Eight: To the Brink, The War Before the War

Eight

TO THE BRINK

1.

Sectional tension had waxed and waned ever since the founding. But by the 1840s, with rancor rising in the courts, antislavery articles pouring from the northern press, and demand growing for personal testimony from former slaves, it reached unprecedented intensity. In the second half of the decade, it came to a boiling point—spurred by events in the far Southwest.

Mexico had won its independence from Spain in 1821. Eight years later, slavery, which had supplied labor under the Spaniards for mining gold and silver as well as for planting, harvesting, and processing sugar, was legally abolished. Meanwhile, settlement by “Anglos,” many of them slave owners, was nevertheless tolerated and even encouraged in the area north of the Nueces River known as Tejas—a huge expanse of prairie, canyon, scrubland, and forest that was home to Comanche Indians and beyond effective control from Mexico City hundreds of miles away. The “open door” policy of the fledgling Mexican government was its acknowledgment that there was no way the door could be closed.

Through the 1820s and into the 1830s, Americans came riding and rolling in. Some came with the intention to settle, others as agents of absentee land speculators. By 1830, they outnumbered Spanish-speaking Tejanos two to one. Five years later, the ratio had risen to ten to one, and by 1845 there were roughly 125,000 English-speaking emigrants in the region now known to Americans by the anglicized name Texas, of whom more than a quarter were enslaved. The slave population was growing faster than the population as a whole.

Meanwhile, according to one satiric account of life on the frontier, it was getting difficult in the states from which the new arrivals mainly came—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama—to “put an inch or two of knife in a fellow” over some property dispute or affair of honor without having to deal with “Law, law, law” in the persons of lawyers, jurors, and judges. Texas, by contrast, was wild and wide open—a place “whar a man [need] not be interfered with in his private consarns.” One man’s anarchy was another man’s liberty, and Texas, to the latter, looked like the place to be.

It was only a matter of time before conflict broke out between the newcomers and those who had preceded them—Spanish Creoles as well as indigenous Indians who allied with one side or the other or tried to stay neutral. By late 1835, sporadic fighting had turned into organized warfare. From the point of view of white English-speaking Texans and their advocates in the United States, the conflict with Tejanos was a glorious reprise of America’s own war of independence—waged by people, in the words of Mississippi senator Robert J. Walker, who “are imitating . . . our own revolution” by fighting a faraway government that would tax and oppress them. But it was also a slaveholders’ rebellion against a regime hostile to slavery—or, more accurately, “a race war against a mestizo nation.”

The fighting was savage. Early in 1836, some two hundred Americans were massacred at a former Spanish mission called the Alamo, where three times as many Mexicans died before the American defenders, including the former Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett, were overwhelmed and slaughtered. Texans regrouped under the leadership of Sam Houston, a twice-wounded veteran of the War of 1812 and former governor of Tennessee, and the tide of war turned. More bloody encounters followed, with summary executions of men on both sides while they were trying to surrender, until Texans finally prevailed at the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836. Five months later, they declared themselves citizens of an independent republic.

Although its troops had been expelled from the province of Tejas, Mexico did not formally renounce the state of war and had no intention of recognizing a new sovereign nation immediately to its north. With border disputes continuing, the issue of whether Texas would remain independent or join the United States as a new slave state became an incendiary question, especially as rumors arose that Britain might assume its debts in return for emancipation of its slaves.

The prospect of British interference was not entirely fanciful. Since 1807, when Britain formally ended its participation in the international slave trade and tried, by means of its navy, to force other nations to do the same, its policy had been to undermine slavery wherever it could. For reasons both principled and calculated, slavery was abolished throughout the empire in 1833. Public revulsion played a part, but so did public concern that colonial slave owners had been bringing too many blacks into the British homeland as laborers and servants. Also at work was the idea that pressuring slavery out of existence throughout the colonized world was a way for Britain to improve its competitive position in the production of sugar, cotton, and rice. By the spring of 1844, the prospect of British intervention in Texas was sufficiently alarming that Andrew Jackson, weak and withered but still a commanding figure for many Americans, roused himself to warn that an “abolitionized” Texas could become “an asylum for all runaway slaves.”

And so for a range of discordant reasons—greed, idealism, strategic prudence—the annexation of Texas became a popular cause in the United States, especially in the South. Its rallying cry was “Manifest Destiny”—the destiny, that is, of America “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” However illogical the logic—that freedom would be served by adding to the Union another slave state—many Americans, North as well as South, found it compelling. “The cry of Free Men,” Frederick Douglass remarked with scathing accuracy, “was raised, not for the extension of liberty to the black man, but for the protection of the liberty of the white.”

Believers in racially exclusive liberty were ideologically diverse. They included slave owners in want of more land as they contended with the problem of soil exhaustion (in order to grow cotton profitably, crops had to be rotated or fields fertilized at high expense), real estate speculators looking to buy low and sell high, immigrants from Europe hoping to move on from the crowded cities of the seaboard states, and many others with their eyes on the West as a vista of opportunity. Walt Whitman, celebrated today as a great poet of individual freedom, gave voice to the expansionist euphoria when he wrote in his poem “Song of Myself,” “I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents, I am afoot with my vision,” but his vision largely excluded black people from the panorama of liberty. Writing in approval of laws barring free blacks from the Oregon Territory, which Britain ceded to the United States in 1846, Whitman asked a rhetorical question, “Is not America for the Whites?” to which he gave an affirmative answer that pleased most if not all of his readers. In this respect, he was correct that “the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”

But there were disbelievers too. A growing faction of northern and western Whigs—later to form the nucleus of the Republican Party—regarded the Democrats as a slavery party that “masked its intentions with propaganda about freedom.” From this point of view, the seizure of Texas was nothing but a land grab by slaveholders for whom the rest of Mexico would be next, and then “Cuba and Central America to be annexed as slave states.” Protests broke out across the North denouncing the prospective acquisition of lands for the United States that had been “wrested from Mexico by violence and fraud.”

