A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction

Lacy Ford

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444391626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction addresses the key topics and themes of the Civil War era, with 23 original essays by top scholars in the field.

• An authoritative volume that surveys the history and historiography of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction
• Analyzes the major sources and the most influential books and articles in the field
• Includes discussions on scholarly advances in U.S. Civil War history.

PART I

Sectional Conflict and the Coming of the Civil War

CHAPTER ONE

Slavery and the Union, 1789–1833

DOUGLAS R. EGERTON

Once upon a time – and it was not so very long ago – studies of American slavery invariably meant studies of slavery as a system of labor, or slavery and its connection to politics. Now, 140 years after the firing on Fort Sumter, monographs on unwaged labor tend to focus on such topics as resistance and rebellion, the black family and community culture, or enslaved women and the internal economy. Each year brings so many new specialized studies and articles on the varieties of unfree labor in North America that even scholars who pretend to specialize in the field can scarcely keep up. This development is as welcome as it is problematical, for many earlier studies on slavery as a form of labor organization tended to ignore the role that bondpeople played in the creation of southern society and culture. But the historiographical trends since the late 1970s have often tended to obscure the role that politics played in shaping the black community – or that slavery played in shaping the nature of the American Union. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese (1983: 212) put it best, if perhaps a bit bluntly: history “is primarily the story of who rides whom and how.” As a good many early national politicians rode to fame and political fortune precisely because labor on their estates was performed by enslaved and unwaged workers, any study that ignores the relationship between political ideology and slavery presents at best an incomplete picture.

This chapter seeks to explore the interconnections between slavery and the American political system during the early national years. As such, this unhappy saga presents modern readers with a cautionary tale. While scholars no longer accept the old view that slavery was all but moribund as an economic system in the wake of the American Revolution, there is also little doubt that the chaos of the war, together with the emergence of natural rights philosophy, damaged unfree labor considerably, especially in the North. Yet the 44 years covered by this chapter proved to be one long, if decidedly unsteady, retreat from liberty. Students tend to regard the story of history as a steady march from darkness to daylight, but no simple hosanna to progress may be found here. Instead, as the years turned into decades, American politicians in the North and South sought to refasten the chains of slavery more often than they tried to sever the links. In 1789, it was difficult – although by no means impossible – to find a political theorist who defended American slavery as anything but anecessary evil. But by 1833, and in some areas even before, white southern leaders were quite nearly unanimous in defending their peculiar institution as a positive good, and far too many northern statesmen were content to sit by and watch as this grim counter-revolution unfolded.

Curiously, a first-rate study of slavery and its tangled relationship to the federal constitution remains to be written. Permanent servitude – although not the term “slavery” itself – appeared at least three times in the original document, in clauses pertaining to runaway slaves, the importation of Africans, and taxation and apportionment (the infamous three-fifths clause). Yet classic studies and law school casebooks on the constitutional convention by Carl Van Doren (1948) and Gerald Gunther (2001) mentioned slavery only in passing; Van Doren’s influential monograph contains fewer than 20 scattered references to unfree labor. Until a comprehensive study appears, two collections of essays and documents remain indispensable for understanding decisions made at the Philadelphia meeting. The first, Slavery and the Law, edited by legal scholar Paul Finkelman (1997), contains 14 original essays that explore the relationship of bondage to the constitution. The second, John Kaminski’s (1995) A Necessary Evil?, is an equally massive collection of primary documents that reveals the founders’ innermost thoughts on the greatest contradiction to the ideals of the Declaration. Neither collection offers much support to the popular notion that the revolutionary generation did all they could to eradicate slavery from the land of liberty.

