CHAPTER TWO

The Relationship of Slavery to Southern Oligarchy

The Cause of Southern Oligarchy Attributed to Domestic Slavery

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

Recounting the history of American slavery in 1864, Isaac Arnold further expounded the cause-and-effect relationship between domestic slavery and Southern oligarchy:

 

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

 

Arnold modified Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s dictum in Dred Scott that black Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” inserting “freeman” for black Americans and “slaveholders” for the white man.³ In applying Taney’s phrase, Arnold meant to say that the effect of domestic slavery fell not upon domestic slaves alone. By precipitating a revolutionary change in the form of government from republican to oligarchical, slavery indirectly caused the political oppression of all Americans in the South, outside the minority ruling class of slaveholders.

In a Boston speech in 1861, Representative George Boutwell of Massachusetts recalled a visit to the slave state of Kentucky in 1857, where he attended church services and was treated to a sermon containing three propositions, “which, as far as I could judge, were accepted by that congregation. They were, first, that the Saviour never said any thing in favor of human equality; secondly, that he never said any thing in favor of universal education; and thirdly, said the preacher, what we need is authority in the Church.”⁴

These propositions, Boutwell said, bore witness to the “radical changes” caused by slavery. The changes were “antagonistic to free institutions,” and, consequently, “free institutions cannot long be maintained.” In this particular case, the visible radical changes were “the denial of the equality of man” and “the denial of the right of individual opinion in matters of religion.” These radical changes corresponded with a transformation in the political regime. Under the causal influences of slavery, the South had “steadily marched towards the establishment of a military, slaveholding oligarchy.” In 1862 Boutwell reaffirmed what form of government slavery had caused, saying, “In the South, a governing class is recognized, which corresponds to the governing classes wherever an aristocracy or monarchism exists.”5 In 1864 he affirmed the inherent, mutual antagonism between slavery and republicanism, saying, “Wherever slavery exists there republicanism is not; that wherever slavery exists there a republican form of government, under the Constitution, cannot be.”⁶ In other words, domestic slavery unleashed forces that destroyed republican government for everyone in its domain.

In another instance, Boutwell confirmed this cardinal point further, saying that legislative acts requiring the abolition of involuntary servitude as a condition of readmitting the insurrectionary states were “acts of justice which are due to one race and necessary for the salvation of the other.” In other words, the abolition of slavery was a moral debt owed to the enslaved race, but it was also necessary for the salvation of the other race that had suffered under the oligarchy. The abolition of slavery was a necessary precondition for reestablishing republican government for all people who had endured the direct and indirect effects of domestic slavery. The direct effects were the brutalities visited upon the slave; the indirect effects were the inevitable changes domestic slavery wrought on the form of government, robbing the common people of their republican liberty. The lesson that Boutwell and the Republicans drew from the national experience with slavery since the American founding was that wherever domestic slavery existed, it would destroy republican government and replace it with an oligarchic form of government.

In 1862, when arguing for the necessity of abolishing slavery, Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania attributed the cause of the war to Southern oligarchy and the cause of Southern oligarchy to domestic slavery. With reference first to the war, he said, “All must admit that slavery is the cause of it. Without slavery we should this day be a united and happy people. So long as it exists we cannot have a solid Union. Patch up a compromise now and leave this germ of evil, it would soon again overrun the whole South, even if you freed three fourths of the slaves, and your peace would be a curse.”⁷

Why would reunion secured by a compromise on the slavery question inevitably result in renewed conflict between slave states and free states? Stevens answered that oligarchic government was the inevitable “evil” produced by the “germ” of domestic slavery. Domestic slavery, or what Stevens called “individual despotism,” brought about political despotism. The ruling class rebelled in order to establish their slave oligarchy as an independent nation, free from the limits, reproaches, and fetters of republican government:

 

They have rebelled for no redress of grievances, but to establish a slave oligarchy which would repudiate the odious doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, and justify the establishment of an empire admitting the principle of king, lords, and slaves.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were a constant reproach to the slaveholding South. They were in palpable contradiction to their domestic institutions. They were conscious of the impropriety of being governed by a Constitution which was an evident condemnation of their actual principles, and of their institutions founded on individual despotism. They feared that the principles of freedom and of the equality of man before the law . . . might be gradually breathed from the North into southern ears and southern minds, and establish even there the doctrine of the RIGHTS OF MAN.8

 

The republican principles and republican organic law of the American government were in tension with the oligarchy’s institutions “founded on individual despotism.” Stevens added that American republicanism and slavery, the “germ” that generated antirepublican oligarchy, could not coexist: “The principles of our Republic are wholly incompatible with slavery. They cannot live together. While you are quelling this insurrection at such fearful cost, remove the cause, that future generations may live in peace.”

Stevens stood with his Republican colleagues in the opinion that domestic slavery was a political as well as a moral evil. The political evil consisted in slavery’s tendency to overcome republican government and erect an oligarchic political regime in its place. For this reason, the partisans of republicanism and oligarchy, who understood that this was the political effect of domestic slavery, could not easily compromise on slavery policy. The ultimate perpetuity of slavery guaranteed the ultimate triumph of oligarchy; the ultimate destruction of slavery guaranteed the ultimate triumph of republicanism. Implacable support for either slavery’s ultimate perpetuity or destruction was not compromise-killing or irrational fanaticism. The Republicans explained that uncompromising positions on slavery questions rationally aligned the respective partisans of republicanism and oligarchy.

How Slavery Causes Oligarchy: Legal Effect

Representative Elihu Washburne of Illinois argued that constitutions founded on an explicitly proslavery basis would immediately produce “oligarchal” governments. That is, he argued that the enshrinement of proslavery principles or ideas in constitutions would inevitably create an oligarchic political regime. He made this claim in 1858, when the House debated whether to admit Kansas as a slave state under the Lecompton constitution, framed by proslavery men in the city of Lecompton, Kansas. The Lecompton constitution differed from all other admitted slave-state constitutions by its provision declaring slavery to be established by “the law of nature.” Washburne pointed out that this claim directly contradicted the assertion of natural equality in the Declaration of Independence. Such a government organized on that basis assumes the principle of natural inequality and “is not republican, but oligarchal.”9 All laws and institutions in the new state would have to conform to that principle of inequality from the outset. Unlike the experience of previously admitted slave states, domestic slavery would not need to revolutionize this state’s government from republican to oligarchic gradually. The Lecompton constitution would establish the government on an “oligarchal” basis at its foundation, due to its acknowledgment of natural slavery.

In this speech, Washburne said that this principle declared all were “created unequal—part to be masters, and part slaves,” the term slaves compassing both white Americans and black Americans. The Lecompton constitution would politically enslave the white population “who break up the prairies, hew down the forests, cut through the mountains, build up cities, towns, and villages, and lay the foundations for empires on the eternal basis of virtue, intelligence, and truth.”¹⁰ He denied that these free whites, accustomed to republican government and free institutions, would freely submit to any form of mastery, domestic or political. But the political enslavement of these free whites would be the consequence of the “oligarchal” form of government that the proslavery Lecompton constitution would generate. A few years after this speech, the national constitution of the Confederate states, unlike the national constitution of the United States, did enshrine the perpetuity of domestic slavery. By Washburne’s reasoning, this government would be “oligarchal” from its founding.

How Slavery Causes Oligarchy: Moral Effect

What about constitutions that do not proclaim the “divinity” of slavery but tolerated its existence, while nevertheless proclaiming republican equality? How could the practical existence of slavery change the form of government, constitutionally organized on natural rights principles, to oligarchy?

