275–6 DeForest, William John 326 DeLay, Brian 77, 119 demobilization 326 Democracy in America (de Tocqueville) 146 Democratic Party National Conventions 172–3, 225 Democratic Republican Party 12 Democratization of American Christianity (Hatch) 64 Democrats: after Vicksburg and Gettysburg 224; cultural debate 118; elections (1862) 220–1; political culture 111–12; political opposition 223, 227–8; resistance to Lincoln 216–17; secret societies 223; wartime policies 219–20; and Whigs 112 demographic pressures 35, 37 Destruction of Slavery (FSSP) 245 Devine, Shauna 193 Dickens, Charles 97

Diehard Rebels (Phillips) 211 digitizing primary sources 202 diplomatic relations 237–9 discontinuity 308, 309 disease 193, 211–12 disestablishment 62, 63 disfranchisement 293 dissenters 217–29; acceptable limits 223; Copperheads and butternuts 222; denial of liberties 227; racist anger 224; surveillance 223; wartime policies 218 District of Columbia 246 “Disturbing the Peace” address (Washington) 136 disunion 22, 24, 121, 172, 178–9 see also Secession Disunion series (New York Times) 321, 331 Divinity School Address (Emerson) 63–4 Dix, John Adams 219 domestic ideology 121, 277 see also patriarchy domesticity 48, 278 donkey engines 338 Douglass, Frederick: African Exodus 347; black slavery and suffrage 263; Corinthian Hall address 138; Heroic Slave 141; Narrative 5; rhetorical campaign 243–4; secession crisis 279; visit to England 98–9 Douglas, Stephen 257 Dowd, Gregory 78, 79 Doyle, Don H. 96, 312 draft riots 221–2, 226 Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) 135, 255–7, 259 Du Bois, W. E. B. 1, 177, 207, 242 Dubois, Ellen 279, 281, 283 Dudden, Faye 280 Due Process Clause (Fifth Amendment) 256 Dunning School 3 Dunning, William A. 313 Dusinberre, William 123 DuVal, Kathleen 77 Dwight, Timothy 63 early American government 115–16 Eaton, Margaret 54 economic booms and depressions 38–9, 315 economic development 33–4, 37, 148–9 economic repression 348 educating future mothers 51–2 Edwards, Laura F. 265, 300 Effingham, Eve 92 egalitarian ideologies 15–16 Egerton, Douglas 13 election violence 114–15, 116, 263 electoral coercion 113 electorate 110, 113 see also voting

362

I N DEX

elite finishing schools 94 elite politics 123 elite privilege 42 see also class divisions; planter class elites: control of government 151; fighting 205; surrendering power 149 elite women 50, 279 see also women Elkins, Stanley 153 Eller, Ronald 312 Elusive Empires (Hinderaker) 75 emancipation 241–50; Caribbean 204; effects of 204, 247–8; homicide 294–5; laws protecting 21; moral imperative 99; northern states 16–17; permanency 248; rural/urban 246; source of conflict 311; studies 249; Union policy 243; Upper South 17–18; war measure 244 see also freed blacks; slavery Emancipation Proclamation (1863) 245, 246, 248, 260–1, 262 embeddedness 92 see also exceptionalism Emberton, Carole 248 Embree, Edwin R. 314 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 63–4, 91 Empire of Cotton (Beckert) 161–2, 316 “Empire of Liberty” 93 Encounters at the Heart of the World (Fenn) 82 Engerman, Stanley 152–3, 160 Enrollment Act (1863) 219, 221 “enticement” policy 261 entrepreneurial processes 41–2 environmental histories 192–3 equestrian nomads 341 Etcheson, Nicole 178 Ethridge, Robbie 80 Europe 90–2, 93, 99, 335 Eustace, John 92 evangelical reformers 69 evangelical revivals 62–3, 64–5 Evans, John 339 exceptionalism 12, 90, 92, 96, 99, 115 Exodusters 347, 348 Ex-Parte Merryman (1861) 218 extra-legal violence 299–300 factors of production 335 families 278 Faragher, John 76 Farmers’ Alliance 350 “Farmers’ Legislature” (Georgia) 352 Farmers’ Uprising 349–53 Farragut, David G. 237 Faulkner, Carol 281 Faust, Drew 193 federal government 334 Federalists 53

Feller, Daniel 34, 109 female virtue 52 Fenn, Elizabeth 82 Fern, Fanny 142 Fields, James T. 328 Fifteenth Amendment 249, 263, 279, 280 Fifth Amendment 256 financial instruments 38, 154 financial system 38–9 Finkelman, Paul 12 Finney, Charles Grandison 63 Fire Eaters 172–4, 177 First Amendment 62 Fitzgerald, Michael W. 296 Fitzhugh, George 147, 152 Flexner, Eleanor 275 “flex-time” 159 Florida 20, 297 Fogel, Robert 152–3, 160 Foner, Eric 109, 122, 243, 308 food supply 212 Ford, Lacy K. 312 foreign investment 335 foreign policies 121 foreign travelers 90 Formisano, Ronald 4, 114 Forrest, Edwin 94 Forten, Margarette 277 Fort Monroe 241, 244–5 Fort Sumter 179–80 Foster, Charles 68 Foster, Francis Smith 140, 141 Foucault, Michel 159 “four cardinal virtues” (Welter) 48 Fourteenth Amendment 249, 262–3, 281, 299 France 238, 239 Frank, Andrew 80 Franklin, John Hope 1 Fredericksburg 234 Fredrickson, George M. 140 free black communities 17 freed blacks: civil and political rights 292–3; fighting for British 20; property crime 297 see also emancipation Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) 208, 241, 245 Freehling, William 174, 207 free labor 158–9, 316 Freeman, Douglas Southall 236 Freemen’s Aid Societies 245 Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (Foner) 308 free-soil truisms 152 French Revolution (1789) 95 “From Borderlands to Borders” (Aron and Adelman) 76

