American Experiment (103 page)

Master and slave were locked in a forced embrace that brought out the worst qualities of each. Dependent on his bondmen for yields, many a planter left them to sicken and die in the swamps while he drank and gambled in northern and European cities. Too conscience-stricken to apply the lash himself, he left that task to his overseer. Unable either to endure their lot or to escape it, slaves resorted to devious means of coping. Frederick Law Olmsted, traveling through Marion County to the Great Pee Dee River, came across a line of slaves, mainly women, dressed in dirty gowns and pieces of blanket. As the overseer, carrying a rawhide whip, rode to one end of the line, the blacks at the other end stopped their heavy labor until the overseer returned.

“Clumsy, awkward, gross, elephantine in all their movements; pouting, grinning, and leering at us; sly, sensual, and shameless, in all their expressions and demeanor,” Olmsted wrote, adding that he had never seen anything so revolting as the whole scene.

The patriarchal planter held his family too in subjection, if a more privileged kind. Wealthy wives were ornaments placed on an artificial pedestal. Daughters were educated for a decorative and domestic role. Fathers wanted their sons to learn to be leaders and rulers, yet kept them dependent and subordinate.

Patriarchs made their house servants and even their field hands part of their “family,” to the point of conceiving mulatto children, but cotton pickers could still be literally sold down the river into the swamplands. Southern wives looked on, helpless but knowing. “Like patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines…” Mary Boykin Chesnut noted in her diary. “Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own.” Mary Chesnut had come into money from her father’s estate shortly after she was married, but it had gone to settle debts. She questioned why
she should “feel like a beggar, utterly humiliated and degraded, when I am forced to say I need money.” She railed at the patriarch who posed as the “model of all human virtues” to his wife and daughters but ran a “hideous black harem.”

“You see,” she added, “Mrs. Stowe did not hit the sorest spot. She makes Legree a bachelor.”

Yet out of this patriarchal, caste-ridden, self-indulgent, elitist community had emerged one of the most cultivated and elegant societies in America. Its capital, Columbia, sitting astride the fall line over a hundred miles from the coast, was a city of handsome houses and gardens, wide, tree-lined streets, and sparkling social life. Thomas Cooper, aging but still vigorous, presided for years over the lively South Carolina College, which spread its maternal wings over the state and strengthened the ideological and political ties binding the Carolinian elite. The eminent political scientist Francis Lieber came to teach here. Small but brilliant groups of artists, scientists, architects, intellectuals, physicians thrived in the state, and many of these masters taught as well. By the mid-1850s educators had founded several women’s colleges that taught classics and not merely comportment.

Probably the most cosmopolitan people in Charleston were the East Bay merchants in the great export and import houses in the Cooper River docks area. Their traditional family and financial ties to Londoners and Parisians, New Yorkers and Philadelphians, their close links to planters needing goods and loans, their involvement in the system of elite power, enabled the merchants to serve as moderating and mediating influences among the powerful forces long building up in the Carolinian lowlands.

Charleston, Carolinians liked to say, was the Athens of America, and the boast was not wholly idle. Here at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers flourished an active press, the stimulating
Southern Review
, the respectable Literary and Philosophical Society, the Apprentices’ Association with its 10,000-volume library and lectures in science, about twenty-five churches, a bank, a theater, and a noted medical college. Here also were a slave auction house, jail with flogging block and treadmill, almshouse, orphan asylum, two arsenals, and noisome slums.

By the 1850s, however, some wondered whether the glory of Charleston and of the state lay in the past, in the eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth. Historians would differ as to just when the state seemed to mutate from the moderate and cosmopolitan community of old to the most bellicose, separatist, and politically homogeneous in the South, but the nullification crisis of the early 1830s seemed to lie at the center of this sea change. Perhaps it was only accidental that such cultural adornments as the
Southern Review
and the Academy of Fine Arts died during this crisis. The fact that many Carolinians were willing separately to take on General Jackson’s armies over the issue of the
tariff
seemingly a mere matter of dollars and cents—reflected the depth and intensity of the feeling. The tariff was not the real issue, of course; the South feared that national majorities could be turned against slavery, that northern firebrands might incite slave revolts. Ten years earlier, South Carolinians had exorcised from their midst Denmark Vesey and thirty-four other blacks by hanging them for planning a revolt that never took place; years later they could not exorcise the great fear that still perturbed them.