In 1860 Charles Sumner explained how this could happen. He noted Southern statesmen’s praise of both slavery and aristocracy and pointed out that they themselves had observed that slavery created a ruling aristocratic class. How did slavery create a governing order like an order of nobility, but without needing noble titles granting authority? Sumner explained: “The denial of all rights in the slave can be sustained only by a disregard of other rights, common to the whole community, whether of the person, of the press, or of speech. Where this exists there can be but one supreme law, to which all other laws, legislative or social, are subordinate, and this is the pretended law of Slavery.”11

The practical existence of slavery in the political community presents a permanent moral question. Is the institution just or unjust? If it is unjust, slavery cannot be defended. Moreover, it exists under a moral ban and must eventually pass away. But if the regime ruling the political community is determined to keep slavery, the only way it can justify enslaving any part of the political community is to deny the principle that demands the slaves’ freedom—that all members of the human family, including slaves, possess an equal share of natural rights common to humanity.

Next, the legal order of the regime reconstitutes itself around a new fundamental principle. If the regime is republican in form in the beginning, the sovereign people will unwittingly expose themselves to tyranny if they accept this denial of others’ natural equality. If they do, they give up the moral foundation of popular sovereignty. Natural inequality justifies rule by those who deem themselves naturally superior. Elevated by superior force, these superiors take possession of the political community’s sovereignty. These new rulers then disregard the natural rights “common to the whole community” by ruling over them, denying them their share of sovereignty and oppressing them.

If it is conceded by the political community that slavery is unjust, despite its practical existence, then slavery can temporarily continue thus marked for ultimate extinction, contradicting, but not immediately commencing to destroy, the republican regime. But, Sumner said, “proclaim Slavery to be a permanent institution, instead of a temporary Barbarism, soon to pass away, and then, by the unhesitating logic of self-preservation, all things must yield to its support. The safety of Slavery becomes the supreme law; and since Slavery is endangered by liberty in any form, therefore all liberty must be restrained.”12

Sumner maintained that only the principle of natural inequality can justify the permanence of slavery. If it is declared permanent, all things subsumed by the political regime based on that principle will be brought into conformity with that principle by the “unhesitating logic of self-preservation.” That logic is common to all political regimes. A republican political regime will likewise bring “all things” it subsumes into conformity with natural equality by that same logic of self-preservation. But if the republican political regime changes its disposition toward slavery, from marked for ultimate extinction to permanent, it must by necessity change the regime principle from natural equality to natural inequality to sustain the justification for slavery. The “logic of self-preservation” then reorganizes the political regime into one that conforms to the new principle. Rule by the strong who deem themselves naturally superior characterizes the new, revolutionary regime, revolutionized by slavery. That regime is an oligarchic regime, ruled by a privileged minority rising from the political community. By that same logic, the oligarchy must restrain liberty claimed by the ruled parts of the political community in order to maintain the regime. Sumner pointed out that the oligarchy had to stamp out the remaining free institutions and free principles of the prior republican regime. The revolution would be complete when slavery and its progeny, oligarchy, were safe from all threats, institutional or moral.

How Slavery Causes Oligarchy: Economic Effect

In 1865 Representative James Patterson of New Hampshire furnished a different kind of theory to explain how slavery’s effects cause the development of an aristocratic political regime. “Slavery, villanage, serfdom, or any system, which lays restraints upon labor” creates two economic classes, separated by marked differences in wealth, intelligence, and manners.¹³ The common people become a rabble; the few become haughty. Republicanism is impossible to sustain, and aristocracy replaces it.

 

Any system of enforced labor, where the laborer is made property, creates a landed aristocracy, and throws the wealth of the community into the hands of a few. The non-slaveholding free population are driven from the country, or sink to the most abject poverty, and yet are too proud to engage in work, which has been degraded by Slavery. Public intelligence and public morals cannot be maintained in such a community. The poverty-stricken masses, pressed by want and lost to self-respect, become either a dangerous and turbulent body of malcontents, or the pliant tools of faction in the hands of an unscrupulous but un-titled nobility. The influence upon the holders of this species of property is not less baneful than upon the disenfranchised and hopeless chattel. Living in ease and luxury, upon gains wrung from the compulsory labor of others, they become indolent, arrogant and corrupt, and naturally desire to carry into the government of the state, the monopoly and oppression, with which they have become familiar in the institutions of social life.14

 

Systems of enforced labor result in extreme inequality of wealth for two primary reasons. First, the fruit of labor accrues to the owners of labor rather than to the laborer. Second, enforced labor degrades labor.

Even if the local laws protect civil liberty, the commanders of labor can nonetheless abuse their command of the laborer in economic relations, because they increasingly own all the means of economic production. Due to these economic conditions, the laborer cannot choose to produce for himself, because that economic alternative becomes increasingly less available. Those outside the wealthy class then face a personal economic choice: to choose to escape their commanders and accept poverty or to choose to labor, increasing the wealth of the commanders of labor. Those who choose to work submit to the degrading oppressions under that command.

The commanders of labor become accustomed to their command over the common people in economic and social life. Their economic command develops a commanding character, and they “naturally desire” to rule over the majority in political relations. The poverty and slavishness of the people inhibit public intelligence and the capacity for self-government. Their character becomes fitted for despotism. Systems of enforced labor necessarily terminate in oligarchic rule.

In his 1858 speech against admitting Kansas as a slave state, Francis Blair presented a similar theoretical account, drawn from the fall of the Roman republic. He first alluded to the political effect of permitting slavery in the territories, in order to argue for excluding the institution: “The Territories of this Government cannot be wrested from the freemen to whom they belong, to be given up to slaveholders and their slaves, in order to strengthen the oligarchy which rests upon this servile institution.” He then expounded excerpts from Hook’s History of Rome to the House of Representatives, “to show how the great Republic of antiquity fell; to decay, when it ceased to cherish the people as landholders, and became an oligarchy, by the very means now being employed in our own.” He explained that due to their access to cheap labor, the slaveholders of Rome could outbid the nonslaveholders for possession of the public land, which increased the concentration of landholding in the hands of the few, dispossessed the nonslaveholders, and increased the incentive of the slaveholders to acquire more slaves. Because free but dispossessed republican citizens of Rome did not easily submit to the command of the slaveholding patricians, the slaveholders began to acquire more slave labor from barbarian nations. These slaves, not accustomed to republican liberty, were more amenable to the individual despotism of the patricians: “So that Italy was in danger of losing its inhabitants of free condition . . . and of being overrun with slaves, and barbarians, that had neither affection for the Republic nor interest in her preservation.”15

This aggravated the destitution and disaffection of nonslaveholding Roman citizens. “To remedy these disorders,” Tribune Tiberius Gracchus proposed a law to redistribute the land that the patricians had acquired and to compensate the patricians from the public treasury. The patricians murdered him, however, before the law took effect. This political step showed that the determination of the slaveholding, land-monopolizing patricians to dominate the free Roman plebeians economically and socially had crossed over into government. The social aristocracy fostered an oligarchic regime. Blair traced the cause of this revolution in the form of government to slavery.

In 1864 Representative Reuben Fenton of New York referred to European and American histories of the ancient world to argue similarly that agrarian slavery created vast economic inequality that irresistibly resulted in political inequality. Slavery depressed the value of paid labor, and nonslaveholding freemen became poor. This gave the owners of capital a great advantage over free laborers in their capacity to accumulate additional wealth. The nonslaveholding freemen could not compete with slaveholders for the price of land, and so those who were rich in slaves and land became richer, engrossing all of the land, while the freemen became increasingly destitute. The radical inequality of wealth easily transformed the political system, resulting in the rule of an aristocratic few. This is what happened in the American South, Fenton argued. The “curse of slavery” had “demoralized the people of the South and was rapidly undermining the liberties of the whole people.”¹⁶

Waitman Willey reminded his congressional colleagues of Thomas Jefferson’s pride in having abolished the rights of primogeniture, and then said, “Sir, the proper effects of the latter bill can never be felt and enjoyed in the slave States, until slavery is abolished. Until then, the poor white man will always be kept in subjection; the land and the capital will be in the hands of the slaveholders.”17 In short, slavery sustained oligarchy even after formal institutions that supported a ruling class were abolished.