363

I N DEX

frontiers and borderlands 75, 76–7, 78, 80, 181 Fugitive Slave Act (1793) 20, 255, 257 Fuller, J. F. C. 210 Fuller, Randall 328 futility of conflict 222 Gage, Matilda Joslyn 47, 278 Gallagher, Gary 205 Gannon, Barbara A. 323 Garrison, William Lloyd 69, 99, 178 Gates Ajar (Phelps) 328 Geiger, Mark 195 gender conventions 279 see also “separate spheres” ideology gender identity 56–7 gender ideology 49–50 General Anti-Slavery Convention (1840) 69 General Federation of Women’s Clubs 354 General Mining Law (1872) 335 “general strike” (Du Bois) 207, 242 General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath 66 Genesee Chief v. Fitzhugh (1851) 254 Genovese, Eugene 147, 149–51 gentility 94–5 gentry 15, 16 see also white supremacy Georgia 19, 297 “Georgia trade” 17–18, 19 Gibson, Arrell 78 Gienapp, William 94 Giesberg, Judith 194 Gilded Age 324–6, 346, 349, 353–4 Gilded Age (Twain) 355 Ginzberg, Lori 276, 277, 280, 283 Glatthaar, Joseph 194, 205, 208–9 Global South 316–17 Glymph, Thavolia 245, 279 Godey’s Lady’s Book 277 God’s providence 67 gold 333–4, 335, 336–7, 340, 341 Goodheart, Adam 331 Goodrich, Charles 67 Goodwyn, Lawrence 350 Gordon, Ann 280 Gordon, Jean 355 Gordon, Joseph 352 Gordon, Linda 278 Gove, Mary Nichols 284 government by consent 48 Graber, Mark 256 Grady, Henry W. 312–13, 315, 351 Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) 323 Grange (Patrons of Husbandry) 350 Grant, Catherine 277

Grant, Ulysses S. 232–3, 234, 235, 236, 263, 340 Gray, Wood 226 Great Basin 77 Great Britain 99, 119, 238–9 Great Lakes 75, 76, 337 Great Plains 339 Great South (King) 330 Great Southwest Railroad Strike (1886) 346 Greeley, Horace 178, 334 Greenberg, Amy 123 Greene, Ann Norton 193 Green, Michael 79 Greensboro County (Georgia) 297 Grier, Justice Robert 259 Griffin, Clifford Stephen 68 Grinspan, Jon 115 “group cohesion” 211 Groves v. Slaughter (1841) 255 guidebooks 91–2 habeas corpus 218, 258–9 Hackel, Steven 81–2 Hacker, J. David 193 Hahn, Steven 118, 122, 156–7, 207, 242 Hair, William Ivy 300 Haiti 14–15 Half Has Never Been Told (Baptist) 153 Haltunnen, Karen 159 Hämäläinen, Pekka 77 Hammond, James Henry 97 Handmaiden of Civilization (Burkett and Poe) 315 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins 279 Harper’s Ferry raid 135, 173 Harris, James 347–8 Harris, M. Keith 323, 324, 328 Harrold, Stanley 181 Hartz, Louis 115 Hatch, Nathan 64 Hawkins, Benjamin 80 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 5, 139, 328 Hayek, Frederick 159 Hayes, Rutherford B. 347 Haygood, Laura Askew 353 Helper, Hinton Rowan 173 Heroic Slave (Douglass) 141 herrenvolk democracy 203 Hess, J. Earl 192, 196 Hettle, Wallace 203 Hewitt, Nancy 275–6, 283 Hicks, John David 350 high-destructiveness interpretations 192 high economic rationalism 155–6 “high” politics 122–3 Hill, Karlos K. 299

364

I N DEX

Hinderaker, Eric 75 historiography: 1960–2000s 4, 12; antiLincoln tradition 261; New South 316; white male scholars 1–2 History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (Warren) 66–7 History of the United States (Bancroft) 67 History of the United States (Goodrich) 67 History of the United States (Webster) 67 History of Woman Suffrage (Stanton) 275, 281 Hoffert, Sylvia 276 Hofstadter, Richard 350 Hogg, James 352 Holcombe, William 97 Holloway, Pippa 297 Holmes, William F. 296 Homestead Act (1862) 335 Homestead Steel Strike (1892) 346 homicides 294–6, 300 Hood, John Bell 210, 233–4 Hooker, Joseph 236 Horowitz, Tony 321 Horsman, Reginald 99 Hose, Sam 299 Howe, Daniel Walker 34, 117–18 Humphreys, Margaret 193 Huston, Reeve 113 hydraulic mining 335, 336–7, 338 ideology of race 49 idle Southerners/busy Northerners narrative 146–7 Illinois 114 Ills of the South (Otken) 315 “Imagining Authorship in America” (American Literary History) 133 Impending Crisis of the South (Helper) 173 Imperial Crisis 15 imperialism 75, 93 Impossible Witnesses (McBride) 140, 141 independent female citizens 50–1, 277 Indian reserves 340 Indian-white relations 75–6 see also Native Americans individual rights 16 industrial bourgeoisie 309–10 industrial capitalism 151 industrial economy and empire 334 industrialization: capital-intensive developments 39; early developments 39, 41; exploiting natural resources 335; pollution 336; population surge 336–7; and slave-based agriculture 204 industrial production 334 industrial revolution 147 industrial West 334–9