Advertisement for an anti-annexation meeting in Boston, 1838

Opponents of annexation also included pragmatic politicians such as Henry Clay of Kentucky (Whig) and Martin Van Buren of New York (Democrat), who for decades had held together a North-South coalition in their respective parties by deflecting the slavery question (they both supported the gag rule) and who feared that granting admission to Texas would open new fissures not only in the parties but in the Union itself.

As for the annexationists, if some of their arguments now seem repugnant to us, others sound downright bizarre. Senator Walker of Mississippi, who had been born in Pennsylvania and would end up supporting the Union in the Civil War, envisioned a new state of Texas as a “funnel through which the slave population could move into Mexico.” Alarmed by the flood of slaves into his adopted state of Mississippi, he joined other southern whites in urging their “diffusion” by sending as many slaves as possible to Texas, whence they would be absorbed by Mexico, a nation where racial “amalgamation” was already far advanced and where, according to one former slave speaking long after the Civil War, no one cared “what color you was, black, white, yellow, or blue.”

Whether Walker really believed in his plan for solving America’s surplus slave problem, or he “had ceased to distinguish between the impressions made upon his mind by what came from it, and what came to it,” is hard to say. However deluded he might have been, the idea that Texas would somehow siphon off America’s excess slaves to Mexico affords a glimpse into the deepening impasse over slavery and the growing desperation to find some way out.

2.

Fear—sheer, chronic, irrepressible fear—had always been endemic to slave culture, and with slaves “crowding into the far South and increasing faster than the whites,” it was growing fast on both sides of the color line. It is hideously expressed in artifacts from the penal world in which slaves were confined not only by law and custom but by shackles, manacles, and chains.

Iron mask, collar, leg shackles, and spurs used to restrict slaves

Slaves in the Deep South were at the mercy of virtually unregulated cruelty, and slaves farther north were not necessarily better off. In St. Louis, ladies and gentlemen strolled in their finery past the “Negro pens in the middle of the city” unfazed by the howls of slaves in transit to the auction house. Alexis de Tocqueville, touring America in 1831, was shocked by the sight of a Maryland slave beaten by a gentleman wielding a walking stick while a mixed black and white crowd looked on in apparent indifference, as if they had seen it all before and fully expected to see it again. Anywhere in the South, a slave could be whipped for any infraction ranging from theft or flight to failure to pound the hominy long enough to make grits soft enough to please her master or mistress at breakfast. In the few surviving photographic portraits of slaves, fear is visible in their eyes.

Delia, a slave in South Carolina, forced in 1850 to pose half-naked for a daguerreotype commissioned by Harvard ethnologist Louis Agassiz

Whites, too, lived in fear—periodic, manageable, often based on next to nothing—but enervating nevertheless. From time to time, their fear was heightened by news of slave revolts. The terrifying precedent was the revolution in Haiti, where, between 1791 and 1804, the island had been periodically convulsed by black-against-white violence, including torture, rape, and murder of thousands of slave masters and their families—sometimes systematic, sometimes anarchic. There were domestic incidents too. In 1826, as a “coffle” of seventy-five slaves was being sent by flatboat down the Ohio River from Kentucky for sale in Mississippi or Louisiana, several of the slaves rose up, killed the slave traders, sank their bodies in the river with weights, and fled north into Indiana, where they were captured and returned south and the ringleaders hanged. That same year, one of America’s first black college graduates, John Russwurm, who went on to co-edit the newspaper Freedom’s Journal, justified the violence in Haiti in a commencement speech to faculty and students at Bowdoin College as “retaliatory measures” against slave owners.

While living in Boston in 1829, David Walker, the son of an enslaved father and free mother, published a pamphlet in which he warned

that one good black man can put to death six white men, the reason is, the blacks, once you get them started, they glory in death. The whites have had us under them for more than three centuries, murdering, and treating us like brutes; and . . . there is an unconquerable disposition in the breasts of the blacks, which, when it is fully awakened and put in motion, will be subdued, only with the destruction of the animal existence. Get the blacks started, and if you do not have a gang of tigers and lions to deal with, I am a deceiver of the blacks and of the whites.

A decade later, Frederick Douglass urged America’s slaves and their allies to “reach the slaveholder’s conscience through his fear of personal danger. We must make him feel that there is death in the air about him, that there is death in the pot before him, that there is death all around him.”

Among domestic insurrections, most infamous was the 1831 uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, led by a pious and literate slave named Nat Turner, in which some fifty whites died before at least two hundred blacks were beaten and killed in reprisal. The frequency of such events was small, but their psychological effects were large. Using Turner’s full name as a mark of respect, Douglass recalled that “the insurrection of Nathaniel Turner had been quelled, but the alarm and terror had not subsided”—good reason, he later added, to “rejoice in every uprising.” In 1841, aboard the slave ship Creole, which was transporting more than a hundred slaves from Richmond to New Orleans for sale, some number rebelled and, according to an account published in newspapers around the nation, attacked one of the owners “with clubs, handspikes, and knives,” stabbing him to death “in not less than twenty places.”

In an effort to prevent such horrors, laws were imposed throughout the South making it a crime to teach slaves—or, for that matter, free blacks—to read or write, lest they learn and spread seditious ideas about rebelling or running away. In Georgia, as early as the 1820s, anyone caught teaching a slave faced imprisonment or a five-hundred-dollar fine. Fathers could be flogged for teaching their own children. In the early 1830s, although there were only about one hundred slaves, mostly house servants, in the city of St. Louis, it was “forbidden on pain of heavy penalty to teach a slave to read or write.” In North Carolina, patrols searched “every negro house for books or prints of any kind,” and if any were found, including “Bibles or hymn books,” the offender was subject to “whipping . . . until he informed who gave them to him.” Every “slaveholding community,” Douglass observed, had “a peculiar taste for ferreting out offenses against the slave system.”