How Slavery Causes Oligarchy: Effect on the Personal Character of Slaves and Nonslaveholders

Slavery was a massive school of antirepublican tyranny and subjection. The Republicans often noted, in the words of Charles Sumner, “the operations of slavery on character” in “those who have been exposed to it.” Emphasizing the extent and effect of slavery on personal character, Thomas Eliot said, “No nation upon the face of the earth with whose history I am conversant has held in bondage over so wide extent of country so many millions of human beings as this nation has dared to hold under a Constitution which the people ordained to secure the blessings of liberty and to establish justice; nor has human ingenuity ever devised a system of slavery more debasing in its character to the slave or to his master.”¹⁸

The degradation of the slave and the poor white, and the elevation of the master to a position of absolute personal and political dominion, tended to destroy any sense of or respect for natural equality. As a result, slavery eroded republican mores necessary to the maintenance of republican government.

Those under the political and personal rule of the master class became unfitted for freedom. In the 1850 slavery debates in Congress, Thaddeus Stevens used sarcasm to depict vividly how Southern representatives misattributed the degradation of slaves to a lower nature rather than to the temporal condition of enslavement. On the floor of the House, the slave-state statesmen had again roundly proclaimed

 

that slavery was a moral, political, and personal blessing; that the slave was free from care, contented, happy, fat, and sleek. Comparisons have been instituted between slaves and laboring freemen, much to the advantage of the condition of slavery. Instances are cited where the slave, after having tried freedom, had voluntarily returned to resume his yoke. Well, if this be so, let us give all a chance to enjoy this blessing. . . . If these gentlemen believe there is a word of truth in what they preach, the slaveholder need be under no apprehension that he will ever lack bondsmen. Their slaves would remain, and many freemen would seek admission into this happy condition. Let them be active in propagating their principles. We will not complain if they establish societies in the South for that purpose—abolition societies to abolish freedom. Nor will we rob the mails to search for incendiary publications in favor of slavery, even if they contain seductive pictures, and cuts of those implements of happiness, handcuffs, iron yokes, and cat-o’-nine-tails.19

 

If slavery really was all that the Southern representatives claimed, the North had been unjust to the South for criticizing slavery and unjust to the Northern people for having yoked them with “the cares, the troubles, the lean anxieties of freedom. This is a monopoly inconsistent with republican principles, and should be corrected.” Therefore, Stevens suggested that the Southern representatives introduce “a ‘compromise’”—which is in quotations marks, indicating a wordplay with the compromise of 1850. By this alternative compromise, the slaves and masters should exchange conditions so that “the oppressed master may slide into that happy state.” But “it may be objected that the white man is not fitted to enjoy that condition like the black man. Certainly, at first, it will be so. But let not that discourage him. He may soon become so.”

 

Let not the white man therefore despair on account of the misfortune of his color. Homer informs us that the moment a man becomes a slave, he loses half the man; and a few short years of apprenticeship will expunge all the rest except the faint glimmerings of an immortal soul. Take your stand, therefore, courageously in the swamp, spade and mattock in hand, and uncovered, and half-naked, toil beneath the broiling sun. Go home to your hut at night, and sleep on the bare ground, and go forth in the morning unwashed to your daily labor, and a few short years, or a generation or two at most, will give you a color that will pass muster in the most fastidious and pious slave market in Christendom. Your shape also will gradually conform to your condition. Your parched and swollen lips will assume a chronic and permanent thickness of the most approved style. Your feet, unconfined by shoes, and accustomed to a marshy soil, will shoot out behind and sideways until they will assume the most delightful symmetry of slavery. Deprived of all education, cut off from all ambitious aspirations, your mind would soon lose all foolish and perplexing desires for freedom; and the whole man would be sunk into a most happy and contented indifference. And all these faculties, features, and color, would descend to your fortunate posterity; for no fact is better established than that the accidental or acquired qualities of body and mind are transmissible, and become hereditary. True, your descendants will be black, stupid, and ugly. But they would only be so many incontestable evidences of their natural right and fitness for the enjoyment of this state of moral, political, and personal happiness!

 

Step by step, in this hypothesized reversal of roles, the newly enslaved master class would gradually assume the character of their slaves. By the end of this transformation, the description of the enslaved masters meets the exact description the master class assigned to black slaves when justifying their natural fitness to be despotically ruled. Stevens ironically used the language of the master class to mock their claims. So severe is the degrading effect of slavery on human beings that the attribution of natural inequality to biology can seem plausible. In reversed roles, the enslaved master would present qualities appearing to be “incontestable evidence” of their natural inferiority. Bondage so degrades human character that human beings in bondage develop an incapacity for republican self-government and seem to be fitted for despotic subjugation.

The Republicans mostly fell in line with Stevens on this point, blaming the slavishness of slaves on the effect of the institution and not on biology. In 1857 Henry Wilson noted South Carolina senator Andrew Butler’s claim that the slaves in the South were contented. Maybe so, replied Wilson, but he then added, “I commend to him, whenever he boasts on this floor of the contentment of the bondman, the words of Edmund Burke, ‘He who makes a contented slave makes a degraded man.’” In 1868 Senator Oliver Morton of Indiana did not deny that black Americans freed from slavery might be “ignorant, imbruited, and half civilized.” But the slave states had “forbidden by law, made it a penitentiary offense to teach the negro to read and write, [had] withheld from him all the means of education and intelligence,” and in general had “degraded him by slavery.” He continued, “If he is degraded, they have made him so; slavery has made him so. If he is ignorant, they have made him so by making it a crime to teach him to read and write.”20

In 1866 Representative Glenni Scofield of New York admitted that the “colored man has never exhibited equal ability, to be sure, but he has never had equal opportunities.” Southern laws had bound him down with “heavy chains” and forbade his education. But these prohibitions proved that the slave “was strong”; otherwise, they would not need these laws. “They debased him by law to fit him for slavery, and justified slavery because he was debased.”²¹

Slavery had so completely debased slaves in fitting them for despotism that even sympathetic Republicans could not imagine how their condition could be reversed. Waitman Willey wondered aloud, “How many generations will it require to divest the slave of his servility, and to clothe him with the independence of the freeman?”22

Slavery had also debased the character of poor whites. In an 1858 speech, Henry Wilson devoted time in “contemplation of the blighting and crushing effects of slavery, not upon the poor bondman, but upon the non-slaveholding poor whites of the South.” Millions lived in a worse poverty than “the poorest people of the seventeen millions of the North.”²³

Quoting six sources, Southerners included, Wilson described the erosion of republican characteristics in poor whites. One South Carolinian had estimated in 1851 that 125,000 whites were unproductive, and “‘but one step in advance of the Indian of the forest.’” Another said that “the poor are very poor. . . . The little they get is laid out in brandy and not in books or newspapers; hence they know nothing of the comparative blessings of our country.” One traveler, comparing poor whites to the “Spanish and Indo-Hispano races,” said, “They are more ignorant, their superstitions are more degrading, they are much less industrious, far less cheerful and animated, and very much more incapable of being improved and elevated, than the most degraded peons of Mexico.”

Wilson quoted Frederick Olmsted, who had reprinted a rice planter’s report, that “they seldom have any meat, except they steal hogs, which belong to the planters or their negroes. . . . They are small, gaunt, and cadaverous, and their skin is just the color of the sand hills they live on. They are quite incapable of applying themselves to any labor, and their habits are very much like those of the old Indians.”

Another source said that in New York, “half of them would be considered objects of charity.” Wilson quoted Representative J. H. Lumpkin of Georgia, who had described the poor white class as “degraded, half-fed, half-clothed, and ignorant . . . without Sabbath schools, or any other kind of instruction, mental or moral, or without any just appreciation of character.” Wilson complemented Lumpkin’s account of these Georgians, again quoting Olmsted: “It is evident that a large part of the people of Georgia still have the vagrant and hopeless habits and character of Oglethorpe’s first colonists, somewhat favorably modified, it is true, by the physical circumstances which have made them superior to absolute charity or legal crime, and also, perhaps, by the influence of a freely preached, though exceedingly degraded, form of Christianity. They are still coarse and irrestrainable in appetite and temper; with perverted, eccentric, and intemperate spiritual impulses; faithless in the value of their own labor, and almost imbecile for personal elevation.”

