Penguin History of the United States of America (53 page)

Finally, men and women cannot be unfree in a free society without knowing that they are wronged – even if their masters try to keep the fact from their attention.

So the African-Americans hated slavery. Decent treatment could not buy acquiescence – rather the contrary, as Frederick Douglass pointed out. ‘Beat and cuff your slave,’ he said, ‘keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog; but feed and clothe him well, – work him moderately – surround him with physical comfort, – and dreams of freedom intrude. Give him a
bad
master, and he aspires to a
good
master; give him a good master, and he wishes to become his
own
master.’ Yet the slaves on the whole did not try to alter their hated condition. They knew their injuries, but they also knew their weakness. It is a striking fact that in the half-century before the Civil War there were no slave risings of any great account, and those that did occur – the abortive Denmark Vesey conspiracy at Charleston in 1822, the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia in 1831, in which some sixty whites were murdered – owed their notoriety chiefly to the terror which they inspired in the master race. From time to time there would be outbreaks on solitary plantations; or a white family might be slain, suddenly, by its slaves, with poison or knives.
¹
These were isolated events, leading to nothing, meaning nothing, except that in one place, at one particular time, matters had reached a crisis point. Nevertheless, the slave-owners could not afford to take such affairs coolly. They too knew insecurity: they dared not trust the people they lived among. Periodically something would terrify them into renewed excesses of cruelty. After the Turner rebellion they hanged not only the murderers but also scores of the innocent.

Indeed, the drawbacks of slavery from the point of view of the whites were so glaring that it sometimes seems astonishing that it lasted so long. The women – some of them – saw clearest. One of them, Mary Chesnut (1823–86) of South Carolina, put the case most trenchantly, and with such frankness that her limitations, of class and personality, are as palpable as her insights. So her testimony is doubly valuable to historians. She disliked living among slaves, and some of the reasons she gives (black faces, woolly heads) show that she was racially prejudiced. But she was also bitter because many Southern women had to pretend not to notice the resemblance between their own offspring and certain little black children on the plantations: proof that their husbands and brothers had been dallying in the slave quarters. She greatly resented the strictures made by such Northern ladies as Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96), author of the immensely celebrated anti-slavery novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(published in 1852):

On one side Mrs Stowe, Greeley, Thoreau, Emerson, Sumner. They live in nice New England homes, clean, sweet-smelling, shut up in libraries, writing books which ease their hearts of their bitterness against us. What self-denial they do practice is to tell John Brown to come down here and cut our throats in Christ’s name. Now consider what I have seen of my mother’s life, my grandmother’s, my mother-in-law’s… They live in Negro villages. They do not preach and teach hate as a gospel, and the sacred duty of murder and insurrection;
²
but they strive to ameliorate the condition of these Africans in every particular. They set them an example of a perfect life, a life of utter self-abnegation. Think of these holy New Englanders forced to have a Negro village walk through their houses whenever they see fit… These women I love have less chance to live their own lives in peace than if they were African missionaries.

The resentment in this diatribe is genuine, but misdirected. The slight note of persecution mania is significant, for it illustrates one of the traits, general among white Southerners, which brought about secession from the Union and, hence, the ultimate destruction of the slave society. But Mrs Chesnut was not prevented from living the life she wanted either by the slaves or by the abolitionists. She was the victim of the planters, who, in a sense, owned the whites as well as the blacks. Certainly they owned their own wives and daughters. Mrs Chesnut loved her husband, or told herself she did; but he treated her abominably. Once he locked her up in her room rather than allow her to keep an appointment to meet a gentleman of whom he disapproved solely, it seems, because his wife liked him. On another occasion Mrs Chesnut congratulated herself: she had acquired a secret supply of money, which meant that for a time she wouldn’t have to run to her husband for every penny she needed. She had no children, and found the work of supervising her house-slaves insufficiently challenging: she had no hope of a career.
³
The myth of slavery exacted this unnatural life. White ladies had
to be idle, else they would not have needed slaves to work for them. They had to be sexually cold and rigidly chaste, or there could be no justification for their husbands to chase after black women. They had to abandon their function as mothers to black ‘mammies’, so that they could parade before the world perpetually in fine dresses, jewels and carriages – the fruits of slavery, advertisements of their menfolk’s success. White women had to be denied education and political rights, so that no challenge could be made to the supremacy of the white male: one challenge might breed another, and if men once conceded that they had no right to tyrannize over women, what right could they claim to tyrannize over slaves?

It was a violent world. In part this was the legacy of the frontier, which persisted longer in the South than in the North (not until the 1830s were the last Indian tribes cleared out of Alabama and Mississippi). And whereas in the North-West the family farm was the most efficient unit for developing the country, and entailed a supporting network of roads and market towns by means of which farm-produce could be got to the customers (there was besides the village tradition of New England to fortify civilizing tendencies), in the South, where vast cotton plantations would be hacked out of the virgin forest, their produce being sent to market down untamed rivers, the density of the population – especially the white population – continued much lower, though the financial yield of agriculture might be as great, or greater. Growth, that is, was too rapid to be smooth. But the time span in question (some seventy years, from the invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin to the attack upon Fort Sumter) is too long for this explanation to be sufficient. The North too was raw country for most of the nineteenth century.