Not all whites complied. At risk of incurring her husband’s ire, the wife of Douglass’s own master taught him to read. Charles Colcock Jones, a Congregational pastor who ministered to blacks as well as whites on the Georgia coast, protested that to deny “knowledge of letters to the Negroes” was to violate the core belief of every true Protestant: that all God’s children, whatever their earthly condition, must have “access to the Scriptures” unmediated by ecclesiastical authority. This meant literacy for all so all could read God’s word for themselves.

In a more mischievous but kindred spirit, Angelina Grimké, daughter of a wealthy slave-owning Charleston family, recalled that as a young girl in the 1820s she

took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks. The light was put out, the keyhole screened, and flat on our stomachs, before the fire, with the spelling book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina.

Among her favorite scriptural passages was Deuteronomy 23:15–16: “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant that is escaped from his master unto thee.” She read these words—presumably sometimes aloud in the company of slaves—as God’s indictment of the constitutional mandate by which “not one city of refuge for the poor runaway fugitive” was permitted to exist in the United States. Before she was thirty, she left the South to take up the antislavery cause in the North, where she married the prominent abolitionist Theodore Weld.

Looking back after the Civil War, one of Grimké’s fellow exiles from the South remarked that “two terrors were constantly before the minds of Southern families—fire and poison . . . the two weapons that slaves had in their hands.” By rumor, report, or family lore, most if not all white southerners had heard of slaves using one or the other. Slave masters were warned not to free their slaves in their wills because “servants knowing that the period of their Emancipation depended upon the Death of a person whom they might possess the means of secretly destroying” would be tempted to hasten the day of liberty by hastening their owner’s death. Floride Calhoun, wife of the senior South Carolina senator, was convinced that slaves on her childhood plantation had tried to poison her father (not that he had any intention of freeing them), and for the rest of her life she lived in fear of being burned or stabbed in the night. Arson, suspected in every fire, was assumed to be a favored stratagem of discontented slaves, so little distinction was made throughout the South between the militia and the Fire Guard. A slave’s “impudence,” as one scholar writes, “was thought a prelude to insurgency.”

And why would whites living among black slaves not think so? Although slave rebellions were rare, quickly suppressed, and punished severely, fear of rebellion was common and constant. Today, after all, we live amid checkpoints and security cameras and bomb-sniffing dogs, yet news of any terrorist attack, no matter how far away, fills us with fear that next time it will happen in our neighborhood, in our home. So it was for slaveholders. Every moment seemed pregnant with danger. No wonder that the leading southern writer of the day, Edgar Allan Poe, was an expert on the subject. In Poe’s novella of 1838, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the narrator and his companion fear at one time or another that they will drown, starve, die of thirst, or be cannibalized by their shipmates, but the ultimate terror arrives when, having survived shipwreck and finding themselves outnumbered ashore by black-skinned “savages,” the narrator (a sort of alter ego for Poe) exclaims, “We were the only living white men upon the island.”

Poe’s readers needed no elaboration. Black violence was always lurking—at least in the white mind. And no matter how much whites wanted to think that blacks were passive under the putatively benign regime of slavery, fugitives and rebels continually disproved this belief. Slave owners feared that if slaves did not run, they would fight. As the black physician, writer, and activist Martin Delany (son of a slave) put it, “Whatever liberty is worth to the whites, it is worth to the blacks; therefore, whatever it cost the whites to obtain it, the blacks would be willing and ready to pay.” As early as the 1780s, Jefferson had feared an outbreak of slave rebellion that would mean the “extirpation” of their masters. The most astute foreign student of American life, Alexis de Tocqueville, after traveling through the slave states in 1831, envisioned the whole South engulfed in “the most horrible of civil wars” destined to end “in the extermination of one or the other of the two races.”

And yet until Texas forced them to confront it, Americans were amazingly adept at dodging the question of the future of slavery. Beginning with the compromises that made possible the Constitution, they found ways again and again to defer it. They deferred it in 1820 through the Missouri Compromise, which ruled out slavery (except in Missouri itself) north of the 36°30′ parallel but permitted it below the demarcation line. That compromise garnered support from expansionists like Calhoun, who warned that excluding slavery entirely from the western territories would lead the South to secede and make alliance with Britain (which, despite its professed antipathy to slavery, had close commercial relations with the cotton-growing South), as well as from anti-expansionists like John Quincy Adams, who acceded because of his “extreme unwillingness to put the Union at hazard.” Between 1836 and 1844, the issue was deflected again by the gag rule, whereby petitions sent to Congress demanding action against slavery were automatically tabled without debate. Yet the question of slavery’s future proved irrepressible. Was it an anachronism that would fade away, or was it poised for a new surge of growth? In the summer of 1845, Texas delivered its answer.

3.

On the portentous date of July 4, 1845, a convention of elected delegates meeting at San Antonio voted to apply to the United States for statehood. After five months of raucous debate, the U.S. Congress formally approved the request, and in December 1845, Texas became the twenty-eighth state of the Union and the sixteenth slave state. The danger—or hope—that it would become a sanctuary for fugitive slaves had passed, and Mexico’s border dispute with Texas was now a dispute with the United States.

