The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (79 page)

Still, even if the enslavers who dominated the conventions rigged the process of secession in order to defend the proslavery state they were creating, they ultimately had to appeal to the yeomen and poor whites whose doubts (and, in some cases, commitment to the Union) they had procedurally suppressed. Ever since the end of the Civil War, Confederate apologists have put out the lie that the southern
states seceded and southerners fought to defend an abstract constitutional principle of “states’ rights.” That falsehood attempts to sanitize the past. Every convention’s participants made it explicit: they were seceding because they thought secession would protect the future of slavery. Lincoln’s victory led Deep South slaveholders to claim that only secession could save the South from being
“stripped,” as one Alabama editor, a former Douglas supporter, said, “of 25 hundred millions of slave property & to have loose among us 4,000,000 of freed blacks.”
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From Missouri to Texas, from Wilmot through Kansas-Nebraska and Lecompton, political debates had been about whether or not slavery could expand, not whether or not the federal government would interfere with it in the states where
it existed. But secessionists feared that they could not convince the non-slaveholding white southern majority to abandon the Union just to protect entrepreneurs’ access to future cotton frontiers. Instead, they proclaimed that by electing Republicans, the North had declared its commitment to “equality between the white and negro races,” as an emissary
sent from the Mississippi convention told
his Georgia counterparts. Not only had the Republican Party declared its goal to be abolition, but it “now demand[s] . . . equality in the right of suffrage, equality in the honors and emoluments of office, equality in the social circle, equality in the right of matrimony.” Not only would emancipation mean that non-planters would lose the chance to move up in the world—a chance that ownership of
even one slave could represent. Worse, the everyday distinctions that gave status to all whites, especially men, would vanish. Lincoln’s victory left only one choice. Secede, or your neighbor’s field “hand” will marry your daughter. Secede, or offer up your “wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.” Republican domination, the emissary concluded,
meant a “saturnalia of blood,” “a war of extermination” that would lead to the destruction of the white people by “assassinations” and “amalgamation,” or rape.
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If racial fears led non-slaveholders to accept the proslavery argument, enslavers could continue to plan for slavery to resume its modernist, capitalist, entrepreneurial, creative, destructive, right-hand-empowering course of expansion.
They could continue to deploy the apparatus of forced migration and slave trading that commodified black bodies, rhetorically breaking them into pieces for more profitable use by white people, and creating isolated and rapeable black women. Yet the rhetoric of fear makes one wonder if the speakers knew that common white men feared the South’s volatile, highly unequal, extractive, exploitative
economy, and knew that without the safety net of racial privilege—and slavery was that net’s strongest cord—they would fall into complete poverty and degradation. Perhaps, too, the speakers’ horrors projected their own scrambled-together desires and anxieties about life in a migratory, expanding modern economy where fortunes were made and lost at a drop; the conflation of sexual force and political
power; and the mixing of sexual pleasure with the use of enslaved bodies for making wealth.

While these arguments worked well enough in the seven cotton-focused states, non-slaveholder majorities in upper-South states stomped on the brakes. The February 4 election for a Virginia state convention produced only 32 immediate secessionists out of 153 total delegates. Despite the commitment of James
Mason and others to Calhounite ideology, less wealthy, less ideologically committed citizens of the Old Dominion were not ready. In the same month, the voters of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina also rejected secession—at least for the time being.
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Meanwhile, in Washington, senators and representatives scrambled to resurrect interregional compromise at the federal
level. Kentucky’s John
Crittenden put together a committee of thirteen senators whose task was finding a way out of the crisis. In the tradition of Henry Clay, Crittenden offered an “omnibus” of six constitutional amendments and four resolutions. Most significant was the amendment that would restore the Missouri Compromise line and commit the federal government to enforcing slavery south of 36°30’
North forever. Another would have forbidden any future change to these amendments, the three-fifths clause, or the fugitive-slave clause of the Constitution.
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If adopted by Congress—and three-fourths of the state legislatures would also have had to approve them to add them to the Constitution—Crittenden’s proposals would have made slavery perpetual in the United States. They would have added
new enticements to filibustering. Here was the pattern of compromise, reasserted: a placating response to southern brinksmanship.

