A Disease in the Public Mind Page 13
• • •
Garrison began blaming most of his woes on the American Colonization Society. While its appeal to free American blacks remained minimal, the ACS’s agents got a great deal of publicity in the newspapers, and they raised dismaying amounts of money. Even more irritating was the way they had won the backing of the established churches. The ACS’s doctrine of gradual abolition gave thousands of vaguely antislavery whites the feeling that there was a way to end slavery with little or no pain or effort. Cash and patience were all that was needed.
Garrison decided to demolish this enemy of immediate abolition. By April 1832 he completed Thoughts on African Colonization, a book-length blast in his best denunciatory style. The American Colonization Society ignored the book, which sold little more than two thousand copies. Garrison learned that an ACS agent, Elliot Cresson, was in Britain raising money. The frustrated editor yearned to go there and challenge him—and win the blessing of his hero, William Wilberforce. He appealed for help from free blacks in Philadelphia and other communities, and soon had six hundred dollars in his bank account—more than enough to pay for a round trip.9
• • •
The editor of The Liberator arrived in England at an historic moment. The British abolitionists were on the brink of winning their forty-year struggle for the abolition of slavery in their West Indian colonies. Garrison’s London host was a wealthy Quaker merchant, James Cropper, who escorted him to the crowded offices of the British Anti-slavery Society, where most of the leaders had gathered to receive hourly reports of the debate in Parliament.
Garrison visited the gallery of the House of Commons to hear the debates. Next he was invited to breakfast by Thomas Folwell Buxton, who had succeeded the aging William Wilberforce as abolition’s chief spokesman in Parliament. The big burly politician stared at the editor in amazement for a full minute, leaving Garrison nonplused. Finally Buxton exclaimed, “My dear sir, I thought you were a black man!” It was an inadvertent commentary on how few white Americans spoke out against slavery. Garrison put Buxton at ease by replying that his words were a compliment he would never forget.
• • •
Garrison was in England when Parliament passed the final version of the bill that abolished slavery in the West Indies. The key provision that had broken the long deadlock was the decision to pay twenty million pounds to the slave owners as compensation for the value of their 850,000 slaves. That was a hundred million 1830s American dollars—the equivalent of perhaps $2 billion today. Garrison disapproved of this compromise, although he did not undertake to lecture the British abolitionists about it. He remarked that it did not give much satisfaction to either the winners or the losers. Like most idealists before and since, compromise was a dirty word to Garrison. In his report to The Liberator, he focused instead in the tremendous wave of antislavery petitions that had engulfed Parliament. One was signed by 800,000 women.10
Here was a moment when a different man—or a different reaction from Garrison—might have altered the course of American history. If Garrison had become a supporter of compensated emancipation, he might have found thousands of reasonable men agreeing with him. Instead he remained locked in his religious fervor, unaware that his New England–induced hatred of the South was distorting his crusade.
Unfortunately, this hostility was reinforced by British antislavery crusader George Thompson. He was about Garrison’s age, and like him was largely self-educated. Thompson had been one of the youthful leaders in the 1831 decision to take a more aggressive attitude toward West Indies slave owners. Like Garrison, he had been converted to the cause by an evangelical experience and was convinced that “sin will lie at our door if we do not agitate, agitate, agitate.” He swiftly became famous for his slashing platform style and the vituperation he flung at the slaveholders. Garrison considered him a soul brother and talked of inviting him to America.11
• • •
As the British antislavery societies celebrated, Garrison turned his attention to the agent of the ACS, Elliot Cresson. In a meeting with William Wilberforce, he persuaded the gravely ill hero to withdraw his endorsement of the ACS. The Liberator’s editor used Wilberforce’s words to demolish Cresson in a series of meetings arranged by other British antislavery leaders.
In the last of these clashes, carried away by the cheers and applause of the audience, Garrison confessed he was unhappy with America’s current stance on slavery. His countrymen were “insulting the majesty of heaven” by tolerating slavery in their Constitution and hypocritically ignoring the great principles of the Declaration of Independence. In a follow-up article in a London newspaper, Garrison wrote that the U.S. Constitution would soon “be held in everlasting infamy by the friends of humanity and injustice throughout the world.”
Garrison was apparently unaware that Elliott Cresson had allies in London, many of them visiting Americans. They were outraged to hear a fellow American denouncing his country in such reckless terms before a British audience, who loved every word of it. The Americans wrote furious letters to newspaper editors back home, urging them to tell their readers about Garrison’s “treachery.”12
• • •
Garrison returned to America in a state of euphoria. In his luggage was a letter signed by a gallery of British notables, including Wilberforce, denouncing the American Colonization Society. In New York, Arthur Tappan, a reformer who had supported Garrison with generous gifts of cash, was carried away by reports of Garrison’s London triumphs and invited him to be the guest of honor at a mass meeting, announcing the formation of an American Anti-Slavery Society which would support a call for immediate abolition.
