Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (10 page)

estate. The continual expansion of the plantation economy to new frontiers uprooted many slaves who left behind family members as they trekked westward. Recent studies of slave marriages have found that about one-fourth of them were broken by owners or heirs who sold or moved husband or wife apart from the other.
⁴⁴
The sale of young children apart from parents, while not the normal pattern, also occurred with alarming frequency.

This breakup of families was the largest chink in the armor of slavery's defenders. Abolitionists thrust their swords through the chink. One of the most powerful moral attacks on the institution was Theodore Weld's
American Slavery as It Is
, first published in 1839 and reprinted several times. Made up principally of excerpts from advertisements and articles in southern newspapers, the book condemned slavery out of the slaveowners' own mouths. Among hundreds of similar items in the book were reward notices for runaway slaves containing such statements as "it is probable he will aim for Savannah, as he said he had children in that vicinity," or advertisements like the following from a New Orleans newspaper: "
NEGROES FOR SALE
.—A negro woman 24 years of age, and two children, one eight and the other three years. Said negroes will be sold separately or together as desired."
⁴⁵

Harriet Beecher Stowe used Weld's book as a source for scenes in the most influential indictment of slavery of all time,
Uncle Tom's Cabin
(of which more later). Written in the sentimental style made popular by best-selling women novelists,
Uncle Tom's Cabin
homed in on the breakup of families as the theme most likely to pluck the heartstrings of middle-class readers who cherished children and spouses of their own. Eliza fleeing across the ice-choked Ohio River to save her son from the slave-trader and Tom weeping for children left behind in Kentucky when

44
. The following studies have found a marriage breakup rate by action of owners ranging from one-fifth to one-third: John W. Blassingame,
The Slave Community
(New York, 1972), 89–92; Herbert Gutman and Richard Sutch, "The Slave Family: Protected Agent of Capitalist Masters or Victim of Slave Trade?" in Paul A. David et al.,
Reckoning with Slavery
(New York, 1976), 127–29; Herbert Gutman,
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom
(New York, 1976), 146–47; Paul D. Escort,
Slavery Remembered: A Record of the Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives
(Chapel Hill, 1979), 46–48; and C. Peter Ripley, "The Black Family in Transition: Louisiana, 1860–1865,"
JSH
, 41 (1975), 377–78.

45
. Weld,
American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses
(New York, 1839), 165, 168.

he was sold South are among the most unforgettable scenes in American letters.

Although many northern readers shed tears at Tom's fate, the political and economic manifestations of slavery generated more contention than moral and humanitarian indictments. Bondage seemed an increasingly peculiar institution in a democratic republic experiencing a rapid transition to free-labor industrial capitalism. In the eyes of a growing number of Yankees, slavery degraded labor, inhibited economic development, discouraged education, and engendered a domineering master class determined to rule the country in the interests of its backward institution. Slavery undermined "intelligence, vigor, and energy," asserted New York's antislavery Whig leader William Henry Seward in the 1840s. It had produced in the South "an exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads . . . an absence of enterprise and improvement." The institution was "incompatible with all . . . the elements of the security, welfare, and greatness of nations." Slavery and free labor, said Seward in his most famous speech, were "antagonistic systems" between which raged an "irrepressible conflict" that must result in the destruction of slavery.
⁴⁶

But whether or not slavery was backward and inefficient, as Seward maintained, it was extraordinarily productive. The yield of raw cotton doubled each decade after 1800, the greatest increase for any agricultural commodity. Cotton from the American South grown mostly by slave labor furnished three-fourths of the world's supply. Southern staples provided three-fifths of all American exports, earning foreign exchange that played an important part in American economic growth. And while slavery certainly made the Old South "different" from the North, the question whether differences outweighed similarities and generated an irrepressible conflict remains a matter of interpretation. North and South, after all, shared the same language, the same Constitution, the same legal system, the same commitment to republican institutions, the same predominantly Protestant religion and British ethnic heritage, the same history, the same memories of a common struggle for nationhood.

Yet by the 1850s Americans on both sides of the line separating freedom from slavery came to emphasize more their differences than similarities.

46
. Foner,
Free Soil
, 41, 51; George E. Baker, ed.,
The Works of William H. Seward, 5
vols. (New York, 1853–84), IV, 289–92.

Yankees and Southrons spoke the same language, to be sure, but they increasingly used these words to revile each other. The legal system also became an instrument of division, not unity: northern states passed personal liberty laws to defy a national fugitive slave law supported by the South; a southern-dominated Supreme Court denied the right of Congress to exclude slavery from the territories, a ruling that most northerners considered infamous. As for a shared commitment to Protestantism, this too had become divisive rather than unifying. The two largest denominations—Methodist and Baptist—had split into hostile northern and southern churches over the question of slavery, and the third largest—Presbyterian—split partly along sectional lines and partly on the issue of slavery. The ideology of republicanism had also become more divisive than unifying, for most northerners interpreted it in a free-labor mode while most southerners insisted that one of the most cherished tenets of republican liberty was the right to property—including property in slaves.