No, Southern violence owed most to the persistence of slavery. Young men had to be trained to ride and shoot so that they could effectively play their part in the slave patrols. As a result a strange, barbarous culture grew up which quickly annihilated (for example) Jefferson’s dream that the University of Virginia, which he founded in 1819, would be a great light of republican civilization. The colleges of the South remained jokes until the twentieth century. Instead of science and Greek, the young gentlemen learned to hold their liquor, or at least not to mind getting blind drunk; how to use a knife in a brawl; how to handle duelling pistols and to play cards; how to race and bet on horses. They were provincial, ignorant and overbearing: excellent cannon-fodder, as it turned out, but lacking the desirable peacetime qualities of a sense of reality and responsibility.

An eye for profit did something to substitute for academic education. The graces with which the planters liked to adorn their way of life and their great white mansions deceived many at the time, and more since, into
accepting them as a class of well-bred gentlemen, strictly comparable to the nobility of Europe. Their account books tell a different story. Experience sobers the wildest blade, if he lives long enough; in the Old South the demands of plantation management turned innumerable roaring boys into disciplined capitalists. They had little in common with the gilded lords of England, whose talent lay in spending rather than getting. Their true affinity was with the restless merchants and manufacturers of Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts.

For the great planters, at their height, it was a good life, so long as new lands could be found for tillage (incessant cotton-growing exhausted the soil as badly as tobacco) and more slaves could be bought from Virginia, and the meddlesome abolitionists of the North could be kept at bay, and the hands in the houses and the fields did as they were told, and the weather was good, and the world market for cotton was buoyant. But for the other white men of the South – the great majority – matters were never so simple.
⁴
Their moral position was weak, for they had taken part in the expulsion of the Indians and were indifferent to the sufferings of the Africans; but they were injured by slavery all the same. The profits of the peculiar institution were so enormous that the slave-holders were always able to outbid the white yeomanry for the choicest lands. As a result a sharp class division grew up in the South, which was to some extent also a geographical division, the poorer whites being thickest on the ground in the upland and mountain areas, the planters and their slaves in such rich lowlands as the Black Belt. In an age as stridently democratic as the early nineteenth century this growing gulf within the white population naturally had to find expression in politics (the yeomen were mostly enthusiastic followers of General Jackson) and might have been expected to lead to an attack on slavery as giving some whites an unfair advantage in the race for riches; but no such thing occurred. Planters exacted the utmost labour from their bondsmen; revelled in the wealth which resulted, and boasted of the skill of their slaves; appeased their consciences by inconsistently asserting the ignorance, shiftlessness and helplessness of blacks – a race so inferior that it needed enslavement; and made themselves affable to the yeomanry at election time. Poor whites shared to the full the contempt for and fear of African-Americans which were felt by their betters; they could not contemplate liberating slaves who, as free men, would compete on their own behalf for land and profit; they deeply resented any scheme which might place blacks on the same footing as themselves, however nominally (it was much more agreeable to feel that, however unfortunate and ignorant you were, there were always a large number of others even worse off); many among them cherished a hope, however unrealistic, that they too would rise into the planter class; and they
dreaded the revenge which, they thought, free blacks would take on their former oppressors. These views forged a strong bond between the yeoman farmers, the ‘poor white trash’ and the rich planters: they formed an alliance that was to survive all vicissitudes until the late twentieth century, and do incalculable damage to America and Americans. This alliance removed what might have been the strongest force making for abolition.

So far as Southern whites were concerned, then, slavery was an evil because, whether they realized it or not, it thwarted progress: in spite of its wealth the slave South lagged further behind the rest of the United States, not to mention Europe, every year. Some Southerners perceived some of its evil consequences; perhaps all its evils were noticed by someone or other in the South at some time in the years before the Civil War. Many voices were heard lamenting the backward state of Southern agriculture and the failure of the South to industrialize, or even to build enough railroads. The great men of the eighteenth century – Washington and Jefferson above all – had freely recognized slavery for an evil; they had been quite prepared to admit that it was inconsistent with the Declaration of Independence, and looked forward with confidence to its eventual disappearance. The tragedy of the South was that it ceased to listen to these prophetic voices. As time went on the assertion was made ever more frequently that slavery, far from being an evil, was ‘a positive good’, bringing all sorts of benefits with it.

It could not have been otherwise. The planters were in a hereditary trap, just as much as the blacks. They had inherited a labour system which, though extremely profitable,
⁵
was also degrading, dangerous and unstable. Towards the end of his life Jefferson, the eternal optimist, despaired and, speaking as a Southerner and a slave-holder, remarked:

I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any
practicable
way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and
expatriation
could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other…
⁶

He had once hoped that a new generation, brought up in republican liberty, would complete the work of the Revolution by abolishing slavery; in his old age he sadly recognized that he had been wrong. And today it is clear that he himself was hopelessly entangled in the contradictions of slavery. He too
was a victim of fear and guilt. Because he could not trust African-Americans, he persuaded himself that they were racially inferior to whites; that God did not intend them to have any share in the bounties of the New World, reserved for enlightened Europeans; that therefore any scheme of emancipation must include provision for sending the Negroes back to Africa, or to Haiti; and that until such a scheme was in operation, slavery must remain, indeed expand. He was not consciously influenced by the consideration that James Henry Hammond of South Carolina (1807–64) put so bluntly when he asked if any people in history had ever voluntarily surrendered two billion dollars worth of property; but the racism which did influence him was at least as responsible for maintaining nineteenth-century American slavery as greed. Guilty slave-holders could not believe that their victims would not take a horrible revenge at the first opportunity. Slaves were sly enough for anything: