CHAPTER SIX

The Evidence

Education

For a long time, historians of education have recognized that basic education was much more broadly diffused in the antebellum Northern states than the Southern states.1 Although the scholars have not yet agreed upon the precise factor that explains this difference, one leading historian of education narrowed down the field of candidates to one factor, slavery.²

As table 1 demonstrates, illiteracy and slavery were strongly correlated in 1860. The illiteracy rate of native-born, free adults (column D) rose wherever slavery was present (C). This supports the claim of Republican Charles Van Wyck, that “your own people feel more keenly than we, that ‘The badge of the slave is the scorn of the free.’”³ Only one slave state, Texas (8 percent), had a lower illiteracy rate of native-born free adults than one free state, Indiana (11 percent), but many poor Southern whites had migrated to Indiana, which probably accounts for Indiana’s high illiteracy rate among Northern states.⁴ The table is sorted by total adult illiteracy (E), which combines the fractions of the total population who were adult slaves, and who are presumed illiterate, and native and foreign-born illiterate adults. This column illustrates Van Wyck’s other claim, that the slave states upheld “a system whose corner-stone is the ignorance of the people.”⁵

At one time, two leading Northern and Southern statesmen agreed upon the importance of basic education to republicanism. John Adams wrote that “education is more indispensable, and must be more general, under a free government than any other.” Since time immemorial, he wrote, despotisms of all kinds had made war against liberty, but if the principles of natural right were laid before the people, the light of understanding would spread and “the more disciples they will have.” Thomas Jefferson’s “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” noted that in the past, “those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.” A general education would also find and develop talent that nations had always neglected in favor of the well-born and the rich. Adams recognized that the laboring classes “are not always the meanest; there arise, in the course of human life, many among them of the most splendid geniuses, the most active and benevolent dispositions, and most undaunted bravery.” Likewise, Jefferson acknowledged those “talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich . . . perish without use, if not sought for and cultivated.”6

Although they agreed on the principles of education policy, their sections differed in putting these principles into practice. In the early national period, education in the South was not so widespread as in the North. Traditionally, southern schools served a few families who would jointly pay the teacher’s fee. Sometimes, prestigious families would organize, endow, and supervise the schools, which then became permanent private academies.⁷ Northerners presumed that elementary education was a necessity, and the northern literacy rate, especially in New England, exceeded the South’s rate.⁸ The northern people also sensed that their communities were incomplete without a school. When northern populations grew at a distance from an existing school district, the distant people demanded a school district for themselves. A resident in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, recalled, “Whenever a neighborhood felt the need of a schoolhouse, one was erected at some point convenient to those who contributed towards its erection. The patrons selected trustees, whose duty it was to take charge of the school property and to select a teacher for the school.”⁹ Education was a community affair rather than a concern of a few families, as it was in the South.

But southern statesmen initially showed that they intended to implement republican principles of education and catch up to northern standards. Their states lacked the stronger cultural foundations of the northern people. To remedy this deficiency, Southern statesmen attempted to build general education from the top down. The delegates who framed North Carolina’s state constitution in 1776 included an educational provision requiring its legislature to establish schools and to make them available “at low prices.” The Georgia Constitution of 1777 similarly ordered that “schools shall be erected in each county, and supported at the general expense of the State.”¹⁰ Jefferson’s plan for Virginia provided for three levels of education, all funded by a county tax.11

Southern statesmen repeatedly echoed Adams and Jefferson, calling for popular education to strengthen republicanism and protect it from subversion. In 1803 Governor James Turner of North Carolina reminded the legislature that popular enlightenment is “the most certain way of handing down to our latest posterity, our free republican government,” because “education is the mortal enemy to arbitrary governments, and the surest basis of liberty and equal rights.” He asked for “the establishment of schools in every part of the State.” In 1811 Governor Benjamin Smith, also of North Carolina, warned, “In despotic governments, where the supreme power is in possession of a tyrant or divided among an hereditary aristocracy . . . the ignorance of the people is a security to their rulers.” Smith recommended that “a certain degree of education should be placed within the reach of every child of the State.”¹² In 1811 Governor Henry Middleton of South Carolina recommended “the propriety of establishing free schools, in all those parts of the state where such institutions are wanted,” because “one of the first objects of a government, founded on popular rights, should be to diffuse the benefits of education as widely as possible.”¹³

All of these calls failed to achieve their intended aim. In 1779 Jefferson’s school plan came before the Virginia Legislature and was defeated. When the legislature finally enacted his plan in 1796, a change in wording permitted the wealthy to kill the plans in operation.¹⁴ The bill did not require but rather gave permission to the counties to fund and set up the schools themselves.¹⁵ Jefferson lamented that the county justices, who decided whether to implement the plan, were “generally of the more wealthy class” and “were unwilling to incur that burthen.”¹⁶ When their principles were put to the test, Virginia’s leaders chose to protect their wealth rather than to build up the republican character of their citizens.

In South Carolina, the people petitioned for free schools, and the legislature passed a school bill in 1811.¹⁷ But the new law deepened class division. School districts were created, and the district commissioners were required to prefer the poor for admission to the free schools, which thereafter became schools for the poor. To obtain state aid, families had to humiliate themselves and take a “pauper’s oath.”¹⁸ In addition, the law permitted the commissioners to give the public funds to private academies for the wealthy. The state had already created and funded South Carolina College in 1801. Rather than building a system of common school education, the law created separate and unequal systems of education for rich and poor, funded by the common treasury. These systems remained in place until after the Civil War.

Soon, Virginia emulated South Carolina. In 1818 the legislature passed over Jefferson’s plan again and instead created a pauper school fund and established and funded the University of Virginia.19 Jefferson disapproved of Virginia’s policy, lamenting the neglect of “primary schools” in 1820, and warning that Virginia was “fast sinking” and “becoming the Barbary of the Union.” The people had raised enough money, and “it should be employed . . . for their greatest good,” their general education. He asked, “Would it not have a good effect for the friends of this University to take the lead in proposing and effecting a practical scheme of elementary schools?” In Virginia as well, the pattern of education consisted in two separate and unequal systems until after the Civil War. In 1826 Governor John Tyler of Virginia held up the free school system of New York, asking the legislature to imitate that model, “embracing all, and alike available to all.”²⁰ But Tyler was not reelected, and his bill did not pass. Instead, the legislature enacted a law providing for a “district free-school system” that authorized but did not require county commissioners to divide their counties into districts for the establishment of free schools, open to all free white children. Voluntary contributions had to fund the construction of schools. The commissioners could direct tax revenues to the support of these schools at their discretion. In practice the commissioners focused on the pauper schools instead.²¹

The legislature of North Carolina did nothing to establish free schools for decades, despite the requirement in their constitution, while the population of North Carolina sank into deeper illiteracy and ignorance. The Georgia Legislature also flouted its constitutional requirement and instead followed the example of South Carolina and Virginia. In 1821 the legislature set aside half of its school fund for paupers and the other half for private academies. Students could receive funding only by taking the pauper’s oath. In 1833 an anonymous author in the Southern Banner complained that Georgia’s educational system was “anti-republican in its tendency,” because “here as in an Aristocracy the poor are taxed for the benefit of the rich.” Public funds built Georgia’s “Colleges and Universities . . . but who reaps the benefit? The rich.”²²

While the southern state governments strayed from their original mission and were funding pauper schools for the poor and academies and colleges for the rich, northern communities were making progress toward universal basic education. The proportion of children enrolled in elementary school was rising more quickly in the Northeast than elsewhere, particularly among female children. By 1830 most white Americans in the North had access to elementary education. Enrollment rates in the South were lower.23

The North sustained this progress whether the state governments supplied encouragements or mandates. In 1789 the Massachusetts Legislature passed a law, similar to its colonial law, requiring that towns maintain a school. But most towns already maintained a school and did offer a partially free elementary education. Responding to the complaint of the governor of New York, George Clinton, that a 1795 education law favored “the children of the opulent,” the legislature passed another law lavishing aid on local common school committees for five years. The law was not renewed, yet enrollments of pupils under twenty years old in New York increased from an estimated 37 percent to 60 percent from 1800 to 1825. Connecticut did provide generous financial support to local “school societies,” approximating a district system, and some American and foreign commentators regarded the common school system so funded the best in the country.²⁴

Like the pauper schools in the South, urban charity schools in the North began as free schools for the poor. These schools transformed into common school systems, the forerunner of modern public school systems, serving all for free. At first, private benevolence and fear of city-dwelling youth growing into adult criminals motivated the establishment and funding of charity schools. In time, advocates for poor school funds advanced republican arguments.²⁵ Boston’s city missionary Joseph Tuckerman believed that “if every child in our country, and in the world, between the ages of four and fourteen were in a school . . . and should receive as much instruction as could be given to them, it would be found that in the diversity God has made of human capacities . . . there is an ample provision for the whole number which is wanted for every service.”²⁶ This was pure republican theory, reminiscent of Adams and Jefferson. The urban charity schools eventually attracted and admitted children from higher socioeconomic positions. The charity school systems of New York and Philadelphia first changed into common school systems. After 1820 urban common school systems grew and received public funds and oversight. They accomplished in the cities what the northern district schools had already been doing since before the Revolution.

After the 1830s the gap between northern and southern basic education steadily widened until the Civil War. In the North leading educational reformers Horace Mann in Massachusetts, Calvin Stowe in Ohio, Henry Barnard in Connecticut, and John Pierce in Michigan all urged reform, relying primarily on arguments to educate children for republican citizenship. All of them preached the power of education to elevate character and develop individual potential as far as the pupil’s talent could go, no matter how humble or unfortunate the child’s origins. All of them recognized that the opportunity to advance was the first fruit of republican society, and education was the surest prop of republicanism. All of them learned the gospel of education from personal experience in New England, where all were born and raised. Barnard came from a middling Connecticut family; the rest knew privation and were left fatherless as children, Mann at age thirteen, Stowe at six, Pierce at two.27 But all owed their success and social respectability to education. The common schools saved their lives, imbued in them a love of learning, and gave them a fair start in life. They worked hard, rose, and then became evangelists for common school education and by extension for American republicanism, to both of which they owed so much. Had not their New England forebears valued education and established schools, they would not have been in the position from which they could diffuse it further still, within their own New England and beyond.

The arguments of the reformers drew from the theory of the founders. In an 1837 report to the Ohio Legislature, Stowe’s central point was that “republicanism can be maintained only by universal intelligence and virtue among the people. . . . And do not patriotism and the necessity of self-preservation, call upon us to do more and better for the education of our whole people, than any despotic sovereign can do for his?” In his third report to the Michigan Legislature in 1838, Pierce wrote that “generally diffused education, combining the great powers of intelligence and a pure virtue, is the only safeguard of our public and our private rights; and upon the progress of this alone, depends the future permanence and character of all our republican institutions.” In 1871, as the first commissioner of the newly created U.S. Department of Education, Barnard wrote, “The problem to be solved under a republican government . . . is not the education of the few, or even the many, but of all.” Mann dilated on the dependence of republicanism on education more than any other of his compeers. In his Tenth Annual Report in 1846 as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Mann wrote, “Since the achievement of American independence, the universal and ever-repeated argument in favor of free schools has been, that the general intelligence which they are capable of diffusing . . . is indispensable to the continuance of a republican government.”²⁸

The reformers aimed at programmatic public management over education, so that education would be more efficient, uniform, and consistent with national purposes. They favored the institution of state superintendents of public instruction, organization directed by the state government, and increased public expenditures. They pushed for a lengthened annual schooling period, higher wages for teachers, libraries, uniform textbooks, teacher training schools, education periodicals, and other reforms. All of these reforms aimed at diffusing the benefits of education by increasing the scale of schools, expanding student enrollments, and improving the quality of instruction under education officials’ supervision. Buoyed by the appeal of their arguments to their public, they did generally succeed at centralizing the oversight and funding of education at the state level in the free states. Although school enrollments in the free states were already rising when they began their reform work, enrollments further increased through 1860. However, the reform movement that they initiated barely affected the South.29

In the South new principles appeared in new arguments leveled against common school education. In 1830 Professor Thomas Cooper at South Carolina College published an attack on northern common school education plans in the Southern Review. “These schemes” were “neither just, nor expedient, nor practical.” Relying heavily on the remarks of John Randolph of Roanoke in the Virginia convention of 1829–30, he attacked majority rule. Taxation to fund common school education was “wanton plunder” and would inculcate “hatred among the persons of no property” toward those with property. Because “nature has made no two men equal in strength of body or strength of mind,” he concluded that the rich were rich because they were naturally superior. Adams and Jefferson also believed that some are more naturally talented than others, but Cooper assumed that natural superiority or inferiority is unalterably transmitted to children, not randomly diffused by nature. Cooper justified withholding education from the poor. Their education would make them a public nuisance. Finally, Cooper uncovered the nerve of his argument: “We deny that all men are created equal. We deny that any two men that ever lived were created equal in any one assignable circumstance. We deny that any human creature has any unalienable rights. We deny that there are any natural rights. . . . We assert that all rights, of whatever description, and without any exception, are the creatures of society, and of society alone.”³⁰

Therefore, even if a poor child was born with superior talent, whoever controlled society had the right to assign him to an inferior place for life. This was not unjust, he maintained, because might determined right and justice. “Resist, if you have the force to justify resistance; if not, quit the country or submit.”31 Cooper sketched an oligarchic argument against republican education, and in a short time, the same argument spread among southern leaders in opposition to general education.