The passage of these amendments might not have persuaded the cotton states to reverse their charge toward political independence. The white population of those seven states was now swept up in a level of violent political fervor that made it hard for anyone to suggest
a change in course. A commitment to the idea that southerners constituted a separate political community was already becoming its own justification. In the meantime, southern political leaders still in Washington over December 1860 and January 1861—such as Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis—remained cool toward the various plans for compromise.

While many Republican Party leaders anxiously participated
in the compromise negotiations, the president-elect took a different position. To Thurlow Weed, master of the New York Republican machine, Lincoln wrote, “Let there be no compromise on the question of
extending
slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and ere long, must be done again.” The people had spoken. They voted for a platform that opposed all expansion of slavery. Lincoln refused to
abandon the results of the election. His insistence that “the tug has to come, and better now,” stiffened the resolve of congressional Republicans, who decided to reject the 36°30’ extension—though they did offer to admit New Mexico as a slave state.

Some historians have criticized Lincoln for these moves. He and other northerners allegedly misread the South, believing that secessionists were
only bullies playing a game of chicken to force the North to back down again. The result of the failure to compromise, this line of thinking argues, was mass death. Such critics of Lincoln’s “interference” with compromise bolster their claims with cost/benefit analyses that assume that slavery would have ended in a few decades even without war. Thus the primary positive gain of
the war is accounted
as thirty years of freedom for several million people, versus, in the loss column, the deaths of about 700,000 Americans, plus the massive financial cost of the war.
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Yet the assumption that slavery would have ended is based on the idea that it was an inefficient form of labor that would soon be weeded out by economic realities. By 1860, this system had been growing for seventy years at a rate
unprecedented in human history. It had broken its supposed limits again and again. Moreover, in very practical terms, the Crittenden plan itself would have rendered the end of slavery far more difficult to accomplish. And, as Lincoln wrote in January, adopt Crittenden, and the past tells us that “a year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the
Union.” In any case, the seceding states sent no emissaries to Washington or Springfield that winter, offered no bargains that included renunciation of disunion.
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On March 4, Lincoln stood before a crowd in Washington to take the same oath that Andrew Jackson had taken. Thirty-two years later, the democracy that Jackson’s crowd drank in had dissolved. Since late January, armed men had seized
most of the federal institutions in the lower South. Representatives of the seven cotton states had met in Montgomery, Alabama, and declared themselves the “Confederate States of America.” They named Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis as their president. Striking a most un-Jacksonian pose, outgoing president James Buchanan had done nothing about any of this. And by Inauguration Day, a crisis was
sharpening to a swordpoint. Federal troops evacuated their fort near Charleston Harbor’s old slave-trade wharf and moved to Fort Sumter—a new installation that was much farther offshore. Confederate officials demanded Sumter’s surrender. So far, its commandant, Colonel Robert Anderson, had refused, but his troops were running out of food.

The rawboned, Kentucky-born lawyer took the oath of office
from emaciated old Roger Taney. Lincoln then turned to face the crowd. His six-foot-four frame towered over the podium. This president, a lifelong opponent of Jackson and his followers, was taking office as the most “common” man to hold the office, before or since. No president had been poorer in his youth. Yet here was Lincoln. And here, too, was another irony. The president-elect had made Jackson’s
great enemy Henry Clay his “beau ideal of a statesman.” But Lincoln had been studying Andrew Jackson’s words from the 1832–1833 nullification crisis in preparation for facing down the rebellious enslavers.