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 342 inevitable decline narrative 74 see also Native Americans infinite appropriation 154 infliction of suffering 205 innovation 193 integrated market system 149 interethnic predation 75 internet research projects 202 interpretive communities 329–30 interracial democracy 307 see also Reconstruction interracial sex and marriage 298–9 intra-racial rape 300 Iroquois Indians 37, 76–7, 81 Isenberg, Nancy 117, 277, 283 Jackson, Andrew 53–4, 94, 112 Jacksonian Democrats 113, 114 Jacobs, Harriet 57 Jaffee, David 40 Janney, Caroline E. 324, 327 Jefferson, Thomas 62, 308 Jeffrey, Julie Roy 49 Jewett, Isaac Appleton 92 Jim Crow era 249, 316, 327–8, 354 John, Richard 116 Johnson, Andrew 262 Johnson, Charles S. 314 Johnson, Herschel 203 Johnson, Michael 203 Johnson, Paul 68 Johnson, Walter 154–5, 159 Johnston, Joseph E. 211, 234 Jones, Martha 276 Jones v. Van Zandt (1847) 255 Jordan-Lake, Joy 138 Jordan, Winthrop 12 Jortner, Adam 79 Judd, Richard 39 juries 293, 296 jute bagging trust 351 Kansas 279 Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) 135 Kantrowitz, Stephen 118 Karok Indians 338 Kazin, Michael 350 Kearsarge (US ship) 237 Kelley, Mary 50 Kemble, Frances Anne 97 Kenner, Duncan 239 Kentucky 119, 246 Khan, Zorina 193 King, Edward 330 Kingsley House (New Orleans) 354–5

365

I N DEX

Kiowa Indians 77, 339 Klamath River (California) 338 Klement, Frank 226–7 Knights of Labor 346 Knights of the Golden Circle 223 Know Nothing Party 114, 119 Kolb, Reuben 352 Kolchin, Peter 247, 315 Kossuth, Lajos 96 Krauthamer, Barbara 81 Ku Klux Klan 263, 295, 296, 330 labor 158–9, 196, 335 Laird rams 239 Lake Ontario 76 Lakota Indians 340–1 Lamar, Howard 75 land 35, 37–8, 155 land grants 335 Landis, Michael 121 Langston, John Mercer 349 Larson, John 116 Lasser, Carol 49 Laurie, Bruce 41, 120–1 Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Tomlins) 158 Lee, Robert E.: administration 235; Army of Northern Virginia 238–9; battlefield leadership 233–4; civil-military operations 236; Grant’s Virginia campaign 235; military strategies 209; offensive operations 232 Lee’s Lieutenants (Freeman) 316 Leff, Mark 109 Leonard, Elizabeth 279 Leonard, Gerald 114 Lepler, Jessica 39 Liberator, The 69, 99 Liberia 99 liberty, and republicanism 111 License Cases (1847) 254 Liebig, Justus 36 Life of Washington (Weems) 67 Lincoln, Abraham: actions against dissenters 224; angry speeches 216; Dred Scott decision 256n16, 257; election (1860) 173; Emancipation Proclamations 260–1; equality at risk 96; free soil indictment of slavery 147; habeas corpus 258–9; inaugural addresses 179, 250; military experience 232; “Mister Polk’s war” 216; protective tariffs 33; and the Republican Party 178; support for emancipation 246; as white supremacist-in-chief 261 Lincoln Administration 217–22, 226–7 literary history 136

literature 131–43; character representation 140; cultural concerns 325–6; European critics 90; and grief 328; southern stories 329; speaking through tensions 142 see also culture “Little Faded Flag” (White) 324–5, 329 livestock 212 Livingstone, David 100 Lockwood, Belva 282 lode mining 337 “Lost Cause” narrative 323 Louisiana 296 Louisiana Farmers’ Union 350 Louisiana Purchase 333 Lower South 17–18, 174n15, 176 loyalties 172 lumber industry 334, 337–8 Lydia (slave) 161 lynchings 294, 296, 299–300 see also crime Lynch, Jr., Thomas 11 Lyons, Clare 51, 52 Machor, James L. 330–1 Macready, William Charles 94 Macune, Charles W. 350, 351 Magruder, John Bankhead 245 Majewski, John 194 Malanowski, Jamie 331 Mallory, Shepard 241, 242 Mallory, Stephen 232 Mancini, Matthew J. 298 Mandan Indians 82 Mandell, Daniel 81 Mandle, Jay R. 311–12 Manning, Chandra 247 Mann, John 161 manufacturing 41 see also industrialization manumission laws (Virginia) 15–16, 18 market economies 79 market revolution 34–6, 37, 38, 40 market society 157 Marler, Scott 195 marriages: interracial 298–9; romantic ideals 278 Marshall, Nicholas 40 Marten, James 325–6, 327 Martineau, Harriet 97 Martinez, Jaime 244 Martin, Joel 80 Marvel, William 232 Marx, Karl 158–9, 163, 335 masculinity, and patriarchy 55 Mason, James 238 master and servant relations 158 “material reductionism” (Abzug) 68 Matthiessen, F. O. 131–6