Another slave-state source, taking a view of all nonslaveholding whites in the South, reported that succeeding generations were “less educated, less industrious, and in every point of view, less respectable than their ancestors.” Another reported, “Poverty, ignorance, and superstition are the three leading characteristics of the non-slaveholding whites of the South.”

Representative Samuel Miller of New York described poor whites as an exploited and ostracized class, for whom “there was no place” in Southern society. “The poor white was a mere hanger-on—a miserable, despised tool of the slave-master.” Representative Thomas Shannon of California blamed slavery for creating “the poor white trash, whose vocation is pander and pimp to the vices of both master and slave, and ultimately dependent on both, having no recognized condition, and enjoying none of the privileges of the governing or governed class, but an outcast from both and despised by both.”24

James Garfield bore witness to the effect of slavery’s debasement of the poor whites. Fresh from military service in the war, in 1864 Garfield spoke of his personal experience at the front lines in Tennessee, reckoning the wrongs suffered by the poor white Southern population. He concluded, “[The slaveholders] have so long believed themselves born to rule, that they will rule the poor man in the future, as in the past, with a rod of iron. The landless man of the South has learned the lesson of submission so well that when he is confronted by a landed proprietor he begins to be painfully deferential; he is facile and dependent, and less a man.”²⁵ Under slavery, poor whites had become the detritus of slave society.

How Slavery Causes Oligarchy: Effect on the Personal Character of Masters

No single speech or writing of a Republican who served during Reconstruction more thoroughly addressed the effect of slavery on masters than the dramatic speech of Charles Sumner in 1860 upon his return to the Senate. After more than three years spent away from the Senate recuperating from Preston Brooks’s attack, Sumner retook his vacant seat. The effect of slavery on the character of the master occupied the bulk of his time. The clear inference of this speech was to the character defects of the class of men to which his assailant, Brooks, belonged. Without a doubt, he intended his performance, as well as his analysis, to demonstrate the difference between the republican and oligarchic character.

Sumner’s beating in 1856 had excited the nation and earned Brooks praise from Southern slaveholders and their adjunct press.26 What would Sumner say in his return address? Observing that “time has passed, but the question remains,” Sumner announced his intention to renew his attack on slavery, to resume “the discussion precisely where I left it.” Sumner was demonstrating firmness, though his opinions had nearly cost him and might yet cost him his life, because “ours is no holiday contest . . . but it is a solemn battle between Right and Wrong, between Good and Evil.” He eschewed conciliation at the cost of principles. “This is no time for soft words or excuses. . . . They may turn away wrath; but what is the wrath of man? This is no time to abandon any advantages in the argument.” If he appeared bowed or chastened, he would be submitting to force and abandoning the ongoing struggle for right. Sumner disdained the coward’s path, avowing his intention to attack slavery: “About me, while I speak, are [slavery’s] most jealous guardians, who have shown in the past how much they are ready to do or not to do, where Slavery is in question. Menaces to deter me have not been spared. But I should ill deserve the high post of duty here, with which I am honored by a generous and enlightened people, if I could hesitate. Idolatry has been exposed in the presence of idolaters, and hypocrisy chastised in the presence of Scribes and Pharisees.”²⁷

He did not hesitate to expose slavery in the presence of slaveholders. He disclaimed both uttering “personal griefs” and “personal wrongs to avenge,” since the first was the product of a “vulgar egotism”—the self-pity of a weak man—and the second was the product of “a brutish nature” of one who usurped the Lord’s right to visit vengeance upon a transgressor. Sumner proposed to take the path of self-disinterested magnanimity. He claimed to “begin my argument with that easy victory which is found in charity.”²⁸ That is, from charity, or love for his enemy, he was able to place the interest of the nation before the personal cause he might have against Southern senators in his presence when resuming his argument. His weapons would be his words, seeking persuasion, rather than threats seeking submission. He would rely on right for might, rather than on force to claim right.

“Motive,” he said, “is to Crime as soul to body.” Slavery was the motive behind the national crimes, and therefore “it must be exhibited as it is, alike in its influence and its animating character, so that not only outside, but inside, may be seen.” The inner influence of slavery, its soul, would be presented. Sumner quoted the proslavery sentiments of Southern statesmen, some of whom he faced. They had variously hailed slavery as the essential foundation of their political institutions and way of life, ennobling to both slave and master, black and white: “Thus, by various voices, is Slavery defiantly proclaimed a form of Civilization.” To that Sumner opposed his thesis, “the essential Barbarism of Slavery.” In prior times, he admitted he had “said too little of the character of Slavery,” but “the debate is now lifted from details to principles.” Sumner signaled his preparation to give a full account, a magnum opus, on the inner soul of slavery. The longer slavery exists, he said, “the more completely it prevails, must its vengeful influences penetrate the whole social system. Barbarous in origin, barbarous in law, barbarous in all its pretensions, barbarous in the instruments it employs, barbarous in consequences, barbarous in spirit, barbarous wherever it shows itself, Slavery must breed Barbarians, while it develops everywhere, alike in the individual and the society to which he belongs, the essential elements of Barbarism.”29

Sumner drew attention away from the outward, visible epiphenomena of slavery and to its inner nature, logic, and power. Slavery reshaped the political society that admitted it, imparted its essential character, barbarism, to that political society, and reorganized it around that central principle. The inner character of slavery corresponded to the inner character of the political regime, which bred men with its corresponding character, American barbarians.

Sensitive to rising conflict, many had objected to the characterization of the strife between North and South as between the two civilizations of “Freedom and Slavery,” Sumner observed. But this characterization, despite the sensitivities of some, was not strong enough; it was “mistaken.” Rather, Sumner said, “Sir, in this nineteenth century of Christian light there can be but one Civilization, and this is where Freedom prevails. Between Slavery and Civilization there is essential incompatibility. If you are for the one, you cannot be for the other; and just in proportion to the embrace of Slavery is the divorce from Civilization.”³⁰ Sumner recast the conflict between freedom and slavery as a conflict between civilization and barbarism.

Barbarism rested upon the law of slavery, which was that “man, created in the image of God, is divested of the human character, and declared to be a ‘chattel,’—that is, a beast, a thing, or article of property.” In support of this, Sumner cited slave-state laws. South Carolina defined slaves as “chattels personal.” Maryland defined a slave as an “article,” equivalent to “working beasts, animals of any kind.” The law of slavery recognized that “man can hold property in man,” abrogated “the relation of husband and wife” and “the parental tie,” closed “the gates of knowledge,” and appropriated “the unpaid labor of another.” What was the “single motive” of these five barbarisms recognized by slave-state law? Sumner quoted Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, a sitting member of that Congress, who said that slavery was “‘but a form of civil government for those who are not fit to govern themselves.’” That statement, resting on a claim of natural inequality, was an “outrage,” invented to justify the “profit” and “power” of the master. “American Slavery, as defined by existing law, stands forth as the greatest organized Barbarism on which the sun now looks. It is without a single peer. Its author, after making it, broke the die.”31

The American law of slavery did not derive from common law, Roman law, Koranic law, or Spanish law, since these bodies of law afforded more privileges and rights than the American law of slavery, such as protections for marriage, parental ties, the freedom of children, and restrictions on punishment. The American law of slavery did not derive from English or American statutes, since, by “positive and repeated averment of the Senator from Virginia [Mr. Mason], and also of other Senators, . . . in not a single State of the Union can any such statutes establishing Slavery be found.”³²

Then Sumner lit this explosive charge: “No, sir; not from any land of civilization is this Barbarism derived. It comes from Africa, ancient nurse of monsters; from Guinea, Dahomey, and Congo. There is its origin and fountain.” Sumner contended that the law of slavery in the slaveholding South derived from the customs of Africa. He traced the absolute dominion of the master over the slave as property from the right asserted in Africa by captors of others in war, transferred from the captor to the slave trader and from the slave trader to the American planter. And Sumner brought forward evidence. The Georgia Supreme Court justified the Georgia planters’ license to hold slaves as chattel on that basis, and Sumner quoted and cited the court’s opinion. Therefore, he continued:

 

It is natural that a right, thus derived in defiance of Christendom, and openly founded on the most vulgar Paganism, should be exercised without any mitigating influence from Christianity; that the master’s authority over the person of his slave—over his conjugal relations—over his parental relations—over the employment of his time—over all his acquisitions, should be recognized, while no generous presumption inclines to Freedom, and the womb of the bond-woman can deliver only a slave. . . .