Principled respect for property rights and its corollary, principled commitment to limited government, do not explain southern reluctance to fund common schools, although they did sometimes claim this ground.³² Cooper’s argument does not rule out taxation and state activism per se but rules it out only on behalf of the inferior poor. In fact, southern state governments did tax all to fund the private academies and colleges for the benefit of rich children.

The one section of the country that supported education with the least government coercion and general taxation was New England, where local communities banded together, raised funds, hired teachers, and built schools. When general education succeeded at all in the antebellum South, the people took matters into their own hands, just as the people of New England had done, but the slaveholders used state power to thwart their efforts.

Slavery was sparse in Washington County, in the southwestern corner of Virginia. As the 1829 state law permitted, the people decided to pool their own efforts, tax themselves, and organize common schools, without state aid. By 1835 thirty-eight school districts operated. Educational development there and in the northern townships in the founding period were parallel, sharing the characteristic of fewer slaves, a stronger republican character, and a commitment to common schools.³³ This success led to greater agitation in the 1840s and 1850s for a statewide system in Virginia. These efforts were defeated by “the interests of the academies and colleges of the State,” that is, the wealthy. They turned the aristocratic label back onto their opponents, ridiculing “the privileged class, the aristocracy of poverty,” who sought common schooling for all.³⁴

In 1839 the North Carolina Legislature finally fulfilled its constitutional duty and enacted its first public school law. The law established county boards of education, which were required in order to divide the county into school districts, and the schools would be open to all. The law also required county courts to levy a tax to support the schools. The plan would apply only to each county that voted for it, and a majority of counties did. North Carolina, alone among the antebellum slave states, built for itself a common school system ex nihilo and became the first slave state to create the office of state superintendent of public instruction. These late but earnest steps were an exception to the rule, but it was too little, too late. Despite these efforts, North Carolina had the highest adult illiteracy rate in the nation but a public school attendance rate rivaling the free states by 1860.35

Education policy changed in North Carolina because the majority gained some power when the state constitution was altered in 1835. The low-slaveholding western section of the state demanded common schools, while the rich in the high-slaveholding eastern section usually opposed them, a pattern repeated all over the slave South. The North Carolina constitutional convention of 1835 retained the eastern legislators’ disproportionate representation, but weakened their strength. In addition, the amended constitution changed the electors of governor from the members of the legislature to the people. These changes and the growth of western North Carolina’s white population sufficiently tipped the scales on the common school question to the side favored by the western part of the state.³⁶ The North Carolina convention of 1835 directly led to the enactment of the 1839 education law, showing that the establishment of common schools in the South required the marginal increase in popular influence in state government.

The same factor determined the fate of common schools in antebellum Louisiana. Since Louisiana had been a territory, private academies flourished, supported by government’s largesse. The parishes that distributed state aid had to reserve limited school enrollments for those designated poor.³⁷ Louisiana, too, had created the distinction between the poor and the rich in their educational laws. But common folk had emigrated to the northern part of the state in large numbers in the 1830s and 1840s, creating a new bulge of political power in that low-slaveholding section, counterbalancing the power of the rich who resided in the high-slaveholding section.³⁸ At the state convention of 1844, preceding the new state constitution of 1845, the secretary of the education committee reported the same complaints heard all over the slave states.³⁹ Publicly funded teachers were incompetent and negligent. Enrollments were down. Only the wealthy were enjoying a good education. School funds earmarked for the poor stigmatized the recipients and repelled many citizens. Large state expenditures for colleges and academies benefited only the rich, because without the availability of basic education, the majority were not qualified to attend them.

The 1845 constitution included an educational provision for the first time, providing for a state superintendent of public instruction, a public school fund, and free schools supported by taxation. The reforms aimed at replacing the stigmatizing poor school system with a competent public school system for all. The constitution also eliminated property qualifications for voting, which enfranchised the new mass of common folk in the northern section. Louisiana commenced building a free school system on the model of northern states.40

The slaveholders soon struck back. In 1852 a new state constitution apportioned representation in the legislature by enumerating total persons, slaves included. By this provision, they gained firm control of the state.⁴¹ That same year, the legislature abolished the office of parish superintendent, cut the state superintendent’s salary, and relieved the superintendent from visiting the parishes, with the result that the numbers of operating schools and enrollments precipitously dropped.⁴² The changes “seriously crippled” the embryonic free school system.⁴³ The movement away from the establishment of common schools corresponded with the increase in power of the high-slaveholding section of Louisiana, secured by the constitution of 1852.

South Carolina’s school policy remained intact from 1811 until the Civil War. As in other slave states, the partisans who fought over educational policy were organized and arrayed along intersectional lines within the state, dividing the slaveholders from the poorer citizens. The low-slaveholding upcountry, the northwestern section around Greensville and Spartanburg, agitated for an improved popular educational system. But because the high-slaveholding low country enjoyed disproportionate representation, the legislature resisted calls for common schools, sometimes with open hostility. As a result, the white majority never had access to respectable education. The teachers at poor schools, at one point, were generally adjudged as being “unqualified for their stations.”⁴⁴ The county school commissioners often neglected their oversight of the schools. Illiteracy was widespread.

The example of antebellum South Carolina proves that the state’s abstention from establishing a publicly funded common school system cannot be attributed to state leaders’ fidelity to limited government and principled opposition to taxes. In fact, their conduct reveals that their claimed fidelity to local liberty, limited government, and property rights in national councils was inconsistent with their practice in their state. Their inconsistency suggests that their positions advanced in national councils were unprincipled and were invoked for political expediency. The state government deliberately pursued an educational policy adverse to the people and favorable to the wealthy. Funds for the pauper schools were divided according to the same formula by which the low-country slaveholders dominated the legislature, that is, the funds were malapportioned. Hence, in a given year in the 1840s, the poorer low-slaveholding Spartanburg district received fifteen hundred dollars of the school funds, while the wealthier, high-slaveholding St. Phillip’s and St. Michael’s parishes received fifty-one hundred dollars in funds, despite the higher number of voters in Spartanburg than in the other parishes.45 The state government actively appropriated more public funds for those who needed less and appropriated less state funds for those who needed more.

Also, the state government actively prevented the poorer sections of the state from helping themselves. In 1855 state senator Thomas Patterson Brockman appealed to his colleagues to pass a law allowing the people in the free school districts to tax themselves as each district might or might not wish and to use the funds to establish common schools.⁴⁶ A “great many” of his constituents from low-slaveholding Greenville abstained from taking state funds, he said, because they refused to be regarded as paupers. But he had ascertained from his constituents that, although their means were modest, the people would accept a capitation tax for the purpose of establishing a common school system. They would attend the schools if they knew that their own funds, and not funds appropriated for paupers, provided the support. This would remove the pauper stigma from the free schools. These funds, combined with the funds appropriated by the legislature to the district school commissioners, would provide enough resources to support the broader diffusion of elementary education.

In the lower branch of the legislature, two representatives from Greenville and Spartanburg supported legislation with a similar funding provision along with a provision for the establishment of a state superintendent of public instruction. One representative supported the capitation tax, “in confident expectation that the day will arrive when my children, your children, and the children of us all, will be educated out of the common treasury.” These bills failed. One of the arguments in the opposition was that the tax power belonged to the state legislature, and, therefore, the local people did not have the right to tax themselves even if they chose to do so.⁴⁷ The poorer, low-slaveholding people in the upcountry desired to pool their small resources and establish a common school system themselves, as the western Virginians and early northern townships did. But a majority of the state legislature, rather than leaving them alone and letting them do what they wished, actively blocked local self-government. The South Carolina doctrine of local self-government, loudly proclaimed by the state against the national government in national councils, did not apply to a parallel case, a section within South Carolina asserting local self-government against the state government in state councils.

Barnard and Mann actively assisted the development of common school systems in the antebellum South and corresponded with their founders and leaders, who were often naturalized foreign educators or transplanted northerners.48 Predictably, their efforts attracted attention from southern opponents who tellingly argued that state funds were for free schools for the poor, not common schools for all. Some objected to the common school ideal on principle, because it was hostile to their idea of good government.⁴⁹ In 1852 one southern writer rejected mixing the rich and poor in common schools. He endorsed the opposite idea that students and instruction should be segregated, not by the students’ ability, but rather “in accordance with the circumstances under which he is to commence his career in life.” This is the idea of Thomas Cooper in action. The writer agreed with “objections to sending their children to schools which are open to all indiscriminately.” Furthermore, republican theory was wrong. Education was not “the palladium of our liberties,” nor “the guide which is to lead us to eternal truth. We believe in neither of these dogmas.” The many must work with their muscles; “the privileged few must govern.” Education was for the latter but, if received by the many, “exposes them to the danger of attacks from the demagogue.” Education for the poor was stirring up agrarianism and was “only a new element of evil. There is no necessary connection between learning and freedom.”⁵⁰

The republican logic of common schools clashed with oligarchic government and would lead some principled defenders of oligarchy to rise viscerally to the defense of their political regime, once they discerned what northern educators like Barnard and Mann were doing in their section of the nation. In New Orleans, New England teachers were called “mischievous spies and agents,” which, in a sense, they were.⁵¹ Sectionalism in education arose from a sharp difference in political principles, and this explains why southerners expurgated Yankee teachers, textbooks, and educational ideas.⁵² Northern “philanthropy” threatened the southern way of life. Evidence suggests that southerners with republican views on education knew that they ran the risk of punishment at the hands of the oligarchy. In one pathetic letter to Mann in 1839, a Mississippian ardently pleaded with him to send him educational materials, adding in a postscript, “Please Sir, not to make this communication public.”⁵³ His correspondence indicates that he was not living in a republican political society in which the people ruled and the rights of conscience were protected. Indeed, he feared reprisals from those who were determined to keep the people in ignorance.

Mann had explained that while republics depend on enlightened citizenry and free schools, “a sincere monarchist, or a defender of arbitrary power, or a believer in the divine right of kings, would oppose free schools for the identical reasons we offer in their behalf.” It was reasonable that in political regimes in which the people were not sovereign, the educational policy of the rulers would be that free schools “should be immediately exterminated.”54 This was the real reason common schools failed in the South.

After he was elected to the House of Representatives, Mann brought these reflections and experience to the floor in 1848. He attacked “the oligarchy who rule the south.” Among the effects of slavery, he called attention to educational culture. The oligarchy kept the slave in ignorance because education would teach “his natural rights.” Therefore, slave education “is prohibited by statute, under terrible penalties.” Likewise, the oligarchy suppressed education of the white majority. The rulers needed ruled whites to remain ignorant and, therefore, weak. The cultivation of ignorance among slaves and the white majority preserved the slaveholders’ mastery over political society. Mann identified the source of the stereotypes of ignorant white southern “rednecks” and former slaves.⁵⁵ The oligarchy deliberately neglected their natural talent, by design, for political necessity.

Mann reached into his education statistics to reveal the extent of illiteracy in Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, sarcastically referring to Virginia’s “republican Government supported by the two pillars of slavery and ignorance!” He claimed to have extensively corresponded with “the intelligent friends of education in the slave States” for the prior ten years, but they could not make headway, because it was “impossible for free, thorough, universal education, to coexist with slavery. . . . Slavery would abolish education if it should invade a free State; education would abolish slavery if it could invade a slave State.”⁵⁶

More precisely, the slaveholders, and not slavery, sought to “abolish education.” But these slaveholders, “the oligarchy who rule the South,” had not abolished education for their ruling class. “In one thing the South has excelled,” Mann conceded: “training statesmen.” The oligarchs hoarded education for themselves, funded by the common treasury, and withheld its blessings from others. Free states and slave states presented a contrast of opposites, republican versus oligarchical: “The free schools of the North lead to the common diffusion of knowledge and the equalization of society. The private schools of the South divide men into patricians and plebeians; so that, in the latter, a nuisance grows out of education itself.” Southern hostility to popular education followed the logic of oligarchy.

In 1859 Senator James Mason of Virginia verified the general point in Mann’s speech. If Congress were to authorize the proceeds from public land sales to fund education, “Would it not be in the power of a majority in Congress to fasten upon the southern States that peculiar system of free schools in the New England States which I believe would tend . . . to destroy that peculiar character which . . . belongs to the great mass of the southern people?”57

Common schools would destroy the “peculiar character,” that is, ignorance, of the “great mass,” which was essential to oligarchy. The wayward grandson of the great Virginia republican George Mason understood that a republican education and the political character of the South, which his ruling class dominated, were incompatible. After the war, fellow Virginian and early historian of education Charles Dabney diagnosed the same cause: “An aristocratic organization of society” had blocked the establishment “of public schools, properly speaking, until the civil war had destroyed her old institutions and so prepared the way.”⁵⁸

Many other southern educators corroborated Dabney’s conclusion, not long after the end of Reconstruction. At a meeting of the National Education Association’s Department of Superintendence in 1879, Georgia state school commissioner Gustavus Orr presented a paper that began by acknowledging the antebellum South and the postbellum South were “two civilizations” and “distinct.” The educational history of his own Georgia, he said, mirrored the rest of the antebellum South. Antebellum Georgia generously aided the education of the rich, especially after 1835. Georgia’s four institutions of higher education, the University of Georgia, Oglethorpe University, Mercer University, and Emory College, produced fifty-five hundred alumni, “who have filled with honor high places in all the departments—legislative, executive, and judicial—of the national and of their respective State governments,” as well as distinguished men in law, medicine, theology, science, literature, and education. The private county academies educated men and women “with respectable academic attainments.”⁵⁹ These academies sometimes received aid from the state but operated on private tuition.