366

I N DEX

Mattison, Edward 335 McBride, Dwight 140, 141 McClellan, George B. 225, 234, 236 McClellan’s War (Rafuse) 236 McClintock, Anne 50, 56 McCord, Louisa S. 48 McCurry, Stephanie 118, 194, 203, 205, 242, 279 McLean, Justice John 257 McLoughlin, William 68, 69 McMain, Eleanor Laura 355 McPherson, James 232 Meade, George G. 235, 236 Mead, Rebecca 280, 282 medicine and health care 193 Meier, Kathryn 193 Memoirs (Sherman) 326 memory 281, 326, 328 mercury 336 Merryman, John 258–9 Methodists 64 Mexican American women 278 Mexican War (1846–48) 74, 78, 112, 121, 123, 333 middle-class evangelicals 64–5, 68 middle-class women 56, 353–4 Middle Ground (White) 75 Middle South states 180 midiwiwin (medicine society) 81 Midwest 40, 217 “military-cotton complex” (Beckert) 162 military leadership 231–9; administration 235; assessing 232; diplomatic relations 237–9; logistical challenges 235; team concept 236; training 233 Military Reconstruction Act (1867) 307 military supply 194–5 Miller, Cary 81 Miller, Marla 41 Miller, William 63 Milton, George Fort 226 Mineral Resources Act (1866) 335 mining 335–6 Minor v. Happersett (1875) 282 miscegenation 298–9 missionary societies 353 Mississippi 37, 158, 296, 297–8 Mississippi Valley Historical Association 308 Missouri 246 Missouri Crisis (1819–1821) 25, 114 “Mister Polk’s war” (Lincoln) 216 mobilization 194, 244 see also wartime service Modoc Indians 341 Monitor (US ship) 237 “monopoly” in rural economy 351

Montana 334 moonshiners 296 Moore v. Illinois (1852) 255 “moral authoritarianism,” 296 morale 204–6 moral establishment 64–5 “moral minorities” (Volk) 117 moral reform 65 Morgan, Chad 194 Morgan, Jennifer L. 49 Morgan, John Hunt 224 Morgan, J. Pierpont 310 motherhood 51 Mott, Lucretia 69, 70, 275, 276, 281 Mullen, Lincoln 65 Murphy, Lucy 76 Murray, Judith Sargent 51 Myers, Martha A. 297 Narrative (Douglass) 5 Nash, Gary 12, 13 national characters 92 National Convention for Women’s Rights (Worcester, MA 1850) 276 National Economist 351 National Farmers’ Alliance and Co-operative Union of America (the Alliance) 350–1 national identity 90 see also exceptionalism nationalism 12 Native Americans 74–82; adopting European customs 78; adopting slavery 81; clearance from lands 37–8, 42; conflicts over resources 338–9, 341; contact with whites 75, 76; inevitable decline narrative 74; slaves escaping to 20; surrendering land 76–7; traditional lifeways 80–1; transnational dynamic 119 Native American women 278 Native Ground (DuVal) 77 “nativist” movement 78–9 natural resources 335–6 natural rights 15, 21, 24, 69, 121 naval operations 237 Neely, Mark 192, 203, 227–8 “Negro chicken thief” racial trope 297 Nelson, Megan Kate 192 “New Americanists” 133 new bourgeoisie 312 New England 35 “New Historians” 309 “new institutionalism” studies 115 New Jersey 16 Newmyer, R. Kent 255 New Orleans 40, 292, 310 new political history 110–12 “new social history” (1970s) 41

367

I N DEX

New South 307–17; backwardness 311, 314, 315; continuity debate 307–8, 309, 313–14, 315, 317; historiography 316; low-wage region 311; northern industries expanding 310; paradox of progress and poverty 308, 315, 317; planter persistence 312; political economy 307, 311; sharecropping 311–12 New South ideologues 312–13, 314–15 New York 16, 40 New York draft riots (1863) 221–2 New York State, Second Married Women’s Property Act (1860) 277 New York Times 321, 331 New York v. Miln (1837) 254 Nichols, Mary Gove 278 Nieman, Donald G. 295, 297 nightriding 294, 296 non-Anglo genders 50 noncombatants 326 non-slave regions 37 North: capitalism 157–8; slavery 16–17; as “un-South” 315; urban population 310 “North American Frontier as Process and Context” (Berkhofer, Jr.) 75 North Carolina 348 Northeast 15, 36, 40, 310, 337 “Northern people” 157–8 northern robber barons 310 northern whites: attitude to slavery 21, 242–3; excluding freed blacks 17 Northup, Solomon 159 North–South binary 309 northwest conspiracy 223–4 Northwest Ordinance 25 Norton, Mary Beth 50 Novak, William 116 NWSA conventions 282 Oakes, James 121, 261 O’Brien, Michael 92 “offensive defense” strategies 209 Ohio governorship election (1862) 224 Ohio Valley 75–6 Ojibwa Indians 81 Old and New South continuity debate 307–8, 309, 313–14, 315, 317 Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth (Adams) 151 Oneida (Iroquois) 81 Opal, J. M. 40 Orchard, Harry 342 Order Number 18 (Burnside) 223 Order of American Knights 223 Order of the Sons of Liberty 223 organized labor 341–2, 346