Prospects for peaceful resolution were dim. Under Mexican rule, the southern border of the province of Tejas had been the Nueces River, and while the short-lived Republic of Texas had officially accepted that boundary, popular sentiment regarded the Rio Grande, 150 miles to the south, as the real and natural dividing line. Already in the summer of 1845, six months before annexation was enacted by Congress, James K. Polk, the expansion-minded Tennessee Democrat who had barely defeated Clay for the presidency a few months before (aided by the defection of antislavery votes to the abolitionist candidate James G. Birney), ordered General Zachary Taylor to lead a contingent of U.S. soldiers into Texas and to take up positions “as near the boundary line, the Rio Grande, as prudence will dictate.” Taylor, aware that the order amounted to a provocation, interpreted it conservatively and advanced no farther than Corpus Christi, at the mouth of the Nueces.

For much of the ensuing year, the United States attempted to pressure Mexico into more territorial concessions, including not only more land to the south but also the grand prize to the northwest, California. After negotiations backed by the threat of force failed to get Polk what he wanted, he ordered Taylor to advance to the Rio Grande. The American president portrayed the movement of troops as a defensive deployment. Mexico, of course, regarded it as an invasion.

The Mexican-American war, which began in April 1846, lasted nearly two years and cost almost twenty thousand lives on the American side alone. Even some of slavery’s most loyal friends opposed it, including Calhoun, who had pushed for annexation but whom Polk now considered not merely “mischievous, but wicked” for refusing to endorse the president’s wish for further expansion. Calhoun feared that new territorial acquisitions from Mexico would only inflame sectional conflict at home—a conflict, he believed, in which the South would ultimately come out the loser.

Another southern dissident, who shared Calhoun’s doubts about both the morality and the strategy of territorial conquest, was the slave-owning Georgia congressman Alexander Stephens. In a speech on the floor of the House delivered several months into the war, Stephens condemned it with words that could have been delivered in the twenty-first century by an opponent of the second Iraq war launched by George W. Bush:

It is to be doubted whether any man, save the President and his Cabinet, knows the real and secret designs that provoked [the war]. To suppress inquiry, and silence all opposition to conduct so monstrous, an executive ukase* has been sent forth, strongly intimating, if not clearly threatening, the charge of treason, against all who may dare to call in question the wisdom or propriety of his measures.

A year later, when Stephens spoke again to the same effect, his fellow Whig Abraham Lincoln described his remarks as “the best speech, of an hour’s length, I have ever heard.” Tempers ran so hot that one Alabama Democrat accused Stephens, the future vice president of the Confederacy, of having “joined the contemptible hordes of abolitionists in this hall.”

Like other wars yet to come, the Mexican War pitted Americans against each other in furious expressions of reciprocal contempt. Supporters saw it as advancing America’s sacred mission to spread itself from sea to shining sea. Opponents saw it as jingoism dressed up in fancy talk about democracy and freedom. At the start of the war, Frederick Douglass was in England speaking to packed halls about the horrors of American slavery. After abolitionist allies raised funds to buy his freedom, he returned to the United States and took full advantage of it. Now he spoke and wrote without restraint, declaring in 1849, “I would not care if, tomorrow, I should hear of the death of every man who engaged in that bloody war in Mexico, and that every man had met the fate he went there to perpetrate upon unoffending Mexicans.” To some, such statements smacked of treason, but that was a hard charge to make stick when the accused had been denied citizenship in his own country.

To anyone who remembers the Vietnam years, the bitter exchanges between pro-war and antiwar camps of the late 1840s will sound eerily familiar, but unlike the debacle in Vietnam the Mexican War ended with an American victory. Once that victory was formalized by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848, the lands over which the United States claimed sovereignty had been extended over an area almost twice as large as the Northwest Territory—a staggering expansion that amounts to some 30 percent of our present-day nation.

4.

But military success—as it often does—created a political problem. How could the new territories be organized in a way that would satisfy both North and South? Emerson predicted that “Mexico will poison us.” Because both North and South had contributed blood and treasure to the war effort, each demanded a share of the spoils, and, just as Clay and Van Buren had feared, the slavery question came back with a vengeance. It might once have been true, according to a novelist who had tried but failed in the 1830s to interest readers in his Mexican themes, that most Americans “know and care as little about Mexico as they do about the moon,” but now, in the words of Senator Benton, it became impossible not to care because “the large acquisition of new territory was fiercely lighting up the fires of a slavery controversy.”

Among those trying to tamp down the flames was Zachary Taylor, who, having fought off a superior Mexican force at a strategic mountain pass known as Buena Vista, came out of the war with a big reputation. Born in Virginia to a family with roots in New England, Taylor had moved as a boy to Kentucky, and in addition to extensive properties there he owned plantations and slaves in Louisiana and Mississippi, so he had a certain national provenance. By 1848, “Old Zack” was being talked about as a potential presidential candidate. Like General Eisenhower a hundred years later, he played coy about his party affiliation, but in the end he went with the Whigs. During the Mexican conflict, Taylor’s combination of reluctance and resolve won him admiration on both sides of the slavery divide, and on the political questions of the day he kept his convictions to himself—or, more likely, he did not quite know what they were.

Although at heart a military man, Taylor had a politician’s talent for seeming to answer a question without actually answering it. When one southern planter, boasting that a lifetime of hard work had earned him enough to buy a hundred slaves, wrote to candidate Taylor with a straightforward question—“Before I vote, I want to know how you stand on the slavery question?”—he got a cryptic answer. “Sir,” Taylor replied, “I too have worked faithfully these many years, and the end product remaining to me is a plantation with three hundred negroes. Yours truly.” Apparently impressed, the planter gave him his support, and so did enough other voters that in November 1848, despite his party’s choice of the mildly antislavery New Yorker Millard Fillmore as its vice presidential candidate, Taylor was elected.

Hard-line southerners who suspected the new president of being soft on defending slavery turned out to be at least partly right. He did not support the unconditional right of slave owners to take their human property into the territories from which the Missouri Compromise had excluded it. Nor did he join northerners who sought prohibition of slavery from the new territories on the precedent of the Northwest Ordinance. The latter view had been introduced in Congress in August 1846 by an obscure Pennsylvania congressman, David Wilmot, who proposed a rider on a military appropriations bill banning slavery in any territory that might be won from Mexico. After passing the House, the “Wilmot Proviso” failed in the Senate, but not before setting off an uproar between pro- and antislavery factions in both parties.* Taylor, trying to mediate, favored extending to the Pacific some version of the boundary line established by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

With Congress now less a forum for debate than “a cockpit in which rival groups could match their best fighters against one another,” a momentous shift was under way in American political culture. The very idea of compromise on which the nation had been built was falling into ill repute, even ridicule, as in a cartoon published by Currier and Ives showing Taylor straddling a pair of scales with “Wilmot Proviso” in one hand and “Southern Rights” in the other. The president’s reward for attempting the balancing act was to be skewered in the crotch.

5.

Considering the victory they had achieved with the annexation of Texas and their ravenous appetite for more (“the slave power must go on in its career of exactions,” Douglass said, “give, give will be its cry”), the notion of a vulnerable South at the mercy of a merciless North may be difficult to take seriously. The antebellum South was proficient at suppressing dissent by means of censorship, surveillance, and, when it came to its slaves, violence and terror. In many respects, it fit the definition of what we would call a police state. It held disproportionate (to its voting population) power in the national legislature. More often than not, its candidates, or candidates sympathetic to its interests, prevailed in presidential elections, and by mid-century the dozen richest counties in the United States were located below the Mason-Dixon Line. The leading producer of a commodity in worldwide demand, it has been aptly described as the “Saudi Arabia of the early nineteenth century.” To sympathize with grievances emanating from this global powerhouse seems something like sympathizing with the Nazis’ quest for Lebensraum.

And then there is the problem of hindsight: we know what happened next. We know that in 1854, during yet another territorial dispute, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act by which the Missouri Compromise was effectively repealed, and the prospect grew that slavery would spread still farther. We know, too, that in 1857 the Supreme Court repudiated the Somerset principle by ruling, in the case of Dred Scott—a slave who sued for freedom on the grounds that his master had taken him into free territory—not only that any slave owner could take his human property anywhere he liked but also that no black man, slave or free, had any “rights that the white man is bound to respect,” including the right to sue in court. To many people in the North, slavery before the Civil War looked like an institution not in retreat but on the march. In 1858, Lincoln warned the citizens of Illinois that they might one day “lie down pleasantly dreaming” but “awake to the reality . . . that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.”

But “living up here in ‘futurity,’” we know what those living before the Civil War could not know. We know which predictions were right and which were wrong. To recover some sense of how it felt for Americans to live through those years requires an effort to imagine their ignorance of what was to come. To southerners in the 1840s, the political winds seemed to be blowing not for but against them. They felt imperiled. Slaves running north were a continual reminder that the border between slavery and freedom was growing weaker as it grew longer, while militant northerners called for arming fugitive slaves so they could defend themselves against anyone coming after them.

Even deep in cotton country slave owners feared that sooner or later the slave-owning border states would follow the North into abolition, raising the pace of slave escapes in their own states and triggering a cascade of panic sales until the value of slave property collapsed. “The North appeared to be growing more hostile,” writes one historian, while “the Border South” was becoming “more disposed to debate its southernness” in the sense of contemplating the mass expulsion of blacks to the lower South. When slave owners looked north, they saw a free-soil enemy with proliferating cities and industries as well as railroads and canals for cross-country transport—a rapidly growing power by which they were treated as quasi-colonials whose main function was to send raw materials up to feed the hungry giant. They knew, moreover, that “the day when slavery can no longer extend itself, is the day of its doom.” If the cotton economy were to prosper, it had to expand—no less in good times than in bad. When the price of cotton rose, so did the incentive to increase production in order to lift profits. When the price fell, the planter’s motive to raise production was even stronger because cotton was the main collateral for his loans. Either way, there was no end to the need for more land and for more slaves to work it.

Yet as the scope of free soil grew, slave owners found themselves running out of places to go. “Confined to prescribed limits,” as the incensed governor of Virginia put the matter in 1849, not only was the cotton economy starved for growing room, but future prospects for the exertion of southern power in national politics looked dim. To make matters worse, as each new free state entered the Union, it would add two senators and a contingent of representatives to bolster the northern voting bloc in Congress. The balance of power in the Senate would be destroyed, and control of the presidency and consequently of the Supreme Court would pass to the North, which, as Calhoun was soon to warn, was gaining “predominance in every department of government.”

Benton, who had once favored slavery expansion but now—to Calhoun’s fury—opposed it, cut to the heart of what was at stake in the struggle over the Mexican cession. He saw that southern anger over the fugitive slave issue was really a proxy for the larger fear that slavery itself was doomed. “Ostensibly,” he wrote, “the complaint [of the South] was that the emigrant from the slave State was not allowed to carry his slave with him: in reality it was that he was not allowed to carry the State law along with him to protect his slave.” In the short run, everyone knew that human property “carried” to free soil became insecure property, and many suspected that in the long run the boundary line between slave and free soil would not hold.

It was less and less clear whether a slave rented to an out-of-state employer or taken on “sojourn” into free territory continued, in the eyes of the law, to be the possession of her master. From the southern point of view, the Aves case in Massachusetts had set a dangerous precedent. It was followed in 1837 by a case in which the Connecticut Supreme Court granted a slave her freedom after two years of residency in the state under the “protection” of her master, who had brought her there from Georgia. And by the mid-1840s, courts throughout the North were ruling in one case or another that slaves brought into any free state were free regardless of how long they had lived there.