Thus are the barbarous prerogatives of barbarous half-naked African chiefs perpetuated in American Slave-masters.³³

 

Sumner seriously maintained that American slave masters had absorbed the customs of African chiefs and framed those customs into American law. The political society of the slave South was reproducing the political society of Africa. The character of slave masters was assimilating the character of African chiefs.

The most prominent principle of the slave master and African chief is violence, for, according to Sumner, “slavery is founded on violence, as we have already too clearly seen; [and] can be sustained only by kindred violence, sometimes against the defenseless slave, sometimes against the freeman whose indignation is aroused at the outrage.” Unaware of their warped character, the slave masters “unblushingly” avow “barbarous standards of conduct. . . . The swagger of a bully is called chivalry; a swiftness to quarrel is called courage; the bludgeon is adopted as the substitute for argument; and assassination is lifted to be one of the Fine Arts.”34

“Bad as slavery is for the slave, it is worse for the Master.” Sumner proceeded to recite American and European authorities’ condemnation of slavery’s effect on the slave master’s character. American founder George Mason said that “every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant,” and Thomas Jefferson said that slavery “transforms those into despots.” Philosopher John Locke declared slavery to be “the state of war continued.” Adam Smith said, “There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving.” Their masters were “wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.” Dr. Samuel Johnson confessed he did not know of anyone who would willingly abstain from advancing Christianity, unless it was “the planters of America, a race of mortals whom, I suppose, no other man wishes to resemble.” Sumner quoted an exchange of letters between Condorcet and Voltaire on the brutality of the slave master, “the American savage.” Speaking of the Africans, Montesquieu ironically said, “It is impossible that we should suppose these people men; because, if we supposed them men, the world would begin to think that we ourselves were not Christians.” And Tocqueville reasoned, “The legislation of the Southern States with regard to slaves at the present day exhibits such unparalleled atrocities as suffice to show that the laws of humanity have been totally perverted, and to betray the desperate position of the community in which that legislation has been promulgated.”³⁵

To prove how violence and not humanity shaped the political society of the slave states, Sumner quoted public Southern sources. One newspaper advertised a runaway slave with “holes in his ears, a scar on the right side of his forehead; has been shot in the hind parts of his legs; is marked on his back with the whip”; another described a sixteen-year-old girl whose rapist master had “no further use of her.” He quoted Olmsted’s interview of a slave master who explained a cure to runaways, by pulling out their toenails, and of another who cut the Achilles’ tendon of his runaway. He quoted the opinion of Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin of the North Carolina Supreme Court, who ruled that “the obedience of the slave is the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body. . . . The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.” A recent Virginia court decision had declared that “the policy of the law . . . to protect the master from prosecution, even if the whipping and punishment be malicious, cruel and excessive.” Perhaps the bleakest view into the masters’ barbaric character was their practice of selling their children, born from their slave women. The Virginia master bred slaves, and in his “crop of human flesh consists much of the wealth of his state.” The slave hunter, “with the blood-hound as his brutal symbol,” pursued slaves, “as the hunter pursues game.”36

Because slavery was founded on violence, slave society was founded in violence, and new leaders, raised to command that society, were naturally prone to violence. By an “irresistible law,” surroundings and institutions refashioned men, Sumner argued. Some might rise above these influences, but most did not. Far from “‘ennobling’ the master,” slavery degraded him. His circumstances lacked anything that would “remind him of his own deficiencies, to prompt his ambition or excite his shame.” Sumner continued: “Without provocation to virtue, or an elevating example, he naturally shares the Barbarism of the society which he keeps. Thus the very inferiority which the Slave-master attributes to the African race, explains the melancholy condition of the communities in which his degradation is declared by law.”³⁷

Taught to believe that men can be held as an article of property, the master’s moral sense was “obscured.” He became lawless, ruling his plantation with violent force, wearing his “bludgeon, revolver and bowie-knife” with pride. Customary violence and not the law became the means of settling differences with other men off the plantation through duels and “street fights.” Unchristian murder, the badge of Cain, became a mark of honor and not the biblical mark of universal condemnation. Sumner then quoted slave-state governors complaining of the violent loss of life from these confrontations. He documented repeated instances of the rough suppression of liberties in the slave states and placed the blame on the tyranny of slave masters. And this was “the social system, so much vaunted by honorable Senators, and which we are now asked to sanction and to extend.”38

Finally, Sumner arrived at “the exhibition of Slave-Masters in Congressional history,” without making any personal allusion to his own historic experience at the hands of Brooks. Despite the “requirements of Parliamentary Law,” their violence in Congress broke “out in fearful examples. And here, again, facts speak as nothing else can.”³⁹ Sumner recited a long list of outrages recorded in the congressional records.

In 1837 a member of the House of Representatives, R. M. Whitney, explained to a committee of investigation that he could not attend “without exposing himself thereby to outrage and violence in the committee-room.” Another testified:

 

Mr. Peyton, a Slave-master from Tennessee, and a member of the Committee, regarding a certain answer in writing by Mr. Whitney to an interrogatory propounded by him as offensive, broke out in these words: “Mr. Chairman, I wish you to inform this witness, that he is not to insult me in his answers; if he does, God damn him! I will take his life on the spot!” The witness, rising, claimed the protection of the Committee; on which Mr. Peyton exclaimed: “God damn you, you shan’t speak; you shan’t say one word while you are in this room; if you do, I will put you to death.” Mr. Wise, another Slave-master from Virginia, Chairman of the Committee, and latterly Governor of Virginia, then intervened, saying: “Yes, this damned insolence is insufferable.” Soon after, Mr. Peyton, observing that the witness was looking at him, cried out: “Damn him, his eyes are on me; God damn him, he is looking at me; he shan’t do it; damn him, he shan’t look at me.”⁴⁰

 

Wise later admitted that he had been armed and that he almost killed the witness.

When James Hammond, the sitting senator of South Carolina, had previously served in the House of Representatives in 1836, Sumner recounted, Hammond had warned his colleagues that if an abolitionist fell into “our hands, he may expect a felon’s death.” In the House in 1841, William Payne, “a Slave-master from Alabama,” threatened that if “abolitionists, among whom he insisted the Postmaster General ought to be included,” ever visited the South, “‘he would hang them like dogs.’” On another occasion, “Mr. Dawson, of Louisiana, confronted another member of the House of Representatives, and promised to “‘cut his throat ear to ear,’” if he “did not behave better.”41 Joshua Giddings recounted that once, upon speaking about slavery in Georgia,

 

Mr. Black, of Georgia, raising his bludgeon, and standing in front of my seat, said to me: “If you repeat that language again, I will knock you down.” It was a solemn moment for me. I had never been knocked down, and having some curiosity upon that subject, I repeated the language. Then Mr. Dawson, of Louisiana, the same who had drawn the bowie-knife, placed his hand in his pocket and said, with an oath which I will not repeat, that he would shoot me, at the same time cocking the pistol, so that all around me could hear it click.”⁴²

 