Origins of the New South (Woodward) 309, 311 Oshinsky, David M. 298 O’Sullivan, John 92 Otken, Charles H. 315 Our Nig (Wilson) 136, 141 overseas travel 91 Pace, Tony 299 Pacific Railroad 334 Pacific Railway Act (1862) 335 Page, Arthur W. 315 Paine, Thomas 64 Panic (1837) 38–9 “Paper War” (1810) 90 Parker, Alison 284 Parker, Theodore 69 Parrillo, Nicholas 195 party-above-principle style 114 party identity 111 party loyalty 110 Party of Lincoln see Republicans “party period” 110, 111–12, 114, 116 Paskoff, Paul 192 Passenger Cases (1849) 254 paternalism 161 “patriarchal bargains” (Bennett) 51 “patriarchal equilibrium” (Bennett) 51 patriarchy 55, 118 see also domestic ideology patriotism 90 see also exceptionalism Patrons of Husbandry (Grange) 350 peace plank 225 Pendleton, George 225 Pennsylvania 151–2, 160 People of the Standing Stone 81 Perdue, J. M. 351 Perdue, Theda 80 Pessen, Edward 4 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart 54, 328 Philadelphia Constitution 24 Philadelphia convention (1787) 11, 23 Phillips, Jason 205, 211 Phillips, Ulrich B. 3, 147, 148, 309 Phillips, Wendell 277 Piedmont 17 “Pig Law” (Mississippi 1876) 297–8 plantation system: economic development 148–9; emancipation 204; mass production 154; slaves during Civil War 207, 245; twentieth century 310–11; urbanization 40 see also Southern economy planter class 309, 311–12, 316 Platte River 339 Plea for the West (Beecher) 68 Poe, Clarence Hamilton 315 Poe, Edgar Allan 142

368

I N DEX

police forces 293 “policy history” studies 115 political economy: continuity versus discontinuity 315; crime and punishment 293; New South 307, 311; slave/free labor 151; studies 115; transnational context 316 Political Economy of Slavery (Genovese) 149–50 political violence 115 Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Hahn) 207 “politics of command” (Connelly) 211 Polk, James K. 216 Polk, Leonidas 352 polling places 115 Pomeroy, Marcus “Brick” 217 population growth 35, 40, 336–7 Populist Party (People’s) 350, 352–3 portable steam engines 334 possibilities of democracy 133–4 postal system 116 postcolonial people 93 Postel, Charles 350 postmasters 223 postwar: culture and literature 321–31; economic development 315–16; prodevelopment philosophy 334; social transformation 346; women’s rights 282 postwar suffrage 279–80, 282 Potter, David 172 poverty 296, 311, 317 Poverty of Clio (Boldizzoni) 153 pre-Civil War era see antebellum period Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (1862) 259 Presbyterians 63, 64 presidential candidates (1860) 173 presidential elections (1876) 347 Preston, William C. 95 Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) 255 primary sources 202 “primitive accumulation,” 162 Prince, Stephen K. 321, 329–30 privateering 195 “private sphere” 48–50, 55, 117 see also women Prize Cases (1863) 259 “Progressive Historians” 309 Progressivism 353–5 promise of democracy 137, 138, 142 property: laws and offences 297–8; and patriarchal families 55; seizing 194; slaves as 256 “pro-slavery defense” 242 pro-slavery ideology 49–50 prosthetics 193

Protestantism 63–5, 67–8 Protestant parachurch organizations 64–5 pro-Union rhetorics 94 “Prussian Road” model 312, 316 public sphere 48–50, 70, 117 public works 116 publishing 66–7 Purvis, Harriet Forten 276–7 Putnam, George B. 91 Quakers 16, 24, 69 Quarles, Benjamin 1 Rabinowitz, Howard N. 294, 297, 300–1 race and racism 2, 3, 12, 99–100 Race and Reunion (Blight) 322 “racial amalgamation” 298–9 racial hierarchy 150–1, 176–7 Rael, Patrick 118 Rafuse, Ethan 236 railroads 192, 334–5, 337, 349 railway grab 310 Ransom, Roger L. 311 rape 295, 300 ratification debates 11 “reactionary agrarian elite” 312 reader response theory 330–1 reconciliation 175, 324, 327–8, 329 Reconstruction: twentieth-century analysis 2; constitutional amendments 262; criminal justice 262–4; end of 347–8; interracial democracy 307; legal system 295–6; pro-business governments 309; Supreme Court 264 Red Badge of Courage (Crane) 327 Red Cloud War 339–40 Redeemers 347, 348 Redemption 312 Redmond, Sarah 277 Red Stick movement 79–80 refinement 94, 95 Regular Democrats 351–2 Reilly, John 137 religion 62–70; consumerism 64; disestablishment 62, 63; new movements 63; partisan attachments 111; reform movements 65–6, 68–9 republicanism 96, 111 Republican Motherhood 47, 51, 52–3, 54–5 see also True Women Republicans: abolitionists 121; antislavery party 135; black electoral influence 295; cultural debate 118; and dissenters 222–3; failure to compromise 175; free labor ideology 308; goals 178; Manifest Destiny 149; manipulating soldier voting 226;

