THE MONSTER DID perish. Most ordinary Americans couldn’t have elaborated the theoretical arguments for and against a central bank, but they perceived that Jackson was fighting their battle against the aristocrats of finance, and in the 1834 midterm elections they rewarded Jackson’s Democrats and punished Clay’s Whigs, as the anti-Jackson alliance of National Republicans and some Anti-Masons had started calling itself. The financial crisis eased as the state banks that received the federal deposits resumed the lending that Nicholas Biddle had curtailed. Biddle’s shrunken bank prepared for its 1836 demise.
John Quincy Adams didn’t care about the bank any longer, though as president he had dealt amicably with Biddle. For Adams the only thing that mattered was slavery. Every president before Adams had retired from politics upon handing the office to his successor. Adams did too, briefly. And he might have remained retired had slavery not nagged at his republican conscience. But the more he thought about it, and the more he observed the growing pretensions of Southern slaveholders as they involved western territories, the more he felt compelled to return to the public lists. He ran for Congress from the twelfth district of Massachusetts and won.
He had initially considered the connection between slavery and territorial expansion at the time of the Missouri Compromise. The legislation composing the package had been approved by Congress and sent to James Monroe for signature or veto. Monroe was inclined to accept, but he put the matter to his cabinet, asking particularly whether the Constitution allowed Congress and the president to bar slavery from federal territories, in this case the upper portion of the Louisiana Purchase. Adams went further than other members of the cabinet, saying that Congress could bar any new state from permitting slavery. And the sooner America was rid of slavery, the better. “The Declaration of Independence not only asserts the natural equality of all men, and their inalienable right to liberty, but that the only just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed,” he said. “A power for one part of the people to make slaves of the other can never be derived from consent, and is, therefore, not a just power.” Monroe and the other Southerners present, including the secretary of war, John Calhoun, disagreed, but civilly.
“After this meeting,” Adams recorded in his diary, “I walked home with Calhoun, who said that the principles which I had avowed were just and noble, but that in the Southern country, whenever they were mentioned, they were always understood as applying only to white men. Domestic labor was confined to the blacks, and such was the prejudice that if he, who was the most popular man in his district, were to keep a white servant in his house, his character and reputation would be irretrievably ruined.”
“I said that this confounding of the ideas of servitude and labor was one of the bad effects of slavery,” Adams wrote.
Calhoun answered that Adams was quite mistaken. “He thought it attended with many excellent consequences. It did not apply to all kinds of labor—not, for example, to farming. He himself had often held the plough; so had his father. Manufacturing and mechanical labor was not degrading. It was only manual labor—the proper work of slaves. No white person could descend to that. And it was the best guarantee of equality among the whites. It produced an unvarying level among them. It not only did not excite, but did not even admit of inequalities by which one white man could dominate over another.”
Adams disagreed. “I told Calhoun I could not see things in the same light.” And as he later reflected on the day’s discussion, he realized how thoroughly he disagreed with nearly everything Calhoun and the other Southerners said by way of defense of slavery. “It is, in truth, all perverted sentiment—mistaking labor for slavery, and dominion for freedom. The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls. In the abstract, they admit that slavery is an evil, they disclaim all participation in the introduction of it, and cast it all upon the shoulders of our old Grandam Britain. But when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. They fancy themselves more generous and noble-hearted than the plain freemen who labor for subsistence. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee’s manners, because he has no habit of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat negroes like dogs. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice; for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin? It perverts human reason, and reduces man endowed with logical powers to maintain that slavery is sanctioned by the Christian religion, that slaves are happy and contented in their condition, that between master and slave there are ties of mutual attachment and affection, that the virtues of the master are refined and exalted by the degradation of the slave; while at the same they vent execrations upon the slave-trade, curse Britain for having given them slaves, burn at the stake negroes convicted of crimes for the terror of the example, and write in agonies of fear at the very mention of human rights as applicable to men of color.”
Adams had never pondered slavery at such length, and the experience made him fear for the future of the republic. “The impression produced upon my mind by the progress of this discussion is that the bargain between freedom and slavery contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious, inconsistent with the principles upon which alone our Revolution can be justified; cruel and oppressive, by riveting the chains of slavery, by pledging the faith of freedom to maintain and perpetuate the tyranny of the master; and grossly unequal and impolitic, by admitting that slaves are at once enemies to be kept in subjection, property to be secured or restored to their owners, and persons not to be represented themselves, but for whom their masters are privileged with nearly a double share of representation. The consequence has been that this slave representation has governed the Union.”
