34 34INCENDIARY TRACTS AND PAPERS.—The Mail brought by the Steam Packet Columbia, arrived this morning, has come not merely laden, but literally overburthened, with the Newspaper called “The Emancipator” and two Tracts entitled “The Anti-Slavery Record,” and “The Slave’s Friend,” destined for circulation all over the Southern and Western Country…. If the General Post Office is not at liberty to act in this matter, it is impossible to answer for the security of the Mail in this part of the country, which contains such poisonous and inflammatory matter.
EVEN TO SPEAK OF slavery, much less to criticize it, was likely to “excite the affections” of Southern congressmen.
The South erected an informational firewall so that its alternate reality could not be disturbed. The censorship of mail in the South was general; ideologically suspect literature was routinely confiscated. People in the South could rely only on Southern sources to tell them of the supposed horrors that the abolitionists were planning for them.
District attorney Francis Scott Key ran Benjamin Lundy out of Washington City in 1833 for having printed an article in the Genius of Universal Emancipation that said, “There is neither mercy nor justice for colored people in this district [of Columbia].” More than half the black people in Washington were free, and Key, one of the most prominent deportationists, was still district attorney in Washington two years later, in August 1835, when a white mob ran riot for two nights and destroyed black schools, churches, and homes.
A sensational pamphlet that described a plan for a Christmas Day slave uprising throughout the South created a panic in central Mississippi during the hot summer of 1835. It was widely believed that a criminal named John Murrell had a huge gang and planned to incite a massive slave rebellion to facilitate plundering the towns. Murrell, a murderous highwayman and notorious kidnapper of slaves, was serving ten years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary at the time for “negro-stealing,” but that didn’t stop the rumors. “Many Mississippians were led to believe that the state was indeed threatened with the fate of Santo Domingo,” writes Edwin Arthur Miles.1 In fact, there was no uprising, and no white people were killed by black people, but respected citizens formed extralegal vigilante groups that extracted confessions and lynched a dozen white men, five of them gamblers, and an unknown number of black people.2 Similar groups hunted gamblers and other transients in towns and settlements up the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers.
Eighteen thirty-five was the summer of abolition propaganda, when a mail campaign by the American Anti-Slavery Society sent tens of thousands of Garrison-published pamphlets down south via the postal system. “They have raised funds to support and circulate inflammatory newspapers and pamphlets gratuitously,” wrote John Quincy Adams, “and they send multitudes of them into the southern country in the midst of swarms of slaves, which is causing great excitement and fermentation in all parts of the Union.”3
Many Southern newspapers carried alarmed reports of the arrival of sheaves of abolitionist literature at the local post office. Charleston postmaster Alfred Huger wrote to his counterpart in the New York post office that
the most respectable men of all parties gather’d about our doors and windows, and in a little time I was formally summoned to give up the “incendiary publications” which were known to be in my possession, and at the same [time] told with very little ceremony, that they would be taken from me, if I did not … I could only resolve that when the mail became the object of attack, I would make it the object of defence; but seeing plainly the excitement and exasperation which were every Moment increasing, I came to the determination to Separate the obnoxious papers, from the rest of the Mail, not doubting that otherwise, the whole might be destroy’d between the Office and the Rail-Road.4
Postmaster and key Jackson adviser Amos Kendall approved. In a letter to Huger that was published in various newspapers, he wrote, “We owe an obligation to the laws, but a higher one to the communities in which we live, and if the former be perverted to destroy the latter, it is patriotism to disregard them.”5
Francis Scott Key would not be outdone in rooting out terrorism. “Are you willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country; to permit it to be taken from you, and occupied by the Abolitionist, according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate with the Negro?” he shouted in 1836.6 It was part of his sensational prosecution of the young doctor Reuben Crandall for having possessed a trunkful of copies of The Liberator and The Anti-Slavery Reporter in his home in Georgetown. Key kept Crandall in jail for months, and though Crandall was found not guilty, he contracted tuberculosis in prison and died two years later. Key remained district attorney until the Whigs moved into the White House in 1841, using his position to suppress abolitionism wherever he found it.
Nor was the hostility only in slavery territory. In Boston, William Lloyd Garrison was nearly lynched after being captured by a mob that came to attack a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. Abolitionist meetings were broken up by mobs in New York, where there was much Southern sympathy.
