A Disease in the Public Mind (31 page)

Southerners were soon using Agassiz and colleagues who shared his views as proof that Negro slavery did not violate Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. When the founder wrote that all men were created equal, scientifically the statement did not include Negroes. In fact, Agassiz maintained that the whole history of the slave trade and the development of slavery in the New World was a gigantic mistake. The white and black races were never meant to interact in such an intimate and proximate existence.

Agassiz strenuously denounced all forms of interracial marriage and predicted mulattoes were doomed to swift extinction because racial intermixing violated the divine plan. At another point he declared that, scientifically speaking, sexual intercourse between blacks and whites was the equivalent of incest.

For Agassiz, Mexico was a living, breathing example of what racial mixing produced—a country in which the entire population suffered from massive mental instability and physical inferiority. “Can you devise a scheme to rescue the Spaniards of Mexico from their degradation?” he asked a Boston friend, Samuel Gridley Howe. Agassiz said America should remember what amalgamating the races did to this southern neighbor. Social equality between whites and blacks was “a natural impossibility, flowing from the very character of the Negro race.” At the same time, Agassiz placated his Bostonian supporters by reiterating that he nevertheless believed that blacks should be free.

This pro forma statement did not prevent southern audiences from inviting him to speak again and again. Echoes of his theories resounded in southern newspapers. In 1856, the
Charleston Mercury
dismissed abolitionist attacks by editorializing: “The moral justification of the South lies in facts against which fanaticism and cant are both powerless. . . . The Negro is inferior to the White Man by nature and by destiny . . . he can never be his equal until the laws of God are abrogated.”
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In 1859, an Englishman named Charles Darwin published a book,
On The Origin of the Species
, which maintained that the human race had evolved over millions of years but somehow retained, in spite of its many differences, a biological unity that made them a single species. Agassiz and his followers heaped scorn on this idea.

•      •      •

Yet another strand in bolstering the southern mindset about slavery was the reappraisal of the emancipation of Britain's West Indian blacks. In the 1830s and 1840s, Theodore Weld and others had journeyed to the islands and reported that all was peaceful and prosperous. By the 1850s, it was apparent that the impact of emancipation on the West Indies was an economic disaster.

Most of the ex-slaves had refused to resume toiling on the sugar plantations. They preferred to cultivate small plots on which they raised enough food to feed their families. Sugar production plummeted, leaving Brazil,
Cuba, and southern states such as Louisiana the uncontested rulers of this hugely profitable market.

In desperation, British officials approached the U.S. government, hoping it would cooperate in a campaign to hire free American blacks to work on the islands' plantations. They got a cold reception from federal spokesmen, many of whom were Southerners. They suspected that Britain was embarked on a policy of ruining slavery in other countries so they could emerge as the world's chief economic power, growing cotton and sugar and coffee in their vast Far East colony, India.
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The American government asked the U.S. consul in Jamaica, Robert Monroe Harrison, to give them a report on conditions on that island since emancipation. His reply was devastating. The price of land in Jamaica had declined by at least 50 percent. Some big plantations, which used to produce thousands of pounds in profits for their owners, were now worth about 10 percent of their pre-emancipation value. “England has ruined her own colonies,” Harrison concluded, “and like an unchaste female seeks to put other countries, where slavery exists, in a similar state.”

Harrison and other Southerners saw the international pressure that Britain put on Brazil and Cuba, and their attempt to bribe Texas into antislavery, as part of their devious plan. It had nothing to do with benevolence or human rights. They pointed to Britain's horrendous conduct toward oppressed Ireland, where the Parliament did next to nothing while a famine caused by the failure of the potato crop killed over a million hapless Celts.

The British tried importing thousands of East Indian “hill coolies” into Jamaica. They arrived in a state of near collapse after a voyage of 131 days. They, too, proved to be unproductive workers and were soon another clog on the islands' ruined economy.
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In 1856 the New Orleans
Picayune,
one of the South's leading papers, ran a long report from a correspondent who had just visited Kingston, Jamaica. “The impressions which, on a personal view, the dilapidation of Jamaica, has made upon me are of the most sad and somber character,” he wrote. “This city, which once counted eighty thousand prosperous inhabitants, who
resided more in a great accumulation of beautiful gardens than in densely built squares, now contains, we are told, only about forty thousand . . . people, composed in great measure, to use the expression of an English gentleman resident here, of poverty-crippled Negroes.”

The white population was “rapidly disappearing.” A large number of the better houses were now “abandoned ruins, with creepers and small bushes clinging to their crumbling walls.” The wharves and storehouses were “sinking and going to decay, telling . . . of the abandonment of the fields and fertile vales of the interior.”

“The colored population” was a study in contrasts. The young men looked “hale, well-fed and joyous.” The young girls, mostly good looking, “sail along with the gait of a Juno and the simper of a Venus.” But the middle-aged of both sexes “seem everywhere sad and joyless, and the old are images of haggard want and despair.”

During a stroll around Kingston, the reporter found himself in the coolie section of the city. Here poverty was far worse than in the black neighborhoods. Everywhere beggars beseeched him in broken English for a few pennies to save them from starvation. The only prosperous people he saw were several dozen Chinese, who were running successful businesses. “The elements of society here are in rapid dissolution,” the reporter said, in a harsh closing sentence. “Social insignificance and impotence is [
sic
] fast closing around the island.”
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After eyewitness reports like this one in their newspapers, more than a few Southerners were not surprised when the
London Times
reported that slave emancipation in the West Indies was a colossal failure that had annihilated millions of pounds of capital and reduced blacks to a degradation lower than they had known as slaves. The
Times
urged English abolitionists to visit the West Indies and see with their own eyes what their fanaticism had wrought. Virtually every major paper in the South carried the story.
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•      •      •

In Washington, DC, politicians still sought a solution that would satisfy the South's demand to take their slaves into the western territories. The South
continued to trumpet this demand as a constitutional right, never mentioning that other motivation, the fear of a slave insurrection as the density of the black population continued to grow. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois decided the answer lay in an idea that Lewis Cass, the Democrat who had run for president against Zachary Taylor in 1848, had proposed. Cass had called it “squatter sovereignty.” The voters of each new state would decide whether they tolerated or rejected slavery.

