A Disease in the Public Mind (15 page)

This opposition of the free blacks inflicted a serious wound on the ACS, but it would struggle on for decades, eventually founding Liberia and helping it become an independent nation. Native Africans did not welcome the Americans, and several times warfare broke out between the two groups. By 1830, fewer than 1,500 American blacks had chosen Liberia. Shocking numbers of the immigrants died of tropical diseases. But the ACS continued to receive strong support from clergymen, Quakers, and other idealists.

•      •      •

In 1819, Missouri applied for admission to the Union as a state that permitted slavery. Two other states with the same policy had already joined the growing Union: Mississippi and Alabama. They had been balanced by the admission of Illinois and Indiana, states without slavery, thanks to the Northwest Ordinance. Missouri would tip the balance in a proslavery direction, but no one thought this mattered at first. There were vast stretches of the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi waiting for settlement by Northerners. Leaders of the House of Representatives began preparing a routine enabling act, as they had done for the previous new states.

On February 13, 1819, while the act was being discussed, Congressman James Tallmadge of Poughkeepsie, New York, proposed two amendments. The first would bar the entrance of any more slaves into Missouri; the second would emancipate slave children born after the state joined the Union when they reached the age of twenty-five. Tallmadge based his reasoning on the Northwest Ordinance. Most of Missouri lay north of a line that extended west from the Ohio River.

A startling number of congressmen, many from New England, backed the proposal. Henry Clay and other Southerners attacked it as unconstitutional. The Northerners added injury to insult by winning a vote that passed the enabling act with Tallmadge's amendments. The Senate eliminated the amendments and sent the bill back to the House, which refused its approval. Congress adjourned with Missouri unadmitted, and the two sides prepared to renew their combat in the next session.

In December 1819, with the galleries packed, Congress reconvened, and it swiftly became evident that no minds had changed. A virulent debate exploded in the Senate. On the proslavery side was William Pinckney of Maryland, a quintessential southern gentleman who wore ruffled shirts and gloves, as if he wished to avoid dirtying his elegant hands with the opposition's arguments. He decried the idea that the federal government could interfere with slavery.

The leader of the antislavery battalion was Senator Rufus King of New York, a transplanted New Englander who condemned slavery as a loathsome violation of the Declaration of Independence's call for universal equality. “No human law, compact or compromise can establish or continue slavery,” King insisted. “Such a law was contrary to the law of nature, which is the law of God.”

The antislavery senators lost a roll call vote, but one of their group, Senator John Thomas from the new state of Illinois, submitted a resolution to bar slavery from all states north of 36 degrees 30 minutes north latitude—the line that ran west from the Ohio River. The amendment passed and the bill went to the House, where galleries were again packed and the debate made the Senate's clashes seem decorous. John Randolph spoke for four full days, repeatedly declaring slavery exempt from any and all federal regulation.

Sessions became all-night marathons. One exhausted congressman toppled to the floor, but his colleagues returned to their orating after he was carried out. Extremists on both sides took all-or-nothing positions. Finally, House Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky brokered a compromise, which admitted Missouri and approved the Thomas amendment, thanks to a new provision. Maine had separated from Massachusetts and was applying for admission as a free state. This restored the balance of slave and free states and mollified the antislavery Northerners.

President Monroe signed the bill, and everyone hoped sectional peace had been restored. But a few months later, Missouri presented Congress with its constitution. Obviously the work of canny lawyers, the charter forbade the Missouri legislature to interfere with slavery, apparently making bondage perpetual within the Show-Me state's borders. It also barred free
African Americans from emigrating there, and emancipated slaves were required to leave the state.

Outrage was the order of the day among the northern members of Congress, and another six weeks of virulent debate shook the walls of the capitol. Again Henry Clay brokered a compromise. A joint House-Senate committee agreed to admit Missouri if the state agreed “to respect the rights of all citizens of the United States.” The weary legislators did not give too much thought to what those words would mean in practice. Missouri was admitted and everyone went home to see if anything was left of the era of good feelings.
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•      •      •

Few followed this war of words with more intensity than the aging master of Monticello. From his mountaintop mansion, a distraught Thomas Jefferson saw the uproar as an impending disaster. “In the gloomiest moments of the Revolutionary War,” he wrote in 1820, “I never had any apprehensions equal to what I feel from this source.” He was especially disturbed to see New Englanders leading the antislavery forces in Congress. He accused them—including transplanted Yankees such as King and Senator Thomas of Illinois—of “taking advantage of the virtuous feelings of the people against slavery to effect a division of parties by a geographical line. They expect this will insure them . . . the majority they could never obtain on the principles of Federalism.”

Jefferson feared that the old conflict between Federalists and Republicans would be fanaticized by this sectionalism. “The coincidence of a marked principle, [both] moral and political . . . would never more be obliterated from the [public] mind . . . it would be recurring on every occasion until it would kindle such mutual and mortal hatred as to render secession preferable to eternal discord.” The triumph of the Republican Party in 1800—and the nation's near-miraculous victory in the War of 1812—had made him “among the most sanguine in believing that our union would be of long duration. I now doubt it very much.” For Jefferson the Missouri Compromise was “like a fire bell in the night, signaling the death knell of the Union.”

Jefferson was convinced that the antislavery men were politically motivated, but he admitted that some were no doubt honestly deluded by their moral detestation of slavery. As a Southerner who had publicly condemned the institution many times, Jefferson wondered why “they are wasting jeremiads [lamentations] on the miseries of the slave as if we were advocates of it.” Personally, he would willingly surrender all his “property” in slaves “if a scheme of emancipation and expatriation could be effected. . . . But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.”