Meanwhile, traders continued trafficking young African Americans southward. On his first trip South in 1835, William Henry Seward saw a disturbing sight in Virginia, as summarized by his brother and biographer, Fredrick W. Seward:
A cloud of dust was seen slowly coming down the road, from which proceeded a confused noise of moaning, weeping, and shouting. Presently reaching the gate of the stable-yard, it disclosed itself. Ten naked little boys, between six and twelve years old, tied together, two and two, by their wrists, were all fastened to a long rope, and followed by a tall, gaunt white man, who, with his long lash, whipped up the sad and weary little procession, drove it to the horse-trough to drink, and thence to a shed, where they lay down on the ground and sobbed and moaned themselves to sleep. These were children gathered up at different plantations by the “trader,” and were to be driven down to Richmond to be sold at auction, and taken South.7
In New Hampshire, the young Jacksonian Franklin Pierce, a protégé of Levi Woodbury, was appalled at the formation of an Anti-Slavery Society in his home state in 1835. He wrote to a friend, “One thing must be perfectly apparent to every intelligent man. This abolition movement must be crushed or there is an end to the Union.”8
James Madison died in 1835, leaving the legal ownership of his slaves to his wife Dolley. His writings bear witness that he had repeatedly agonized about the wrongness of slavery, though not as much as his slaves must have agonized about it. Madison did not leave Dolley in good financial condition, and the Panic of 1837 exacerbated her problems. It was a typical Southern widow’s situation: Dolley Madison’s slaves were her nest egg, and despite language in Madison’s will forbidding her to sell them without their consent, she sold them off to pay her ne’er-do-well son’s debts. Montpelier itself was sold to a Richmond merchant in 1844.
Along with the explosion of abolitionist propaganda in the 1830s came a new kind of argument, one championed by an emerging generation of free black abolitionists, that focused on the degradation forced on the enslaved. Frederick Douglass expressed it in his Fourth of July speech of 1852 in Rochester, New York: “The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced.”9
Douglass was so radical that he called for full political rights for women. A nascent American women’s-rights movement drew energy from women’s activity in the antislavery movement, their largest participation in American politics up to that time. Often denied membership in men’s political organizations, and without the right to vote, they formed “ladies’” political clubs, collecting signatures for the petitions that John Quincy Adams lay on the table by the hundreds in the House of Representatives.
The coffles marching through the nation’s capital became the number-one target of the antislavery movement. The District of Columbia was Congress’s responsibility, so grassroots organizations—local clubs—flooded both houses of Congress with petitions to close the slave trade in the federal capital. The term “slave-breeding” became a part of the antislavery polemic, the interstate slave trade the visible symbol of slavery.
In response to John Quincy Adams’s continued presentation of abolition petitions, Speaker of the House James K. Polk in 1836 cut him off with the “gag rule” requiring that nothing relating to the subject of slavery could be introduced or discussed. The gag rule, which was reinstated every year with ever more restrictive language until 1844, became a cause célèbre for the anti-slavery movement. Adams, outraged, focused on breaking it, exposing himself to censure for receiving and submitting petitions. The more petitions he laid on the table, the more came in. By the 1837–38 term, there were 130,200 petitions calling for the end of slavery in the District of Columbia. Others called for abolition nationally, for abolishing the interstate slave trade, for lifting the gag rule, against the annexation of Texas, against dueling, and, during the winter of 1838–39, more than two hundred petitions for the recognition of Haiti, which was a busy trading partner of US merchants while officially remaining a pariah country.10
The arrival of master-race Jacksonian Democracy, the eruption of abolitionism as a movement, and the radicalization of the nullification movement combined to make a new, unapologetic attitude toward slavery that was felt especially along the southwestern frontier. In Mississippi, which had grown from twenty-six counties in 1832 to fifty-five in 1836 as former Choctaw and Chickasaw lands became occupied, Seargent S. Prentiss, newly elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1836, introduced a resolution that the people of the state “look upon the institution of slavery, as it exists among them, not as a curse, but as a blessing, as the legitimate condition of the African race … and that they hope to transmit this institution to their posterity, as the best part of their inheritance … we will allow no present change, or hope of future alteration in this matter.”11
In the decade between 1830 and 1840, as the plantation system exploded into the newly available lands, Mississippi’s free population increased by a factor of 2.54 to 180,440 (free people of color were only 1,366 of them), but the enslaved population almost tripled, to 195,211.12 Mississippi now had a black majority.
In Mississippi, as in Carolina, there was no doubt, at least among the slaveholders: God himself was pro-slavery.
“I am a nullifier!” shouted South Carolina’s Robert Barnwell Rhett in 1837, in his first major speech as a congressman.
Having unsurprisingly outed himself as a Calhounian with that declaration, Rhett’s speech pivoted into another kind of discourse as he unwound into over-the-top hyperbole. Rhett, who had no military experience, romanticized war and even annihilation in the service of the glorious cause of state sovereignty over the federal government, which in the case of South Carolina was to say, in the service of slavery. As he extolled martyrdom, which he had no intention of personally experiencing, he gave the House its sharpest taste yet of the belligerent, self-apotheosizing oratory of the new generation.
After shouting chains of rhetorical questions, Rhett spoke defiantly of the resistance that, he insisted, would have met Jackson had Jackson invaded South Carolina during the nullification crisis:
Had South Carolina been invaded, upon the first gleam of the bayonet along our mountain passes, he would have seen and known what the chivalry of the South really was, not in bloodless tropes and metaphors, but in the stern realities of the tented field. Not only Carolinians, but thousands of volunteers from the whole South, whose names are upon the file, would have met you in that fierce contest [etc. etc.] … We knew the mighty inheritance for which we were to contend—that soil over which, for two centuries, we had been the lords; and those altars at which our fathers knelt and we had received our brides. We won it by the sword, and we were prepared to keep it by the sword.
Rhett had taken his political stage name just before running for office. Following a fashion in South Carolina to rename one’s self after one’s most illustrious ancestors, Robert Barnwell Smith and all his brothers changed their common laborer’s last name to the more romantic-sounding Rhett. It was a Gaelic-style spelling of the name of a matrilineal ancestor, a Dutchman named Raedt, whose claim to fame was having captured Stede Bonnet, Charleston’s only pirate of note.13
Margaret Mitchell took two of the Lowcountry’s best-known pro-slavery political names for her fictional character of Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, but Robert Barnwell Rhett was no Clark Gable. Balding on top by his thirties, he tried to disguise it with a comb-over, his red face framed by a hightop starched collar. There is little favorable commentary about him. He was ambitious, arrogant, belligerent, and an implacable foe with a martyr complex who attacked no one as ferociously as those who almost agreed with him. His biographer William C. Davis speculates that there might have been favorable commentary about him in documents that were destroyed when Charleston fell, and concedes that “it is something of a struggle to present a balanced portrait of the man, especially since out of his own mouth he so often offends.”14 Rhett was self-righteous, utterly convinced of the rightness of slavery, and careless with the truth. To that we could add, again quoting Davis, “the inability to follow others and compulsion to enforce his own will, his unwillingness or inability to countenance any ideas but his own, and his constant scheming.”15 He was aggressively religious, having had a kind of born-again experience, while remaining within the Episcopal fold.
Rhett’s view of history was decidedly odd and self-serving, believing as he did that Charles Pinckney, and not Madison, was the real father of the Constitution. One might be forgiven for thinking Rhett barking mad, but that is an insufficient explanation for the phenomenon he presented. He was arguably the single most influential individual in pushing the South to secession; he referred to himself as a “lucifer,” a matchstick that lit the blaze.16 Rhett had been a force in the nullification movement, and played an active if complicated role in Calhoun’s increasing radicalization. Under his former name of Robert Barnwell Smith, he had for years been pushing Calhoun to the right from his position in the South Carolina General Assembly, a powerful body that chose the state’s governor, senators, and representatives.
Rhett was from Beaufort, the wealthy town by the site of the former Huguenot settlement of Charlesfort and the Spanish Santa Elena, in the heart of the region that produced long-staple, or Sea Island, cotton. At Beaufort College in South Carolina the aristocratic young planters flatly rejected the notion of the Age of Reason, and believed fully in the natural right of the oligarchy.17 Beaufort was Ground Zero of secessionism; the “secession house” in that town, owned in the 1850s by brother Edmund Rhett, was a central meeting place for the secession apostles who became known as the Fire-Eaters.
By the time Rhett arrived in Congress, he had not merely declared (in 1829), that “I am a Disunionist! I am a Traitor!” In the wake of the Force Act, he proposed what might lie beyond secession: a confederacy. He was the prophet of an independent slave nation, commanded from South Carolina. In what was perhaps a veiled dig at the most famous Jacksonian poet, Rhett declaimed at the States Rights and Free Trade Party convention of 1833 that “The star-spangled banner no longer waves in triumph and glory for me. Sir, if a Confederacy of the Southern States could now be obtained, should we not deem it a happy termination—happy beyond expectation, of our long struggle for our rights against oppression?”18
Rhett and his clan built the most powerful political clique in Charleston. Any serious politician needed a newspaper, and Rhett’s brother-in-law John A. Stuart owned the Charleston Mercury, the most radical paper in the South. The family also came to control the Columbia South Carolinian in the state’s capital. There were Rhett brothers in the state legislature, and they had control of the Bank of South Carolina.
Ironically, Rhett was a distant cousin of John Quincy Adams. When they were much younger, the two had met in private life. Describing Rhett’s congressional speech, Adams drily noted his recent name change: “Robert Barnwell Rhett (Smith heretofore) moved a long amendment, and literally howled a nullification speech. I say howled, for his enunciation was so rapid, inarticulate, and vociferous that his head hung back as he spoke, with his face upward, like that of a howling dog.”19
In an 1838 speech before Congress, Rhett explained his economic theory of the superiority of slavery: according to him, slaves were better off than free laborers, because they were both capital and labor, and self-interest would mandate their better treatment. In the midst of his lengthy lecture in political economy, he said, “there is but one state of society in the world, where labor and capital are identical in interest; and that is where domestic slavery exists … Labor, there, is capital, and capital is labor.”20
According to Rhett, that was what South Carolina was fighting for, with God’s full approval: for labor to be capital.
Of course, that meant there had to be a capital market. Rhett owned over a hundred slaves, whom he had bought pursuant to a promise not to sell them off. But his obsession was political power, and like many other slaveowning politicians, he was inattentive to his business as a planter, so he sold thirty-six people away to traders to cover his losses.
SALE OF SLAVES. — I will sell at public auction, on Monday, the 23d October, at 4 o’clock P.M. at the auction room of Edward Dyer, in Washington City, D.C. the following slaves, purchased by me upon the 22d of August last, from Rezin Orme, and who were warranted sound in bodies and in mind, to wit, Dorcas Allen, and her two surviving children, aged about seven and nine years, (the other two having been killed by said Dorcas in a fit of insanity, as found by the jury who lately acquitted her.)
Terms of sale cash, as said slaves will be sold on account of said Rezin Orme, who refuses to retake the same and repay the purchase money, and who is notified to attend said sale, and if he thinks proper to bid for them, or retake them, as he prefers, upon refunding the money paid, and all expenses incurred under the warranty given by him.
JAMES BIRCH
EDWARD DYER,
Auctioneer.
Four years before John Quincy Adams delivered the winning argument in the well-known Amistad case, he went up against District of Columbia slave trader James Birch, with less successful results. A diary entry of October 23, 1837, notes that:
There was in the National Intelligencer this morning an advertisement signed James H. Birch, and Edward Dyer, auctioneer, headed “Sale of Slaves”—a sale at public auction, at four o’clock this afternoon, of Dorcas Allen and her two surviving children, aged about seven and nine years (the other two having been killed by said Dorcas in a fit of insanity, as found by the jury who lately acquitted her). The advertisement further says that the said slaves were purchased by Birch, on the 22d of August last …
I asked Mr. Frye what this advertisement meant. He seemed not to like to speak of it, but said the woman had been sold with her children, to be sent to the South and separated from her husband; that she had killed two of her children, by cutting their throats, and cut her own to kill herself, but in that had failed; that she had been tried at Alexandria for the murder of her children, and acquitted on the ground of insanity; and that this sale now was by the purchaser at the expense of the seller, upon the warranty that she was sound in body and mind.21
Adams visited the slave jail and spoke to Dyer, letting the traders know someone in Congress was watching:
I learnt from Dyer that the woman had been the slave of a white woman who had married a man named Davis, who lived at Georgetown and was a clerk in the War Department; that this white woman had died, and had before her death promised Dorcas her freedom; that on her death-bed she had made her husband (Davis) promise her that he would emancipate Dorcas; that he did actually liberate her, but gave her no papers; that she lived twelve or fifteen years at large, married, and had four children; that in the mean time Davis married a second wife [Maria], and afterwards died, without granting to Dorcas her papers of freedom; that Davis’s widow [Maria] married a man by the name of Rezin Orme, and that he sold Dorcas and her four children, on the 22d of August last, for seven hundred dollars, to Birch, who is an agent for the negro slave-traders at Alexandria; that Dorcas and her four children were on the same day removed to one of the slave-prisons in Alexandria; that in the night of that day she killed the two youngest of her children—one, a boy four years of age, and the other, a girl under twelve months; that she attempted to kill the other two, but was prevented—their screaming having roused some person in the house, who went into the cell where she was confined and took her surviving children from her; that she was tried at Alexandria for the murder of her two children, and was acquitted by the jury on the ground of insanity.
Adams discussed the case with district attorney Francis Scott Key, who “appeared to interest himself,” Adams thought, in the plight of Allen’s desperate free black husband, and proposed a fund to purchase her freedom, to which Adams contributed fifty dollars. But, Adams wrote dejectedly on November 2, “if their freedom from Birch’s sale should be purchased, they might still be reclaimed by Davis’s creditors.”22 Eight days later, he wrote: “Upon conversing with [Mr. Key], I found he would give no assurance that Dorcas Allen and her children will be free if they should be purchased from Birch. By the law of the place, they are assets of the estate of Gideon Davis, upon which there never has been any administration; neither his widow nor her second husband … had any right to sell them.”23
What ultimately happened is left a cliff-hanger in Adams’s diary, but Key doesn’t seem to have come through for Dorcas Allen. By November 13, she was with her husband, and her two children were back in Birch’s jail. “Mr. Key told me,” Adams wrote, “that if upon a writ of habeas corpus Birch’s title should be disproved, still they were slaves; they could not be discharged.”24
In his diary, Adams routinely referred to his Southern congressional opponents as “the slavers” and to their Northern supporters as “the serviles.” On December 22, 1837, he recounted “banter” with Ratliff Boon of Indiana, who, recounts Adams, “said that if the question ever came to the issue of war, the Southern people would march into New England and conquer it. I said I had no doubt they would if they could, and that it was what they were now struggling for with all their might.”25
The land-value bubble burst, but it was worse than that.
In a feat of election-year politicking, Congress passed, and Jackson signed, the Whig-sponsored Deposit Act, which directed that most of the federal government’s surplus achieved from approximately $35 million in land sales be distributed beginning in January 1837 to the states in proportion to their number of electoral votes, a formula proposed by Calhoun.
Unfortunately for Mississippi, the state was only entitled to receive about a half million dollars in the distribution, but its deposit banks had ten million dollars’ worth of revenues from land sales in the region and therefore were going to have to send away 95 percent of their capital.