People on both sides began pointing with pride or alarm to certain quantitative differences between North and South. From 1800 to 1860 the proportion of the northern labor force in agriculture had dropped from 70 to 40 percent while the southern proportion had remained constant at 80 percent. Only one-tenth of southerners lived in what the census classified as urban areas, compared with one-fourth of northerners. Seven-eighths of the immigrants settled in free states. Among antebellum men prominent enough to be later chronicled in the
Dictionary of American Biography
, the military profession claimed twice the percentage of southerners as northerners, while the ratio was reversed for men distinguished in literature, art, medicine, and education. In business the proportion of Yankees was three times as great, and among engineers and inventors it was six times as large.
⁴⁷
Nearly twice the percentage of northern youth attended school. Almost half of the southern people (including slaves) were illiterate, compared to 6 percent of residents of free states.

Many conservative southerners scoffed at the Yankee faith in education. The
Southern Review
asked: "Is this the way to produce producers? To make every child in the state a literary character would not be a good qualification for those who must live by manual labor." The South, replied Massachusetts clergyman Theodore Parker in 1854, was "the foe

47
. Rupert B. Vance, "The Geography of Distinction: The Nation and Its Regions, 1790–1927,"
Social Forces
, 18 (1939), 175–76.

to Northern Industry—to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce . . . to our democratic politics in the State, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community." Yankees and Southrons could no more mix than oil and water, agreed Savannah lawyer and planter Charles C. Jones, Jr. They "have been so entirely separated by climate, by morals, by religion, and by estimates so totally opposite of all that constitutes honor, truth, and manliness, that they cannot longer exist under the same government."
⁴⁸

Underlying all of these differences was the peculiar institution. "On the subject of slavery," declared the
Charleston Mercury
in 1858, "the North and South . . . are not only two Peoples, but they are rival, hostile Peoples."
⁴⁹
This rivalry concerned the future of the republic. To nineteenth-century Americans the West represented the future. Expansion had been the country's lifeblood. So long as the slavery controversy focused on the morality of the institution where it already existed, the two-party system managed to contain the passions it aroused. But when in the 1840s the controversy began to focus on the expansion of slavery into new territories it became irrepressible.

"Westward the course of empire takes its way," Bishop George Berkeley had written of the New World in the 1720s. Westward looked Thomas Jefferson to secure an empire of liberty for future generations of American farmers. Even President Timothy Dwight of Yale University, who as a New England Federalist belonged to the region and group least enthusiastic about westward expansion, waxed eloquent in a poem of 1794:

All hail, thou western world! by heaven design'd
Th' example bright, to renovate mankind.
Soon shall thy sons across the mainland roam;
And claim, on far Pacific shores, their home;
Their rule, religion, manners, arts, convey,
And spread their freedom to the Asian sea.

A half-century later another Yankee who had never been to the West also found its attractions irresistible. "Eastward I go only by force," wrote

48
.
Southern Review
quoted in Kaestle,
Pillars of the Republic
, 207; Parker quoted in John L. Thomas, ed.,
Slavery Attacked: The Abolitionist Crusade
(Englewood Cliffs, 1965), 149; Jones in Robert Manson Myers, ed.,
The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War
(New York, 1972), 648.

49
. John McCardell,
The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860
(New York, 1979), 270–71.

Henry David Thoreau, "but westward I go free. Mankind progresses from East to West."
⁵⁰

"Go West, young man," advised Horace Greeley during the depression of the 1840s. And westward did they go, by millions in the first half of the nineteenth century, in obedience to an impulse that has never ceased. "The West is our object, there is no other hope left for us," wrote a departing migrant. "There is nothing like a new country for poor folks." "Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward," wrote one pioneer on his way to Illinois in 1817. "We are seldom out of sight, as we travel on this grand track towards the Ohio, of family groups behind, and before us."
⁵¹
From 1815 to 1850 the population of the region west of the Appalachians grew nearly three times as fast as the original thirteen states. During that era a new state entered the Union on the average of every three years. By the 1840s the states between the Appalachians and the Mississippi had passed the frontier stage. It had been a frontier of rivers, mainly the Ohio-Mississippi-Missouri network with their tributaries, which had carried settlers to their new homes and provided their initial links with the rest of the world.

After pushing into the first tier of states beyond the Mississippi, the frontier in the 1840s leapfrogged more than a thousand miles over the semi-arid Great Plains and awesome mountain ranges to the Pacific Coast. This was first a frontier of overland trails and of sailing routes around the horn; of trade in beaver skins from the mountains, silver from Santa Fe, and cattle hides from California. By the 1840s it had also become a farming frontier as thousands of Americans sold their property at depression prices, hitched their oxen to Conestoga wagons, and headed west over the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails to a new future—on land that belonged to Mexico or was claimed by Britain. That was a small matter, however, because most Americans considered it their "manifest destiny" to absorb these regions into the United States. Boundless prospects awaited settlers who would turn "those wild

50
. Henry Nash Smith,
Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
(Vintage Books ed., New York, 1957), 11; Loren Baritz, "The Idea of the West,"
AHR
, 66 (1961), 639.

51
. Lewis O. Saum,
The Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War America
(Westport, Conn., 1980), 205; Malcolm J. Rohrbough,
The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions
1775–1850 (New York, 1978), 163.