369

I N DEX

opposing growth of slavery 243; political culture 111; strategies against Democrats 225–6 Republic of Texas 333 Restoration movement 63 reunion and reconciliation 327–8, 329 revenue wars 296 Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (McLoughlin) 68 revolutionary movements 95–6 Reynolds, David S. 133 Rise of American Civilization (Beard and Beard) 149, 309 River of Dark Dreams (Johnson) 155 Robinson, Armstead 207 Rockman, Seth 41 Roland, Charles 210 Roll Jordan, Roll (Genovese) 150–1 “romantic racialism” (Fredrickson) 140 romantic worldview 328 Roots of Southern Populism (Hahn) 156 Rosecrans, William S. 234 Rosen, Hannah 295 Rothman, Joshua 37 Rowson, Susannah 51 Rubin, Anne Sarah 329, 330 Rugemer, Edward 204 Ruin Nation (Nelson) 192 runaway slaves 119 rural homicide rates 295 rural societies 35–6, 40–1 Russian serfs 316 Ryan, Mary P. 50, 115 Sacramento River 336, 338 Sacred Revolt (Martin) 80 salmon 338 salvation stories 329 Sand Creek massacre 339 Sanders, Bernie 3 Sandow, Robert 229 San Francisco 336–7 Saunt, Claudio 79 “Savage Ideal” (Cash) 309 Savannah police 300 Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur 3, 70, 109 Schoen, Brian 195 Scott, Anne Firor 354 Scott, Joan 47 seasonal workers 39–40 Secession 171–81 see also disunion secession movements 96, 173–4, 177–8 Secession Winter 171–2, 177, 180–1 second-class citizenship 292 Second Confiscation Act (1862) 219, 247, 259

Second Great Awakening 68 Second New York State Married Women’s Property Act (1860) 277 second party system 4, 5, 54, 110–11, 116 “second slavery” period 14, 153–4, 158 sectional conflict 11–12, 19–26, 110, 114, 120, 122 Sectional Crisis 109–23 sectional differences 15–19, 120 sectional healing 324 see also reconciliation sectionalism 12, 171, 308–9 sectional loyalties 114 sectional veto 22, 23, 24 segregation 293 self-awareness 90 Self-Culture (Channing) 160 self-ownership 284 see also women’s rights Sellers, Charles 34 Seminoles of Florida 81 Seneca Falls Convention (1848) 47, 70, 275 Sensational Designs (Tompkins) 139–40 sensory history 192, 211 “separate spheres” ideology 48–9, 117, 277–8 separationists 173, 176 settlement houses 354–5 Seward, William H. 225 sexual morality 52–3 Seymour, Horatio 224–5 Seymour, Thomas 217 sharecropping 311–12 Sharkey, Robert 196 Shawnee Indians 37, 79–80 Sheehan-Dean, Aaron 194, 205 Shelden, Rachel 123 Sherman’s March 329 Sherman, William T. 232–3, 234, 236, 326, 340 Shopkeeper’s Millennium (Johnson) 68 Shoshones 77 Sierra Leone 99 “Significance of the Frontier in American History” (Turner) 342 Silber, Nina 329 “silk-hat bosses” 352 silver 334, 337 Simms, William Gilmore 142 Simonsen, Jane 278 Singleton, Benjamin (“Pap”) 348–9 Sinha, Manisha 69 Sitting Bull 340 Six Nations 76–7 see also Iroquois Indians Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) 263 slave-based agriculture 204 slave breeding 52, 159–60 Slave Community (Blassingame) 2

370

I N DEX

slave economy 36–7, 147–8 slaveholders: as aggressive imperialists 121; constitutional rights 255, 256–7; defining slave gender 52; dominance in political economy 120; misinformation on Union army 245; powerful political class 13–14, 121–2; property rights 15–16; protecting staple crop production 162–3; reactions to criticisms 97–8; secession movements 176 slaveholders’ republics 12, 22 Slaveholding Unionists 246 slave mistresses 56–7 slave rebellions 119, 242 slavery: abolition 16, 248–9; American Revolution 12; Atlantic context 14; changes in work 17; dominant ideologies 16; globalization 155; historiography 12; Indians adopting 81; millstone for Confederacy 207; moral problem 69; multivalent system 81; national/sectional institution 122; as a necessary evil 97; northern colonies 15; opposition to 120–1; protected from commercial logic 161; scholarship 1960–1970s 12; scholarship 2000s 12–14; and self-government 160; “total” social organization 161; white northerners’ attitude 242 see also capitalism and slavery; emancipation; white supremacy Slavery and American Economic Development (Wright) 153 slavery cases 255–6 Slavery (Elkins) 153 slaves: “contraband of war” 241, 259; escaping to the British 20; escaping to the Union 207, 242, 245, 247, 278–9; passive resistance 207; political actors 13, 120; political ideas 207–8; Protestantism 63; Russian serfs 316; Secession Winter 177; as security 38; struggle for national inclusion 55; taxed as property 11, 24, 25 see also emancipation Slidell, John 238 Smith, Anna Ferry 282 Smith, Haskins 298 Smith, Mark M. 192 Smith, Timothy 68 Sneider, Alison 284 Snyder, Christina 81 social contract 48 social control 68 social differentiation 94 social network analysis 202 social reforms 353 Society of Friends (Quakers) 16, 69 soil exhaustion 35, 37