When Garrison debarked from his ship, he picked up a New York City newspaper on the dock and read an editorial that told readers “the notorious Garrison” was coming to the city. The paper urged New Yorkers to attend the antislavery meeting and tell the foul-mouthed betrayer of his country what they thought of him. The stunned Garrison made his way through the crowded streets to Clinton Hall, the site of the meeting. Unrecognized, he stood on the edge of an enraged crowd as they shouted denunciations of him and immediate abolition. The hall was dark and there was a notice on the door that the meeting had been moved elsewhere.
The crowd adjourned to a rally at nearby Tammany Hall, headquarters of the already notorious Democratic political machine. For a noisy hour, orators denounced abolitionists as the enemies of New York’s southern friends, whose business was vital to the city’s prosperity. Several thousand members of the audience, now totally infuriated, responded to news that the abolitionists were meeting at the Chatham Street Chapel near the docks, and charged into the streets again.
The rioters, many of them drunk, banged and kicked at the chapel’s doors, shouting obscenities. Once more Garrison lingered nervously on the edge of the mob while the lights in the chapel went out and Gotham’s handful of abolitionists fled for their lives. Soon the mob smashed in the chapel doors and swarmed inside.13
An appalled Garrison decided he would be safer in Boston, where he wrote a derring-do version of his narrow escape in The Liberator. Five thousand enemies of freedom had tried to tar and feather him, but he had eluded their evil clutches. “I regard them with mingled emotions of pity and contempt,” he declared. He was ready to “brave any danger, even unto death.” The words may have won him some sympathy in Boston, where opinions of money-grubbing New Yorkers had never been high. But it remained clear that the nation’s largest and richest city was unimpressed by Garrison’s supposed triumphs in Britain.14
New Yorkers also did not think much of the British abolition of slavery in the West Indies. Freeing 850,000 slaves who were three thousand miles away was simply not the same as the immediate liberation of 2,000,000 blacks in the American South. Virginia, the nation’s largest slave state, was only three hundred miles away. What was to stop tens of thousands of ex-slaves from heading for New York and competing with white workers for jobs? If employment was not forthcoming, they would hav
e to be fed and clothed by the city or state government to prevent an insurrection that would make Nat Turner’s eruption a mere skirmish. William Lloyd Garrison and his followers remained tragically blind to this crucial difference between British and American slavery.
CHAPTER 9
New England Rediscovers the Sacred Union
While William Lloyd Garrison was learning that his love affair with British abolitionists was meaningless, American politicians had other things on their minds. The Industrial Revolution in Britain and parts of the United States—notably New England—was beginning to transform the world. To protect the new factories, Congress began passing tariff bills that shielded America’s manufacturers from competitive British products.
At first many southerners supported the tariff; they expected to industrialize too. South Carolina was especially optimistic. They had water power, and their plantations were producing cotton by the ton. But few southerners had the technical background to run a mill, and imported Yankees proved poor managers of slave labor. The cotton growers decided they could make more money by expanding their plantations. Many of the most ambitious planters headed west to bigger farms and richer soil in Alabama and Mississippi. South Carolina slid into a slow but unmistakable economic stagnation.
In 1819, the stock market had crashed and a recession stifled the American economy everywhere. By the mid-1820s, South Carolina was looking at the tariff as a burden rather than a benefit. Their hostility was deepened by a cotton surplus that triggered a sharp drop in the price paid by British and New England mills. The state began to see the tariff as a sinister policy aimed at enriching greedy Yankees and impoverishing genteel southern aristocrats.1
In 1827, this persecution complex was exacerbated by finding a Yankee, John Quincy Adams, in the White House backing a new and even steeper levy on consumer goods from Britain. President Adams was hoping to raise money for canals, highways, and other public works projects that the country needed. South Carolina’s politicians dismissed these ideas and denounced “the tariff of abominations.”
Virginia’s John Randolph, always ready to create an uproar, accused the New Englanders of building their factories with dollars pilfered from the pockets of the South. Charleston began hosting mass protest meetings where politicians wondered aloud whether there was any point in staying in a Union that was bankrupting them. The North, cried one man, veering toward a metaphor everyone instantly recognized, acted as if they were the masters and the Southerners were their humble “tributaries.”2
In Washington, DC, South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, vice president under President Adams, paid close attention to these growls of discontent. Calhoun decided it was time to borrow a leaf from Thomas Jefferson’s play-book and resort to the ominous word, nullification. At this point Calhoun was considered a likely prospect for the presidency. Strikingly handsome, he was a superb orator and a politician who seemed adept at working with Northerners and Westerners. He had been a well-regarded secretary of war under President Monroe. But he was extremely sensitive to the growing hostility to slavery in the northern states.
Soon there was something called “the Exposition of 1828,” a treatise secretly written by the vice president and approved by the South Carolina legislature. It declared that the Constitution was a compact between the states, each of whom still retained an ineradicable sovereignty. This meant a state had the right to nullify any act of Congress if its legislature thought the law exceeded federal powers. Some politicians in Virginia and other southern states applauded this idea. Seventy-six-year-old James Madison, still very much alive in his Virginia mansion, Montpelier, said the argument was preposterous and nothing in the Constitution countenanced it. The nullifiers dismissed him as a senile has-been.3
These tensions did not diminish when Andrew Jackson defeated President Adams’s run for reelection. The ex-general had no quarrel with high tariffs. They did not bother many people in his home state, prosperous Tennessee. But the West wanted a better deal on the government’s sale of public lands. Would she get help from the South or the North? The debate swiftly became a confrontation between the two older sections.