In the Senate in 1848, Henry Foote, a slave master from Mississippi, invited “Mr. Hale, the Senator from New Hampshire, who still continues an honor to this body,” to travel to Mississippi, where “he would grace one of the tallest trees of the forest with a rope around his neck, with the approbation of every virtuous and patriotic citizen, and that, if necessary, I should myself assist in the operation.”⁴³ In 1850 Foote confronted Senator Thomas Benton of Missouri. “Mr. Benton rose at once from his seat, and, with an angry countenance, but without weapons of any kind in his hand, or, as it appeared afterward before the Committee, on his person, advanced in the direction of Mr. Foote, when the latter, gliding backward, drew from his pocket a five-chambered revolver, full loaded, which he cocked. Meanwhile Mr. Benton . . . exclaimed: ‘I am not armed. I have no pistols. I disdain to carry arms. Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire.’”⁴⁴

Not long after, Foote challenged Benton to a duel from the floor of the Senate in veiled but unmistakable language. The Senate did nothing. In 1852 “Mr. Clemens, a Slave-master of Alabama,” challenged Robert Rhett to a duel. The Senate called none to order. In 1854 Senator Judah Benjamin from Louisiana, “who is still a member of this body, ardent for Slavery, while professing to avoid personal altercation in the Senate . . . , proceeded most earnestly to repel an imagined imputation on him by Mr. Seward, and wound up by saying: ‘If it came from another quarter, it would not be upon this floor that I should answer it.’”⁴⁵

In that very session, Senator Jefferson Davis, “who speaks so often for Slavery,” had praised the duel as a means of settling quarrels “and vindicating what is called personal honor; as if personal honor did not depend absolutely upon what a man does, and not what is done to him.” Also in that session in the House, Sumner quoted the interruptions of Owen Lovejoy by a host of Southern representatives whose invectives included calling him a “black-hearted scoundrel and nigger-stealing thief,” a “perjured villain,” and a “despicable wretch.” One threatened, “And if you come among us, we will do with you as we did with John Brown—hang you as high as Haman.”46

In referring to these examples, Sumner said that he meant to show how such conduct violated “the first principles of Parliamentary Law.” But it would be too much to expect these men to restrain themselves “while Slavery prevails here, for the Duel is a part of that System of Violence which has its origin in Slavery.” He continued, “Men are transformed into wolves.” Slavery impels men to violence and to violate the rules of debate as a means of settling disagreement, “not knowing that there is a serener power than any found in personalities, and that all severity which transcends the rules of debate becomes disgusting.” Violence degrades the man who is the mouthpiece for violence and slavery. “Of course, on such occasions, amidst all seeming triumphs, the cause of Slavery loses, and Truth gains. If men cannot afford to be decent, they ought to suspect the justice of their cause, or at least the motives with which they sustain it, but our Slave-Masters, not seeing the indecency of their conduct, know not their losses.”⁴⁷

In a republican political community, governing itself on the basis of natural equality, reason in debate, not violent force, decides political questions. In the eyes of a republican people, threatened and actual violence proves nothing. In fact, these examples, which “might be multiplied indefinitely,” Sumner continued, “attest the weakness of their cause. It requires no special talent to estimate the insignificance of an argument that can be supported only by violence.” But to members of a political community that governs itself on the basis of violent force, reason in debate is not sovereign in deciding political questions. At bottom, might makes right. In parliamentary councils, when reason expends itself short of victory, the issue is not settled until force is resorted to and expends itself. Paradoxically, the slave masters can accept the sovereignty of reason in debate only by “the cultivation of those principles which make Slavery impossible.”⁴⁸

Sumner pointed out that pride made the slave masters unconscious of the “fatal influence” of slavery, “which completes the evidence of the Barbarism under which they live.” It was “natural that a cherished practice should blind those who are under its influence,” and indeed the slave master exulted “in his unfortunate condition.”49 The slave masters’ deformities of character appeared to themselves as the distinctiveness of superiority.

Pride in their mastery had not only made them unconscious of their wrongs that had deformed them, but also made them forgetful of their republican fathers’ proscription of their wrongs. Sumner, along with his associates whose fellowship he saluted at the beginning of his return speech for “thinking alike concerning the Republic,” found “in the boasts of Slave-masters new occasion to regret that baleful influence under which even love of country is lost in love of slavery.” The slave masters had reversed the meaning of the “great motto of Franklin,” so that “Where liberty is, there is my country” had become “Where slavery is, there is my country.” In their pride, the slave masters had forgotten or scanted the fact that Jefferson and Washington were abolitionists. They had threatened or had made good on threats to shoot, beat, hang, and stab their colleagues in Congress for having “simply expressed the recorded sentiments of Washington, Jefferson and Franklin.” The fathers “looked down upon Slavery,” but the slave masters of the present age “look up to Slavery.” Sumner continued, “The first, recognizing its wrong, were at once liberated from its insidious influence; while the latter, upholding it as right and ‘ennobling,’ must naturally draw from it motives of conduct. The first, conscious of the character of Slavery, were not misled by it; the second, dwelling in unconsciousness of its true character, surrender blindly to its barbarous tendencies.”⁵⁰

The difference between the slaveholding abolitionist fathers and the pro-slavery slave masters of the day consisted in the former’s immunity to and the latter’s infection by the contagion attacking the soul. The republican fathers believed in popular rule and tried to doom slavery; the latter-day slave masters believed themselves born to rule and were trying to spread slavery. Their embrace of slavery accounted for the latter’s moral crimes against the slave and their political crimes against the rule of the people. Sumner had given a complete and prophetic account of the character of the slave masters, explaining why they could not easily respect any law conflicting with the law of their own political mastery. This account explained why they seceded. They could not tolerate the lawfully expressed will of the people if it differed from their own. They intended to rule.

On a different occasion, Representative Tobias Plants of Ohio presented a theory of the effect of slavery on the character of masters that complemented Sumner’s. His theory was unmistakably inflected by classical training, though he made no direct references to Greek authors. Plants began with the premise that “the constitutions, laws and institutions of a people are but the outgrowth of the wants, development and the culture of that people.”51 That is, a common spirit or character arises from the political culture of the people and is impressed upon the formal organization of government.

Plants continued, saying that “the community has within it the germs of all possible forms of government by reason of the various characters of the individuals who compose it.” Every community possesses different types of individual character, each sharing in the specific character unique to different forms of government. These individual characters, in their “germ” form, represent the diversity of character types found within humanity: “The good and the bad, the educated and the ignorant, the simple and the crafty, the benevolent and the selfish, the inborn democrat and the natural tyrant” are all present in and part, “so to speak, of this grand man, the body-corporate.” When political regimes are founded and government is formally organized, a ruling class is established that corresponds with a certain character type among many. At the American founding, “Selfish men would gladly have made everything subservient to their own aggrandizement, and to accomplish this would have formed an oligarchy, a monarchy, or a despotism. Good men would gladly have laid the foundations of the structure upon the broad principles of right and justice, and would have embodied them into the forms of a pure republic.” Good men prevailed, and the people were established as the sovereign rulers of the Republic upon the principle of natural equality.

However, subsequent history in which slavery was permitted to live demonstrated how slavery revolutionized republican, or popular, government by directly developing the oligarchic character of the masters. Plants isolated the “essential spirit of slavery” as the “selfishness which disregards the rights of others.” That selfishness was not bounded to “geographical lines, or limited to any particular color of skin”; that is, selfishness is not peculiar to one specific place or human relation defined by an incidental attribute like skin color. Selfishness is, simply, a “sin” to which humanity is always susceptible, and it corresponds to a certain character shared by “oligarchy, monarchy or despotism.” That sin “may be just as active and remorseless in the home of a domestic tyrant in Massachusetts as upon the cane-fields of Louisiana.” Though selfishness is found everywhere, its prevalence depends upon conditions that might feed the sin and give it scope versus counteracting forces of surrounding political society that might regulate and restrain that sin.