Even law students who are dimly aware that the constitution contained veiled references to slavery probably have no idea of just how central unfree labor was to American organic law. The delegates who met in Philadelphia, Finkelman (1997) observes, “talked frankly about slavery.” They only decided “not to use the term in the final document because they feared it would undermine support for ratification in the North,” where laws for gradual manumission had already been passed in several state assemblies. But despite their preference for euphemistic terms, such as “other Persons” or “person[s] held to Service or Labor,” the men who wrote the constitution were careful to insure against federal emancipation (Finkelman 1997: 17–18). The requirement that it take three-quarters of the states to ratify an amendment all but gave the slaveholding states a veto over any future attempts to alter the protections granted in the constitution. As Jack Rakove (1986) writes in his examination of the ideas behind the constitution, even Virginia delegate Edmund Randolph, who publicly “lamented that such a species of property existed,” agreed that the constitutional “security” southern states “sought for slavery was legitimate” (p. 85).

Modern defenders of the Philadelphia convention accuse its historical critics of presentism, and indeed it would be both acontextual and unreasonable to insist that the men who fashioned the constitution – a roster that included northern slaveholders like Alexander Hamilton – should have eradicated slavery by constitutional fiat. Even had the delegates expressed any desire to do so, such a radical course would have doomed ratification to failure. But the present-day debate should not be about what the founders did not do, but rather what they did. Viewed in this light, the documents collected by Kaminski (1995) are damning. For every delegate like Virginia slaveholder George Mason, who argued that “[s]lavery discourages arts and manufactures” and teaches “the poor [to] despise [manual] labor,” two voices from the lower South denounced those “who carried their ethics beyond the mere equality of men, extending their humanity to the claims of the whole animal creation” (Kaminski 1995: 59–60, emphasis in original). Nor was this a simple debate between northern and southern delegates. Because many slave ships sailed from New England ports – Captain Joseph Vesey’s slaver, the Prospect, was fitted out and insured in Boston – it was rare for a northern voice to criticize the Atlantic trade, which in fact continued for at least 20 more years. In Newport, one writer even heard it said that Quaker Moses Brown was “going into this trade in Middletown and Norwich” (Kaminski 1995: 95). The currently fashionable defense of presentism, it seems, covers a multitude of sins. After all, it was not the sons or daughters of the founding fathers who were being sold into bondage in a foreign land; nor, to be blunt, was it the ancestors of those historians now most inclined to embrace the presentism defense.

Just as the definitive monograph on slavery and the constitutional convention remains to be written, so too does the topic of unfree labor and the Federalist party during its heyday require a new writer. Admittedly, fiscal and diplomatic issues dominated the rhetorical landscape throughout the 1790s, yet an historiographical consensus is beginning to suggest that the two emerging parties were divided by more than whiskey taxes and federal banks. According to Fritz Hirschfeld (1997), whose George Washington and Slavery is as close as one can come to a study of federal policy toward unwaged labor during the first half of the decade, the president consistently if quietly urged his correspondents to support gradual emancipation on the state level. Typical of his writings on this matter was a 1796 letter to an English correspondent. “[T]here are laws here [in Pennsylvania] for the gradual abolition of Slavery,” Washington wrote, “which neither [Maryland nor Virginia] have, at present, but which nothing is more certain than that they must have, and at a period not remote” (Hirschfeld 1997: 190). Washington’s strong feelings regarding manumission, however, were characteristically made to a foreign national; as Robert McColley (1973) once observed, early national Virginians tended to sound most like abolitionists when writing to European acquaintances.

Encouraging plans for gradual emancipation in the Chesapeake states was all to the good, but private letters hardly substituted for aggressive federal action. As Hirschfeld (1997) admits, Washington, like far too many modern presidents, consistently delayed action on race relations in the name of sectional harmony and the larger (white) national good. Having listened at the Philadelphia convention as South Carolina delegates threatened to leave the meeting if the further importation of Africans was not allowed, Washington never used his considerable power or prestige “to muster the necessary votes” in Congress “to cripple effectively the commerce in human cargoes.” Worse yet, his only official action pertaining to slavery was to affix his signature on the federal Fugitive Slave Act 1793. Here too, of course, context is critical. Early national presidents never vetoed legislation they regarded as constitutional on policy grounds. Still, thousands of young black men and women undoubtedly shared Hirschfeld’s judgment that Washington “cannot escape his share of the blame for the pain and suffering inflicted on future generations of African Americans” by putting his signature to this law (Hirschfeld 1997: 190–1).