Early abolition measures such as the Pennsylvania law of 1780 had been written with an eye toward reassuring slave owners that excluding slavery from one state “shall not give any relief or shelter to any absconding or runaway Negro or Mulatto slave or servant, who has absented himself or shall absent himself from his or her owner, master or mistress residing in any other state.” But such reassurances sounded increasingly hollow. No matter what the law said, when a slave ran for freedom, it was less and less sure that he could be caught and returned. Depending on time of residence or the disposition of local sheriffs and judges, all sorts of means could be used to obstruct rendition. A deed of ownership could be demanded from the claimant, and if produced, it could be contested. The identity of the accused fugitive could be disputed. Enemies of slavery who came to be known as conductors on the Underground Railroad might intervene to shelter a threatened runaway and send her farther north or even out of the country.

As early as 1827, one Louisiana jurist conceded the uncomfortable (to slave owners) truth that had loomed ever since the Somerset decision of 1772:

By the laws of this country, slavery is permitted, and the rights of the master can be enforced. [But] suppose the individual subject to it is carried to England or Massachusetts;—would their courts sustain the argument that this state or condition was fixed by the laws of his domicile of origin? We know, they would not.

By the 1830s and 1840s, this prediction had been borne out in many northern states. Southerners were enraged by the rash of personal liberty laws guaranteeing jury trials for accused fugitives and forbidding state authorities throughout the North to cooperate in recapturing fugitives. What seemed in the North a defense of human rights seemed in the South brazen defiance of the law of the land and of the principle of comity itself.

Meanwhile, from outside the circle of slavery, abolitionist “agitation,” as southerners called it, was becoming so routine that even the normally punctilious Massachusetts representative Horace Mann took to the floor of the House to say, “Better disunion, better a civil or a servile war—better anything that God in his providence shall send than an extension of the boundaries of slavery.” From our point of view, he was speaking an obvious and overdue truth. But from the point of view of antebellum white southerners, to speak of “servile war” was to call upon slaves to rise up and murder them and their families. To say that southern whites felt insecure amid unceasing attacks on their “peculiar institution” is an understatement. The historian Matthew Karp, in documenting the outsize influence of antebellum southerners over American foreign policy (ten of the first sixteen secretaries of state were from slave states), writes of “the paradox of the 1850s,” by which he means “slaveholders growing more confident abroad but becoming more beleaguered at home.”

“Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable,” Tocqueville wrote, “become intolerable when once the idea of escape from them is suggested.” He was referring not to slavery in the New World but to revolution in the Old World, which broke out in his native France not when the poor and dispossessed had fallen into despair but when their hopes were rising. In the same sense, American slave owners lived in dread of a “revolution of rising expectations” among their slaves. Sooner or later, they feared, the drumbeat from northerners urging them to flee their masters or to rise up in violence against them would be answered by action.

Given the gulf between their time and ours, and—one dares to hope—between prevailing racial attitudes then and now, it is difficult to see the world through the eyes of antebellum white southerners. One modern writer who managed to do so, not exactly with sympathy but with an unusual degree of understanding, was the twentieth-century scholar Barrington Moore Jr. Writing at the height of the cold war, when Americans felt themselves living within striking distance of an enemy both potent and reckless, Moore made an analogy with the “bitterness and anxiety” white southerners had felt a century earlier:

To grasp how a Southern planter must have felt, a twentieth-century Northerner has to make an effort. He would do well to ask how a solid American businessman of the 1960s might feel if the Soviet Union existed where Canada does on the map and were obviously growing stronger day by day. Let him further imagine that the communist giant spouted self-righteousness at the seams (while the government denied that these statements reflected true policy) and continually sent insults and agents across the border.

Whatever we may think of their morals, the anxiety of southerners was real, and by the late 1840s the figure of the fugitive slave had become its leading symbol.

6.

Whether or not the pace of slave escapes actually rose through the 1840s, mutual recrimination between North and South was certainly growing louder. From Florida to Iowa and just about everywhere in between, incidents involving slave escapes were “agitating our country from Washington to the most distant borders.”

In some cases, disputants continued to take recourse to the courts. In 1844, a Massachusetts shipowner operating in Florida (which joined the Union as the twenty-seventh state in the following year) was convicted of helping local slaves escape to the British Bahamas. In addition to incurring a fine, he was sentenced to time in the pillory, then jailed and branded “SS” on one hand—marking him forever as having committed the heinous crime of slave stealing.

In 1845, in Ohio, a Virginia slave owner traveling by steamboat on the Ohio River with his slave found his human property standing on the dock during a stopover in Cincinnati and took him before a justice of the peace with proof of ownership in case any meddlesome abolitionist should challenge it. Salmon P. Chase did just that, obtaining a writ of habeas corpus to prevent the slave owner from repossessing his slave. The case was heard by Ohio Supreme Court justice Nathaniel Read, who ruled that despite having entered Ohio, the slave remained the property of his Virginia master because to “deny the right to navigate the Ohio with a slave” would be an affront to the citizens of a “sister state.”

Two years later, in Illinois, another telling piece of evidence emerged that the law regarding fugitive slaves remained unsettled. This was the case of Robert Matson, a Kentuckian who owned land in southern Illinois and brought some of his slaves there to work his Illinois farm. Matson was careful to send them back to Kentucky periodically and to replace them with others so he would not run afoul of Illinois laws granting freedom in cases of prolonged residency. One of his male slaves, however, with Matson’s consent, remained in Illinois long enough to obtain papers certifying his freedom and continued to work as Matson’s foreman. He was joined by his wife, who eventually filed suit for her own freedom based on her extended residency in a free state. Matson contested the suit with the help of two local lawyers, one of whom was none other than Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s “business” at the time, one biographer contends, “was law, not morality.”