Domestic slavery was unusual in its powerful effect on selfishness. By giving one human being absolute dominion over another, slavery tempted selfishness to expand beyond the limits of self-control. Nothing but the conscience of the master checked the master’s selfish use of the slave’s life in any way that pleased the master, and if the master’s principle changed from the wrong of slavery to the rightfulness of slavery, the check of conscience was gone. The masters of political society became the slaves of all their selfish desires, especially “pecuniary gain and political importance and the gratification of their lusts.”52 The master resembled the classical definition of a tyrant.

When spread out in society, domestic slavery created a class of tyrants, enslaved to their appetites and lusting for lawless power. They sought to break the constraints of existing law, to make themselves rulers, and to make their twisted eroticism the law. In domestic slavery, “the selfish and tyrannical found a central rallying point, which naturally drew together and to concert of action all the elements of reckless disregard of human rights, corresponding in the body-corporate to the animal propensities in the man.” Those simultaneously habituated to tyranny by slave mastery naturally coordinated their actions to establish themselves and their rule, in “disregard of human rights.” Their character type was defined by enslavement to “animal propensities,” that is, the instinctive and unregulated pursuit of desires. Oligarchy was the natural political effect of inflated selfishness nurtured under the dark wing of domestic slavery.

The shocking proof of slave masters’ unregulated lust was known to the Republicans. Responding to the oft-repeated charge that Republicans’ advocacy of equality for the slave would produce racial amalgamation, Ashley answered that if not “for a negro equality all over the South that must be nameless here, there would be no blue-eyed, light-haired octoroons, the children and descendants of African slaves, in every southern city, and in every neighborhood.” By a nameless Negro equality, Ashley meant that the one way that Southern masters treated slaves as equals was as counterparts in forced sexual union. At least Mormon polygamy, “about which even southern Representatives profess to be so shocked,” was voluntary and had to receive church sanction. Southern slavery permitted and encouraged “an involuntary, forced, and revolting concubinage, from which there is no escape,” and there was “no law to punish the aggressor.” Most shockingly, “the offspring of this criminal negro equality are slaves.” If the law punished these crimes and liberated the ill-used slave women and the children, slavery would immediately end. But it was “only in the land of slavery where this crime is tolerated. There it is unrestrained. There alone it is cherished.” The masters’ unpunished practice terminated in “eradicating from the heart of man all love for his own offspring, and filling the land with slaves who are the children of the dominant race.” In every “congressional district, in all the slave States of this Union,” one could find slaveholders who “own and sell their own children.” These fathers “see them toil daily beneath the lash of a taskmaster, and see them driven in coffle gangs to the southern market—their sons to the shambles, and their daughters to the hells of southern cities.”53

Representative William Kelley of New York remembered that in 1824, when Lafayette traveled the South, he was surprised to find the “the complexion of the negro population in their cities so largely changed from what it had been at the close of the revolutionary war, and expressed the hope that in finding the two races thus blending their blood he might discover the solution of the slavery question.” Lafayette’s hope would have been plausible if the masters had repented of their unrestrained eroticism and had raised their children according to the law of paternal affection. But occupying Union armies encountered the evidence of paternal carelessness. Kelley held up a picture sent to the North by General Nathaniel Banks “of a band of slaves . . . four of whom are as white as we who hold this discussion.” They were born in Virginia and Louisiana and “were owned or sold by their fathers as negro slaves.”⁵⁴ The strength of the masters’ lust not only overcame any affection for common humanity in the abstract, but also extended to vicious and unnatural treatment practiced on their own children. Their hearts were as cold and as hard as iron while their lust irresistibly impelled them to rule despotically over all. In disregard of every other law, they elevated their lust to the lofty status of law.

Why Republicans Often Meant Oligarchy or Aristocracy When Saying Slavery

Quite often, when the Republicans used variants of the word slavery, they were referring to the oligarchic, slave-owning rulers of the South. Because the Republicans identified oligarchic rule with slavery, the oligarchy’s most outstanding feature, they often spoke in a manner that relied upon the audience’s common understanding of that identification. To that audience, the identification of oligarchic rule with slavery did not need explanation at every instance, because leading Republicans shared a common understanding of the oligarchic regime and its intimate connection to slavery. They often shortened their reference to the slave states’ different form of government and way of life by using the word slavery to represent all of it. The historical record contains countless occurrences of Republicans using the word slavery and its variants, such as slave power, slave interest, slavocracy, and so on, in ways that literally do not make sense, unless the identification between domestic slavery and oligarchic political regime is borne in mind. Very often, their usage of these terms can make sense only if we understand that they often used the word slavery metonymously, that is, to represent the rulers, interests, and forces of the political regime that owed its revolutionary, unrepublican character to that potent institution. Due to the generally understood, close causal relationship between slavery and oligarchy, Republicans could use these variants of the word slavery with the knowledge that their contemporaries understood the associated meaning that these terms represented. In some cases, the context in which Republican speakers and writers made metonymous usage of slavery also contains direct confirmation that this is what they meant. These cases help the reader of the historical record understand that when variants of the term slavery appear, much more meaning is often intended than domestic slavery alone.

An 1864 speech by Senator Daniel Clark of New Hampshire illustrates this interpretive point. Clark cataloged slavery’s many oppressions and crimes. Slavery had “shut up to them the liberty of speech and the press.” Slavery “assaulted,” “imprisoned,” “lynched,” “expatriated,” and “murdered” citizens, “for no crime but because they testified against her.” Slavery “set up the doctrine of State rights . . . [and] made war again on Mexico for more territory.”55

Obviously, “slavery” did not commit all these evils and cannot literally be an agent of these actions. More precisely, those with the strongest interest in maintaining slavery and clothed with the political authority to maintain it committed these evils. Clark named the author of these actions, saying that slavery had “reared an aristocracy and trampled down the masses.” The aristocrats of the regime that slavery had reared did all these things. And this was a regime that trampled not only domestic slaves but also “the masses.” Slavery here is a metonym for slavery-supported aristocracy.

The reader would be mistaken to limit the interpretation of slavery in this context to mean no more than the domestic institution supported by individuals who were morally sympathetic with it. This interpretation would ignore the fundamental reorganization of the antebellum Southern political regime devoted to the preservation of slavery, the cause of this political reorganization, which Clark and many others acknowledged. In appreciating the Republicans’ identification of slavery as the cause of Southern oligarchy, the crimes attributed to “slavery” are often more accurately read as government actions whose agents were the despots of a ruling class elevated by slavery.

A portion of an 1858 speech by Owen Lovejoy in the House of Representatives supplies another example like Clark’s catalog of slavery’s crimes. Lovejoy colorfully indicted slavery in this speech, which begins, “The demon of slavery has come forth from the tombs. . . . It claims the right to annihilate free schools . . . to hamper a free press, to defile the pulpit, to corrupt religion, and to stifle free thought and free speech.” In this speech, Lovejoy clarified that by the word slavery, he meant government changed by domestic slavery. He said that the national conflict over slavery was not precisely between “the North and the South, but between freedom and slavery—between the principles of liberty and those of despotism.”56 The sectional nature of the conflict was incidental to the primary difference—a difference in political regimes that were separated by the border between “liberty,” the domain of republican government, and “slavery,” the domain of oligarchic government.

Republicans often referred to the North-South conflict, as Lovejoy did, as a conflict between “liberty and slavery” or “freedom and slavery.” But in stating this, the word slavery included but signified more than enslavement of Africans.⁵⁷ Isaac Arnold said, “It is a question between liberty and slavery; not of the black man alone, but of the white man also. Constitutional liberty and despotic slavery will struggle and contend on this continent until one or the other is subdued.”⁵⁸ In these contexts, slavery carried the political meaning of the subjugation of all—of domestic slaves as well as the subjugation of all those not sharing in, or allied with, the ruling oligarchic class.

