American Experiment (95 page)

Ultimately, the abolitionist leaders were strategists of propaganda. Since even their incessant editorializing and lecturing could not reach masses of people, much depended on men and women who could. To some degree
the antislavery writings and sentiments of Emerson and Thoreau had penetrated the popular consciousness. James Russell Lowell’s poetry and prose—especially
The Biglow Papers
—and John Greenleaf Whittier’s poems against slavery expansion influenced public opinion, as did Richard Hildreth’s 1834 novel
The Slave, or, Memoirs of Archy Moore.
But their combined impact could hardly compare with that of a tiny woman, lately of Cincinnati, of a deeply religious family, who had been antislavery though not abolitionist, but who reacted passionately to the fugitive-slave provisions of the Compromise of 1850. The author earlier principally of books on housekeeping and “domestic science,” she now penned a sentimental novel about two well-meaning but negligent southern masters, a cruel, New England-born villain named Simon Legree, a faithful black couple called Tom and Eliza, and a little white child named Eva. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
sold three thousand copies on the day of publication, one hundred times that within a year, perhaps a million copies in Britain alone. Inspired by moral conviction and religious fervor, filled with gripping banalities, the book (and the play based on the book) became probably the most effective piece of propaganda in American history.

Whatever their differences and conflicts, antislavery people were united in their belief in moral persuasion and their opposition to the use of force. Some indeed made a fetish of nonviolence and “nonresistance.” By the advent of the 1850s, however, powerful antislavery propaganda, intensifying abolitionist feeling, deepening southern intransigence, and a constitutional and political system that seemed to satisfy neither side, combined to raise storm clouds on the horizon. Not only nonresisters had responded to Lovejoy’s murder. At a memorial meeting in Ohio a man of thirty-seven had risen at the end of the ceremonies to raise his hand and vow to consecrate his life to the destruction of slavery. His name was John Brown.

I
N
O
CTOBER 1852, IN
his big house overlooking salt marshes stretching toward the Atlantic, hardly a dozen miles north of the Pilgrim landing, Daniel Webster lay dying of cirrhosis of the liver. His stomach and legs were swollen; he could barely sit up; he vomited blood even as five or six leeches sucked away. But the old warrior would die as he had lived, acting the parts of squire, orator, and statesman. Even prostrate on a sofa the Secretary of State seemed as imposing as ever in his blue coat, buff vest, black pantaloons, white cravat and turned-down collar. He spent hours watching as his ox and sheep were paraded, past his window, and he supervised the daily activities of house and farm, gazing raptly at the stars and stripes of a miniature Union flag fastened to the masthead of a tiny boat in his pond. Toward the end, after completing his will and assembling family and servants around his bed, he delivered an oration on immortality. Drowsily closing his eyes for a moment and then opening them, he cried out, “Have I—wife, son, doctor, friends, are you all here?—have I, on this occasion, said any thing unworthy of Daniel Webster?”

The old gladiator died in bitter political disappointment. Vexed and humiliated by the Whig convention’s nomination of General Winfield Scott earlier in the year, he had written his son that he was determined to quit as Secretary of State “and either go abroad, or go into obscurity…” President Fillmore kept him on until the end. Webster predicted that the Democrats under Pierce would sweep the country. As a “
national
party,” he said, “the Whigs are ended.”

But not only the Whig party was dying in the early 1850s; a way of government was dying with it. The three resplendent leaders who had, in their different ways, acted for union were gone. Calhoun had died within a few weeks of Webster’s great speech of March 7, 1850, still doubting that “two peoples so different and hostile” could “exist together in one common Union,” while hoping that the North might make the necessary concessions for the nation to continue. Henry Clay, the very symbol of union, had died only four months before Webster. During most of their public lives these three leaders had fought to save the Union, even at the sacrifice of high principles like liberty and equality, as they defined them.