Perhaps his experience with the Matson case—which he might have taken on for financial reasons, or to fulfill what he considered his duty to represent clients regardless of his personal feelings about the extralegal merits of their cases—contributed to his growing antipathy to slavery. In any event, Lincoln tried to counter the suit on the grounds that Matson had brought his slaves into Illinois temporarily and therefore retained ownership rights. But ever since the Aves case of 1834, northern courts had been inclined to reject the “sojourn” defense. The Illinois judge proved to be no exception. He ruled against the slave owner in a case that would be forgotten by now except for the fact that Abraham Lincoln was the losing counsel.

In 1848, nine slaves escaped into Iowa from their owner in Missouri, who put up a reward for their recapture. Pursuing both the slaves and the reward, two white men crossed the state line and found the fugitives in hiding. Before they could take them back, a crowd intervened and hauled the slave hunters before a local justice of the peace who dismissed their claim on the grounds that without a document signed by the slave owner, they had failed to meet the requirements of the 1793 fugitive slave law. Undeterred, the slave catchers returned with reinforcements and went on a search from house to house, at one of which they focused their attention on a ladder leading up to a loft. Here is what the owner of the house is reputed to have said, with discouraging effect:

You may go up if you wish, gentlemen. There are three negroes hidden away in that loft. But mind you, it is a risky business to make an attempt to carry out the search. The first man who touches a rung of that ladder is in danger of his life. I am armed, gentlemen, with enough of these little instruments [bullets] to make just thirteen holes in your flesh.

In the end, none of the runaways were returned to Missouri. Their aggrieved owner successfully sued six Iowans for financial damages equivalent to their market value.

The upset caused by the Florida, Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa cases, among many others, never rose to the level of uproar. But in 1848 an incident took place with much larger reverberations because of its scale and location. That spring, the nation’s capital was a scene of celebration. The White House was festooned with flags and bunting; marching bands and citizens formed spontaneous parades converging on Lafayette Square, where speakers cheered the recent expulsion of King Louis-Philippe from France and the establishment of the Second French Republic. Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi spoke of universal human brotherhood, rejoicing that “the age of tyrants and of slavery” was drawing to a close and would soon be followed by the “universal emancipation of man from the fetters of civic oppression.”

The grotesque irony of these remarks was not lost on everyone in the crowd. Washington had been created in 1791 by the cession of land from two slave states (Virginia and Maryland), and slavery continued to thrive in the city despite all the talk of liberty and the rights of man. It was home as well to a substantial population of free blacks, some of whom attended the celebrations that day. Washington’s black population also included fugitives whose siblings, parents, and children remained enslaved in neighboring states and who feared for their own safety in a town that was prime hunting ground for slave catchers. A few weeks earlier, the president of the Philadelphia Anti-slavery Society had been informed by a “gentleman of Washington” of “two or three slave cases there of great distress—females who for months have been concealed by humane families to prevent them being sold”—and told “that it was extremely desirous that they should soon be got off” to safety in the North. In the intervening weeks, the “two or three” cases ballooned to several dozen, and on April 15, 1848, more than seventy slaves, after preconcerted planning with the help of free blacks and white abolitionists, made their way through the night to the schooner Pearl, docked on the Potomac under the command of Daniel Drayton.

Drayton, who was badly in need of money, was somewhere between a moralist and an opportunist. A few weeks earlier, while in Philadelphia, he had been approached by a stranger with an offer to pay him to smuggle a group of slaves out of Washington. The plan was to sail the Pearl downriver into the Chesapeake Bay and then turn toward some northern port. On Sunday morning, a good number of Washington’s slave owners were shocked to find their slaves gone. “Breakfasts were not ready, babies were not dressed, horses and chickens were going hungry; nobody was performing the morning tasks expected of urban slaves.”

The runaways did not get far. Slowed by unfavorable tide and wind, the Pearl was forced to drop anchor about 150 miles out of Washington, where, news of the escape having spread, it was boarded by an armed party that had followed by steamer. The fugitives were seized and the ship towed back to Washington, where an angry pro-slavery mob waited. The crowd warmed up by hurling stones at the offices of the antislavery newspaper the National Era. After the white crew and black passengers arrived in port under guard by the men who had seized the ship, they were marched through the streets to shouts and screams for a mass lynching. Drayton and two white accomplices were eventually convicted and imprisoned, despite the best efforts of their defense attorney, Horace Mann, until President Fillmore pardoned them in 1852.

In a half-organized attempt to extract information about how and by whom the plot had been hatched, slaves as well as free blacks were assaulted and beaten throughout the city. When Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire proposed that authorities within the District of Columbia be held liable for property damage due to “any riotous or tumultuous assemblage of people,” Senator Henry Foote invited Hale to visit Mississippi, where he would soon “grace one of the tallest trees of the forest, with a rope around his neck.”

Some fifty of the slaves who had attempted to flee were taken off by train to the Baltimore auction house operated by that ever-resourceful slave dealer Hope Slatter, who was eager to groom them for sale. Slatter, whom William Lloyd Garrison described as a “double-distilled devil,” had rushed to Washington as soon as he got wind of the Pearl affair to see what money could be made. Just as he had hoped, some Washington slave owners were in a mood to dispose of their disloyal slaves, and so Slatter was soon seen at the train depot with a trove of human loot. He was assisted by men armed with canes who prodded the captives to get aboard while fending off relatives hoping to give them a last embrace.

7.

The bold but failed escape down the Potomac and the ensuing pro-slavery riot in Washington seemed the capstone events of a decade during which the nation moved closer and closer to a decisive confrontation with itself. Then, in the spring of 1849, there occurred perhaps the most spectacular slave escape yet. On March 23, Henry Brown, an enslaved Virginia tobacco worker, had himself shipped from Richmond to the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-slavery Society in Philadelphia in a twelve-cubic-foot crate labeled “dry goods,” from which he emerged after twenty-six hours of confinement.