The bonds that would snap between North and South a quarter century later were already fraying between Carolinians and other Americans. Calhoun’s resignation as Jackson’s Vice-President, Hayne’s resignation as United States senator and selection as governor, and Calhoun’s election to replace him in the Senate marked the turning away of these men from national to sectional leadership. In South Carolina the nullifiers now were top dogs. Seeking always to strengthen Carolinian solidarity in the face of external threats, nullifier leaders almost put through a test oath that would require all state officers to swear primary allegiance to a sovereign South Carolina. Any possible ties between Carolina slaves and the North were attacked by laws that forbade slaves to learn to read and write and that taxed out of existence peddlers who might traffic in tempting ideas as well as goods. Thus the planter elites tried to suppress criticism and choke off opposition.

The leadership now governing South Carolina was as powerful and unified as any the nation had seen for half a century. Its power and unity flowed from a political system that reflected an ideological solidarity so strong as to render most questions merely tactical disputes over how best to carry out an agreed-on strategy. The Carolinian structure of government was remarkable in a nation that worshipped the checks and balances. An almost omnipotent legislature selected the governor for a two-year term, at the end of which the incumbent was ineligible for re-election. The legislature chose other key state officers and court clerks, as well as local officials. The governor lacked the power of veto. This centralization of power in legislative elites might not have been unusual if the legislators operated in a competitive two-party system, or at least could expect to face opposition, but such was not the case. The absence of a statewide-gubernatorial election that might stimulate grass-roots participation and unity, a doctrine of “virtual representation” that gave legislators wide leeway, the absence of a strong and continuing opposition party, the fear of any opposition at a time when Carolinians were mobilized against external and
internal threats, the weakness of local government and voluntary associations, the partial diking off of state from national politics—all these intended and accidental factors drew South Carolina away from the mainstream of national competitive politics, immensely fortified the power of the slaveholding elites, and emasculated the old Unionist opposition.

Mightily sustaining the Carolinian power elites, and mightily sustained by them, was an ideology—a set of lenses through which the elites perceived the world, a system of doctrines by which they understood it, a hierarchy of values by which they measured it. South Carolinians needed such an ideology, a guide to political action and policy decision, and a way of rationalizing and justifying action taken. Under the intellectual leadership of John Calhoun, the Carolinians and Southerners allied with them shaped perhaps the single most potent ideology to appear in the nation since its founding—but an ideology so flawed at its very heart as to betray those who embraced it.

When Calhoun responded to President Jackson’s famous toast, “Our Federal Union—
it must be preserved
, ” with his own counter-toast, “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear,” the South Carolinian was expressing the central value of his ideology. From Jeffersonian roots Calhoun had drawn a relatively generous and expansive concept of this supreme value. To him liberty was the goal because, in Charles Wiltse’s words, “it was the liberty of the individual to seek his own betterment, to develop his own talents and skills, to realize his own fullest potentialities, that led to every advance in civilization and thereby improved the condition of the whole society.” While this was a highly individualistic theory of liberty, it flowed powerfully from the historic defense of the rights of man against authority as expressed in the English, American, and French revolutions.

Carolinians warmly embraced Calhoun’s idea of an elaborate mechanism to keep government off the back of the citizen—not only states’ rights in general but state nullification of abhorrent federal law, not only the traditional checks and balances but the requirement of a “concurrent majority”—that is, agreement of all major sections and interests—in order for the federal government to act. Calhoun wanted two Presidents, representing two major sections of the country and each having an absolute veto over the other. Calhoun’s was almost a caricature of the old notion of checks on government officials to stop them from interfering with individual liberty; once again the questions of checks against private abuse of individual liberty, and of the ready availability of “government by the
people” to curb arbitrary use of private power, were left by the wayside, enveloped in a fog of theory.