Meanwhile, there was an explosion of commercial banking in which new institutions were chartered as if broadcasting seed, with no oversight. Florida banking operations of that time were satirized years later by Ellen Call Long, the daughter of Florida’s governor during that era (former Jackson aide Richard K. Call, who had prosecuted the Seminole War):
You want to know how it operates? Well, you see a man can mortgage his land or negroes; draw from the bank two-thirds (in money) of their value, which will be re-invested in more land and more negroes. One or two crops of cotton will redeem all obligation to the bank; so you see that it is the best thing afloat; a man can just go to sleep, and wake up rich.26
The riches obtained from this kind of maneuver, needless to say, were not in the form of gold pieces, but “negroes,” who remained as capital in the planter’s possession when the cotton was sold and who could always be used to collateralize a loan.
After Jackson promoted the obliging Roger B. Taney to chief justice of the Supreme Court, he named Secretary of the Navy Levi Woodbury to be his fourth secretary of the treasury. As speculators bought public land with increasingly questionable paper, Woodbury on July 11, 1836, issued the document that snapped the overextended banking system: the Specie Circular. Taking effect August 15, it announced an abrupt shift to hard money on the part of the government, which would henceforth require payment for public lands in specie. The plan, apparently, was to remove all notes from circulation under $20 (a little more than $500 in 2014 dollars) and replace them with coins, with paper money being reserved for larger transactions. To make these coins a series of new mints was built, including the US Mint in New Orleans, one of the city’s enduring landmarks.
This move created a demand for coin that sucked specie reserves out of eastern banks. As paper money spiraled toward worthless and banks suspended specie payments, silver and gold pieces were physically repositioned among the states. Biddle wrote in an unsigned piece in 1839 that “the monetary affairs of the whole country were convulsed—millions upon millions of coin were in transitu in every direction, and consequently withdrawn from useful employment. Specie was going up and down the same river, to and from the South and North and the East and West at the same time; millions were withdrawn from their usual and natural channels, and forced against the current of trade.”27
The term that was used to describe the westward movement of specie was the same used for the westward movement of Native Americans: removal. The Specie Circular was not the only thing that brought down the American economy, but it was Jackson’s crowning achievement to that end.
As Jackson was preparing to leave office, still riding a national wave of adulation, he warned, according to his biographer Parton, that a “paper money system and its natural associates, monopoly and exclusive privileges, have already struck their roots deep in the soil, and it will require all your efforts to check its further growth and to eradicate the evil.”28
Paper money was … evil. No moral relativism: evil. Only gold and silver were good.
Fast-growing New Orleans had broken into three pieces. The French speakers (in the downtown “French Quarter”) and the uptown Anglophone businessmen had long been at loggerheads, physically separated by Canal Street, which was a filthy, muddy, no-man’s-land, or, as they say in New Orleans, “neutral ground.”
Though immigrants generally did not come to the South, they did come to New Orleans, the second largest destination for them after New York. They encountered a vicious nativist movement; one New Orleans newspaper was called the True American.
The uptown Anglo-Americans in fast-growing New Orleans in effect seceded from the city (though historians have generally refrained from using that term in speaking about it) on March 8, 1836, separating themselves off from their French-speaking counterparts, whom they saw as receiving an excessive share of the public purse. The city split into three municipalities, each in charge of its own revenues.
The First Municipality, French-speaking and Catholic, was the old town below Canal Street (the French Quarter). The Second, English-speaking and Protestant, was the Faubourg St. Mary, uptown above Canal Street (today’s Central Business District). The Third, French-speaking and Catholic (and unpaved and unlighted), was the Faubourg Marigny, downriver from the First below Esplanade. These municipalities, which were more or less antagonistic, each had their own police force, complete with hostilities between the respective departments, whose primary duty was slave patrol. Each municipality built its own levees and administered its own infrastructure.
The Anglo-Americans of the Second Municipality intended to corner railroad commerce. A proposed railroad, the New Orleans and Nashville, planned to link the major trade terminus of Tennessee with Carrollton, a suburb of New Orleans named for railroad hero Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who had died in 1832 at the age of ninety-five. “There is very little doubt,” hummed an 1835 editorial in the New Orleans Bee, “of the New Orleans and Nashville railroad being completed in 3 or 4 years.”29
The local spur line to Carrollton was built entirely within the Anglo-controlled part of town. In seceding from New Orleans, the Anglo-American Second Municipality made off with that new railroad link, which began operations on September 22, 1835. But the Nashville railroad was never built; the only part ever completed was the local link, from present-day Lee Circle to Carrollton. Though it never became a freight corridor connected to a mighty railroad, the link became instead the anchor of uptown New Orleans development. Carrying passengers (it even had a ladies’ car), it made the far-flung Carrollton Hotel a chic place for downtowners to repair to for supper and encouraged the development of the territory in between. The space between New Orleans and Carrollton filled in alongside the train, whose track became the extension of the former stub street of St. Charles. The rail line became public transport through what became known as the Garden District, and is today the main streetcar line that connects downtown with uptown. The New Orleans streetcar line was thus approximately tied with New York (the Long Island Rail Road) as the first in the US to connect city with suburb by rail.