The high water mark of Federalist antislavery activity, if such a term may be applied to such a moderate policy, came during the single term of President John Adams. The second president’s numerous biographers have consistently failed to emphasize this point, beyond the routine observation that the Massachusetts

Calvinist regarded unfree labor as immoral and economically wrongheaded. Yet buried within Alexander DeConde’s (1966) classic The Quasi-War is the little-studied fact that Adams pursued a policy of détente with Saint Domingue’s Toussaint Louverture that not only was free of racial bias but also quite nearly altered the course of slavery’s westward expansion. For a variety of obvious reasons, from New England trade to the desire to deny France its crucial privateering base during the last years of the eighteenth century, Adams and Secretary of State Timothy Pickering made peace with the French colony the centerpiece of their Caribbean diplomacy. In early 1799, the administration dispatched Edward Stevens to Le Cap François with promises that America would end its naval blockade of the colony in exchange for promises that General Louverture would quietly pull free of Parisian control. The result, partly negotiated in Philadelphia between Adams and Louverture’s agent Joseph Bunel (talks that included the first-ever formal dinner between an American president and a man of color), was the secret treaty of amity and commerce of June 23, 1799, which was signed by Louverture, Stevens, and English diplomat Thomas Maitland (DeConde 1966: 206–12).

At length, Pickering openly encouraged Louverture to drop the façade of loyalty to the Directory and declare independence, which was to be guaranteed by both the English and American navies. According to biographer Gerald H. Clarfield (1980), Pickering worried that as a French subject, Louverture might help to “arouse and organize the slaves of the [American] South for a bloody revolution.” But a President Louverture safely within the American orbit could serve to quell slave unrest throughout the Caribbean. To that end, Adams dispatched four frigates to support Louverture in his struggle with mulatto General André Rigaud, who remained loyal to France (Clarfield 1980: 198). Thomas Ott’s (1973) study of The Haitian Revolution adds that Pickering, for his part, dispatched a model constitution for Louverture’s consideration, which was penned by Alexander Hamilton. When Rigaud and the colonial agents loyal to Paris were defeated, Stevens assured Pickering, “[a]ll connection with France will soon be broken off” (Ott 1973: 119).

The failure of Adams to achieve reelection in 1800 put an end to the growing understanding between the American government and the all but independent French colony. Despite modern efforts to suggest that the election of Thomas Jefferson ushered in an “empire of liberty” (Boyd 1948), it is hard not to conclude that for Americans of African descent, the Republican victory meant a diminution of liberty both in the Caribbean and on the western frontier. As is suggested below, because French imperial schemes wedded the reenslavement of Saint Domingue to the reacquisition of Louisiana, a continuing détente between the federal government and General Louverture might well have left New Orleans in the weak hands of Madrid. Certainly, a Federalist victory would have left Atlantic diplomacy in the staunchly anticolonial hands of young John Quincy Adams and William Vans Murray, both of whom were deeply sympathetic to Louverture. The younger Adams hoped to “protect [Haitian] independence” with the American and British navies, while “leaving them as to their government totally to themselves” (Egerton 2002: 323).

