The Fall of the House of Dixie

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Author: Bruce Levine
Full Title: The Fall of the House of Dixie
Category: #books

Highlights

But during the following decades, growing numbers of slavery’s champions adopted a more aggressive line of argument, one associated most closely with South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun. Slavery was not an evil, insisted Calhoun, but “a good, a positive good.”72 To Calhoun and his colleagues, indeed, slavery came to appear to be the single, essential, irreplaceable foundation of any good society. It was “the principal cause of civilization,” William Harper claimed in 1838—even “the sole cause.”73 They believed, with Abel P. Upshur, that all civilizations rested on the proposition that “one portion of mankind shall live upon the labor of another portion.”74 Every advanced society in history, they affirmed, had achieved greatness by assigning its dullest, heaviest, most exhausting, and unrewarding (but no less necessary) labors to one portion of the people. Only such an arrangement could allow the development among another portion of the kind of intellectual, cultural, and political leaders that civilization required. “In all social systems,” James Henry Hammond declared, “there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.”
This system and the tremendous power it bestowed fostered personalities quite different from those of most northern businessmen, whose workforces consisted of legally free wage laborers. Visiting English journalist James Silk Buckingham was taken with the way that members of the American planter elite exercised a degree of “arbitrary power” that left them “always accustomed to command.”86 A generation later, Katherine Stone made the same point about her own family and her planter neighbors. Their domination of other human beings had made them “a race of haughty” and “waited-upon people,” she noted, who expected to have their way in all things.
Thomas Jefferson, who owned about two hundred slaves, had put the matter even more bluntly. Masters, he unhappily acknowledged in 1787, exercised “the most unremitting despotism” over their slaves that gave free rein to “the most boisterous passions.” Having and wielding that kind of despotic power, Jefferson continued, imbued masters with a deep-seated belief in their own inherent superiority and their natural right to impose their will upon others. That belief and the personal qualities that it encouraged then passed from one generation to the next. When we dominate and abuse our slaves, he wrote, “our children see this,” and they “cannot but be stamped by it.” They are “nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny.”
Mary Chesnut saw the deep marks that such a life had left on her father-in-law, the great South Carolina planter James Chesnut, Sr. He was “as absolute a tyrant as the Czar of Russia, the Kahn of Tartary, or the Sultan of Turkey,” she wrote. He and others like him “would brook no interference with their own sweet will by man, woman, or devil.”89
Tennessee master Oliver P. Temple confirmed that judgment retrospectively. “The supersensitiveness of slaveholders as to slavery was not unnatural,” he wrote. Because of “the inherent weakness of the institution,” they “had to guard it against attack, whether from without or within, with the utmost vigilance.” They could therefore tolerate no open “opposition to it, without danger of the most serious consequences.”5
It also required that the white population be dependably and visibly united in support of black servitude—and ready to enforce it. To allow antislavery sentiments to spread among whites might weaken the aura of permanence with which masters tried to surround their “peculiar institution.” That, in turn, would surely encourage slaves to question, test, resist, and even openly challenge the masters’ power.
But while racism remained very much alive and well in the North, enthusiasm for bound labor did not. Merchants, bankers, and manufacturers in New York, Boston, Cincinnati, and elsewhere were happy to sell goods and services and to lend money to southern slaveholders. But they did not try to run their own operations with bound labor. An economy based on a combination of small farms, lively internal commerce, and growing urban and manufacturing sectors seemed more compatible with self-employment and the hiring of legally free wage laborers than it did with slavery.
The relative ease with which slavery had declined in the northern United States and the British Empire led many critics of the institution to anticipate a similarly smooth evolution in the U.S. South. Over the course of time, they expected, the same light of reason that had illuminated northern and British minds would do the same for their southern cousins. Slavery would then disappear from the nation as a whole—gradually, peacefully, irresistibly. But those who expected slavery to die a natural death in the United States seriously underestimated the southern masters’ attachment to what they called their “way of life.” Slavery had been growing steadily more profitable and ever more central to the identity and values of the elite, especially in the cotton-growing states of the lower South. Mounting challenges to slavery’s legitimacy therefore spurred most slaveholders not to emancipate but to dig in.