But the failure to connect to the national rail network betokened the beginning of New Orleans’s long decline. Meanwhile, the breakup of the city left the English speakers without the year’s biggest fun. Mardi Gras was a French thing, done at that time in New Orleans more or less on the Parisian model. The pre-Lenten carnival season was celebrated with masked balls galore in the French Quarter, the masks being the main difference between carnival balls and the year-round schedule of dances.
The first organized Mardi Gras parade that we know of in New Orleans took place in 1837, less than a month before the inauguration in Washington of President Martin Van Buren, which was only six weeks before the New Orleans True American published its sensational reportage on the failure of Hermann, Briggs, and Co.
Headed by America’s most famous war hero, with Martin Van Buren, Amos Kendall, James K. Polk, Sam Houston, John Tyler, James Buchanan, and the young Franklin Pierce; Taney and Woodward on the Supreme Court; and Francis Scott Key as the capital’s district attorney, the Jackson dynasty was the most powerful political force the United States had seen.
Van Buren’s election was to be its consolidation. Matty Van, or the “little magician” (for his short stature and political cunning), the “red fox” (for his hair), “O.K.” (Old Kinderhook, for his New York home town), or the “wily Dutchman” of the “Albany Regency,” as one of Polk’s correspondents unflatteringly put it, was the first president born after independence, the first presidential candidate to campaign openly, and the first professional politician to become president.30
But the chickens came home to roost on his head. Six weeks after Van Buren was inaugurated on March 4, 1837, his one-term presidency was wracked by economic convulsions as banks began suspending specie payments.
The winds of global trade had shifted again. The British financiers most heavily exposed to American debtors were insolvent; the Bank of England, which had its own problems, constricted credit. The invention of the telegraph was still seven years away, and steamships did not yet ply the Atlantic: the Panic of 1837 was in part a crisis of slow-moving financial information.
The panic seems to have begun in New Orleans when the cotton factorage firm Hermann, Briggs, & Co. failed. Perhaps because its proprietor Louis Florian Hermann was a German Jew, the New Orleans True American printed a sensational story about it that traveled far and wide, spreading the worry. Then J. L. & S. Joseph & Co., a New York firm that was Hermann, Briggs’s creditor, failed too. Meanwhile, the price of cotton plunged in Liverpool to “a staggering fifty percent of what the cotton brokers had extended to the planters,” writes Jessica M. Lepler. There was not yet class solidarity among bankers, so the directors of New Orleans’s sixteen (!) banks did not take concerted action or even, apparently, talk to each other as the crisis accelerated. They all suspended specie payments in April, then the failure spread to New York on May 8.31
The 1840 census showed New Orleans as the nation’s third largest city, with 102,193 residents, effectively tied with Baltimore’s 102,313 for second place. New Orleans, the number-one port in the United States, was unlike the rest of the South in many ways. It was urban. It had a substantial business community and a local economy dominated by factors; a waterfront that shipped the world’s greatest quantities of cotton and much sugar; and, since the plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi required enormous amounts of credit, it had a large banking sector, heavily capitalized by captive human beings.
But though the port’s overall receipts continued to grow, the panic was the end of New Orleans’s peak period of national influence, and its share of the nation’s expanding commerce grew progressively smaller. In particular, New Orleans failed to get in on rail transport, the competition from which was cutting into the river trade more every year. The Mississippi River had formerly been the only way for a wide swath of the United States to get its goods to market. But as railroads slowly extended their reach—slowly, because laying a railroad was a big operation that required solid financing—the rivers would matter less. New Orleans continued growing, but it would never again be tied for second largest city in the nation.
New Orleans was, however, the largest slave market in the United States. At least half if not more of its sales, and probably most of its high-value deals, were conducted by private sale out of dealer showrooms. Some of the buildings are still there, though the spectacular main auction venues are long gone. Some dealers made slaves stand out on the sidewalk from nine to four, trying to entice buyers. The horrors of slave auctioning have been amply detailed elsewhere, and we will not describe these wrenching scenes here, citing as merely one example the testimony of the formerly enslaved Stephen Jordon, many years after he was sold in New Orleans:
I tell you, people were miserable in that old slave-pen. They used to make them open their mouths so that they could examine their teeth; and they used to strip them naked, from head to foot, to see whether they were perfectly sound. And this they did to women as well as men. I tell you, my dear child, it used to seem to me so brutal to see poor women treated in that way by brutal and heartless men. I declare, child, I can’t understand it, although I’ve been right in it. When they would put them naked that way they used to switch them on the legs to make them jump around so that buyers could see how supple they were.32
Dealers generally got better prices at private sale than at auction, but not necessarily. Auctions in New Orleans, typically conducted bilingually in French and English, were conducted to turn over large numbers of people as quickly as possible. It was a fast way to get rid of less desirable slaves or, on the other end of the profit scale, to maximize the value of a white-looking beauty or a first-rate cabinetmaker.
The New Orleans market sent large numbers of young men to the sugar plantations, which always wanted fresh victims, so the gender ratio of people sold in New Orleans skewed disproportionately toward males. But with so many wealthy people in the city, New Orleans also served the nation’s largest market for domestic servants and skilled artisans, and it was the number-one retail market for fancy girls, with either Natchez or the horse-racing and gambling center of Lexington, Kentucky, perhaps a distant second in that category.