Douglas had emerged as a leader in the passage of the Compromise of 1850. Only five feet tall, when he spoke in the Senate he became a verbal tornado with a voice that seemed to belong to a man ten times his size. Often he worked himself into a near frenzy, stripping off his coat, his vest, his shirt, and finally his undershirt, as he made his thunderous points. Before long he had earned the nickname “the Little Giant.”

Douglas decided that the South would be mollified if they were allowed to bring slaves into one of the two new western states that he had in mind, Kansas and Nebraska. Blocking this idea was the 1819–1820 Missouri Compromise, which barred slavery from territories north of the 36-30 line of latitude. The senator's oratorical skills persuaded Congress to repeal the compromise, with the tacit understanding that Missouri slave owners would people Kansas and antislavery Iowans would do likewise for Nebraska. Douglas concocted a new slogan for his proposal, Popular Sovereignty.

The senator persuaded President Franklin Pierce that the proposal was the answer to achieving a peaceful solution to slavery. Pierce helped whip Democratic congressman and senators into line. On May 25, 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed with comfortable majorities in both houses, making the Missouri Compromise history.
¹⁴

For New Englanders, the date almost coincided with the day that runaway slave Anthony Burns was led through the outrage-filled streets of Boston to the ship that would return him to Virginia. The coincidence produced something very close to hysteria in the Bay State. The frenzy multiplied when the Yankees learned that a Missouri senator was boasting that slave owners from his state were pouring into Kansas, staking out claims and virtually declaring a victory for southern pride and principles. Soon
there was a New England response. An “Emigrant Aid Company” organized groups of antislavery pioneers and sent them to Kansas, armed with new breechloading Sharps rifles.

•      •      •

Among those who joined this throng of New England crusaders were John Brown and his four sons. Brown was descended from Puritans who had arrived in America not long after the Mayflower. In 1805, his father, Owen, had moved his growing family to Hudson, Ohio, just south of Cleveland in the Western Reserve, land that Connecticut had purchased for its rapidly growing population. The elder Brown combined farming with a tannery, and with land speculation in which he lost a great deal of money.

In this small community, John Brown acquired the strict, severe Calvinist faith of the seventeenth century, virtually undiluted by later fads and fancies. He followed his father's example and started a tannery near Hudson. But it did not prosper, nor did any of his other businesses. He plunged into ventures such as wool merchandising that ended with everyone angry and/ or disappointed with him, including his chief partner. His manic-depressive mind was constantly attracted to large schemes. But his inability to deal with details, or to get along with business associates, invariably led to disaster. At times, fear of failure made him a near-crook. He took out three different mortgages on one piece of property without informing his lenders.

When things went wrong, the anger bred in John Brown's soul by his harsh jeremiad-drenched faith exploded. In a dispute over some land in Ohio, he had holed up in a cabin with several of his sons and declared he would kill anyone who set foot on his property. He finally surrendered without a fight. As his failures and embarrassments multiplied, he began sinking into depressions, expressing “a strong wish to die.”
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Brown was uniquely susceptible to the angry words exchanged in Congress and in newspapers between North and South over abolitionist petitions, the annexation of Texas, the admission of California, and the Fugitive Slave Act. From an early age he had sympathized with both free and enslaved blacks and tried to help them. In Ohio, his house had been a stop on
the Underground Railroad. Soon he was a total believer in the evil designs of The Slave Power. Striking a blow against slavery became his last hope of ending his disappointing life in triumph.

Kansas offered John Brown an opportunity to make his commitment more than a war of words. His view of the conflict is apparent in a letter he wrote to John Brown Jr. in August 1854, only a few months after Congress had passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He asked if his son was thinking of going to Kansas or Nebraska, “with a view to help defeat Satan and his legions.” As Brown and his sons and their fellow abolitionists saw it, Kansas was proof of The Slave Power's insatiable appetite for virgin land. The annexation of the immense prairies of Texas had not satisfied them, because they were constantly consuming productive soil, thanks to the careless way they raised cotton and the supposedly shiftless character of slave labor. These Slave Power critics knew nothing about the way the South was rapidly learning the science of soil rejuvenation and making huge profits from its chief crops, cotton, sugar, and indigo.
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By May 1855, Brown and his sons were in Kansas, settled near the abolitionist town of Osawatomie. They had staked out good claims to fertile land and begun growing crops. The last part of their trip took them through Missouri, where hostile inhabitants refused to sell them food or even give them water. In a letter to his father, Salmon Brown wrote: “We saw some of the curses of slavery and they are many. . . . The boys have their feelings well worked up so that I think they will fight.”

The Browns minced words with no one. When a band of armed Missourians rode up to their settlement, the Browns told them, “We are free state, and more than that, we are abolitionists.” When the proslavery Kansas settlers convened a legislature and wrote a series of laws making it a crime to speak out against slavery, John Brown Jr. told one of them that he did not think any person had a right to own a slave in Kansas. If anyone tried to arrest him for violating the new laws, he would “surely kill him so help me God.”
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