In December 1829, a Jackson-hating Connecticut senator introduced a proposal to put a hold on selling any more western land. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri called the idea a “scheme to injure the West and South” by keeping “pauperized” factory workers in the East. Senator Robert Y. Hayne saw an opportunity to score points for the South. The slim, handsome orator attacked the proposal as a typical example of New England’s habit of putting self-interest ahead of the nation. This charge led readily to a condemnation of the Yankees’ role in promoting ever-higher tariffs, forcing South Carolina to consider leaving the Union.
Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts rose to deplore Senator Haynes’s hostility to New England and his habit of speaking of the Union “in terms of indifference, even of disparagement.” Too many Southerners talked this way. Webster challenged Hayne to a debate on whether there was any justification for his condemnation of New England—and dared him to prove a state could legally disobey a law passed by Congress, such as a tariff.
Hayne accepted the terms of this verbal duel, and he began by attempting to prove New England’s hostility to the West. Webster replied that the claim was absurd. Tens of thousands of New Englanders had already migrated to the growing states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The retort was superficially effective but largely beside the point. Already the northern tiers of these states was called “the Yankee Midwest.” The settlers brought with them their New England traditions and loyalties, which included hostility to the Southerners who inhabited the lower half of these states—and to the rest of the South.
Senator Hayne replied with a speech that lasted two days. He attacked New England’s record of disloyalty to the federal government, culminating in the Hartford Convention, and defended the Calhoun view that a state’s rights transcends the authority of the Constitution. By now the small circular Senate chamber was packed with spectators. They filled the gallery and the aisles on the floor below. People sensed that the future of the nation was being debated.
• • •
Daniel Webster rose to rescue New England from the obloquy of its secessionist flirtations. The senator had begun his political career as a combative Federalist congressman and had graduated to the Senate in 1827 under the banner of the proto-Whig National Republican Party. A large, imposing man, Webster’s craggy brow seemed to darken like an impending thunderstorm as he assailed Senator Hayne for his betrayal of Washington’s and Madison’s ideal of an indissoluble Union. Hour after hour Webster’s rhetoric engulfed the Senate. He was alternately witty, sarcastic, angry—and ultimately, solemn. He called on the Senate and the rest of the nation to dedicate America to the founders’ faith that the Union was eternal.
I have not accustomed myself to hang over the precipice of disunion, to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe counselor in the affairs of this government, whose thoughts should be bent mainly on considering, not how the Union may be preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the people when it should be broken up and destroyed.
What did these disunionists want? Webster thundered. “A land rent with civil feuds and drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood?” For him there was only one answer to such a prospect. The flag as it now soared above American soil, “honored by all the nations of the earth”; the flag without a single star or stripe “erased and polluted,” with its motto what it has always been and always should be. Not “words of delusion and folly” such as what is this all worth? Or Liberty first and Union afterwards. “No, there can only be one sentiment, dear to every American heart: Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”
If these magnificent words had been spoken by anyone but a senator from Massachusetts, they might have made the Union as unbreakable as the biblical rock of the ages. Webster’s subsequent career
would demonstrate he was deeply sincere. But in 1830, Southerners heard his speech as a hypocritical attempt to obfuscate the way New England had repeatedly ignored George Washington’s plea in his farewell address to avoid any and all political posturing that endangered the Union. On the other hand, Westerners, most of them passionate nationalists, applauded Webster. President Andrew Jackson, that quintessential Man of the West, agreed with every syllable.4
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A few months later, on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, President Jackson was the guest of honor at a public dinner celebrating the famed Virginian, who had died four years earlier. Calhoun—now Jackson’s vice president—and some of his allies attempted to trap the president with a series of toasts that reminded everyone that Jefferson had endorsed the idea of nullification.
The plotters were confident of winning this not-so-subtle confrontation. Andrew Jackson had been born in South Carolina. His life had been molded by southern traditions. He was a rebel by instinct, with a long history of quarrels with his superiors. Perhaps most important, he was the virtual opposite of a political theorist; he had no education worth mentioning.
Finally, it was Jackson’s turn to offer a toast. He raised his glass and riveted his flinty eyes on Vice President Calhoun. “Our federal Union,” he growled. “It must be preserved!”
The vice president replied with a defiant countertoast: “The Union—next to our liberty, the most dear!”
Those words ended all possibility of John C. Calhoun serving another term as vice president. In 1832, with Martin Van Buren of New York as his running mate, Jackson won a second term on a tidal wave of votes. He also signed a new tariff bill, which lowered some of the 1828 duties but still retained high rates on textiles and other materials, such as iron, that South Carolina needed. The state’s infuriated politicians summoned a convention that declared the law null and void. No federal officer would be permitted to collect a penny on imports in Charleston after February 1, 1833.5