But on the subject of elementary education, the “inferior schools,” Orr admitted that the teachers of elementary institutions “were often incompetent.” No level of his state’s governments offered teaching institutes, associations, libraries, periodicals, examinations or licenses, or supervision. The teachers answered only to the patrons, who “were often utterly incompetent to judge the teacher’s qualifications.” The state government “did not propose to make even these inferior schools free.” Funds were provided for “the education of the poor.” Orr admitted that in the antebellum South, “our inferior schools were indeed very inferior” and “far behind” the northern states.60

Orr proposed the political axiom that “education by the State rests upon the sole basis of self-protection.” What kind of state is protected by an educational policy that provides for private academies and institutions of higher education but withholds or absolutely forbids elementary education from the majority? His answer was clear that the southern state governments had placed a premium on the education of the few and on perpetuating the ignorance of the many. But “minds of thinking men” in the new postbellum southern civilization were changing.⁶¹ They were beginning to accept the necessity of education’s “greater universality.” The change portended a change in southern civilization, from oligarchic to republican.

In his address to the Southern Education Association in 1899, Alabama state superintendent John Abercrombie used the terms old South and new South to distinguish the antebellum and postbellum South. The old South was “of aristocracy and bondage.” Though claiming only one-third of the nation’s population in 1861, “the South excelled the North in the number of colleges and college professors; equaled her in the number of students enrolled in academies and colleges and universities, and approximated her in the amount of money expended for higher education.” State aid “in whole or in part” supported these colleges and universities. In turn, they produced graduates “who have not been excelled” in “science, art, literature, education, and statesmanship.” But the South neglected schools for industrial training, because the “old South did not awaken to a realization of the truth that industrial trades are as respectable as business and professional callings.” That is, the old South believed in a different truth, that the industrial trades were not respectable. Similarly, in “the matter of common school education the old South did not keep pace with the North.” But in the postbellum South, Abercrombie favored a new approach to education—at least new to the South—that he connected to the maintenance of free government: “We fully realize that, in a government like ours, the preservation of free institutions depends upon the general intelligence of its citizens.” Whereas government in the old South preferred to educate the few, and prevented general education, “universal education at governmental expense is now a well-established Southern doctrine.”62

At the Ninth Conference for Education in the South, convened in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1906, Governor Joseph W. Folk of Missouri urged the conference audience to pay “more attention to the education of the many instead of devoting nearly all our energies to the education of the few.” Noting the generous allotments of public funds to universities, he said, “It is more important that all of the people have some education than that some of the people have all of the education.” Whereas in “foreign lands ruled by Kings and Emperors” only a single child needs an education “with special reference to the duties of sovereignty,” in the United States, “every child will be a sovereign,” and so attention must be paid “to instilling into the minds and hearts of the youth of the land the sacred duties of sovereignty in a free country where every man is a King.” Another speaker at that conference, Alabama state superintendent Isaac W. Hill, announced, “It was not until 1898 that public schools began to attract much attention in Alabama.”⁶³

Writing for the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in 1900, a daughter of the South, Celestia Parrish, recalled that before the war, “Massachusetts and Connecticut were making education possible to every boy at least,” and in the southern states, the “poorer classes in the meantime were not educated at all.” To Parrish, their policy that disregarded the southern majority derived from the same principles that justified oligarchy. Noting that the poor usually could not read nor write, she asked in the voice of the slave master, “Why should they? Had not God ordained that some men should serve others?” Education in the South thrived only among “the upper classes,” who sometimes employed “tutors of the traditional type for the education of their boys, and were sending their sons back to Oxford and Cambridge for the higher training.” In the South, education “was distinctly aristocratic” and “developed a splendid superior class.” In her present time, Parrish noted the ongoing but incomplete establishment of southern public schools. She stood for universal elementary and high school education as necessary for citizenship. Yet in her day, as in the past, “A few wealthy people are still unwilling that their money should be taken to educate their neighbor’s children.” This conduct, she said, was “impossible to understand” without “recalling some of the conditions of the past.” She attributed the origin of those conditions to the aristocracy.⁶⁴

The South did not begin that way. When the United States became a nation, leading Americans in the North and the South advanced arguments and framed laws calculated to secure a general education for free Americans. Over time, the free states did diffuse education more widely among the people. In the slave states, government policy departed from the educational aims of the founders and supported oligarchy.

Property

The founders’ republican theory of property began with natural equality. John Adams wrote that “through life,” he had “asserted the moral equality of all mankind,” attributable to “God and nature.” All have a right to liberty “derived from our Maker.” Also, “Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty.” He added, “If ‘Thou shalt not covet,’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.” Civil equality derives from natural equality, so that “each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property.”65

With Aristotle, Adams recognized that human beings are a compound of equality and inequality. He observed that “nature . . . has ordained that . . . no two creatures [shall be] perfectly equal. . . . [Nor can two creatures ever] be made so by any power less than that which created them.” Individuals are born with unequal abilities. “There are great inequalities” among mankind, including natural talent, and the “sources of inequality, which are common to every people . . . can never be altered . . . because they are founded in the constitution of nature.”⁶⁶ Each member of the human family is endowed with an equal share of liberty but an unequal share of ability, by which mankind acquires unequal property. Just laws are equal laws that recognize this paradoxical constitution of human nature and equally protect what is equal and unequal in mankind.

James Madison concurred with Adams. Every human being has a right, “in exclusion of every other individual,” to the “liberty of his person” as well as to “the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.” A government is “just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” Madison also recognized that human nature is a compound of equality and inequality. None is naturally endowed with more or less liberty, but all are more and less naturally endowed with ability, and “a distinction of property results from that very protection which a free Government gives to unequal faculties of acquiring.” Things can go wrong when “an excess of power prevails,” such that those with more property control the government and rob the poorer citizens of their liberty and property, or when poorer citizens become strong, control the government, and rob the richer citizens of their liberty and property.67 This is unjust government. Just government favors neither the rich nor the poor, but equally protects equal liberty and unequal ability.

Nevertheless, widespread poverty endangers just government. Following Harrington, Adams believed that the rule “power always follows property” is an “infallible . . . maxim in politics.” Under the conditions of extreme inequality in property, just laws are practically impossible to uphold. Approvingly quoting Aristotle, Adams showed that neither liberty nor property, and sometimes not even life, is safe. Both the rich and the poor “with difficulty obey reason,” due to the “excesses” unique to each. The rich “are not willing to submit to command or law,” and they do not know “how to rule over freemen, or to command others, but despotically.” Deprivation “makes the poor too mean,” and they “are in the habit of being commanded, too often as slaves.” In cities like this, “one party despise, and the other hate,” and “the government must either be in the hands of the meanest rabble, or else a pure oligarchy.” Wealth determines rank; hostility, distrust, and tension among the ranked parts of society are constant; a state of war within political society prevails. Genuine friendship is difficult; what is left of friendship is akin to war comradeship within the ranked part of society in which one is a member. The parts of political society become insular; hostility and violence to outsiders are acceptable; unquestioned loyalty to one’s rank is expected. Sometimes broils and open warfare break out between the few and the many, the former unjustly seeking complete domination, the latter unjustly seeking theft. These, Adams wrote, were among “the wisest sentiments of Aristotle.”⁶⁸

Adams saw many instructive illustrations of this problem in histories of Europe, especially the chronic contest between patricians and plebeians in the Roman Republic. He observed, “The patricians usurped the lands, and the plebeians demanded agrarian laws.” The conflict destroyed their sense of justice, and they massacred each other. When the civil wars ended, everyone in Rome lost their liberty. Therefore, it is “essential” to consider how to address inequalities “in the institution of a government.” The people will tolerate an inequality of property and will uphold natural justice if most can avoid poverty. Adams mentioned in his diary that in his career, he kept company with many “very rich men,” yet “there is not one of all these who derives more pleasure from his property than I do from mine; my little farm, and stock, and cash afford me as much satisfaction.” Inequality is tolerable if most have modest wealth. The condition to be sought “is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society,” that is, make upward economic mobility possible. If this is achieved, and “the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will have the balance of power, and in that case the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude, in all acts of government.”69

Adams believed that from the earliest settlement of New England, the people “felt, if not understood,” these organizing principles of their society with respect to property. Although they held their lands in the name of the king, they were unwilling “to render homage . . . [to] subordinate lords,” and they “transmitted to their posterity a very general contempt and detestation” of paying rents in acknowledgment of feudal superiors. Massachusetts entirely lacked “artificial inequalities of condition, such as hereditary dignities, titles, magistracies, or legal distinctions,” so that “moral and political equality” overcame the legacy of the Old World.⁷⁰

The economic history of colonial New England lines up well to his account. The New England settlers recognized that the equal right to accumulate property was God-given and that the protection of God’s unequal bestowal of talent for acquiring property was a more just basis for accumulating property than artificial titles and privileges. Work earned title to property.⁷¹ Subsequently, New England successfully resisted attempts to impose feudal land titles in the seventeenth century and moved toward fee-simple land titles before the mother country did.⁷² Between 1620 and 1630, New England began land privatization, with the result that property ownership equalized, despite attempts by government to preserve unequal holdings. As government further established property rights, agricultural commerce flourished, so that landowning families conducted most production and consumption. The availability of land and the growth of commerce drove up wages, to the point that in Massachusetts, “it was difficult to distinguish gentlefolk from servants.” By the end of the 1640s, New England had begun to develop a diversified economy. By the mid-1700s, per capita income in New England was lower or equal to that to that of the southern states, depending upon the metric used, but far more evenly distributed.⁷³

The New England communities transformed the feudal institutions of property. The smaller proprietors or tenants refused to accord honors to the larger landowner that feudalism otherwise entailed, and the large landowner could no longer command his neighbors in consequence of greater wealth.⁷⁴ Power slipped from the hands of the rich. Political equality became firm, despite economic inequality; economic rank no longer determined political or social rank; republicanism overcame feudalism. Before national independence, the economic condition of New England already supported republicanism.

Virginia entered the Union in a much more unequal economic condition, and after national independence the attempt was made to equalize property ownership. Thomas Jefferson led Virginia’s “first republican legislature which met in 76” to adapt the state’s laws to a “republican form of government.” Jefferson, like Adams, believed in the prudence of measures “lessening the inequality of property,” which would ensure “the equality among our citizens so essential to the maintenance of republican government.” The laws of entail and primogeniture, Jefferson said, had raised up “an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger, than benefit, to society,” and had obstructed the rise of an “aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society, & scattered with equal hand through all it’s conditions.” The abolition of these laws “was deemed essential to a well ordered republic.” He succeeded at this reform, but the effect of the legislation was minimal.75 Although the laws did break up the landed estates, only the dispossessed progeny of the rich felt its benefit.⁷⁶ The reform helped level inequality in landownership at the top of the economic scale, but did not affect the many Virginians at the bottom of the scale. Jefferson’s draft constitution for Virginia in 1776 included a further remedy, a provision to grant public lands to the landless in lots of fifty acres, but the provision never became law or part of the Constitution.⁷⁷ Instead, property inequality continued to plague Virginia, and the prime suspect for causing this was slavery.

The evidence indicates that the elasticity of property inequality in the South always related to density in slaves. Where slaveholding was low or nonexistent, landownership was diffused more equally, as in New England. Where slavery was most dense, property inequality widened.⁷⁸ According to the census of 1860, the modal size, or most common size, of a farm was in the range of 20 to 99 acres in 94 percent of all counties in the free states, but the modal farm size exceeded 1,000 acres in 26 percent of all counties in the slave states. The eight states with the highest number of counties with modal farm size of 100 acres or above were slave states. Ten of the eleven states that had no counties with a modal farm size of 100 acres or more were free states. New York, with a total population of 3.9 million free persons, had 246 farms that were 500 acres or larger, while Florida, with a population of 140,424, of whom 44 percent were slaves, had 288 farms 500 acres or larger.⁷⁹

In Virginia in the 1780s, one scholar estimated that “from one half to three fourths of the adult males, exclusive of town dwellers, were landless. . . . Most of these landless men were very poor. Seven out of ten owned no slaves, and half had not even a cow.” They were either laborers or tenants who paid rent in order to farm the property of large landowners. The highest percentage of landless men, 75 percent, was found in the Northern Neck region, where slavery was the most dense. There, large estates predominated, but only two-fifths of all households owned any land. While a great many were poor in Virginia, a very few were land wealthy. One out of 25 men owned 500 acres and 20 slaves. Where slave density decreased, property inequality diminished. In the southwestern part of the state where slaves were few, there were more middle-size farms and few large estates, and only 10 percent of the men had no property. The proportion of the landless and very wealthy to total population was lower there than in any other region of the state.80 But in the ten counties in Virginia and six counties in Maryland that composed the Tidewater region, “just one in four landowners . . . had fewer than 100 acres.”⁸¹

Wealth distribution in South Carolina had been fairly equal until 1710.⁸² As a wave of new planters settled in the low country, slavery increased. The total population of the low country by 1770 was 88,244, of which approximately 22 percent was white and 78 percent black. In the backcountry, the ratios were the reverse. Of an estimated population of 36,000, 83 percent were white and 17 percent black. The increase in slave density in the low country correlated to growing wealth concentration. Between 1720 and the 1770s, the distribution of all slaves who worked on South Carolina plantations with more than 30 slaves increased from 29 to 64 percent. In one low-country parish in 1763, 39 percent of landowners possessed fewer than 500 acres of land, while 38 percent possessed more than 1,000 acres of land. By 1793 landowners possessing fewer than 500 acres dropped to 23 percent, and landowners possessing more than 1,000 acres of land increased to 49 percent. By the early 1800s, the average size of a low-country plantation was 871 acres. One scholar claims that by the end of the colonial period, the low-country slaveholders were “by far the richest single group in British North America.”⁸³ During the same period, as fewer slaveholders engrossed a larger share of wealth, poverty among whites living in the low country increased.⁸⁴ In the backcountry, or upcountry, slave ownership remained markedly lower, and landownership remained more diffused than in the low country, throughout the antebellum period.⁸⁵