With so much money flowing through town, it was a great moment for architecture, not all of which survives. The St. Louis Hotel, which ran the length of the block from Royal to Chartres on St. Louis Street, is long gone. Frederic Bancroft visited its abandoned shell in 1902 and wrote of the “blaze of light” from the dome that illuminated the floor where slaves were sold daily.33 With its front entrance on St. Louis Street, the British visitor J. S. Buckingham described it in 1839:
The entrance into the Exchange at the St. Louis, is through a handsome vestibule, or hall, of 127 feet by 40, which leads to the Rotunda. This is crowned by a beautiful and lofty dome, with a finely ornamented ceiling in the interior, and a variegated marble pavement…. in the Rotunda, pictures are exhibited, and auctions are held for every description of good. At the time of our visit, there were half a dozen auctioneers, each endeavouring to drown every voice but his own, and all straining their lungs and distorting their countenances in a hideous manner. One was selling pictures, and dwelling on their merits; another was disposing of ground-lots in embryo cities, and expatiating on their capacities; and another was disposing of some slaves.
These consisted of an unhappy negro family, who were all exposed to the hammer at the same time. Their good qualities were enumerated in English and in French, and their persons were carefully examined by intending purchasers, among whom they were ultimately disposed of, chiefly to Créole buyers; the husband at 750 dollars, the wife at 550, and the children at 220 each.
The middle of the Rotunda was filled with casks, boxes, bales, and crates; and the negroes exposed for sale were put to stand on these, to be the better seen by persons attending the sale. Often as I had witnessed this painful scene in the old times of the West Indies, and in several of the countries of the East, it had lost none of its pain by repetition; it appeared, indeed, more revolting here, in contrast with the republican institutions of America.34
The St. Louis was far from the only auction venue. Banks’ Arcade, an enormous building that ran from Gravier to Natchez Street on Magazine, hosted them. (A small part of Bank’s Arcade still stands, as do a number of now repurposed former slave dealer showrooms in New Orleans.) It was at Banks’ on October 15, 1835, that a meeting of the “friends of Texas” promised financial and military support to the Anglo-American provisional “government” in Texas, in blatant violation of US neutrality laws.35
Mexico after its independence in 1821 prohibited slavery, but the territory was only sparsely settled; hoping to populate it, the Mexican government invited in settlers from the United States, giving them land. But once the settlers moved in, they declared it theirs. Moses Austin, who had become one of the country’s major producers of lead, was a major promoter of the Texas colonization movement. With his eyes on Mexico’s lead mines, Austin had sworn allegiance to the Spanish crown in 1798. His son, the Virginia-born, Missouri-raised land speculator Stephen F. Austin, brought slavery to Texas and fought to keep it.
It was an article of faith throughout the South that American slavery must expand into Texas and beyond. There was no question that Texas would be an ultimate destination for young African Americans who were being born and raised all over the cotton kingdom. Stephen Austin wrote his sister Emily from New Orleans in August 1835, the summer of the Southern abolition panic: “It is very evident that Texas should be effectually, and fully, Americanized … Texas must be a slave country. It is no longer a matter of doubt. The interest of Louisiana requires that it should be. A population of fanatical abolitionists in Texas would have a very dangerous and pernicious influence on the overgrown slave population of [Louisiana].”36
Andrew Jackson had mentored Sam Houston, the Scotch-Irish-descended, Virginia-born, Tennessee-raised land speculator, politician, and military leader. Houston had served under Jackson in the Creek War, and had been the Jacksonian governor of Tennessee, before fleeing to Texas to escape a disastrous marriage. He was one of fifty-nine signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence on March 2, 1836, four days before the massacre at the Alamo. As a general in the Texas army, he was the hero of the decisive Battle of San Jacinto that took Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna prisoner. On October 22, Jackson’s protégé became the first president of the Republic of Texas.
There was much opposition in the North to annexing Texas, because it meant the expansion of US slavery. With Jackson’s anointed successor Van Buren fighting hard to be elected president, annexation was too politically controversial and would provoke a sectional controversy instead of strengthening the national party the Democrats had built. James Hamilton of South Carolina printed a report in the Telegraph, a Jacksonian organ that presented “the Texans as a people struggling for their liberty, and therefore entitled to our sympathy,” as John Quincy Adams disgustedly wrote in his diary. He continued: “The fact is directly the reverse—they are fighting for the establishment and perpetuation of slavery, and that is the cause of the South Carolinian sympathy with them.”37
But for all his involvement in the Texas project, Jackson didn’t annex the territory. Instead, one of his last acts as president was to recognize the independent Republic of Texas. Houston tendered an annexation offer, but John Quincy Adams stalled the annexation of Texas in Congress. Houston took it off the table in 1839, with the result that Texas and the United States dealt with each other for about ten years as independent nations.