Henry “Box” Brown became an instant celebrity. He toured New England as a speaker and singer specializing in hymns of thanksgiving, his story was published as a book ghostwritten by the abolitionist Charles Stearns, and he was featured in a painted panorama depicting slavery scenes that opened to public view in several northern cities.*

By the time President Zachary Taylor delivered his annual message to Congress on December 4, 1849, all these fugitive slave incidents, which in isolation might have flared out, had combined to take the territorial crisis to the verge of combustion. Earlier that fall, at what pro-slavery southerners considered a rogue convention, Californians wanting to skip the territorial stage during which Congress would have authority to determine the status of slavery had petitioned for immediate entry into the Union as a free state. Word was out that the president would welcome the same request from New Mexico. The discovery of gold in California was luring scores of thousands of migrants from all over the country, and although some in California objected to slavery on moral grounds, much of the opposition came from whites wary of competition from black slaves for mining jobs. Whites were fearful that once slave-owning gold prospectors had found—or failed to find—the treasure they were looking for, they would simply abandon their slaves to beg and steal on the streets. For many immigrants to California—as for many whites who opposed slavery in the established states of the East and the old Northwest—there was no difference between wanting to keep slaves out of their state and wanting to keep out blacks.

The “unboxing” of Henry “Box” Brown at Philadelphia

Amid all the contention, Taylor sounded like a well-meaning uncle who walks in on a family quarrel and tries to calm everyone with genial chatter. He counseled patience while the new territories sorted out their preferences. He promised that “all causes of uneasiness may be avoided, and confidence and kind feeling preserved. With the view of maintaining the harmony and tranquillity so dear to all, we should abstain from the introduction of those exciting topics of a sectional character which have hitherto produced painful apprehensions in the public mind.”

But sectional rancor had long passed the point where it could be dispelled by this kind of “now, now, children” scolding. The president had alienated southern supporters by, among other things, relying for advice on the antislavery senator from New York William Seward, who supported personal liberty laws guaranteeing jury trials to accused fugitives and requiring district attorneys to provide them with legal counsel at public expense. Some fellow southerners considered Taylor, in his unwillingness to confront “disquieting issues, such as fugitive slaves,” a traitor to the South.

The day after the president’s message to Congress, Alexander Stephens wrote to his brother that “the feeling among the Southern members for a dissolution of the Union” was stronger than ever. Within the week, Calhoun noted that more and more southern members of Congress “avow themselves disunionists,” and according to Calhoun’s South Carolina colleague James Hammond, “The value of the Union is now calculated hourly in every corner of the South.” Richard Crallé, a Virginia confidant of Calhoun’s, confirmed that “many men here speak openly in favor of dissolution; for the course of the northern States has goaded them on to this.”

All semblance of order in Congress was breaking down. Free-soil independents in the House stalled the election of a Speaker by demanding adoption of the Wilmot Proviso as the price of their votes. After multiple ballots failed to produce a majority for any candidate, Representative Richard Meade of Virginia predicted that if a bargain were reached that included the Wilmot Proviso, whoever was elected would be the last Speaker of the House because Congress would never meet again. When the sergeant at arms tried to restore order, he was mocked and hissed. Between December 1849 and March 1850, meetings were called in South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, and Virginia to prepare responses to northern “aggression.” To consider next steps, a gathering of delegates from all across the South was planned for the spring in Nashville.

Meanwhile, talk of secession was spreading north. New Hampshire’s senator John P. Hale declared that “if this Union . . . has no other cement than the blood of human slavery, let it perish.” Later that year, the intensity of secessionist sentiment in both North and South disturbed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow so much that he tried to tamp it down with a poem, “The Building of the Ship,” about a majestic sailing vessel named Union. Lest anyone miss the point, he built his ship out of “Cedar of Maine and Georgia pine”:

Thou too, sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O UNION, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears,

With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

. . .

In spite of rock and tempest’s roar,

In spite of false lights on the shore,

Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!

Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,

Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,

Our faith triumphant o’er our fears,

Are all with thee,—are all with thee!

The poet’s reward, despite his well-known antislavery convictions, was to be attacked for toadying to the slave drivers of the South. A storm of abolitionist contempt broke over him for having “prostituted his fine genius in praise of that which is crushing the Slave population to the earth,” namely, the “Union . . . formed in utter derogation of all the principles of justice, humanity and righteousness—solely by the immolation of one-sixth portion of the population on the altar of Slavery—and through the most guilty compromises.” At a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society, Garrison called yet again, but this time with some prospect of success, for “IMMEDIATE DISSOLUTION OF THE AMERICAN UNION—a Union based on the prostrate bodies of three millions of the people, and cemented with their blood.” Its “overthrow,” he proclaimed, “would inevitably burst asunder the chain of every bondman.” How exactly disunion would break the chains of slavery he did not say.

Orations, editorials, pamphlets, poems, even sermons, sank to a level of personal invective unmatched before or since. It became standard practice for politicians to call each other devils and whores. With dripping irony, the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society praised the “Cotton Whig” Robert C. Winthrop—a Boston blue blood allied with local banks involved in financing the slave-dependent textile industry—for selling himself to the Slave Power and flaunting his “wages insolently and without shame” like a streetwalker flashing her baubles. By comparison with antebellum politics, our politics, even in the age of Trump, are a model of decorum.

On December 13, 1849, Representative Robert Toombs of Georgia, who had a reputation for moderation, issued a warning from the floor of the House:

I do not hesitate to avow before this House and the Country, and in the presence of the living God, that if, by your legislation, you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people, and to abolish slavery in this District, thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half the states of this Confederacy, I am for disunion.

Two months later, Democratic senator Lewis Cass of Michigan made the rueful—and prophetic—observation that “we talk flippantly of breaking up this Union as we talk about dividing a township.”