A study of the Chesapeake region also shows the engrossment of land by fewer owners over time. In that region, middling yeomen farmers were most plentiful in the seventeenth century. In the 1660s, 70 percent of the free population in the Chesapeake region owned land, but with the increase of slavery, the percentage of the free population owning land decreased. By the American Revolution, 50 percent of the free population owned land. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, landlessness grew from 33 percent in 1660 to 50 percent in 1750, 69 percent in 1800, and 75 percent in 1820. At the same time, large landowners were also engrossing a larger share of the slaves. From 1800 to 1820, the percentage of nonslaveholding landowners and landless slave owners dropped. The pattern then in formation was that middling farmers were becoming fewer, with some becoming large slave-owning landowners and others becoming smaller nonslaveholding landowners, tenants, or landless.86

One comparison also demonstrates that these patterns of property ownership strongly correlated to slavery. Property distribution in Georgia during the colonial period more closely resembled the free states of 1860. Land was granted to settlers who worked the land themselves. As late as 1752, fewer than 12 percent of all land grants in Georgia exceeded 50 acres.⁸⁷ In contrast, the average landholding of a slaveholder in Chester County, Pennsylvania was 222 acres by 1765. At that time, slavery was legal in Pennsylvania, reaching a peak of 6,316 in the countryside by 1780, but was illegal in Georgia.⁸⁸ These trends began to reverse just before national independence. Georgia began to import slaves legally in the 1750s. From 1750 to 1766, the estimated slave population in Georgia jumped from 500 to 7,800.⁸⁹ Under opposite influences, Pennsylvania gradually abolished slavery after national independence.

In 1750 the prospects for the broader diffusion of wealth were better in Georgia than in Pennsylvania. But from the late colonial period, land-distribution patterns dramatically changed as slavery grew in Georgia and disappeared in Pennsylvania. By 1860 the total population of Georgia in 1860 was slightly more than 1 million, of whom 44 percent were slaves. The population of Pennsylvania almost reached 3 million free persons. Yet Georgia farms in excess of 500 acres numbered 3,594; in Pennsylvania there were only 76. The modal size of a farm exceeded 100 acres in 51 of 132 Georgia counties, but in only 6 of 65 Pennsylvania counties.⁹⁰

Wealth in land and slaves concentrated in the hands of the few everywhere slavery spread and increased, until the Civil War. From 1850 to 1860, the percentage of slaveless Southern farms increased from 40 percent to 50 percent, while the fraction of Southern families owning slaves decreased from 36 percent in 1830 to 31 percent in 1850 and then to 25 percent in 1860. Of the 25 percent of slaveholding families, 55 percent fell in the lowest category of slave ownership, of 1 to 5 slaves. Twelve percent of slaveholding families owned the great bulk of slaves.91 At the same time that slave ownership was concentrating, the overall slave population increased from just below 2 million slaves in 1830 to just below 4 million by 1860, and the price of slaves was rising. By the end of the cotton boom of the 1850s, the price of slaves had reached its highest level, linked to the expected profitability of their use. By 1860 a substantial but shrinking minority of slaveholders possessed an increasingly large share of increasing aggregate wealth. The average slaveholder was five times wealthier than the average Northerner and ten times wealthier than the average Southern nonslaveholder. Slaveholders possessed 90 to 95 percent of all agricultural wealth in 1850 and 1860, and their share of wealth was rapidly outpacing the growth of Southern nonslaveholders’ wealth.⁹²

The slaveholders substantiated these observations. Speaking about his state in 1855, Senator Clement Clay of Alabama reported:

 

Our small planters . . . are going further west and south in search of other virgin lands. . . . Our wealthier planters . . . are buying out their poorer neighbors, extending their plantations, and adding to their slave force. The wealthy few . . . are thus pushing off the many. . . . Of the twenty millions of dollars annually realized from the cotton crop of Alabama, nearly all . . . is re-invested in land and negroes. Thus the white population has decreased and the slave increased, almost pari passu in several counties of our State. In 1825, Madison County cast about 3,000 votes; now she cannot give more than 2,300. In traversing that county, one will discover numerous farm-houses, once the abode of industrious and intelligent freemen, now occupied by slaves, or tenantless, deserted, and dilapidated.⁹³

 

Gavin Wright explained how slavery caused the results that Clay described. The profits from slaveholding biased reinvestment toward more slaves and land and away from alternative investments. The growth of plantations was limited only by their purchasing power, which was funded by slave labor, and the availability of more land and more slaves. Those with no slaves or fewer slaves could not form capital for reinvestment in slave agriculture as quickly as those who had more slaves and more land. In the free states, the purchasing power of wages enabled free laborers to buy land more easily than to hire labor. Consequently, many owned farms, but the growth of the farms was constrained by the availability of family workers. Northern reinvestments were biased away from agricultural activities and toward labor-saving technology.94 The logic of this explanation suggests that the absence of slavery and universality of family farming in the North increased the scarcity and wages of labor and that in the South slavery depressed the wages of nonslaveholders, which inhibited them from outbidding the slaveholders for slaves and good land.

Some scholars have found that antebellum wages were high in the South, suggesting that slavery did not cause widespread poverty and instead produced general upward mobility.⁹⁵ Another way to test the purchasing power of wages and upward mobility in the antebellum South relative to the North is to find proof of capital formation rather than to depend on finding reliable wage data. It is evident that Northern free labor could work, save, and accumulate sufficient capital to purchase farms, as free-labor advocates claimed. One scholar studying midwestern capital formation in the nineteenth century concluded, “To one acquainted only with a sophisticated industrial and commercial system, the proportion of farm capital formation created by farm labor, and so in a sense self-financed, is truly astonishing.” If Southern free-labor wages were competitive with Northern wages, we would expect to find evidence that the 75 percent of families who did not own slaves could also work and accumulate sufficient capital from wages to invest in either slaves, land, or nonagricultural economic activities in order to raise their standard of living. But that is not the case. Southern nonslaveholders did not develop nonagricultural economic sectors comparable to the North, nor did more nonslaveholders become slaveholders. The evidence shows that fewer became slaveholders at the same time that aggregate wealth from slaveholding in the South increased. This suggests either that the nonslaveholding families frivolously spent their allegedly higher wages or that they were neither wage wealthy nor asset wealthy and tended to be poor. Wright himself admitted that the prices of slaves were rising beyond the means of more Southerners to purchase them.⁹⁶

If the slave economy produced high wages, those higher wages would have attracted nonslaveholders to the black belt and induced them to stay, but case studies of different regions at different periods yield evidence that the impoverishment of nonslaveholders was highest where slave density was highest. A study of middle Tennessee found that in 1860, “Virtually all rich families (95 percent) were slaveholders, and virtually all the poor (98 percent) were nonslaveholders.”97 Rather than migrating to the black belt, nonslaveholders fled. In the 1850s the migratory patterns of nonslaveholders were from areas that were more dense to less dense in slaves.⁹⁸ Another study concludes that rising costs in the black belt induced small farmers to vacate and resettle elsewhere.⁹⁹

Apart from leaving the slave South, the only apparent alternative left to the nonslaveholder was to head upcountry. The Georgia upcountry was an isolated world of self-sufficient households and farmers who were not prosperous but not groveling poor, either. Unlike Northern farming communities, they cut themselves off from general society and traded with each other, often using barter rather than money.¹⁰⁰ But even in the upcountry, where the economic prospects of the nonslaveholder might have been better, broad impoverishment has been found in the late-antebellum period. It is estimated that between 12 and 20 percent of all farm operators in the South Carolina upcountry were landless tenants.¹⁰¹ A general estimate of landless whites for the whole slave South is between 30 and 50 percent of the white Southern population.¹⁰²

New Northern industrialists were becoming wealthy, in addition to the Southern slaveholders. Noting this, one economic historian collapsed the difference between the two sections, commenting, “In the North the top one percent of the wealth holders were mainly urban merchants and manufacturers whose businesses were based on wage labor, while in the South the top one percent were mainly rural planters whose businesses were based on slave labor.”¹⁰³ On this basis, it was claimed that the North and South were both “plutocracies.”

Setting aside the fact that this statement passes over wealth mobility, sector diversification, and other metrics of general economic benefit to the citizenry, sovereign rule of the few and concentrated wealth at the top of the scale are not the same. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they do not. In a model republican society, political and social equality prevails despite property inequality. But in a plutocracy or oligarchy, wealth is the distinctive ruling principle. In an oligarchy wealth determines rank; those unequal in property are absolutely unequal.¹⁰⁴ Therefore, even if the same quantitative pattern of wealth distribution prevails in republican and oligarchic society, those patterns produce very different results, because the political standing of wealth is qualitatively different.

Evidence of this qualitative difference between North and South appears early in the early national period. Statesmen from the free states noticed that slavery both widened property inequality and created a ranked political society. After the South Carolina Legislature reopened the slave trade, the U.S. House of Representatives considered taxing slave importations into that state in 1804. In his argument on the House floor, Representative John Lucas of Pennsylvania first spoke of economic harm, stating that by importing more slaves, “you virtually reduce the value of the labor of the whites.” Second, the social and political standing of the free white would decline. He explained, “The rich part of the community will not employ a white man who feels the spirit of a freeman, and who will not submit to be subservient to the caprices of his employer, so long as they can employ a slave whom they can control as they please.”105

Because “the poor white man . . . is entirely dependent on his labor for the support of himself and family,” he will face a choice: be subservient or starve himself and his family. Lucas wanted the tax, because once slaves were imported in South Carolina, they would “soon find their way into the others where slavery is allowed,” and the poor white man’s “relative importance in society will be as nothing.”¹⁰⁶

In the Missouri debates of 1819–20, free-state congressmen advanced the same arguments. Speaker of the House John Taylor of New York argued that if Missouri were admitted as a slave state, the only whites who would emigrate would be those who were willing to “take rank with negro slaves,” which was their fate in slave society. He objected to the low esteem in which the slaveholders held all laborers. This banishment of common laborers to a subordinate political station, regardless of their character, education, or talent, was the inevitable consequence of slavery and had no place “in a country like this, where the people are sovereign, and every citizen is entitled to equal rights.”¹⁰⁷

In the Senate, Jonathan Roberts of Pennsylvania described the political relationship between labor and employer in the free Northern societies in contrast to the same relationship in the South. In the North, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which he quoted just previously, governed that relationship.

 

The white laborer is always a free man, generally an honest man; often an intelligent and informed man. He knows his rights, and understands his duties. Free laborers, who are housekeepers, are seldom without their newspapers and means of information. These channels of intelligence are everywhere established with us. . . . The relation between laborer and employer, where the latter is a freeman, is that of equals. Each looks to the other for the fulfillment of the covenant between them. They often stand in the relation of friends. Their intercourse is almost always respectful and courteous. I have been forcibly struck with how equal a share of happiness, to say the least, was enjoyed by the man of opulence and the cottager in the Northern States.108

 

An employer and an employee are political and social equals, despite unequal wealth. They are equally free agents contracting with each other. Intelligence, education, and integrity in the discharge of contractual duties command mutual respect, regardless of unequal wealth or the character of their business relationship. Roberts saw a sharp difference between the condescension of his slaveholding colleagues in Congress toward laborers and the equality between employers and employees in his section.

He was a credible witness to this relationship in the North because he had risen from poverty. When he was sixteen, he had been an apprentice for three years, and it was a harsh experience. Such a story of upward mobility by a nonslaveholder in the South was unknown by this time. Taylor asked, “When have we seen a Representative on this floor, from that section of our Union, who was not a slaveholder? Who but slaveholders are elected to their State Legislatures? Who but they are appointed to fill their executive and judicial offices?”¹⁰⁹

All of these statesmen saw that slavery and republicanism were mutually hostile in one important respect. They argued that slavery blocked the upward mobility of free labor and, worse, that within the domain of slavery, economic standing determined social and political rank, destroying republican equality. These were the same arguments advanced thirty years later by Republicans. Some scholars detached these later arguments from their longer tradition, grouped and misinterpreted them, claiming that “Free labor” was a distinct ideology conjured by the Republican Party in the 1850s to counter Southern statesmen’s praise of slavery and critiques of nascent modern industrial capitalism in the North.¹¹⁰ On the contrary, American critics of slavery always recognized that the presence of slavery precluded the possibility of genuine republican citizenship, informed by the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

Economic inequalities determined ranks in Southern political society because republican equality was unstable in the South, and this fact was also recognized in the early national period. In 1785 Jefferson considered the difference between northern and southern character. His list of specific contrasts hit upon one that illustrated the general difference between a ranked and an equal society and showed that the foundations of oligarchic and republican political societies were already entrenched in the North and South, respectively. He wrote that southerners were “zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others,” whereas northerners were “jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others.”111 In this contrast, Jefferson revealed his preference for northern character, if we use the Declaration as his critical standard. Northerners respected the dominion that nature’s God had allotted in equal measure to each person and were protective of the dominion allotted to each one of themselves. Jefferson’s approval of “jealousy” is implicit in the Declaration, in which he wrote that it is the right and duty of a people to rebel against encroachments upon their personal dominion of liberty. Jealousy protects what belongs to you by natural right, and justice respects what belongs to others by natural right. A political society of such individuals is a coequal republican people, despite their inequalities in other respects, including inequality in wealth.