But now, in the early 1850s, the air was filled with the voices of those who proclaimed that the Union was but a means to higher ends—and what lofty ends was
this
union serving? Ralph Waldo Emerson happened to be on the beach at Plymouth the Sunday morning when Webster died, looking out across the rough water whose spray was blowing onto the hills and orchards. Not since Napoleon, Emerson reflected, had Nature “cut out such a masterpiece” as Webster, a strong leader, the teacher of the nation’s legislators in style and eloquence, the model for young adventurers. “But alas!” as he wrote in his journal, “he was the victim of his ambition; to please the South betrayed the North, and was thrown out by both.”

At dawn that Sunday morning the great bell of the Marshfield parish church loudly rang out. People stood transfixed; someone had died. The bell tolled three times three strokes, the signal for the death of a male. Then, indicating his age, it pealed seventy times. Webster! Born a few years before Shays’ Rebellion and the drafting of the Constitution, he had, along with Clay and Calhoun, dominated the last forty years of Congress. A friend, walking around Webster’s farm with him, once noted that the Marshfield land was not rich by nature, but rich with the money and manure the senator had lavished upon it. Webster had made
a fainéant
national government work too, after a fashion. Emerson mused: “He brought the strength of a savage into the height of culture.”

By the 1850s in the upper Mississippi Valley, the endless work to clear and plow the land, the desperate struggles with bugs and blizzards, the risky financial gambles with machines and middlemen—all this effort was paying off. A twelve-year-old boy in Wisconsin, John Muir, would never forget the joys and woes of pioneer Wisconsin farm life: planting corn and potatoes and spring wheat while the nesting birds sang in the mild soothing breeze, the oaks behind “forming beautiful purple masses as if every leaf were a petal”; then the heavy summer work, sweaty days of sixteen or seventeen hours grinding scythes, chopping stove wood, fetching water from the spring, harvesting and haying under a burning sun; in the winter, rising in a bitterly cold house, squeezing throbbing, chilblained feet into soggy boots, hauling and chopping and fencing in the frozen wastes and yet still relishing the wonderful radiance of the “snow starry with crystals.”

Farming remained the main occupation of Americans—about three-quarters of the nation’s 24 million population were still “rural”—but the agricultural heartland was moving west. In what Allan Nevins called the Northwestern Surge, land-hungry settlers had broken through the
Appalachians to seize the flat and later the rolling prairies to the west. Illinois began the 1850s with fewer people than Massachusetts and ended the decade with almost half a million more. Wisconsin jumped ahead of New Jersey. The population of Iowa soared from 200,000 to almost 700,000. With 2,340,000 inhabitants, Ohio became the third biggest state of the Union. The irresistible magnet was the soil, dark and black, fertile from age-old grassland vegetation and deep root systems, six and even ten or twelve feet deep. The climate, while occasionally cruel, was just about right for rich yields.

Improved farm machinery boosted production during the 1840s and 1850s. The steel plow was the decisive weapon in breaking up the prairie land, replacing eastern-type cast-iron plows that would not scour effectively. John Deere had fashioned his first steel plow from a saw blade in 1837; a decade later this plow, manufactured by the thousands in the East, was rapidly coming into use in the prairie region. In the late 1850s farmers even tried to substitute a steam plow for the ox-driven plow, but the ungainly contraption was not a success. The most dramatic change on the prairie came with the improvement of the reaper. Hussey’s reaper, the most widely known in 1840, was mounted on two large drive wheels from which extended a platform with its cutting knife on the forward edge. The grain fell on this platform and had to be quickly raked away by half a dozen men. With Cyrus McCormick’s improved reaper, the grain was raked from the side of the platform, thus forestalling the need to bind before the machine came around again. Reapers often were deployed together by the scores, with hundreds of men, women, and children harvesting the golden grain behind them.