Just as he had pointed out to his wavering Republican colleagues, when he refused surrender disguised as compromise, Lincoln now told the nation
and the world that consent to secession meant
agreement to the principle that the loser can overrule the outcome of an election. The secessionists’ demand, Lincoln argued, ripped the fabric of democratic government, replacing it with the principle that a slaveholder’s threat is the ultimate right-handed veto. The claim that states that were controlled by slavery entrepreneurs could break up the United States by unilaterally revoking the contract
of the Constitution was analogous to scrawling a “G.T.T.” on every key document of the Union.

At the same time, Lincoln warned, “The certain ills you fly to, are greater than all the real ones you fly from.” If enslavers wanted to protect their property and power, their own decisions were counterproductive. In the War of 1812, thousands of slaves had fled to the British. An army raised in the
free states, on the ground in the slave ones, would by its mere presence disrupt enslavers’ power. It is certainly strange that few enslaver-politicians considered this possibility. Among the few exceptions to this self-induced blindness were ex-Whig megaplanters such as Stephen Duncan and Paul Cameron, who remained Unionists deep into the crisis. But in general, the more enslaved people secession
delegates owned, the more radical were their demands.

In the face of a clear decision by slaveholders and the non-slaveholding whites who appeared to support them, Lincoln counseled patience. He insisted that the Union remained unbroken, but that he would not use his executive power as president to retake seized federal property, send troops into the states, or appoint officeholders “obnoxious”
to local communities. Here he accepted the limits of the then possible. In March 1861, the US Army numbered in the few tens of thousands. Moreover, the upper South states remained on the fence. Let Lincoln seem to coerce, and he would shift leverage into the hands of secessionists in those wavering states. So the new president deftly played the ball back into the enslavers’ court. “In
your
hands,
my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in
mine
, is the momentous issue of civil war.” Perhaps nationalist loyalty and reason would persuade states like Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, and Kentucky not to join the ranks of secession. So he closed with his famous invocation of the emotional ties of a common history: “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave . . . will yet swell the chorus of Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

The paths of the future were at that moment unlighted. It seemed unlikely that enslavers would accept the new normal that Lincoln offered and remain part of a nation that had decided to insist
that they accept that their desires and
dreams would shrink rather than expand. Their inevitable rejection meant that suddenly the future of millions of enslaved African Americans and of their enslavers—these twinned bodies who spread across a subcontinent in a vast embrace of suffering and power—was more uncertain than it had been since the moment when Andrew Jackson looked out across the sugarcane
stubble and January mire at Pakenham’s scarlet lines. Or then again, as open as at any one of the millions of moments when enslaved men and women pushed their minds and nerves and hands to pick one or two more pounds before twilight fell, to save their backs from the cowhide verdicts of slate and chalk. In those moments, entrepreneurs had revolutionized the world. They had always done so. This
time, instead of trying to sweep away old market patterns, traditional ways of making things, or African Americans’ families, it was the Union that they would try to sweep aside. And then, as with all of those other creations and destructions, they would try to replace it with a new arrangement that was far more conducive to their own profit and power.

Back when John Brown’s attack began to make
the possibility of a resort to arms seem less like a distant fantasy, Henry David Thoreau had written these prophetic words about the imminent execution of the martyr: “When you plant . . . a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up.” Still, the white South did not believe the North would fight. Lincoln’s caution seemed unheroic. Perhaps it fed the Confederate leaders’ confidence
about war as a solution. But in the month after the inauguration, the new president demonstrated that he was canny enough to outmaneuver enslavers on the field of peace. Instead of forcing his way into Charleston’s harbor with blazing guns, he sent a resupply fleet sailing from New York with instructions to resupply the Fort Sumter garrison—but not to reinforce it with troops and weapons. The South’s
decisionmakers decided to move the game onto a different board. They would assert their independence by eliminating the Union presence off the coast of the state where the cotton frontier had started. On April 10, the local Confederate commander heard from Montgomery: tell the Union troops to evacuate Fort Sumter immediately. If they refuse, begin the bombardment before supplies can arrive.
At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, the first cannon boomed. Fort Sumter surrendered at first light on the 14th, after thirty-three hours of shelling that produced not a single fatality.
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