Jefferson’s disapproval of “zeal” is also implicit in the Declaration. Zeal is passionately seeking things that you do not possess, that is, things that are in excess of what is already assigned to you by natural right. To acquire those things, Jefferson wrote, southerners trampled on others. In southern society, liberty was not fixed, but floating, and the southern man expected himself and his neighbors to act upon this knowledge.

In this short strip of text, Jefferson laid one hand on the beating heart of republican society and the other on the beating heart of oligarchy. The principles found in the Declaration could be abstracted from northern conduct but not from southern conduct. The implication in this evidence is that Jefferson knew that southern society needed reform in order to become republican.

Reformation was unsuccessful. In 1830 a North Carolina abolitionist echoed Jefferson, observing that southern society had become careless toward and covetous of the rights of others. He attributed the origin of that carelessness and covetousness to the effect of slaveholding on those with more “wealth and affluence.” The result was that “the same contempt which they cherish for the negro they . . . cherish towards the white peasantry.” Anyone “who will oppress and abuse his own slaves, will also . . . oppress his indigent neighbour, or any one else over whom he may have gained an advantage.” This effect of slavery was not restricted to the slaveholders. Everyone who had some advantage over another used it to oppress whom they could. He added that this tendency was “common among the wealthy, and by far too common with the middle classes of our citizens,” striking “at the root of our republican institutions, and if suffered to become sufficiently strong, would overturn even our liberty itself.”112 He recognized the development of a haughty ruling class, and much more. He saw that oppression of the stronger over the weaker was becoming general throughout slave society.

Eventually, the law formally established ranks of the stronger over the weaker, determined by wealth. A study of local legal records in North Carolina and South Carolina has found evidence that economic standing determined political standing in law.¹¹³ Between the 1820s and 1840s, slave-state law recombined elements drawn from the liberal conception of rights and possessions and created a new doctrine. The new legal order entitled those with a larger share of possessions to a larger share of rights. This change meant that the law transformed the right to liberty into an alienable possession. In contrast, the founding idea of American republicanism is that one’s rights are fixed by nature and fixed in equal measure for each person.

By then, the political development of the South was heading in a direction opposite to republicanism. Around this same time when Southern law was undergoing change, Southern statesmen, led by John C. Calhoun, began to praise slavery, which destabilized republican equality, and to denounce the standard of justice in the Declaration by which Jefferson had criticized Southern political character. Calhoun corrected their Southern forebears, who had said that slavery was “a moral and political evil.” Those old beliefs were “folly and delusion.” Instead, he attacked the basis of their antislavery and republican convictions, saying that the principle “all men are born free and equal” was “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.”¹¹⁴ That principle was dangerous only to oligarchy and slavery, but not to republicanism.

The new legal standing of wealth and the decline of natural equality correlated. By making relative wealth the basis of rights, the slave South made rights alienable and reintroduced domination as a lawful principle of civilized government. The law promised to reward the covetousness of the rich for the liberty of the many. Superior success and power conferred the right of one to dominate the other. The weak were contemptible objects of paternal care, not equals in liberty.

This new ruling principle in the antebellum South transformed economic classes into political ranks and governed their relations, up and down the economic scale. Historical evidence shows that poor whites and slaves exhibited affinities characteristic of shared rank. In the Georgia low country, where planters predominated and nonslaveholding whites probably constituted more than half the white population and were very poor, slaves, free blacks, and the poor whites socially mixed.115 The poorest were ranked to such an inferior degree that they forfeited their possessory title to their own liberty. In the North Carolina Piedmont, the law degraded impoverished white women and treated their liberty as a revocable privilege and not a natural right. Poor white women sometimes sexually mingled with black men, casually or through prostitution, and sometimes they established families together. The state’s response was to punish them vigorously and to use the apprentice laws to seize children from these unions. The law saw little separation between these women and the slaves and meted out a kind of justice to them fit for slaves.¹¹⁶ Apprentice laws in the South became a means by which the rich could forcibly enslave poor whites. In 1858 the U.S. Senate debated a harsh apprentice law in Kansas passed by the proslavery legislature. The law determined that an apprentice was property, to which Northerners strenuously objected. In support of the law, Senator James Mason referred to laws in his own state, requiring that “men who wander about society without having any visible means of support, shall be arrested and sold.”¹¹⁷

That same year, Representative Philemon Bliss of Ohio brought forward his own shocking experience with the decline of liberty in the South. Bliss claimed that poor white women were forced into sexual slavery. On the House floor, Bliss said he knew this to be true because, he said, “I have, since a member here, contributed to purchase for redemption white Virginians, and to prevent their forced denizenship of the brothel.” His point was that the oligarchy practiced equal-opportunity supremacy. Continuing, Bliss read extracts from Southern newspapers to demonstrate that “the more honest advocates of slavery have already repudiated the idea that it should be the sole condition of any race.”¹¹⁸

Clearly marked intermediate ranks emerged. The economic class of yeoman farmers in the South, or slaveholders with fewer than ten slaves, belonged to the political rank of minor nobility. In the low-country parishes of South Carolina in 1860, planters owned more than 90 percent of improved acreage and slaves, although they constituted a small numerical percentage of farmers. The yeomen owned a small share of total improved acreage and slaves, though constituting a disproportionately larger share of the farmer population. The planters accepted the independence of the yeomen’s households on account of their having achieved mastery over dependents. To put this in Jefferson’s terms, their liberty was achieved by having successfully trampled on the liberties of others. In conflicts with the planters over such things as common land use and slave discipline, the planters prevailed over the yeomen, which demonstrated the political legitimacy of the same logic.119 The planters’ greater liberty was achieved by trampling on and acquiring the liberties of the lower nobility. The relative amount of landed wealth owned determined the extent of the possessor’s liberty—yeomen over poor whites and slaves, planters over them all. The hierarchical relationships between these ranks revived the medieval relationship between lords, vassals, and serfs, which goes far to explaining why, in the middle of America in the nineteenth century, wealthy Southerners actually staged medieval fairs and jousting tournaments, emphasizing chivalry, courtliness, martial virtue, crownings, and maids of honor.¹²⁰ Evidently, they felt an instinctive affinity for the dominating lords of the bygone era and sought to imitate them and re-create their way of life as they developed their revolutionary regime.

Liberty was dependent upon acquiring wealth and could be won only by devouring the liberty of others. In contrast, a model republican society protects the liberty of all against all oppression, despite inequality of wealth. Economic competition is mild, defused of the fear of oppression and the appetite for domination. Prosperity and poverty can neither elevate nor depress the individual’s equal standing as a citizen. The most that greed can acquire is wealth, simply, and so the appetites are restrained.

Because oligarchic society jettisoned the principle of natural equality, its character resembled that of many nations prior to the revolutionary American founding. The antebellum South was a Nietzschean, agonistic society pitting the mass of the people against each other. It was self-servingly argued by antebellum Southern leaders that the aim of their political society was not dividing people and envenoming them against each other, but the harmonious integration of ranks, over which they were the self-appointed rulers, and this was a very old idea. When rule by the few achieves this, the regime may be denominated an aristocracy, which rules for the common good. But the mainspring of their political society encouraged strife, and everyone had to strive to be an oppressor or to accept submission and subordination.

Greed and the fear of being consumed by greed pervaded political society. Because wealth and rank correlated, economic competition was simultaneously political struggle. Mutual jealousy, distrust, and violent tendencies were the logical by-products, which explains why historical research has found that antebellum Southerners viewed the world as violent and contentious.¹²¹ In a place where rights were uncertain and the prey of other individuals, left unprotected by government, the individual had to vindicate his rights, if he was to have any. This necessity explains a historical finding that comports with popular recollections of the South, that Southerners were sensitive about their honor and rights and resorted to extralegal violence to settle disputes.122

A researcher of American homicides over four hundred years concluded that political stability and declining murder rates correlated. He recognized an uptick in the murder rate in the antebellum South, while the homicide rates declined in all other areas of the United States. Higher homicide rates correlated with the black belt, the centers of the oligarchic regime. The exception to the Southern pattern was the Ozarks and highlands of the South, where nonslaveholding whites had escaped, the number of slaves was low, and, contrary to the stereotype of feuding poor whites, the homicide rates were low, equal to the Midwest. The researcher attributed the cause of the high murder rate in the black belts to the abolitionist movement, for creating political instability in the South. A better explanation is that the revolutionary oligarchy was consolidating and destroying public confidence in Southern government’s commitment to protect equal liberty, leaving men to fend for themselves. One Southerner is reported to have said, “The worst fate that could befall a man in the South was to be afraid of another man, because fear made a man a slave.” Timidity did not merely expose a man to a cowardly reputation, but exposed him to actual domination. After recounting the murder of one man, stabbed through the heart with a Bowie knife, the author of the study comments, “The South swarmed with men who prided themselves on giving in to such violent impulses.”¹²³ These were not all deeds done by poor, desperate men. A Colonel McClung was reported to have killed more than a dozen men in his life.

The rules of society required that an ambitious man had to be unscrupulous and manage his estate as if he were an independent nation in a dangerous world, in order to advance above his subordinate rank. The bifurcated career of William Lowndes Yancey demonstrated this. Yancey began life as the reformers of northern education did, losing his father when he was very young. His family’s means were modest, but due to his stepfather’s relocation, he gained an education in the North. Returning to the South, Yancey settled in the South Carolina upcountry, away from the black belt. In 1834 he became editor of the Greenville Mountaineer and attacked Calhoun, nullification, and disunion, disputing the nullifiers’ claim that South Carolina’s sovereignty rose above the supremacy of the United States. His future patron, Governor Benjamin Perry of South Carolina, admiringly recalled that Yancey “wielded a fierce and terrible pen.”124 Yancey caricatured Calhoun as an aristocrat under false republican concealment, “the Duke of Pendleton, Ruler in and over the said State of South Carolina.” A bill came up for consideration by the legislature that included in the definition of treason, to merely organized popular assemblies for the purpose of establishing “any form of government in South Carolina,” except that form of government prescribed by the legislature controlled by the oligarchy. In response, Yancey defended fundamental America rights.¹²⁵ He attacked the typical Calhoun supporter as misguided and “perfectly prepared to be made a slave by the very man whom he thinks almost a god, or to be made a tool of, in his hands, to enslave his fellow citizen!” Calhoun’s theories were “the loathsome offspring of foiled Ambition.” He compared Calhoun to Aaron Burr; they were “two fallen archangels.”¹²⁶

Around the age of twenty-one, however, Yancey changed, after simultaneously resigning from the Mountaineer and marrying a planter’s daughter, who brought him a “dowry of thirty-five slaves” that “instantly elevated him to the planter class.” The ruling class co-opted him. He set out for cotton country in Alabama to build his fortune.¹²⁷ The talented young man then switched sides and became a partisan of the theories and a protégé of the man he had once attacked, Calhoun.¹²⁸

Yancey’s reversal from oppressed upcountry republican, clamoring for liberty, to low-country oligarch was complete. In the Alabama secession convention, some delegates urged that the convention submit the question of secession to the people, since the convention delegates represented a minority in the state.¹²⁹ Nicholas Davis of Huntsville, in North Alabama, the low-slaveholding unionist section of the state, insisted that the people of North Alabama would never submit to secession if the convention denied them the right to vote on it. Yancey rose and berated them, calling them “tories, traitors and rebels,” and threatened force on North Alabama. Davis replied, “We will meet him at the foot of our mountains, and there with his own selected weapons, hand to hand, face to face, settle the question of the sovereignty of the people.”¹³⁰ The position of Davis, in Davis versus Yancey, was Yancey’s position in Yancey versus Calhoun, twenty-five years prior.

Before and after Yancey changed ranks and joined the ruling class, he always was an oligarchic man in the sense that his character, like the character of all rich and poor men in his political society, was imbued with its oligarchic principle. The zeal for liberty inflamed resentment and envy of classes above one’s rank and domination and contempt below. The early Yancey resentfully attacked the interests of the wealthy and clamored for liberty as long as he was without wealth and power and under the domination of others. After he became a member of the planter class and acquired dominion over others, he scorned those who occupied his own former rank.

The mind of the master class was thoroughly convinced that their political society in the South, and possibly even the nation, belonged to them as a rightful possession. The address by Governor George McDuffie of South Carolina to his state legislature in 1835 provided a comprehensive and candid picture of what their idea of good government was. He claimed that it was an empirical fact that “servitude, in some form,” was “one of the essential constituents” in “all political communities.” The picture that Roberts drew of the relation between employer and employee in the North, who were political equals despite inequality of wealth, was simply inconceivable to McDuffie, but he did not doubt that Northerners believed the delusion that they were equal and that employees were not a kind of slaves in fact. Due to this delusion, Northern slaves were allowed to control their governments: “hence the alarming tendency to violate the rights of property by agrarian legislation, which is beginning to be manifest in the older States, where universal suffrage prevails without domestic slavery.”131

But McDuffie was not sounding the alarm that the Northern people were poised to redistribute the planter class’s land and money. That was not his concern. He was offended by the presumption of commoners to possess any rights at all, since the rights of property that belonged to the rich extended without limit. The rich were entitled to the person and liberty of others, compassing rights that were among the dearest, according to James Madison: “his opinions and the free communication of them” and “the safety and liberty of his person.” To McDuffie, the right to others’ person and liberties belonged to the rich in principle, because “the capacity to enjoy freedom is . . . an endowment of God, and one of the rarest. . . . It is conferred as the reward of merit, and only upon those who are qualified to enjoy it.” God had ordained that men should be ranked, and both reason and revelation confirmed this truth.¹³² Since this was the case, all legislation that failed to conform to the right of the rich to dispose of society as they chose was agrarian in character.