Meanwhile, two real estate speculators from New York who intended to develop a town obtained permission to use Sam Houston’s name. Incorporated on June 5, 1837, the town of Houston—a city named for the sitting president—served as the capital of the Republic of Texas until the capital was moved to Austin in 1839. That year, the Texas Congress adopted the Lone Star banner, representing the territory’s readiness to go it alone, as the national flag. It subsequently became, and remains, the state flag of Texas.
It sounds impressive: the Mississippi and Alabama Railroad Company. More familiarly known as the Brandon Bank, it was chartered in Brandon, Mississippi, in 1836—supposedly to build a railroad, but it never even tried. In 1837, with most of the state’s plantation land already mortgaged, the Brandon Bank began making cash advances on cotton crops, paying $0.12 per expected pound. Unfortunately, by July 1838, the price for cotton was down to $0.083 a pound, and moreover, many farmers delivered no cotton to the bank at all. By the fall of that year, the bank’s money was circulating in Jackson at 30 to 40 percent off face value.38
The sell-off of the public lands continued; John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary in June 1838 that “the thirst of a tiger for blood is the fittest emblem of the rapacity with which the members [of Congress] of all the new States fly at the public lands. The constituents upon whom they depend are all settlers, or tame and careless spectators of the pillage. They are themselves enormous speculators and land-jobbers.”39 The nation’s economy seemed to recover in 1838, as banks warily resumed specie payments, but it didn’t last. The US government was broke, and couldn’t make the final payment on the redistribution of the long-gone surplus.
Three Mississippi bank commissioners traveled to Philadelphia, where they sold Nicholas Biddle $5 million in Mississippi bonds. Biddle sent the bonds on to London, where “the United States Banks’ London agency sold $2 million of them to European investors and transferred the remaining $3 million to London and Amsterdam bankers as collateral security.”40 They wound up in the hands of the Rothschilds, the Baring Brothers, and others who knew quite well that they were purchasing shares in slaves.41 James T. MacIntosh writes that “when the specie resulting from the sale of the bonds finally reached Mississippi, people celebrated in the belief that their financial woes were at an end.”42 Edwin Arthur Miles writes that the entire population “regarded those five millions as an especial Godsend … Wagon after wagon was seen conveying a portion of those five million in hard dollars to the vaults of the bank.”43 With that money in hand, loans were made supporting cotton production—which was to say, purchasing the bodies of young African Americans, trafficked from more settled regions of the country.
Several other states also indebted themselves wildly in the British and other capital markets. “In a very short period,” writes Alasdair Roberts, “American states had accumulated obligations roughly equal to the combined national debt of Russia, Prussia, and the Netherlands.”44 Then, prompted by a bad wheat harvest in England that made Britain a food importer, the price of cotton in Liverpool crashed again in April 1839. Prices of slaves, so fundamental to the Southern economy, took a precipitous tumble—the only major slide in the dollar value of slaves during the antebellum decades. As mortgages crashed and liquidation sales put thousands of enslaved laborers for sale in a depressed market, the interstate slave trade slowed down. In Mississippi, the Union Bank lasted less than two years from its creation before its charter was withdrawn by Governor Alexander G. McNutt on July 10, 1840. By 1841, both of the Mississippi state banks had suspended interest payments on their $7 million worth of bonds. Eight states defaulted on their bonds, plus the Territory of Florida. All but Mississippi and Florida eventually resumed payment on at least some of them, though Louisiana, Arkansas, and Michigan repudiated part of them.
The Republic of Texas, which had no extradition treaty with the United States, quickly became notorious as a haven for busted farmers escaping their debts—G.T.T., gone to Texas—and for deadbeats and crooks of all sorts. Texas had no money to speak of, but when Texans did have money—often meaning, when they could borrow it—they tended to spend it on slaves. Sam Houston wrote General William G. Harding of Nashville on July 17, 1841, trying to explain why he hadn’t paid back a $500 loan yet:
I have offered every sacrifice in property, but there is no money in Texas, but our depreciated notes. I have upward of twenty five thousand dollars due me, and some of it for years, and I cannot collect as much as will pay one fourth of my land Tax! In addition, two valuable negro boys for which I had paid in cash $2100 previous to my visit to Nashville, ran away last spring to Mexico. Thus you see I am in bad luck!45
The State of Mississippi’s answer was simple: rather than impose a tax to pay its obligations, it flat-out stiffed its creditors. Alleging legal technicalities, Governor McNutt proposed debt repudiation to the legislature on January 5, 1841. It was blatant theft, based on a bogus legalistic argument, and it became a divisive campaign issue in the subsequent state election. The pro-repudiation forces won, and passed a constitutional amendment that forbade repaying the bonds. Occasioning litigation that dragged on into the twentieth century, the default ruined the name of Mississippi in Europe, and even affected the ability of the US government to borrow there, although the federal government had a clean credit record.
Bill collectors prowled Mississippi. When England threatened to invade the state on behalf of its burned creditors, John Quincy Adams moved on March 2, 1843, that any state that found itself at war as a result of repudiating its debts “will cease thereby to be a State of this Union, and will have no right to aid in her defense from the United States, or any one of them.”46
When the Southern states seceded not twenty years later—repudiating debts in the process—British financiers were not eager to lend money.