The Fiery Trial (4 page)

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grew to adulthood, the institution of slavery underwent a profound transformation. By the 1830s, when he entered Illinois politics, war, revolution, slave rebellion, and the spread of Enlightenment ideas concerning human freedom had combined to reduce significantly the geographical scope of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. In the United States, the combination of a revolutionary ideology centered on liberty and the disruptions caused by the War of Independence threw the future of slavery into doubt. Between 1777, when Vermont adopted a constitution prohibiting slavery, and 1804, when New Jersey acted, every northern state enacted measures to abolish the institution. These were the first legal steps toward emancipation in the New World. The 1790s witnessed the slave revolution on the rich French sugar island of Saint-Domingue, which destroyed slavery and established the nation of Haiti. Wars for independence in Spanish Latin America soon followed, producing new nations that embarked on the process of emancipation. In 1833, Parliament outlawed slavery throughout the British Empire. Although it persisted in Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, by the mid-nineteenth century slavery had become the South’s “peculiar institution”—that is, the institution that set the region apart from the rest of the nation and, increasingly, the rest of the world.

With a few exceptions, the end of slavery came through gradual emancipation accompanied by some kind of recognition of the owners’ legal right to property in slaves. In the United States, court decisions in Massachusetts and New Hampshire in the 1780s declared slavery incompatible with new state constitutions that affirmed mankind’s natural right to liberty. But the abolition laws of the other northern states freed no living slave. Rather, slave children born after a specified date would work for the mother’s owner as indentured servants until well into adulthood (age twenty-eight, for example, in Pennsylvania, far longer than what was customary for white indentured servants), and only then would become free. Most Latin American nations also allowed slaveholders to retain ownership of existing slaves, as well as the labor of their children for a number of years. These laws, in effect, required slaves to compensate their owners for their freedom by years of unpaid labor. As one official wrote, they “respected the past and corrected only the future.”

In some cases, owners received direct cash payments as well. In the British Empire, Parliament in 1833 mandated almost immediate emancipation, with a seven-year transitional period of “apprenticeship” that produced so much conflict between former masters and former slaves that complete freedom was decreed in 1838. The law appropriated twenty million pounds to compensate the owners. Even Haiti, where slavery died amid a violent revolution, agreed in 1824 to pay a large indemnity to former slaveowners in exchange for French recognition of its independence, a financial burden the new nation could ill afford. No one proposed to compensate slaves for their years of unrequited toil. The experience of emancipation in the North and other parts of the hemisphere strongly affected subsequent debates over slavery and influenced Lincoln’s own ideas about how to abolish the institution. Even after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he reiterated that he would be glad to see the southern states return to the Union and enact “the most approved plans of gradual emancipation.”
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The end of slavery in the North did not imply political or social equality for blacks. Race, long one of many forms of legal and social inequality among colonial Americans, now emerged as a justification for the existence of slavery in a land of liberty. How else could the condition of blacks be explained other than by innate inferiority? Northern blacks who became free endured severe discrimination. At first, the northern states allowed black men to vote if they could meet existing property qualifications. But beginning with Ohio in 1803, every state that entered the Union, with the single exception of Maine in 1821, restricted the suffrage to whites. Between 1818 and 1837, moreover, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania limited black voting rights or eliminated them altogether. With the federal government under the control of southerners (of the sixteen presidential elections between 1788 and 1848, all but four placed a slaveholder in the White House), free blacks were denied basic rights. The Naturalization Act of 1790 barred black immigrants from ever becoming citizens; the Militia Act of 1792, which established ground rules for a central responsibility of citizenship, limited service to whites. In 1853, Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery as a young man and gone on to become one of the most prominent lecturers and newspaper editors in the abolitionist movement, described the condition of his people, free as well as slave, as “anomalous, unequal, and extraordinary…. Aliens we are in our native land.”
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The U.S. Constitution contained several protections for slavery, notably the fugitive slave clause, which required the return of runaways, and the three-fifths clause, which gave the slave states increased representation in Congress and added electoral votes by counting part of their disenfranchised slave population. Nonetheless, many of the nation’s founders hoped that slavery might eventually die out. Instead, with the opening of fertile land in the Deep South and the spectacular growth of world demand for cotton, the key raw material of the early industrial revolution, American slavery received a new lease on life. As the nation expanded westward, so did slavery. Cotton became by far the most important American export, an indispensable source of the foreign earnings that enabled the country to import manufactured goods.