Somerville, Nellie Nugent 355 Soul by Soul (Johnson) 154 South: comparing 1860 and 1900 310; continuity debate 307–8, 309, 313–14, 315, 317; defending slavery 97; distinctiveness 308–9, 317; as a foreign land 308; gender conventions 279; identity 329; middle classes 121; political system 180; politicians 15, 22, 24–5; postbellum political economy 312; stories 329 see also New South South Africa 316 South Carolina 17–18, 19, 114, 173–4, 298 South Carolina Low Country 118 “southern backwardness” (Wright) 311 Southern capitalism 157–8 Southern economy 154, 156–7, 310, 315–16 see also plantation system Southern industries 147–8, 310 Southern Lady (Scott) 354 “Southern people” 157–8 “southern violence” 294 southern whites: attitude to the Union and slavery 172; defending slavery 242; homicide rates 296; plantation discipline 207; reconciliation 327; sovereignty over slavery 18–19 see also white supremacy Southwest Ordinance (1790) 25 Spanish Florida 20 Spirited Resistance (Dowd) 78 Stampp, Kenneth 1, 174–5 standard consensus narrative 311 Stanley, Amy Dru 159–60, 279 Stansell, Christine 277, 280, 283 Stanton, Edwin M. 218, 232 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 47, 69, 70, 275, 277, 280 state, role of 42 state-centered nationalism 264 state religion 64 states’ rights 203 Statute of Religious Freedom (Virginia 1786) 62 steamships 92 steam technology 334, 338 Stephens, Georgian Alexander 177 Stephenson, Nathaniel 202 Steunenberg, Frank 342 Stevenson, Brenda E. 53 Stevens, Thaddeus 160, 243 St. Louis (Missouri) 334 Stoker, Donald 209, 210 Stokes, James 348 Stoll, Steven 36 Stone, Barton 63 Stone, Lucy 278, 279, 282

371

I N DEX

stories 328–9 Story, Justice Joseph 254 Story, Wilbur 217 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 57, 137–8, 140 Stowe, William W. 92 Strader v. Graham (1851) 255 strikes 341–2, 346 subtreasury certificates of deposit 351 Suffolk system (Massachusetts) 38 suffrage 275, 281–2, 355 see also voting Suffragists in an Imperial Age (Sneider) 284 Sugden, John 79 summary justice 296 see also lynching Sumner, Charles 243, 248 Sunday schools 65 Supreme Court 253–7, 264 surveillance 206, 223 suspicion of government 42 Sutch, Richard 311 Tallmadge Amendments 25 Taney, Chief Justice Roger B. 135, 253–7, 258–9 Taney Court 218, 253–7 Tappan, Arthur and Lewis 69 taxation 11, 24, 25, 42 Taylor, Alan 76 Taylor, Amy Murrell 247 Taylor, Bayard 90–1 tenancies 311, 312 Tennessee 119 Tenskwatawa (Shawnee prophet) 79 “term-slaves” 21 “territorial monopolies” (Ransom and Sutch) 311 Tetrault, Lisa 277, 281, 282 Teute, Fredrika 76 Texas 333 Texas Alliance 350 theft 296, 297 Thirteenth Amendment 248–9, 262 Thirty-Sixth Congress (1859–61) 174 Thomas, George H. 233–4 Thomas, William 192, 236 Thompson, Holland 313–14, 315 Thompson, Leonard 75 Thomson, Ross 193 Thornton, J. Mills 176 three-fifths clause 22, 23, 24 Tilden, Samuel J. 347 Tillman, Benjamin 299–300, 352, 353 timber see lumber industry Timber and Stone Act (1878) 335 timekeeping technologies 192 Time on the Cross (Fogel and Engerman) 152–3, 160

Tiro, Karim 81 Tocqueville, Alexis de 90, 115, 146 Tomlins, Christopher 158 Tompkins, Jane 139–40 “total” wars 192 tourism 92 Towne, Stephen 228 Townsend, James 241, 242 trade and finance 195–6 trades (artisans) 41 Train, George 279 transatlantic networks 70, 98 transatlantic trade 14, 19, 34, 38, 148, 196 Transcendentalist movement 63–4 transnational history 121 travel guides 91–2 travel writing 322, 329–30 treason 219 Trinity Home Mission (Atlanta) 353 “triumphalist” Union victory 323 Trowbridge, John 322, 329 “True Womanhood” ideology 47–8, 54 True Women 58 see also Republican Mothers Truth, Sojourner 276 Tubman, Harriet 5 Tullahoma campaign 234 Turner, Frederick Jackson 75, 78, 109, 148, 342 Turner, Nat 135 Tushnet, Mark 161 Twain, Mark 355 Twelve Years a Slave (Northup) 159 unacceptable dissent 219 see also dissenters Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 57, 138, 140 Unger, Irwin 196 Union Army: emancipating slaves 207, 241, 245, 247, 278–9; “enticement” policy 261; leadership 233 unions 341–2, 346 Union States: concern for 178–9; dissenters 228–9; imperial nature 93; mobilization 194; naval operations 237; slaveholding states 246; war economies 194–5; “white only” version of victory 323 Unitarians 63–4 United States Colored Troops (USCT) 248 United States Military Academy (West Point) 233 United States v. Cruikshank (1876) 264 United States v. Reese (1876) 264 universal suffrage 280, 282 see also voting University of Maryland 241 University of Richmond 208 unmanliness 325–6

372

I N DEX

Unorganized Territory 333 Upper South 17–18, 20, 180 urbanization 35, 40–1 Utes 77 utopian experiments 278 Vallandigham, Clement 217, 220, 222, 223, 224 “vampire lien system” (Wallace) 315 Van Buren, Martin 114 Vance, Zebulon 351 Vapnek, Lara 282 Varon, Elizabeth 50, 54, 56, 121 veterans 323–7; and civilians 326; Gilded Age literature 324–5; gulf with civilians 327; as implacable enemies 324; reconciliation 324; reintegration 326–7; retreating to memories 326; shared memories 323 see also Civil War Vicksburg campaign (Grant) 235 Views a-Foot (Taylor) 90–1 “Village Enlightenment” (Jaffee) 40 Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft) 50, 276 violence, as a mode of production 77 Violence over the Land (Blackhawk) 77 Virginia 15–16, 18, 62, 151, 220, 235 Virginia (Confederate ship) 237 Vision of Columbus (Barlow) 90 Visualizing Emancipation project (University of Richmond) 208 Volk, Kyle 117 voluntary societies 64–5 von Clausewitz, Carl 209 Voorhees, Daniel 217 Vorenberg, Michael 248 Voss-Hubbard, Mark 114 voter turnout 111, 112 voting 116; black political rights 263; blacks with criminal records 298; fraud 113; Republic manipulating soldiers 226; social characteristics 110 see also electorate; suffrage; universal suffrage; women’s suffrage Waite, Chief Justice Morrison 264 Walker, Mary 279 Wallace, D. D. 315 Wall, Orindatus Simon Bolivar 348–9 Walters, Ronald 68, 69 Walther, Eric 172 war capitalism 162–3 War Democrats 217 War Department 232 war economies 194–6 Ware, Henry 63 war finance 196

War for Independence 16, 19, 74 “war made men” rhetoric 327 Warner, Beverley 354–5 “War of a Thousand Deserts” (DeLay) 77 Warren County (Mississippi) 295–6 Warren, Mercy Otis 51, 66–7 Warshauer, Matthew 229 wartime destruction 192 wartime emancipation 248 see also emancipation wartime service 326 see also mobilization Washington, Booker T. 315 Washington County (Texas) 295, 297 Washington, Mary Helen 136 “wasting carnage” (Phelps) 328 Watertown (New York) 334 Watkins, Sam 326 Watson, Tom 351, 352 Way, Peter 41 Weaver, James B. 352 Weber, Jennifer 221, 228 Webster, Noah 67 Weems, Mason Locke 67 Weiner, Jonathan 311–12 Weitz, Mark 205, 210 Welles, Gideon 232 Wells, Cheryl 192 Welter, Barbara 48, 277 Western Federation of Miners (WFM) 341–2 West Point (US Military Academy) 233 West Virginia 220 Wharton, Vernon Lane 298 “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July” (Douglass) 138 Wheatley, Phillis 52 Whig Party 110, 112, 114 “Whig women” 54 whipping 154, 159 “white collar” occupations 41 White, Edward L. 324–5, 327 white homicide rates 296 white officers 208–9 White, Richard 75 Whites, LeeAnn 279 white supremacy 15, 21–2, 279, 299 see also slavery; southern whites white violence 263–4, 295 white women 53–4 Whitman, Walt 113, 142 Wigfall, Lewis 211 Wilentz, Sean 34, 41, 109, 110, 122 Wilkes, Charles 238 Wilkinson, Charles 335 Willard, Frances 283 Williams, David 205 Williams, Eric 148

373

I N DEX

Williams, George Washington 248 Williams, Heather 208 Williams, T. Harry 232 Wilmot Proviso 96 Wilson, Harriet 136, 141 Wilson, Henry 243 Wilson, J. Leighton 98 Wilson, Joseph 248 Wiyots massacre (1860) 339 Wollstonecraft, Mary 276 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) 283, 353–4 women: abolition and racial integration 57; activism and work 353; antebellum domestic realm 277; associations/clubs 278–9, 353–4; Cherokee matrilineality 80; church membership 67; class and gender expectations 56; elite 50, 279; factory workers 41; gender identity 117–18; historians 47; independent legal identity 50–1; “influence” 51; institutions of power 47; literature 136; missionary societies 353; political activists 116–17; property ownership 55; Protestant morality 67–8; public life 70, 117; resisting reconciliation 327; wartime political actors 194 Women’s National Loyal League 279 women’s rights 47–58, 275–84; Civil War 278–80; contraception 278; gender

ideology 50; losing right to vote 54; self-ownership 284; transatlantic nature of ideology 276; and “True Womanhood” 47–8 Women’s Rights Convention 277 women’s rights movements 57–8, 69–70, 275–6, 282 women’s rights reformers 278 women’s sphere 49, 55, 56, 277 women’s suffrage 282, 283, 355 see also voting “Won Cause” narrative 323 Wood, Fernando 217 Woodhull, Victoria 281 Woodward, C. Vann 1, 309, 310, 311, 312, 316–17, 347 Woodworth, Steven 209 working classes 56, 94, 158, 282 world manufacturing 334 Wright, Gavin 153, 311 Wright, Martha 276 Wright, Paulina 278 yeomen 157 Yuba river (California) 336 Zagarri, Rosemarie 48, 51, 54, 277 Ziesche, Philipp 96 Zimmerman, Andrew 316

374