The occasion of McDuffie’s address proved all of this. He was addressing the legislature to recommend that they enact a law punishing the crime of promoting abolition, a crime “of the very highest grade known to human laws,” and fix the penalty of “death without benefit of clergy.” The rich possessed others’ right to free speech, so that, in fact, free speech was a revocable privilege, or a right enjoyed only by the permission of the rich. That right of the rich to others’ free speech was not limited to South Carolina, but extended to other parts of the Union also. The refusal of another state’s government to act as the proxy for the ruling rich and punish abolitionism, in obedience to the right of the rich to control others’ speech, he said, “furnishes a just cause of war.”133

McDuffie observed that all political societies must choose how much freedom to give to the ranks below the rich. Because domestic slavery in the South recognized that mankind was unequal by nature, their system was “the most perfect system of social and political happiness that ever has existed.” All were happiest in their ranks assigned by God, including the slaves, who were “cheerful, contented and happy.” But the deluded rich in the North had permitted too much freedom to their slaves. Old governments solved the problem of how to keep the agitations of the majority at bay by establishing “political orders” and “artificial barriers,” and McDuffie said that “it will be fortunate for the non-slaveholding States” if they did not have to do the same in twenty-five years. Eventually, rich Northerners would realize the necessity of having to create some kind of institution to serve the purpose that titled nobilities served in feudal Europe. The South, on the other hand, had already found that the “institution of domestic slavery supersedes the necessity of an order of nobility, and all the other appendages of a hereditary system of government.” The slaveholders were not simply lords over slaves; ownership of slaves made them lords over political society. Slavery achieved a result that the Constitution’s Article I, Section 10, was intended to suppress: “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States.”¹³⁴

McDuffie mentioned nonslaveholding whites only once in his address, noting that successful abolition would impoverish them.¹³⁵ He did not need to say more. The place of nonslaveholding whites in McDuffie’s idea of a good society was clear enough. Their rank was generally above chattel slavery, but individually they were vulnerable to sinking to the level of slaves. They were part of the political society owned by the rich, but subordinate because they were not rich themselves. Hence, their economic rationale for vacating the black belt was also political. When confronted by the oligarchic suggestion that they would be happy in the rank assigned to them, they fled. Scholars have found that the “plain folk” of the South who congregated in the uplands of the South were determined to be economically self-sufficient.¹³⁶ This is because dependence meant sure subjugation. Economic interdependence with the planters was risky. The more self-sufficient these communities were, the more insulated and the less vulnerable they were to the domination of the planters. The retreat of the plain folk, as Garfield said, “to the mountains, where liberty always loves to dwell, and to the swamps and by-places of the South” was how they preserved their American freedom.137 By living apart from the social and political order of the planters, they could resist the imputation that they were unequal subjects of the rich. They were fugitives from civilization, uneducated, and poor, but they were free.

Market-oriented economic activity was difficult for them because state government policy usually favored the planters’ interests. If nonslaveholders could find fertile land for a good price outside the black belt, and could successfully cultivate staple crops for market, they would have difficulty transporting those crops to market.¹³⁸ In Alabama the railroad lines from the port city of Mobile extended northward to the black belt and stopped there, leaving the northern section of the state, where the density in slaves was low, without means of efficiently transporting commercial crops to market. Politicians talked, but nothing was done. In July 1865, a northern Alabama newspaper editorial called for the railroad’s extension, decrying South Alabama’s historical domination of the state. There had “never been a community of interest nor an identity of feeling and sentiment in Alabama, owing to the geographical division of the state,” but rather “an antagonism of interests, of feeling and sentiment.” In antebellum times, South Alabama, where the planters resided, “grasped the lion share of state honors, offices, benefits, etc., and rather imposed an undue portion of the public burthens upon the weaker and less wealthy section, north Alabama,” even though the white population of North Alabama exceeded that of South Alabama.¹³⁹

In antebellum Georgia, the story was the same. The railroad lines connecting the black belt were privately funded. Then, led by black-belt politicians, the state legislature used the public revenues to fund new railroad lines connecting the private railroad lines to market ports. The western and southern parts of the state, away from the planters, opposed the initiative.¹⁴⁰

In national councils, Southern statesmen had protested against the national tariff and other public burdens that were alleged to favor unequally one section of the country over theirs. These were the crimes committed by the popular majority in the nation against the South that Calhoun enumerated in his “Exposition” of 1828, to justify nullification of federal law.¹⁴¹ But while Southern statesmen rallied to Calhoun’s sectional defense of the South against allegedly unequal laws, they enacted unequal laws that preferred the sections of their states where the planter class resided over the sections where most nonslaveholding whites resided. The conduct of the Georgia planters showed that they did not object to internal improvements and taxes in principle, as they claimed in national councils. They just objected to internal improvements and taxes that did not exclusively benefit themselves.

Another case reveals the same inconsistency between Southern statesmen’s principled claims in national councils and their conduct within their own states. In antebellum Virginia nonslaveholders carried the burden of taxes that funded slave catching. The slaveholders in the eastern counties of the state controlled the legislature, which determined to appropriate large sums of public money to guard against slave insurrection and flight. But the property taxes that funded this appropriation fell upon the whole state, including the western counties where slaves constituted less than 5 percent of the population. More than 86 percent of the slaves in Virginia resided in the eastern counties. To compound the injury, slaves under twelve years old were exempted from taxation, amounting to taxable property worth seventy million dollars. This meant that the free, nonslaveholding western Virginians were disproportionately paying for the slave-keeping practice of eastern Virginia.142

According to oligarchic principle, these policies were just and served the common good. In exchange for obtaining possessory title to society, the rich reciprocated by committing themselves to the paternal care of all in that society. When the rich hoarded all of the advantages life offered in their society, their divinely ordained place in society was strengthened and they could better accomplish God’s work and serve all. This rationale justified radical selfishness disguised as piety and civic virtue.

The slaveholders’ dilemma was what to do about nonslaveholding whites. The number of slaveholders was declining in the 1850s, and the nonslaveholders were restive. This was a reprise of a very old dilemma. In colonial Virginia the rich had oppressed poor white laborers, who rebelled. The solution then was to use African slaves for their labor instead.¹⁴³ In the antebellum South, the moral defense of slavery and the revolutionary transformation of the South portended the ultimate subjugation of whites by the slaveholders, but the poor whites might not submit meekly as they felt the yoke tightening around their necks. Unsurprisingly, “[t]he back-country farmers seemed politically dangerous to the aristocracy of the Black Belt,” a scholar concluded.¹⁴⁴ The rich put themselves on a collision course with those whites. The much-discussed antebellum sectionalism within the slave states between the planters and these other whites gave rise to the chronic outbreaks of collisions between rulers and the ruled that are visible in colonial Virginia. The non-slaveholding whites were a problem precisely because the antebellum South was not a white democracy.

To strengthen themselves, the oligarchy considered a measure that ruling nobilities in the past sometimes considered when their numbers were dwindling and they faced the prospect of rebellion. The measure that they contemplated was to expand their ruling class, or, in other words, to co-opt inferior whites, more men like Yancey, into the ranks of the nobility. The oligarchy understood that to achieve this, they needed to lower the price of slaves, making them affordable to more free whites, and to fill the “mudsill” rank with more Africans. In the 1850s they reached for the solution that Virginia aristocrats did before the American Revolution—slave importations from abroad. Francis Lieber recognized that the problem of poor whites was the cause of renewed interest in the slave trade. Southern government needed to maintain “a numerous and independent yeomanry . . . a large class of fairly schooled, intelligent, and respectable freeholders of moderate yet sufficient estate.” But the aristocracy was absorbing the yeomen’s land, not because a “feudal law promotes the land-devouring tendency with us, but the institution of slavery takes its place.” Due to the displacement of the yeomanry, “a dangerous class of men without direct interest in slavery, was springing up.” Therefore, Governor James Adams of South Carolina recommended that the state legislature reopen the slave trade in 1856, despite the federal ban in 1808.145

Government

The slaveholders controlled government in the antebellum South. The aggregate number of large slaveholders, or holders of ten or more slaves, was 98,517 out of a total free population of 5.6 million in the eleven seceding states. Those 98,517 held 77.4 percent of the total number of slaves.¹⁴⁶ Table 2 shows that these large slaveholders were disproportionately represented in the legislatures of the seceding states on the eve of the Civil War. On average, the percentage of state legislators holding ten or more slaves was three to four times greater than the ratio of all large slaveholders to the general population of free adult males, yet this small minority ruled over 9 million people, free and slave inclusive.

One cannot always find evidence in the state constitutions of the antebellum South to explain how the slaveholding minority controlled the state governments. Blueprints for government have a relationship to the actual form of government, but they are not the same thing. The case of Alabama illustrates the difference. The constitutions of the southwestern slave states, especially that of Alabama, appear to lay a foundation for a democratic republic. One study of Alabama constitutional development concludes that the Alabama Constitution of 1819 was more democratic than those of other states on account of the frontier influence. Its distinguishing democratic features included the rejection of the federal ratio for representation in favor of enumerating whites only; “no property, tax-paying or militia qualifications for voting or for office holding”; the authority of the legislature to override the governor’s veto with simple majority; and the governor’s election by popular vote rather than by both legislative houses.147 These features of the constitution do look democratic and seem to lodge all power in the people.

However, in the 1866 Reconstruction Committee hearings, Alabama lawyer Mailton J. Safford testified to the contrary. Safford was a credible witness. He was born in Dallas County and resided in the capital, Montgomery, in the middle of the black belt. He professed to be well acquainted with prominent men in the state and admitted that the northern population of the state had “for a long time felt that the free institutions of the north were more calculated to advance their interests than the slave institutions of the south. A great many of them showed their adhesion to the United States government during the war.” The people there “might have been called a non-slaveholding population, a poor white population.” He also noted that “there has always been a certain degree of antagonism between them and the planters occupying the rich interior counties of the State.” The planters, the disloyal men, had “heretofore controlled the reins of the government.”¹⁴⁸ The numbers of large slaveholders in the Alabama Legislature confirm Safford’s testimony. In 1860 Alabama was one of only four seceding states in which the majority that controlled both houses of the legislature were large slaveholders.

How did the Alabama slaveholders gain power over the state, despite a democratic constitution? Although a firm answer to that question has eluded this study, intelligent Southerners who reached adulthood before the war and opposed the oligarchy are probably our best sources of clues. Reviling “the demagogical manoeuverings of the oligarchy” by which they maintained their power, Hinton Helper claimed that “their intrigues and tricks of legerdemain are as familiar to us as household words.”¹⁴⁹ He claimed to know how the ruling class operated, but did not specify the institutional mechanisms that they used, which might help us better understand a case like Alabama. Others who fitted Helper’s profile might have revealed more. It is at least clear that large slaveholders generally controlled most wealth and tended to hoard education to themselves, and these advantages alone might have sufficed for the Alabama slaveholders. Evidence has been uncovered that shows the slaveholders controlled the political parties in Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia.¹⁵⁰ It seems likely that whether provisions in the state constitutions gave the slaveholders power over state government or not, they could nevertheless maintain their control by restricting the rolls of candidates and by using their wealth and superior education to defeat candidates representing nonslaveholding interests in electoral competition. One might also consider how the slaveholders could use their control of one administration, including patronage, to preserve their control in future administrations and their use of extralegal violence and intimidation to prevent the rise of non-slaveholding political interests.

Other state constitutions gave direct control to the slaveholders. The South Carolina Constitution in force at secession was framed in 1790 and amended in 1808. Political power was annexed to slave ownership. Like other constitutions of the seceding states, the South Carolina Constitution bowed to republicanism. Article IX, Section 1, maintained, “All power is originally vested in the people; and all free governments are founded on their authority.”151 This statement is misleading. The people were not sovereign in South Carolina. The property qualifications for representative, for senator, and for governor were quite high,¹⁵² ensuring that citizens of modest means could not stand for those offices.¹⁵³ Members of the legislature’s lower house, the popular branch, had to own five hundred acres of land or ten slaves, and twice those property qualifications were required for members of the upper house. Voters outside cities had to own at least fifty acres of land, but even if the freeman could meet the property requirement, voting power diminished outside of areas where slavery was dense. This was because the apportionment of the lower house’s districts was determined by a ratio of white population and wealth, and in weighing wealth the constitution gave greater representation to areas dense with slaves.¹⁵⁴ Through this provision, the slaveholders maintained control of the lower house. The apportionment of the upper house’s districts was fixed and followed the density of slaves. The senate “remained a stronghold of the rotten borough low country parishes.”¹⁵⁵ This malapportioned legislature, which drew its members from the minority of slaveholders, chose the governor and selected members of all state and local offices, and it also appointed electors for president of the United States.¹⁵⁶

One efficient and direct way for the slaveholding minority to rule a slave state was by enumerating slaves when apportioning representation. Statesmen from the free states often denounced the effect of enumerating slaves by three-fifths, as required by Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution, in apportioning representation in the House of Representatives, because these enumerations granted more power to slaveholding states in proportion to their slave populations. This effect was more pronounced in favor of slaveholders in proportion to the uneven concentration of slave populations. Those concentrated areas where slave numbers were highest enjoyed more voting power in government. Because the slave populations were most concentrated in sections within the slaveholding states, even a partial enumeration of slaves in their state constitutions placed power over these states directly in the hands of the slaveholders. The effect of enumerating slaves at three-fifths, which statesmen from the free states deplored, was far worse in Southern state government, because the numbers of slaves in concentrated areas within the slave states were much higher in relation to the low-slaveholding areas of a slave state.

Therefore, the question of enumerating slaves “remained a provocative issue in southern constitutional politics throughout the antebellum period.”157 If states apportioned legislative representation on the “white basis,” that is, by enumerating only free persons (whites), the slaveholders would have to preserve their power over the states by using other methods. In the contest over the “white” basis or “black” basis, the slaveholders sometimes acknowledged that ruled whites knew the source of the oligarchy’s power and that they might harm the slaveholders’ interests if they acquired more influence in government. In 1851, a state representative from the heart of Alabama’s black belt introduced a bill for enumerating slaves in apportioning representation in Alabama. The bill’s supporters quoted John C. Calhoun in saying that the white basis was “the entering wedge of abolitionism.”¹⁵⁸ They and Calhoun rightly suspected that Alabama’s use of the white basis might eventually lead to the abolition of slavery. What Calhoun understood and feared, American founder Benjamin Rush understood and welcomed. Rush preferred legislative apportionment by free population because it would “have one excellent effect, that of inducing the colonies to discourage slavery & to encourage the increase of their free inhabitants.”¹⁵⁹ Rush assumed, as Calhoun did, that nonslaveholders resented slavery. Antebellum Southerners John Jacobus Flournoy and Hinton Helper did support abolition on behalf of nonslaveholders, because they maintained that slavery had brought about the subjugation of the white majority.

Of the state constitutions of the eleven seceding states, five constitutions in force at the time of secession enumerated slaves when apportioning legislative representation. Florida enumerated slaves by the “federal ratio,” or by counting slaves as three-fifths of a person. In the Florida Constitution of 1838, Article IX, Sections 1 and 2, enumerated free persons plus three-fifths of slaves in apportioning representation to both the lower and the upper house of the state legislature. According to the 1860 census, Florida’s slave population was 61,745, and the free population stood at 78,679. Of Florida’s thirty-six counties, seven (Leon, Jefferson, Marion, Gadsden, Madison, Alachua, and Jackson) counted 39,795 slaves and 26,518 free persons, for a total population of 66,313. Seventeen counties (Lafayette, Franklin, Clay, Volusia, Levy, Santa Rosa, Washington, Bradford, Hillsborough, Hernando/Benton, Orange/Mosquito, Monroe, Walton, Taylor, Brevard/St. Lucie, Holmes, and Dade) counted 7,031 slaves and 27,199 free persons. Thus, although the first group of seven counties contained 26,518 free persons, they possessed 62 percent more representation than the second group of seventeen counties with 27,199 free persons and few slaves.160

The Georgia Constitution, as amended in 1843 (Article I, Sections 3 and 7), also enumerated free persons plus three-fifths of slaves for apportioning representation to the lower house, but assigned one senator to two contiguous counties. However, the counties greatly varied in slave and free populations. According to the 1860 census, the twenty counties with the lowest slave population (9,347 slaves) contained 93,167 free persons. But the twenty counties with the highest slave population (134,978 slaves) contained 60,371 free persons.¹⁶¹ The free population in the latter counties would receive equal senatorial representation and 70 percent more representation in the lower house of the legislature, despite having one-third less free population.

By the 1835 amendment to the North Carolina Constitution (Article I, Sections 1 & 2), the state employed the federal ratio when apportioning representation in the lower house of the legislature, which again gave slaveholders power over the lower house. However, the state apportioned representation to the upper house according to taxes paid, or, in other words, according to wealth. The dominant source of wealth would be expected to be in land and slaves, directly placing the senate in the control of the slaveholders.¹⁶²

Louisiana enumerated total population, including slaves. In the Louisiana Constitution of 1852, Articles VIII and XV enumerated total population for apportioning representation in the lower and upper houses of the state legislature. According to the 1860 census, Louisiana’s slave population was 331,726, and the free population was 376,276. Of Louisiana’s forty-seven parish counties, eleven (Concordia, Tensas, Madison, West Feliciana, St. Charles, St. Mary, Carroll, West Baton Rouge, Iberville, Pointe Coupee, and East Feliciana) contained 28,794 free persons and 119,845 slaves, for a total population of 148,639. Those 28,794 free persons had more than three times the representation than fourteen parishes (Claiborne, Lafourche, Bienville, Jackson, Caldwell, Union, Washington, St. Tammany, Jefferson, Vermillion, Livingston, Sabine, Calcasieu, and Winn) with 73,575 free persons and 44,547 slaves, amounting to a total population of 118,122.¹⁶³

The Virginia Constitution of 1850 used a fixed formula accounting for both slaves and free persons in apportioning representation.164 Although western Virginia exceeded slave-heavy eastern Virginia in free population, the East received thirty state senators to the West’s twenty, while the West received eighty-two state representatives to the East’s sixty-eight state representatives. This was deemed a major change to eastern Virginia’s domination of the state, even though the constitution preserved the slaveholding section’s direct control of the state senate.¹⁶⁵

Another method by which the slaveholders could retain power was by requiring the people to vote viva voce, which meant that electors cast their vote by live voice. Four seceding states’ constitutions in force in 1860 prescribed viva voting in popular elections: Article IV, Section 8, of the 1836 Arkansas Constitution; Article IV, Section 2, of the 1798 Georgia Constitution; Article I, Section 4, of the North Carolina Constitution; and Article III, Section 4, of the 1850 Virginia Constitution.¹⁶⁶

In his memoir, The End of an Era, John Sergeant Wise, son of Virginia governor and Confederate general Henry Wise, recalled witnessing viva voce voting when he was a boy and his father was candidate for governor:

 

Father being absent, the young cousin above referred to represented him at the polling-place, and took me with him. In those days, voting was done openly, or viva voce, as it was called, and not by ballot. The election judges, who were magistrates, sat upon a bench with their clerks before them. Where practicable, it was customary for the candidate to be present in person, and to occupy a seat at the side of the judges. As the voter appeared, his name was called out in a loud voice. The judges inquired, “John Jones (or Bill Smith), for whom do you vote?”—for governor, or for whatever was the office to be filled. He replied by proclaiming the name of his favorite. Then the clerks enrolled the vote, and the judges announced it as enrolled. The representative of the candidate for whom he voted arose, bowed, and thanked him aloud; and his partisans often applauded.¹⁶⁷

 

This method of voting exposed the elector to the candidate’s control by means of bribery, pressure, or intimidation. In addition, it could reverse the effect of the central reform of the Jacksonian democracy movement—the elimination of property qualifications for voting. If the elector was landless or a tenant but had to express his choice by voice vote at the polls, the individual’s fear of the landlord or employer could more easily induce him to vote as the landlord wished, increasing the landlord’s control of election outcomes. Madison expressed this concern in the Federal Convention of 1787, when he predicted that if the propertyless obtained suffrage, they would become the “tools of opulence and ambition.” His intention was not to limit the republican liberty of the people; rather, he intended the opposite. In the same context, he said, “The right of suffrage is certainly one of the fundamental articles of republican government” and that a “gradual abridgment of this right has been the mode in which aristocracies have been built on the ruins of popular forms.”168 The apparently democratic reform of giving suffrage to the propertyless would actually augment the ruling power of oligarchy, not restrict it, and Madison wished to check that result. Viva voce voting assisted the oligarchy, under democratic guise.

The secret ballot solved this problem. The case of antebellum New York illustrates the efficacy of this solution and demonstrates the impact of voting method on the form of government. New York substituted the secret ballot for viva voce voting early in the state’s history. Article VI of its 1777 constitution ordered an experiment of the secret ballot at popular elections, due to the opinion of “the good people of this State that voting at elections by ballot would tend more to preserve the liberty and equal freedom of the people than voting viva voce.”¹⁶⁹ The experiment was done and deemed successful in two elections, and by 1799 the state instituted a canvassing system to protect the integrity of the ballots and their accounting.¹⁷⁰ By Article II, Section 4, of its next constitution, framed in 1821, voting by ballot in “all elections by the citizens” became a fixture in New York government.¹⁷¹

During the early national period, New York resembled the Southern slave states. According to the 1790 census, New York had the sixth-highest number of slaves in the nation, behind Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Maryland, and Georgia. New York had 21,193 slaves and Georgia 29,264. Well after the enactment of gradual emancipation in 1799, New York landholding patterns still resembled the great plantations of the South. The landlords lived like nobility in large manor homes, presiding over massive estates. In 1785 Stephen Van Rensselaer reputedly owned 750,000 acres in Albany and Rensselaer Counties, which were home to around 1,000 tenants. Annually, they visited the manor to pay their respects and their rent. The royal government had granted title to these lands before the Revolution, and between independence and the 1820s large estates encompassed millions of acres and thousands of tenants.¹⁷² Relations between the tenants and land barons were semifeudal, obeisance on the one side, paternalism on the other.

This system was permanently altered through electoral politics. For their part, the tenants claimed their natural right to acquire civil title in the soil. The landlords employed lawyers and dispensed political favors to check the political agitations. They also attempted to sway the tenants’ votes.173 But the power of the tenants’ votes advanced their cause, despite the landlords’ efforts to forestall them. Eventually, the tenants won sufficient influence to bring about relief. The New York parties had to respect the votes of the antirent movement in the 1840s or suffer electoral consequences. Had the New York state government not adopted the secret ballot in 1777 and readopted it in its 1821 constitution, these many thousands of tenants would have had to risk their subsistence by voting their conscience in full view of their baronical landlords. Undoubtedly, the secret ballot assisted them in expressing their conscience.

As a result, the constitutional development of New York and Georgia strikingly differed. Both began from a common original point in 1776. Their slave populations were nearly equivalent, and their land-distribution patterns were similar. But New York abolished slavery and viva voce voting, whereas Georgia did not abolish either. By 1860 Georgia had 902 farms exceeding 999 acres, and New York had only 21.¹⁷⁴

Early critics of Virginia government blamed viva voce voting and malapportionment for preventing majority rule. In 1797 the Aurora General Advertiser of Pennsylvania printed a letter by a militia battalion from Lexington, in Rockbridge County, Virginia, addressed to its state legislature, demanding a state constitutional convention and insisting on secret-ballot elections. The letter declared that “unequal representation is a grievance . . . for as slaves and citizens are so distant characters . . . , it is utterly repugnant to democratical or republican principles, that any number of citizens in a commonwealth, should have more voices in the legislative body, than another equal number.” The militiamen complained that Virginia’s legislature granted slaveholders additional power in the government. In their demand for a convention to correct this, they anticipated the oligarchy’s mode of preserving its power: “And, considering the evils which arise from the present mode of election, viva voce, especially when men offer to serve, we with [sic] you to insist that the election of the members of the convention shall be by ballot.” Virginia preserved viva voce voting until after the Civil War, but when republican western Virginia seceded from oligarchic Virginia during the war, it framed a constitution for the new state of West Virginia that instituted the ballot and abolished viva voce voting.¹⁷⁵

In 1790 the Gazette of the United States editorialized, “Wealth, where elections are free, if not attended with some degree of ability, is no recommendation to a candidate; but where the viva voce method is adopted, it is the great, sometimes the only requisite.” The editorialist named secret-ballot elections “free” and contrasted them with viva voce elections, in which wealth could dominate the outcome. By 1860 only one free-state constitution prescribed viva voce voting in elections by the people; many specifically prescribed the ballot in elections, while at the same time prescribing viva voce voting by legislators. The one free state was the new state of Oregon, but that prescription was supplemented by an escape clause. Article II, Section 15, of Oregon’s 1857 constitution required viva voce voting “in all elections by the people, until the legislative assembly shall otherwise direct.”176

Scholars have frequently remarked that the Constitution of the Confederate States of America is almost identical to the Constitution of the United States.¹⁷⁷ One scholar noted the prominent role of Alexander Stephens in “making the Confederate Constitution a close replica of the Federal document” but does not pause to ponder the incongruity between his claim and Stephens’s own claims about the constitution he had just drafted. In Savannah, weeks after completing his work, Stephens said that the Confederacy’s “new constitution, or form of government” was “decidedly better” than the form of government or Constitution of the United States, that the new constitution included “numerous changes for the better,” and that the most important change was its new foundation. With respect to the old foundation, “the prevailing ideas” of “most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution” were “fundamentally wrong.”¹⁷⁸

Parsimonious changes in wording can make a world of difference and did in the case of the Confederate Constitution. Madison had said to the delegates to the Federal Convention that he “thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”¹⁷⁹ The delegates concurred with him and kept the word slavery out of the Constitution. Stephens and his coadjutors inserted the words slave or slavery ten times. The rejection of natural equality and the adoption of natural inequality underwrote the small but powerful change in word choices and laid the foundation for legislation and policy that treated all unequally.