The nightmare memory of Saint-Domingue's (now Haiti's) race war was obviously still haunting Jefferson. “Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?” he asked one of his favorite correspondents, ex-President John Adams. If the antislavery restrictionists were right, and Congress could regulate slavery in the new states, it could also declare all slaves free in current states. “In which case,” he told another correspondent, “all the whites south of the Potomac and the Ohio must evacuate their states, and most fortunate will be those who can do it first.”
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The more Jefferson thought about the Missouri debates, the more unhappy he became. Restricting the spread of slavery would not free a single human being. It was pseudo morality, a feel-good policy motivated more by hatred of southern whites than by concern for the slaves. He now thought it was far better to spread slavery over the widest possible geographical area. This would lighten the burden of future liberation “by bringing a greater number of shoulders under it.”

Here was irony: the original sponsor of the Northwest Ordinance was now repudiating the idea of barring slavery in new states. Jefferson probably changed his mind after a discussion with his right-hand man, James Madison. He was the one with the analytical mind, as he repeatedly displayed throughout his remarkable career. Madison was now convinced that “diffusion” was the best hope of future emancipation. Thus far, the states that had abolished slavery had a relative scarcity of blacks in their population.

The thinking of another Virginian, St. George Tucker, a professor of law at the College of William and Mary, strongly influenced both men. In the aftermath of the Haitian bloodbath, Tucker concluded that the “density” of
a slave population was intimately connected with the likelihood of insurrections. The numerous revolts in the West Indies, where the white-black imbalance frequently approached that of Saint-Domingue, was additional evidence supporting this conclusion.

Madison saw two routes to diffusion. One was the spread of slavery into new states; the other was an “external asylum for the colored race” beyond America's borders. For the moment, he was placing his hopes in the hands of the American Colonization Society. He recognized it was a weak reed, even though he became its president in the 1830s. At one point he asked some of his slaves whether they would consider going to Liberia, if he freed them. All expressed terror, even horror, at the idea.
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It was rapidly becoming evident that Africa was not the answer. Its unpopularity and the steady growth in the numbers of the southern slave population made it more and more obvious. That made diffusion into new states even more important. But the uproar over Missouri signaled that this would be difficult—perhaps impossible.

•      •      •

In 1822, South Carolina had almost as many blacks as whites in its population. A small minority of blacks were free; the vast majority were slaves. In 1799, a slave named Denmark Vesey paid six dollars for a ticket in the state lottery and won $1,500. He bought his freedom and became a carpenter. In his youth, he had served as a cabin boy aboard a ship captained by Joseph Vesey, which regularly sailed between Saint-Dominque and Charleston. The captain had sold him to a plantation owner on the island, but the buyer had demanded his money back, complaining that Denmark was subject to fits. Captain Vesey had made the young man a house servant in Charleston until Denmark won his freedom.

Vesey was an avid reader of the Bible and a member of Charleston's African Methodist Episcopal Church. The church had links to a black church of the same faith in Philadelphia, which often called for an end to slavery. Nervous Charleston officials had closed the local church in 1818. Vesey reportedly had become very angry about this decision. His anger was further
fueled by coming across a pamphlet containing the antislavery speeches that Senator Rufus King had made during the controversy over Missouri.

Next, Vesey heard from one of the many black seamen who visited Charleston that Haiti had a new president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, who wanted American blacks to settle in his country and would pay their transportation costs. About six thousand blacks, many from Philadelphia, accepted this offer—four times as many as the American Colonization Society had been able to entice to Africa. Vesey wrote a letter to President Boyer, expressing interest in his invitation.

Meanwhile, Vesey began meeting secretly with several men who responded to his proposal that they seize the Charleston arsenal, arm their fellow blacks, slave and free, and kill all the whites. They would then set the city afire, seize a ship or ships, and sail to Haiti. They found hundreds of the city's blacks, some of them artisans, others seemingly devoted house servants, who were ready to join them. Soon messengers had enticed field hands on the plantations near Charleston into the plan. They promised to kill their masters and race into the city to guarantee that the whites were quickly overwhelmed.

The eruption was scheduled for July 14—Bastille Day, which was evidence that Vesey was well acquainted with the French Revolution and its influence in Haiti. Vesey told his followers “not to spare one white skin alive, as this was the plan they pursued in Santo Domingo.”

As the climactic day approached, two blacks who had been invited to join the insurrection informed Charleston's mayor and other city authorities of the plot. Armed militia swiftly filled the streets and rounded up Vesey and his leading confederates. Ultimately, over 131 men were tried; 25 were sentenced to be hanged. The rest were shipped to the brutal slavery of the British West Indies sugar cane fields.

The shock waves generated by the size and murderous intent of Denmark Vesey's revolt sent shudders through the slave owners of the South. It validated everything they thought and imagined when they heard the words “Santo Domingo.”
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CHAPTER 8

How Not to Abolish Slavery

On January 1, 1831, an unusual newspaper appeared in Boston. On the front page were four columns of dense type, topped by block capital letters that proclaimed its identity:
THE LIBERATOR
.
Beneath it were the names of the publishers, William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp. On the next line was a motto: “
OUR COUNTRY IS THE WORLD
—
OUR COUNTRYMEN MANKIND
.”

At the top of the first column, “Wm L. Garrison” identified himself as the editor. Below his name was a poem:

To date my being from the opening year

I come, a stranger in this busy sphere

Where some I meet perchance may pause and ask,