Everything ultimately turned on the intelligence, daring, and persistence of the farm people. James Baldwin left a striking record of his farm days, as portrayed by Allan Nevins: “Here is a sober, hardworking Quaker farmer of Indiana, living in a log cabin with stick-and-clay chimney—but with the skeleton of a new frame house near by.” About it stretched the “big woods,” especially thick down by the watercourses, two large cornfields speckled by charred stumps, other fields marked for “tree dead-enin’,” and a full-grown orchard. “The farmer’s speech is Hoosier dialect. Yet like the Yankee squire he is proud of his shelf of books: the
Journals
of George Fox and John Woolman, Walker’s
Dictionary
, standard texts like Noah Webster’s blue-backed spelling book, Pike’s
Arithmetic
, and Lindley Murray’s
English Reader
; some volumes of McGuffey; old classics like
Robinson Crusoe
; and in due time Dickens. Though his daily dress is blue jeans, he has a ‘go to meetin’ suit of drab homespun and a gray beaver hat in which he takes on a mien of dignity.”

Out of this magical mix of men and machines and moisture with sun and soil was arising the granary of the world—a cornucopia of corn and wheat, of oxen and horses, of pork and beef, and later of poultry, and the products of grain, especially whiskey. At first corn was king, then wheat. The corn crop of 1839 came to 377 million bushels, while that of 1849 was almost 600 million. Wheat production in the next decade rose by 75 percent to about 175 million bushels, while the rate of increase of corn production fell somewhat. Illinois led the nation in corn and later in wheat. By the 1850s that state and Indiana and Wisconsin were far outstripping New York and Pennsylvania in wheat output. One stockman alone, B. F. Harris of Urbana, raised annually about 500 cattle and 600 hogs on his four-thousand-acre farm.

The prairie land seemed to pulsate with energy. The air was filled with the clatter of revolving wooden horse rakes, threshing machines, seed drills, corn planters, harrows, sulky plows, self-scouring disks, and—in the farmhouse—hand-washing machines and chain-bucket pumps. Farm people flocked to agricultural fairs to see new machines, inspect livestock and produce, hear political orators. Energy radiated outward. The railroads and canalboats that brought people and machines west returned east loaded with hogs and foodstuffs. Cattlemen trying to save money drove huge herds of steers overland, pasturing their beeves on roadside grass and in hired meadows, trying frantically to keep them out of farmers’ fields. With a sixty-day drive from Illinois to eastern cities, however, stockmen increasingly chose to sell their hogs and cattle in western cities instead. Alton and Peoria and especially Chicago were rapidly becoming the slaughtering centers of the nation.

This Northwestern Surge in agriculture produced a powerful social and economic undertow in the East. Farmers in the Northeast were accustomed to change; many had shifted from a self-sufficient home economy to a market economy as the seaboard cities expanded. Now they were faced with a more severe challenge as grain from the West cut heavily into the market for their cereals, and their holdings of swine and sheep fell off. The drovers of Long Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Westchester, who had once hustled their herds into the cattle market at Bull’s Head Village in-lower Manhattan, had to stand by helplessly as wholesale slaughterers brought in cattle and hogs by the hundreds of thousands via canals—especially the Erie—and railroads from the West. Some farmers could not make the transition, and they—or at least their sons and daughters—escaped to the city or to the West.

But others proved that Yankee resourcefulness was still alive. They stepped up their production of milk and apples and berries and market
vegetables. They bred some of the best sheep and blooded horses and poultry and cattle—Guernsey, Durham, Devon, and other breeds. Upstate New Yorkers produced cheddar good enough for the export trade, and built more than a score of cheese factories during the 1850s. New England farmers made money out of the rich tobacco lands along the Connecticut River, out of maple sugar, cranberries, butter, vegetables. Canneries, using tin canisters—later “tin cans”—preserved lobsters, oysters, fruit jellies, peas, tomatoes, sweet corn, some of which was bought by whalers for their long voyages. The Yankees were quick to take advantage of farm fads. One of these was “hen fever”—unbridled speculation in blooded fowls. Shanghai chicks, Cochin Chinas, and other fancy Oriental poultry brought from $75 to $100 a pair at the Boston Fowl Show in 1852.