Leading Texas secessionist W. S. Oldham later attributed southern white unity to something else: a dedication to white supremacy and to keeping the black population down and under strict control. “The great mass of non-slaveholders in the South, and especially in the cotton States,” he judged, shared with masters “an interest in social order and domestic peace, which were threatened to be destroyed by the emancipation of the slaves, and allowing them to riot without restraint.”108
It was the nearly universal determination of southern whites to keep blacks subordinate that ultimately proved to be the secessionists’ strongest card. Only slavery, they believed, could guarantee white supremacy.
It was true, Siler wrote, that his neighbors had “but little interest in the value of slaves.” But there was nonetheless “one matter in this connection about which we feel a very deep interest. We are opposed to negro equality.” “To prevent this,” he declared, and to avoid being “equalized with an inferior race,” he as well as his constituents were prepared to die fighting. “Every thing even life itself stands pledged to the cause,” he affirmed.
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Although the Emancipation Proclamation excluded Tennessee, slavery no longer enjoyed the active, enthusiastic support of and enforcement by those who now wielded political power. It had lost, in other words, precisely the monopoly of violence that its champions always knew was essential to its survival. In January 1864, William Tecumseh Sherman judged that “slavery is already dead in Tennessee.” Where “a negro … can run off without danger of recapture,” he observed, “the question is settled.”
Jeers about the supposed impotence of Union emancipationist policies rang all the more hollow as slavery began to buckle not only where Union troops went but even in parts of the Confederacy they had not yet reached. Hearing that northern soldiers were even in the vicinity increased the boldness of black laborers while simultaneously weakening the self-confidence of their masters. Laborers began working more slowly, less intensively, and sometimes for fewer hours—or began to spend more and more of their time tending food crops for their own consumption. Hungry slaves were now also more likely to seize foodstuffs from their masters’ storehouses or kitchens.
Masters in the interior began to object to the practice. As one Virginia legislator put it, “refugeeing” exposed their own slaves to the influence of men and women who had seen and perhaps had even spoken with Union soldiers—men and women who thereby “had become imbued by the enemy with ideas and habits” that were not “consistent with the obedience and subordination proper to their condition and necessary to the peace and safety of the whites.”
Most slave owners greeted their sudden loss of accustomed mastery with outrage and vituperation. This was not merely an economic blow; it was a challenge to and rejection of their most basic views, values, and identities. Their “people” had betrayed them—had repaid their masters’ many kindnesses with treason. They had proved themselves to be, indeed, immoral wretches without loyalty or conscience. “As to the idea of a faithful servant, it is all a fiction,” wrote Honoria Cannon, Catherine Edmondston’s sister, in the late summer of 1863. “I have seen the favourite and most petted negroes the first to leave in every instance.” She was “so disgusted” with “the whole race,” in fact, “that I often wish I had never seen one.”
How can we allow black men to become soldiers, R.M.T. Hunter demanded, when “the condition of the soldier” is one “socially equal to any other in society”?35 In North America, slavery’s justification rested largely on claims that Africans and their descendants were uniquely suited to dull, arduous labor but incapable of assuming the responsibilities of free people, citizens, or soldiers. To recruit black men into Confederate armies now, exclaimed Davis’s critics, would mean confessing that slavery was based on a lie. The reigning ideology, furthermore, held that blacks, because incapable of governing themselves, needed masters both to discipline and to look after them. Freedom was not only useless to them but positively harmful. How could the masters’ government now offer to reward them with something that whites had always said would ruin blacks’ lives? Finally, Davis’s plan undermined the claim that blacks recognized their inability to thrive in freedom and were therefore satisfied to be slaves. Offering them liberty as a reward implicitly admitted that they longed for freedom.
The most candid reply to this question was rarely heard in public. It held that slavery was already dead, or at least was at death’s doorstep. The only real question now was, what will replace it? And that was why southern whites had to be ready to do almost anything to win the war and keep the Confederacy secure. Because only then would they be the ones to answer that crucial question.
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This would allow southerners to “control the negroes” and make sure that “they will still be our laborers as much as they now are.” The Irish-born Cleburne found an analogy in the way that the British Empire had stripped legally free Catholics in his birthplace of their civic rights in order to dominate them economically. The lesson, Cleburne noted tartly, was that “writing a man ‘free’ does not make him so.”