The more, however, that Carolinians apotheosized liberty as individual opportunity, as defense against oppression, as the “unalienable right” written into the Declaration of Independence and signed by eminent Carolinians, the more they faced a flagrant political and intellectual contradiction—the subordination of women and especially of blacks in a caste society. Immensely sharpening this dilemma was the emphasis that Calhoun and others placed on the constant threat to liberty of excessive power, the tendency of those holding power to abuse it, the need to balance power with power. Where was the balancing power of slaves? For a century Carolinians had had to confront the taunting cry from the North: how could slaveholders talk about liberty?

It would take men of great intellectual power and resourcefulness to resolve this dilemma, and such men South Carolina had in abundance in the antebellum period. Calhoun had deposited his intellectual legacy with a group of thinkers who were at least as uncompromising as he and who criticized him, indeed, mainly for his expedient concessions to the North when he was seeking the presidency. There was William Gilmore Simms, a big, proud man with a bluff manner and slyly sarcastic tongue, shunned by the Charleston elite even after he “married into a good name.” There was Edmund Ruffin, an archetypal Yankee-hater, a Virginia-born and -raised agriculturalist who served for a time as agricultural surveyor for South Carolina. There was James Henry Hammond, well wed to a woman who brought him a plantation of 7,500 acres and 148 slaves, a onetime fire-eater who called slavery “the cornerstone of our Republican edifice.” An able politician and longtime champion of nullification and secession, Hammond started as the editor of a paper in Columbia, where he challenged one critic to a duel and horsewhipped another, and once advocated the death penalty for abolitionists. These men and other Carolinians, like Thomas Cooper, in intellectual communion with writers in other states, such as George Fitzhugh and Nathaniel Beverly Tucker of Virginia and William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, wrenched the concept of liberty out of its old moral foundations to make it serve new political purposes.

Thus, where Calhoun contended that people were not all “equally entitled to liberty” but had to earn it, Simms added that liberty was “not intended to disturb the natural degrees of humanity,” but was served only when a man was “suffered to occupy his proper place.” Where Calhoun warned that liberty should not be overextended to those not yet ready for it, Simms would grant only “such liberty as becomes one’s moral condition.” Slavery was a benign institutionalization of natural inequality.
Liberty was often defined simply as states’ rights, in the Calhoun tradition, but this old doctrine too was flawed. If South Carolina demanded her freedom from national governmental control on the ground that she knew best how to govern her affairs, should not South Carolinians in their localities be guaranteed their liberty against
state
control—and how could that proposition be defended when the South Carolina legislature had almost total power over local officials?

There was a much simpler way to overcome the intellectual dilemma over liberty than reinterpreting and narrowing and trivializing it—to repudiate the concept entirely and with it the essence of Jeffersonian moral philosophy. “Liberty and equality are not only destructive to the morals,” said George Fitzhugh, “but to the happiness of society.” So much for the Declaration of Independence. Slavery, contended Albert Taylor Bledsoe, another non-Carolinian, was in effect liberty: “By the institution of slavery for the blacks, license is shut out, and liberty is introduced.…” It was even simpler to dispose of that dangerous concept of Mr. Jefferson’s that “all men are created equal.” Hammond simply denied it.

Whatever their attitude toward liberty in theory, Carolinians and other Southerners were unquestionably ready to abrogate it in fact. By the 1850s every southern state save Kentucky had passed laws limiting freedom of speech, press, and discussion. Hammond recommended “one way” to silence talk of abolition: “
Terror
—
Death
…” Even in Kentucky, Cassius Clay’s antislavery
True American
was suppressed by other means, as a mob dismantled his presses and sent them to Cincinnati: Most southern editors applauded this clamp-down on their fellow journalists. The failure of the press to challenge the proslavery litany reflected—aside from the ever-present threat of the duel—a failure of the southern imagination to see alternative possibilities for its society.