The single term of John Adams also coincided with the passage of a gradual Emancipation Act in the important state of New York. The ideology of revolutionary republicanism, combined with the impact of mercantile capitalism and a relatively smaller number of slaves in the northern states, had led to a series of gradualemancipation laws in the North, starting with Pennsylvania in 1783. But conservative as these laws were – most bondpeople born after the passage of these Acts received their freedom only in their mid-twenties – they were especially difficult to pass in those states where unwaged labor remained important to regional economies. Dutch farmers on Long Island were bitterly critical of even the smallest steps toward gradual manumission, and several attempts to pass emancipation laws in the 1790s failed. As Graham Russell Hodges (1997, 1999) demonstrates in a series of monographs on New Jersey and New York, legislation finally achieved a measure of liberation in those states in, respectively, 1804 and 1799, but only after pacifying masters who charged that the states were robbing them of their property. In New York, black men born at the dawn of the new century remained enslaved until their twenty-eighth birthday (at a time when average life expectancy for black males was 33). In New Jersey, where approximately six African Americans remained enslaved as late as 1861, the Democratically controlled state assembly initially defeated ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Even less promising was the way in which many white northerners hoped to eliminate slaves at the same time as they eradicated slavery. In New England especially, whites quickly forgot their involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, and many people, as Joanne Pope Melish (1998) suggests in Disowning Slavery, made “an easy leap from the erasure of the experience of slavery to the illusion of the historical absence of people of color generally” (p. xiv). Leonard Bacon of New Haven bristled at suggestions that the poverty of African Americans in Connecticut had anything to do with northern racism. “On the contrary,” he wrote, “it would seem far otherwise; inasmuch as slavery never existed here to any considerable extent.” Even John Quincy Adams, who had good cause to know better, tried to rewrite New England’s history in such a way as to imply that it had always stood as a beacon of individual liberty (Melish 1998: 214–20).

Such comforting untruths to the contrary, the fact remains that by 1804, slavery had become the peculiar institution of the South alone, and that was hardly all to the good. Moreover, if the Adams years may be regarded as a momentary hiatus in the Union’s long march toward a national defense of slavery, the election of Virginia planter Thomas Jefferson returned the young republic to its unhappy path toward civil conflict. The extant scholarship on Jefferson and slavery is enormous, and of late tends to focus on personal events at Monticello, most notably his relationship with Sally Hemings, his enslaved sister-in-law. For the purposes of this chapter, however, the proper focus should be on the relationship between Jefferson’s administration and slavery as a national issue. Curiously, until the mid-1970s and publication of John Chester Miller’s (1977) The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, no monograph paid much attention to the role that slavery played in the political activity of the third president. (As late as 1961, Thomas P. Abernathy could write a lengthy chapter entitled “Jefferson and the South” in his magisterial The South in the New Nation, 1789–1819 and mention slavery exactly once.) Although Miller’s 29 chapters examined Jefferson and unfree labor from every possible angle and over the course of the Virginian’s long life, several chapters dealt specifically with Jefferson the president.

Although Miller defended Jefferson on several private issues, he was quick to criticize Jefferson as chief executive. His failure to support proposed legislation in1806 – at a time when his popularity was at its peak – that would have excluded slavery from Washington City drew Miller’s fire. “Had the president exerted himself on this issue,” Miller wrote, “he might have spared the country the spectacle of a slavemarket in the shadow of the Capitol and gangs of manacled slaves being driven through the streets of the nation’s capital” (Miller 1977: 132). It was certainly not the case that Jefferson favored the internal slave trade. Rather, as Joseph J. Ellis observed, “[m]oral pronouncements aside, Jefferson had also left a long and clear record of procrastination and denial on the slavery issue” (Ellis 1998: 264).

As to the Louisiana Purchase, typically regarded by scholars as Jefferson’s greatest accomplishment while president, Miller (1977) takes an equally dim view. Although some writers have argued that the president voiced support of Napoleon Bonaparte’s plans to invade Saint Domingue in hopes of persuading the first consul to sell his recently acquired New Orleans and West Florida, Miller suggests that the Virginian was painfully slow to grasp the French connection between the Caribbean sugar colony and the Louisiana breadbasket. Only after informing Paris of his support for a French invasion did Jefferson come to understand “that St. Doming[ue] and Louisiana were part of a master pl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction: A Civil War in the Age of Capital
• Part I: Continuity and Change; Forces and Movements
• Part II: The Civil War and American Society
• Part III: Reconstruction and the New Nation
• Bibliography
• Index