The free states shared in the profits of slavery. As Lincoln experienced on his journeys to New Orleans, the slave states provided a crucial market for the produce of free western farmers. On the strength of its control of the transatlantic trade in cotton, New York City rose to commercial dominance. Even the abolition of the slave trade from Africa in 1808, a year before Lincoln’s birth, did not slow slavery’s growth. A flourishing domestic slave trade replaced the importation of slaves. By the eve of the Civil War, the slave population in the United States had reached nearly four million. The economic value of these men, women, and children when considered as property exceeded the combined worth of all the banks, railroads, and factories in the United States. In geographical extent, population, and the institution’s economic importance, the South was home to the most powerful slave system the modern world has known.
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Nevertheless, abolition in the North drew a geographical line across the country. The Mason-Dixon Line, a boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland drawn by a colonial-era surveyor, became a dividing line between freedom and slavery. Although the antislavery impulse inspired by the struggle for independence waned in the early nineteenth century, slavery remained a divisive political issue, and plans for abolition continued to be discussed. Between 1790 and 1830, dozens of proposals for gradual, compensated emancipation came before Congress.
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Increasingly, supporters of emancipation coupled their proposals with “colonization”—the removal of the black population from the United States. Until around 1830, most organized antislavery activism, at least among white Americans, took place under this rubric. In this respect, the United States was truly exceptional. As
Harper’s Weekly
later pointed out, nowhere else in the Western Hemisphere was it seriously proposed “to extirpate the slaves after emancipation.” Absurd as the idea of colonization may appear in retrospect, it seemed quite realistic to its advocates. Many large groups had been expelled from their homelands in modern times—for example, Spanish Muslims and Jews after 1492 and Acadians during the Seven Years’ War. Virtually the entire Indian population east of the Mississippi River had been removed to the West by 1840. In an era of nation-building, colonization formed part of a long debate about what kind of nation the United States was to be. It allowed its advocates to imagine a society freed—gradually, peacefully, and without sectional conflict—from both slavery and the unwanted presence of blacks. At mid-century, the prospect of colonizing American slaves probably seemed more credible than immediate abolition.
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Colonization was hardly a fringe movement. “Almost every respectable man,” as Frederick Douglass observed, supported it. Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay, the statesmen most revered by Lincoln, favored colonization. Jefferson remained committed to the idea to his dying day. In 1824, he proposed that the federal government purchase and deport “the increase of each year” (that is, children) so that the slave population would age and eventually disappear. Critics, Jefferson admitted, might object on humanitarian grounds to “the separation of infants from their mothers.” But this, he insisted, would be “straining at a gnat.”
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The first emancipation—the gradual abolition of slavery in the North—contained no provision for colonization. It seems to have been assumed that the former slaves would somehow be absorbed into society. But the rapid growth of the free black population in the early republic spurred believers in a white America to action. Founded in 1816, just as slavery was becoming established in the Cotton Kingdom, the American Colonization Society at first directed its efforts toward removing blacks already free. But the long-term goal of many members was to abolish slavery. Planters and political leaders from the Upper South dominated the American Colonization Society. Few were more adamant about linking colonization with abolition than Henry Clay.
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Despite representing a slave state, and in the face of the spread of proslavery ideology during the 1830s, Clay never retreated from his conviction that slavery was “a great evil.” He continued to look forward to the day “distant, very distant, perhaps” when not a single slave remained in the United States. Clay saw slavery as the greatest threat to the Union to whose preservation he was passionately devoted. He remained equally certain that “abolition is impossible, unless it be accompanied by colonization.” Clay hoped that abolition would transform Kentucky into a modern, diversified economy modeled on the free-labor North. Slavery, he believed, was why his state lagged behind neighboring Ohio in manufacturing and general prosperity. Clay succeeded James Madison as president of the American Colonization Society in 1836 and served until his own death sixteen years later. He manumitted ten of his slaves during his lifetime and in his will offered freedom and transportation to Africa to the future children of his female slaves when they reached adulthood. The presentation of colonization as an adjunct of abolition by Clay and other northern and Upper South advocates helps explain why hostility to the idea became more and more intense in the Lower South.
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Many northern Whigs, observed the Indiana politician Schuyler Colfax, regarded Clay with “great reverence, almost adoration.” Lincoln was no exception. In 1832, he cast his first vote for president for Clay and later referred to him as “my beau ideal of a statesman.” During the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Lincoln referred to Clay no fewer than forty-one times. Clay’s outlook on slavery—condemnation of the institution and affirmation of the blacks’ humanity coupled with the conviction that emancipation could only come gradually and should be linked with colonization—strongly affected Lincoln’s. More than once during the 1850s when speaking about slavery and race, Lincoln quoted or paraphrased Clay. “I can express all my views on the slavery question,” he once said, “by quotations from Henry Clay.”
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Some African-Americans shared the perspective of the colonization movement. Almost every printed report of the American Colonization Society included testimonials from blacks who either had gone to Africa or were anxious to do so. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, most black Americans rejected both voluntary emigration and government-sponsored efforts to encourage or coerce them to leave the country. In asserting their own Americanness, free blacks articulated a vision of American society as a land of birthright citizenship and equality before the law, where rights did not depend on color, ancestry, or racial designation. They denied colonizationists’ arguments that racism was immutable, that a nation must be racially homogeneous, and that color formed an insurmountable barrier to equality. Through the attack on colonization, the modern idea of equality as something that knows no racial boundaries was born.
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The black mobilization against colonization formed one of the key catalysts for the rise of a new, militant abolitionism in the late 1820s and 1830s. Compared to previous antislavery organizations that promoted gradual emancipation, compensation, and colonization, abolitionism was different: immediatist, interracial, rejecting payment to slaveholders for their slaves, and committed to making the United States a biracial nation. The abolitionist movement arose as the joining of two impulses—black anti-colonization and white evangelicism and perfectionism. In his influential 1832 pamphlet,
Thoughts on African Colonization
, the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison explained that his experience with the vibrant black communities of Baltimore and Boston inspired his conversion from colonization to abolition and racial equality. The most potent objection to colonization, he wrote, was that it “is directly and irreconcilably opposed to the wishes of our colored population as a body.” White abolitionists of the 1830s, most of whom, like Garrison, had previously been sympathetic to colonization, now denounced the American Colonization Society for intensifying racial prejudice in America. The New York merchant and religious reformer Lewis Tappan, another former colonizationist who embraced immediate abolitionism, called on Henry Clay to recognize the society’s ineffectiveness. “Slavery is rapidly increasing,” he wrote to Clay in 1835. “Colonization has not, nor will it…diminish slavery. What is to be done? I answer, emancipate.” Clearly annoyed, Clay responded that northerners had no right to speak about slavery in the South.
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