In 1862 Representative Francis Kellogg of Michigan referred to slavery as a ruler, which is literally nonsensical: “For the last ten years [when candidates for schoolteacher, clergyman, constable, or justice of the peace presented themselves] in any one of the thirty-four States, the first question asked was ‘what are his opinions on slavery.’ . . . In the thirteen states where it has the control of the local government, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are unknown, and the laws which it enacts and enforces are more oppressive and tyrannical than the decrees of the despots of Austria.” His meaning becomes clear in light of a speech two years earlier on the same subject, freedom of speech and the press: “This freedom of speech and of the press has cost too much blood and suffering in the past to be given up now for the sake of accommodating a few thousands of an aristocracy, who rob one class of all their rights, and then bid their poorer neighbors relinquish half of theirs, so they may live on in security.”59 This shows that when Kellogg said slavery “has the control of the local government,” he meant “slaveholding aristocracy.”

The Republicans often used the term slave power. In 1858 Henry Wilson said that the “gigantic slave power” was the only “power on this continent that could thus control, direct, and guide men.” Furthermore, it held “this Administration in the hollow of its hand,” and it “guides and directs the Democratic party, and which has only to stamp its foot, and the men who wield the Government of this country tremble and submit and bow to its will.” In 1860 Representative John Bingham of Ohio defined the term with reference to the abandonment of the early national policy of containing slavery: “The precepts and example of Jefferson were discarded. An influence appeared in the southern States which sought to change the settled policy of the Government, and to establish, and perpetuate the institution of slavery. This influence I shall denominate the slave power.”⁶⁰

In 1862 Representative William Windom of Minnesota said that “the loyal people of this nation” would never again “confide its interests and its destiny to the slave power,” implying that the slave power had controlled the nation’s destiny. If slavery emerged intact from the war, the slave power “will inevitably renew the old struggle for supremacy. Just so long as it can aspire to rule, it will conspire to ruin the nation, and there will be no peace.” In 1864 Senator John Hale of New Hampshire recalled when “the Government of the United States, under the cruel and arbitrary sway of the slave power, in the madness of its power undertook to shut up Faneuil Hall” in Boston, by prosecuting antislavery speaker Theodore Parker in federal court “for seditious words.” Also in 1864 Thomas Shannon mentioned in passing that when the convention of California, his state, asked Congress for admission, “the slave power was then in control here, and refused to admit them” unless the Missouri Compromise line’s extension to the Pacific was ordained. This “would have cut the state in two and made the lower half a slave State.” In the same year, Representative John Baldwin of Massachusetts equated the slave power with the “vicious old political dynasty that has long controlled the Government” and still commanded “supporters at the North,” who, “forgetting or failing to comprehend the grand meaning of this Republic, brought themselves to act as if the slave power were really the fundamental law of the land.”⁶¹

Speaking for himself, but also for all these aforementioned Republicans, Henry Wilson gave the term slave power this definition: “When I speak of the slave power of this Government I mean the political influence of slavery in the Government of this country.” With Bingham, Wilson perceived that the slave power had risen after the founding generation had passed away: “When the Constitution was made there were about six hundred thousand slaves in this country. . . . Slavery as an element of political power was utterly contemptible. . . . These six hundred thousand now have increased to four million.”62

With the increase of that interest “upheld by State law . . . , the result is that men in favor of perpetuating and extending this system of slavery over this continent have obtained the control of the sovereign States of this Union.” But it would not be altogether true to say that the “slave power” completely consisted in those men. In 1862 Isaac Arnold called the leaders of secession, “the chief conspirators, Davis, Floyd, Slidell, Mason and others . . . , the instruments of the slave power” but not the slave power itself, despite their leading positions in the Confederacy.⁶³

The Republicans’ conception of the slave power’s nature was that it was served by men, but not entirely by the men themselves. The slave power’s life in America had a beginning point—sometime after the founding generation; it was predictably rational, dictating commands consistent with its certain character; it was instantly and recognizably different from the power that it competed against for control of American governments; it was foreign to their own character; and, as such, it was indisputably evil. The Republicans understood that the slave power emanated from the oligarchic political regime among the slave states.

In 1854 Sumner had signed the public “Appeal of the Independent Democrats of Ohio in Congress to the People of the United States,” which explained that the slave power’s object was to extend slavery and, with its extension, to make not just slavery national, but also to nationalize the oligarchic political regime that correlated with slavery. The document stated that the “Federal Government, controlled by the Slave Power,” was being directed “to extinguish freedom and establish slavery in the States and Territories of the Pacific, and thus permanently subjugate the whole country to the yoke of a slaveholding despotism.”⁶⁴

In 1864, Representative John Longyear of Michigan also described the slave power in terms of political regimes. He said that the arm of the slave power was reaching forth from the slave states, attempting to destroy national republicanism and liberty in favor of the establishment of a new system of government familiar to itself:

 

In respect to slavery it is not change merely that is taking place, it is radical substitution; and of what? Of freedom for slavery; and why? Because slavery proved itself inimical to civil liberty, to the Constitution, and to republican institutions. The slave power, not content with the enslavement of its immediate victims insisted upon . . . the control of the Government, and the enslavement in fact, of all its [the national Government’s] energies, its power, its wealth and its emoluments. At length, . . . a cry went up from the great body of the people of the free States and from many in the slave States against the aggressions of the slave power and demanded that it should confine itself to its own particular domicile and not stretch its arms over the entire nation and attempt to control the liberties of the entire people.65

 

The slave power could not coexist with the form of government alien to its nature, which was inimical to republicanism and the Constitution framed by the republican fathers. This explained why, in the opinion of Windom and other Republicans, “so long as it [the slave power] can aspire to rule, it will conspire to ruin the nation.” From the Republicans’ point of view, unchecked oligarchy would be the ruin of the nation, whether by coercive violence or by the oligarchy’s displacement of American republicanism.

In a short space of an 1862 speech, George Julian employed several of these terms together—slavery used metonymously, slave power, and oligarchy—all intimately related, which enables us to see the “slave power” connected to the political regime from whence it came:

 

Slavery triumphed, finally, when it clutched the national Treasury, sent our Navy into distant seas, plundered our arsenals, fired on our flag, and sought to make sure its dominion by wholesale perjury, treason, rapine, and murder. . . . [S]lavery has now forced upon the nation the question of liberty or death. . . . In the year 1850, when the slave power triumphed through the “final settlement” which was then attempted, I had the honor to hold a seat in this body; and I said, in a speech then delivered, that—

. . . Sir, these questions are no longer within the control of politicians. Party disciples, presidential nominations, and the spoils of office, cannot stifle the free utterance of the people respecting the great struggle now going on in this country between the free spirit of the North and a domineering oligarchy in the South. Here, sir, lies the great question, and it must be met. . . .

Sir, I speak to-day in the spirit of these words, uttered nearly twelve years ago, and verified by time.⁶⁶

 

Slavery and slave power, in this passage, signify the same thing: the powers had been contending for “a domineering oligarchy in the South” and contending against “the free spirit of the North.” Julian’s 1850 claim, that the questions of the day were “no longer within the control of politicians,” portended larger changes than ordinary political realignment. The great question then was as follows: What would issue from the interregime struggle that lay underneath the surface of normal politics? Julian claimed that time had verified his correctness in predicting great changes caused by that struggle. Following his 1850 speech, the parties did realign, and after the dust cleared, they did become sectional, each aligned to one of the two dueling regimes. The contention between the two political regimes became an interregime war that put at stake the life of each political regime.

At the sight of the voluminous instances when the Republicans indicted “slavery,” later generations must understand that they were not merely engaged in moral disputation with opponents over the rectitude of slavery. Often, they were also railing against slavery’s corrosive effects on free institutions and republican government; moreover, they were railing against slavery’s offspring and patron, oligarchic government, its way of life and its rulers. In sum, when the Republicans indicted slavery, they were waging a struggle over the ultimate political question: the character and type of the American political regime. Disarmed of this meaning bound up in their usage of the word slavery, the reader cannot see the full breadth and depth of the impression oligarchic government made on the Republicans. With that meaning understood, the reader can better comprehend the centrality of oligarchic government in Republicans’ concerns about Reconstruction.