Far from quietly tolerating preexistent slavery, as did the Constitution of the United States, the Confederate Constitution created slavery in law as a national institution. That constitution positively affirmed the right of property in slaves in all present and future territories in that nation.¹⁸⁰ No territorial government could ever abolish slavery. In the highly unlikely event that a slave territory graduating to statehood or an established slave state ever tried to abolish slavery, it is possible, though not certain, that they might be within their constitutional rights to do so. The attempt was foredoomed to failure. The Confederate Constitution guaranteed the right of other citizens to sojourn in any state with their slaves, the laws of other states notwithstanding.181 A slavery prohibition in any state would, therefore, have no effect. The permanence of slavery secured the permanence of oligarchic rule.

Under the U.S. government, roughly half of the state legislatures that chose senators were controlled by the people; the other half came from slave states where an oligarchy of slaveholders controlled the state legislatures. Under Confederate government, the same provision for selecting senators generated different results. All Confederate senators would be chosen by ruling oligarchies in the respective states. The Confederate Senate became a direct appendage of the ruling minority, whereas the U.S. Senate mixed representation from states in which the people ruled and from states in which an oligarchy ruled.

The retention of the three-fifths formula for enumerating slaves in the Confederate Constitution created a new pattern of apportioning House districts because the free-to-slave-population ratio in the Confederacy markedly differed from the ratio in the United States. Before secession the free population in the United States was 27,197,315 in the 1860 census. The total slave population in the nation was 3,950,531, or an adjusted population of 2,370,319 after applying the three-fifths rule. That adjusted number represented 8.7 percent of the free American population, or 8.7 percent additional voting power, adhering to the slaveholders.¹⁸²

In the eleven states of the Confederacy, the free population was 5,562,192. The aggregate number of slaves was 3,521,110, or an adjusted population of 2,112,666 after applying the three-fifths rule. Hence, the new adjusted number represented 38 percent of the free population, or 38 percent additional voting power, enough to give the minority of slaveholders in the high-slaveholding regions additional representation and control over the Confederate House of Representatives as well as the Confederate Senate.

The eleven states that are usually recognized as having seceded (not counting Missouri and Kentucky) accounted for eighty-five congressional districts in the Confederate government. A majority of the free white population was concentrated in a minority of districts. The ten districts with the highest white population totaled 871,407 free whites; the ten lowest had 382,227. Yet each district was equal in the Confederate House of Representatives due to the greater number of slaves in some districts than others.183 At the extreme ends of the scale, represented in table 3, the variation in free white population approaches a magnitude of three.

The founding fathers of the Confederate States of America malapportioned the entire national legislature in favor of slaveholders, just as they had done in many of their state governments.

The conduct of the Confederate government belies a longstanding neo-Confederate panegyric, that Calhoun and the secessionists were heroes for limited government and liberty and fought a losing battle against the consolidation of government and the centralization of authority.¹⁸⁴ An alternative interpretation is that they were not principled defenders of limited government, but used arguments for limited government in order to blunt the constitutionally warranted power of the federal government when their interests were threatened. The deeds of the Southern statesmen support the second interpretation. They certainly did not practice limited government within their states as strictly as they demanded it in national government. Likewise, the administration of the Confederacy never practiced limited government. In its short life, the Confederate government was more centralized and energetic than the government of the Union during the war, or “quasisocialist,” one study has concluded. But, the author of the study notes, Southern statesmen “did, in fact, oppose expansion of the central state both before and after the Civil War,” when they were part of the United States.¹⁸⁵ They deployed their theory when their rule was obstructed by a powerful republican people within the Union and was dropped when they were independent of that impediment. Their inconsistency is explained by the panoptic, overarching conflict between oligarchy and republicanism. Their constitutional theory was a strategy with a motive, not born from republican principles.

As the war marched onward, libertarian dissenters like Governor Zebulon Vance of North Carolina and Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia did oppose the centralized state activism led by Jefferson Davis.¹⁸⁶ But they were in the minority, and their opposition failed. A majority of Confederate governors supported or tolerated centralization. The most plausible interpretation of the conduct of Vance and Brown is that they unwittingly accepted the constitutional arguments of antebellum Southerners and never discerned that the arguments were merely strategic.

It has been alleged that the Confederacy’s founders aimed for a more perfect form of republicanism, purged of “conventions, election oratory, editorial feuds, and partisan wrangling.” They are deemed the faithful heirs of the American founding fathers, who also disliked parties.187 But the antipartyism of the Confederate founders crucially differed from the antipartyism of the American founders.

Close in time to the ratification of the Constitution, the American founders do seem opposed to the formation of parties, but the parties they have in mind are not the sort that eventually formed in America. Like the Confederate founders, they denounced the spirit of party and associated parties with unjust factions. In his Farewell Address in 1796, Washington warned, “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge,” was “natural to party dissension” and had produced “horrid enormities.” This party activity was “itself a frightful despotism” or oppression that could lead to “a more formal and permanent despotism.” But Washington drew his lesson from “different ages and countries,” when parties were demonstrably factious and unjustly oppressed each other. Similarly, in Federalist 10 Madison observed that the factious impulse, inseparable from human nature, had forever “divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.”¹⁸⁸

The reason to fear the formation of parties in America was their factious character and crimes against the natural rights of others since time immemorial. Restrained from injuring the rights of others, parties were not dreaded. In fact, organizations that promoted political platforms and candidates and united popular support under their heads were unprecedented and proved to be a useful discovery by the founding generation after the formation of the government under the Constitution. These “parties” differed from past parties by shedding their factious, despotic character. As long as they operated within a republican consensus and respected the rights of others, parties could be advantageous to republican government, even necessary. In 1823 Madison reflected on their experience and acknowledged, “There has been in fact a deep distinction between the two parties.” But experience had taught them that “in all free Countries somewhat of this distinction must be looked for; but it can never be dangerous in a well informed Community and a well constructed Govt. both of which I trust will be found to be the happy lot of the U.S.”¹⁸⁹ The American founders had tamed parties into useful instruments of popular government.

The Confederacy turned against these tame forms of party organization because their “revolution against politics” was a revolution against republican politics and republican government, and the evidence is heaped high. Newspaper editors argued for “no more deification of popular ignorance,” for eliminating “caucuses, conventions, and campaigning.” Some suggested “dispensing with elections altogether.” Another editor doubted that “the masses were capable of self-government” and “argued for a government run by the planting interest.” Since the “planting interests” already ran Southern governments, the editor’s call suggested that the founding of the Confederacy was the beginning, and not end, of the consolidation of oligarchic government. J. L. M. Curry, a Confederate congressman from Alabama, attacked frequent elections, which made representatives “sycophants who seek popularity.” Curry’s position was the reverse of John Adams’s in “Thoughts on Government,” which he had written in 1776 at the request of Curry’s republican fathers in the South. Adams wrote, “And these and all other elections, especially of representatives and counsellors, should be annual, there not being in the whole circle of the sciences a maxim more infallible than this, ‘where annual elections end, there slavery begins.’”190

The secessionists are said to have rejected “a model of politics based on competition and compromise” and instead “hoped to construct a commonwealth resting on social harmony, political consensus, and unquestionable legitimacy.”¹⁹¹ However, their contemptuous references to the people and popular institutions suggest that their idea of good government was outside the genus of republicanism. A political society that suppresses peaceful party competition and compromise to achieve political consensus is not free. The structure of Confederate government already diminished popular participation, and they were not finished. They did not seek the consent of the people to achieve social “harmony” and “consensus.” They sought consensus only within their ruling class. With this consensus they could easily command the silence of the people and exact their obedience. The peace and harmony of oligarchic political society was achieved when popular liberty was laid low in the grave. By remaining unified as a ruling class, they, and not the ruled majority, would choose the terms of social harmony. They alone were competent to speak on behalf of all.

Oligarchies, Aristotle taught, do not trust the multitude.¹⁹² They are jealous of their power and reluctant to share any affairs of the state with the people, unless pressed by necessity. This explains why Confederates further sought to restrict popular participation in government and why the Confederate Congress conducted “so much of its business in closed sessions” and “aroused public suspicion.”¹⁹³ In conducting themselves this way, the Confederates broke from the republican tradition in America and resurrected the old British parliamentary tradition under the monarchy. Long prior to the American Revolution, the British Parliament had customarily conducted its proceedings in secret, and only its members could read the journals. Breaches of secrecy were punished with great severity, sometimes by imprisonment in the Tower of London and permanent expulsion. Colonial legislatures in America emulated the secrecy of Parliament until 1766, when the General Court of republican Massachusetts became the first legislature in modern history to open its proceedings formally to the public, on the motion of James Otis.194 After the formation of the national government under the Constitution, the House of Representatives kept its doors open to the public, but the Senate regularly met behind closed doors and published only its journal, not its proceedings.

The drawn-out battle that led to the opening of the Senate completed the consecration of that chamber to republicanism. Almost immediately after the Senate first met, Senators Richard Henry Lee and James Monroe from Virginia led the campaign to force the doors open, but their respective motions were defeated in 1790 and 1791.¹⁹⁵ The secrecy of the Senate irritated the American public.¹⁹⁶ The newspapers mocked the Senate. One critic denominated senators “the PEERS of America” who disdained “to be seen by vulgar eyes.” Another offered the monitory reflection that “it augurs an unfriendly disposition in a public body. . . . Upright intentions, and upright conduct are not afraid or ashamed of publicity.”¹⁹⁷

Responding to popular pressure and pressure from state legislatures, Senator Alexander Martin of North Carolina made a motion in 1794 to open the Senate doors. His resolutions explained that the senators were “responsible for their conduct to their constituents,” and while their debates were “withheld from public view, responsibility is destroyed, which, on the publicity of their deliberations, would be restored.” By opening the Senate doors, “abuse of power, maladministration of office” would be “more easily detected and corrected; jealousies, rising in the public mind from secret legislation” would be “prevented.” The people would place “greater confidence . . . in the National Government.”¹⁹⁸ While the Senate hesitated, one newspaper thundered, “This practice is borrowed FROM KINGS and their MINISTERS, and seems to imply a disposition to assimilate our government, if not in theory, at least in practice, to monarchy.”¹⁹⁹ Finally, galleries were built, and the Senate began to receive the public and allow its debates to be published in December 1795.²⁰⁰

In America the republican legislative tradition of publicity, to prevent popular suspicions, restore popular confidence in the government, and expose the conduct of legislators to public inspection, was begun by Massachusetts and advanced in the Senate by Virginians and a North Carolina member. The sons of those Southern republicans who ruled the Confederacy overturned this republican achievement. The Confederate Congress habitually conducted “many, if not most of its most important deliberations . . . in secret session.” Although the Union was fighting the same war, the American Congress almost never conducted its proceedings in secret.201

The Confederate custom of conducting secret deliberations derived from the character of the oligarchic regime native to its region. Before the war in 1853, Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio attempted to complete one reform left undone by the Senate in 1795. Senate executive sessions were still held in secret. Chase offered a resolution to amend the Senate rules so that “all sessions and all proceedings of the Senate shall be public and open, except when matters communicated in confidence by the President shall be received and considered.” The explanation presented in 1853 by Chase, the Northerner, mirrored the explanation of Senator Martin of North Carolina, the Southerner, in 1794. Chase said, “The people have a right to know the character of our discussions and the reason for our votes. Our institutions are based on the principle of publicity and responsibility,” and, therefore, “exceptions should be confined within the narrowest practicable limits.” Shedding some light on the reason for later Confederate secrecy, Senator Andrew Pickens Butler of South Carolina replied, “This is not a pure democracy.”²⁰² With due respect to fair criticism of pure democracy, the transparent administration of the government, apart from the management of national security, is an institutional practice suited to any system of government in which the people are sovereign. The diffusion of information about the administration of government is necessary if the administration is directly or indirectly accountable to the people on policy matters.

Quickly after its formation, the Confederate Congress was marked by “petty quarrels, ideological rigidity, and plain stubbornness.”²⁰³ Contending individual alliances spread throughout the Confederate government. This conflict was different in kind and in danger from shifting political alliances within a republic. Whereas harmony is the essential preservative of oligarchy, its opposite, rivalry, is the bane of oligarchy. According to Aristotle, when harmony breaks down among ruling oligarchs, the ruling class narrows, as one man or one clique within the ruling class becomes more powerful than others.204 This explains the remarkable spectacle of serious calls within the Confederacy for dictatorship.²⁰⁵ Among domineering men, disagreement could be settled only by superior domination. They were bred to rule and never to voluntarily submit. A dictator was a fit choice to restore order once disorder broke out within the Confederate oligarchy. Monarchy was the next step in the development of their political regime.

Instead, the regime that might have changed American and world history died violently, ushered to its demise in part by ordinary Americans, black and white, who arose from the bowels of the Confederacy and with their arms faced down all the insulting moral presumptions of Southern government. For our part, we can know the ruling class only through books, and very imperfectly, but poor white Americans and enslaved black Americans personally felt the burden of its disdain for their common humanity. It is not surprising that when the Civil War began, these Southern Americans took up arms against the Confederacy and looked northward for assistance. We now know much more about Southern unionism during the war. Newton Knight, a conscripted Confederate soldier, deserted and led an anti-Confederate militia within the rebellious state of Mississippi, the legendary “Free State of Jones.” Unionist resistance was extensive in Alabama and North Carolina.²⁰⁶ As many as 450,000 black and white Southerners fought for the Union, amounting to fully half of all the men who served in the Confederate army.²⁰⁷ Their fight against the Confederate rebellion was an American uprising against an un-American political regime that developed in the antebellum South. For their resistance to the Confederacy, the ruled classes often paid a terrible price.²⁰⁸ The suffering they endured fills a forgotten chapter in the long history of American sacrifices for liberty.