Attachment to the South and its slave owners had brought the rest of the Union nothing but grief, Adams judged. “It would be no difficult matter to prove, by reviewing the history of the Union under this Constitution, that almost everything which has contributed to the honor and welfare of the nation has been accomplished in despite of them or forced upon them, and that everything unpropitious and dishonorable, including the blunders and follies of their adversaries, may be traced to them. I have favored this Missouri compromise, believing it to be all that could be effected under the present Constitution, and from an extreme unwillingness to put the Union at hazard.”
But he might have been wrong. “Perhaps it would have been a wiser as well as a bolder course to have persisted in the restriction upon Missouri till it should have terminated in a convention of the states to revise and amend the Constitution. This would have produced a new Union of thirteen or fourteen states unpolluted with slavery, with a great and glorious object to effect, namely that of rallying to their standard the other states by the universal emancipation of their slaves. If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break.”
YET THE UNION wasn’t ready to break, and not over slavery. The crack-up of the Republican party and the emergence of democracy, with its attendant turmoil, kept Americans too busy during the decade after the resolution of the Missouri question to take on slavery directly. But an event occurred in the summer of 1831 that riveted the attention of the country, terrified Southern slaveholders, and thrust the peculiar institution back onto center stage of American politics. A Virginia slave named Nat Turner led a band of several dozen slaves and free blacks on a murderous spree in Southampton County that claimed the lives of some sixty white men, women and children. Turner, a charismatic figure possessed by a mystical vision, hoped to inspire other slaves in that black-majority region of Virginia to rise up against their masters. Yet the white militia responded more quickly, and in a bloody reprisal captured or killed hundreds of slaves and free blacks, including many who had nothing to do with Turner or his rebellion. Turner escaped capture for two months but was finally found, tried, convicted and hanged.
The uprising sent shudders through Virginia and the broader South. Virginians concluded that something was drastically wrong with the state’s policy toward slaves and slavery, and something had to be done about it. But different groups in the state proposed competing solutions. Quakers predictably called for abolition, but even many people less prompted by religion concluded that slavery was a rotten institution Virginia would be better rid of, eventually if not at once. The calls for emancipation were often accompanied by plans for colonizing the freed slaves in Africa. Most slaveholders contended that emancipation was a terrible idea; they held that the answer to the Turner rebellion was not less slavery but more of it—that is, more stringent restrictions on what slaves could do. Nat Turner was well educated for a slave; his education, the restrictionists said, was what had put ideas in his head and allowed him to communicate them to others. Education should henceforth be denied slaves. Slaves had often been allowed to gather outside the view of whites, and it was outside white view that Turner’s conspiracy had been hatched; slaves therefore must be more carefully monitored. Other groups asserted that the presence of free blacks encouraged slaves to aspire to a freedom they didn’t deserve and shouldn’t have. Free blacks should be driven from the state, and manumission made more difficult.
The debate lasted weeks, spilling from the legislature into the larger Virginia community. Quite possibly the advocates of emancipation had a numerical advantage in the state; they also had the endorsement of influential papers like the Richmond Enquirer. But the slaveholders and the other opponents had greater weight in the legislature, and in the end the Select Committee on the Colored Population reaffirmed the status quo by declaring, “It is inexpedient for the present to make any legislative enactments for the abolition of slavery.”
The inexpedience persisted, and deepened. In short order a strong trend in the opposite direction took hold: toward the proposed curbs on education of slaves, manumission and the rights of free blacks.
NOR DID THE new restrictions apply only to blacks. The Virginia debate had been open and free, but before long the promotion of abolitionist ideas became effectively forbidden in the South. It wasn’t lost on the defenders of slavery that the first issue of William Lloyd Garrison’s stridently abolitionist newspaper The Liberator was published in Boston just months before the Turner rebellion. Garrison’s opening editorial explained that he had previously promoted gradual abolition but had decided it was morally wrong and politically counterproductive. “I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice,” he promised. “On this subject, I do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.”
To Southern conservatives, the writings of Garrison and other abolitionists were incendiary. Read and repeated by the likes of Nat Turner, they made killers out of contented slaves. They threatened the property rights of slaveholders and the stability of Southern society. They promoted race war and possibly, when the South took measures to defend itself, civil war. Not least of all, they fostered a moral smugness in the North about the South, a demonization of the God-fearing white men and women to whose care the black slaves of the region had been entrusted. The nineteenth-century South hadn’t invented slavery, its defenders repeated again and again in the years after the Turner rebellion. The institution was an inheritance. Like other inheritances it came with responsibilities, and the responsibility of the current generation was not to deny the inheritance but to administer it as humanely as possible.