Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (42 page)

This mudsill theme was becoming increasingly visible in southern propaganda. The most extreme expression of it occurred in the writings of George Fitzhugh. A frayed-at-the-elbows scion of a Virginia First Family, Fitzhugh wrote prolifically about "the failure of free society." In 1854 and 1857 he gathered his essays into books entitled
Sociology for the South
and
Cannibals All!
The latter was published a few weeks before the Panic of 1857 and seemed almost to predict it. Free labor under capitalism was a war of each against all, wrote Fitzhugh, a sort of social cannibalism. "Slavery is the natural and normal condition of society," he maintained. "The situation of the North is abnormal and anomalous." To bestow "upon men equality of rights, is but giving license to the strong to oppress the weak" because "capital exercises a more perfect compulsion over free laborers than human masters over slaves; for free laborers must at all times work or starve, and slaves are supported whether they work or not." Therefore "we slaveholders say you must recur to domestic slavery, the oldest, the best, the most common form of Socialism" as well as "the natural and normal condition of the laboring men, white or black."
⁵⁸

57
.
Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond, of SouthCarolina
(New York, 1866), 317–19.

58
. Fitzhugh,
Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters
, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 40, 32, 31; Fitzhugh,
Sociology for the South
, in Eric L. McKitrick, ed.,
Slavery Defended: The View of the Old South
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963), 38; article by Fitzhugh in
Richmond Enquirer
, and extract from
Sociology for the South
, in Harvey Wish, ed.,
Ante-Bellum: Writings of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper on Slavery
(New York, 1960), 9, 85.

Fitzhugh's ideas flowed a bit outside the mainstream of the proslavery argument, which distinguished sharply between free whites and slave blacks and assigned an infinite superiority to the former
because
they were white. But while Fitzhugh's notions were eccentric they were not unique. Some proslavery proponents drew a distinction between southern yeomen and northern workers or farmers. Southerners were superior because they lived in a slave society. Yankees
were
perhaps fit only to be slaves. To explain this, southerners invented a genealogy that portrayed Yankees as descendants of the medieval Anglo-Saxons and southerners as descendants of their Norman conquerors. These divergent bloodlines had coursed through the veins of the Puritans who settled New England and the Cavaliers who colonized Virginia. "The Southern people," concluded an article in the
Southern Literary Messenger
, "come of that race . . . recognized as Cavaliers . . . directly descended from the Norman Barons of William the Conqueror, a race distinguished in its earliest history for its warlike and fearless character, a race in all times since renowned for its gallantry, chivalry, honor, gentleness, and intellect."
⁵⁹
If matters came to a fight, therefore, one Norman southerner could doubtless lick ten of those menial Saxon Yankees.

Whether or not southern superiority resulted from "the difference of race between the Northern people and the Southern people," as the
Southern Literary Messenger
would have it, the vaunted virtues of a free-labor society were a sham. "The great evil of Northern
free
society," insisted a South Carolina journal, "is that it is burdened with a
servile class of mechanics and laborers
, unfit for self-government, yet clothed with the attributes and powers of citizens." A Georgia newspaper was even more emphatic in its distaste. "Free Society! we sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? . . . The prevailing class one meets with [in the North] is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman's body servant."
⁶⁰

59
.
Southern Literary Messenger
, 30 (June 1860), 401–9.

60
. South Carolina newspaper quoted in Nevins,
Ordeal
, II, 498;
Muscogee Herald
, quoted in
New York Tribune
, Sept. 10, 1856.

Northern newspapers picked up and reprinted such articles. Yankees did not seem to appreciate southern sociology. Sometimes the response was good-humored, as demonstrated by a banner at one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates: "
SMALL-FISTED FARMERS, MUD SILLS OF SOCIETY, GREASY MECHANICS, FOR A. LINCOLN
." Other reactions were angrier and sometimes unprintable. No doubt some of the soldiers who marched through Georgia and South Carolina with Sherman a few years later had read these descriptions of themselves as greasy mechanics and servile farmers.

In any event, northerners gave as good as they got in this warfare of barbs and insults. In a famous campaign speech of 1858, William H. Seward derided the southern doctrine that "labor in every society, by whomsoever performed, is necessarily unintellectual, groveling, and base." The idea had produced the backwardness of the South, said Seward, the illiteracy of its masses, the dependent colonial status of its economy. In contrast "the free-labor system educates all alike, and by opening all the fields of industrial employment to . . . all classes of men . . . brings into the highest possible activity all the physical, moral and social energies of the whole State." A collision between these two systems impended, "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will . . . become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation."
⁶¹

Southerners claimed that free labor was prone to unrest and strikes. Of course it was, said Abraham Lincoln during a speaking tour of New England in March 1860 that coincided with the shoemakers' strike. "
I am glad to see that a system prevails in New England under which laborers
CAN
strike
when they want to (Cheers). . . . I
like
the system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere. (Tremendous applause.)" The glory of free labor, said Lincoln, lay in its open competition for upward mobility, a competition in which most Americans finished ahead of where they started in life. "I want every man to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he
can
better his condition." That was the significance of the irrepressible conflict and of the house divided, concluded Lincoln, for if the South got its way "free labor that
can
strike will give way to slave labor that cannot!"
⁶²

The harshest indictment of the South's social system came from the

61
. George E. Baker, ed.,
The Works of William H. Seward
, 5 vols. (New York, 1853–84), IV, 289–92.

62
.
CWL
, IV, 24, 8.

pen of a white southerner, Hinton Rowan Helper. A self-appointed spokesman for nonslaveholding whites, Helper was almost as eccentric in his own way as George Fitzhugh. Of North Carolina yeoman stock, he had gone to California in the gold rush to make his fortune but returned home disillusioned. Brooding on the conditions he perceived in the Carolina upcountry, Helper decided that "slavery lies at the root of all the shame, poverty, ignorance, tyranny and imbecility of the South." Echoing the free-soil argument, Helper maintained that slavery degraded all labor to the level of bond labor. Planters looked down their noses at nonslaveholders and refused to tax themselves to provide a decent school system. "Slavery is hostile to general education," Helper declared in his 1857 book
The Impending Crisis
. "Its very life, is in the ignorance and stolidity of the masses." Data from the 1850 census—which had alarmed the southern elite itself a few years earlier—furnished Helper information that, used selectively, enabled him to "prove" the superior productivity of a free-labor economy. The hay crop of the North alone, he claimed, was worth more than the boasted value of King Cotton and all other southern staples combined. Helper urged nonslaveholding whites to use their votes—three-fourths of the southern total—to overthrow "this entire system of oligarchical despotism" that had caused the South to "welter in the cesspool of ignorance and degradation. . . . Now is the time for them to assert their rights and liberties . . . [and] strike for Freedom in the South."
⁶³

If Helper had published this book in North Carolina or in Baltimore, where he was living when he completed it,
The Impending Crisis
might have languished in obscurity. Endless recitals of statistics dulled its cutting edge of criticism. But no southern publisher would touch it. So Helper lugged his manuscript to New York, where it was published in the summer of 1857. The
New York Tribune
recognized its value to Republicans and printed an eight-column review. This caused readers both North and South to take notice. Helper had probably overstated the disaffection of nonslaveholders from the southern social system. Outside the Appalachian highlands many of them were linked to the ruling class by ties of kinship, aspirations for slave ownership, or mutual dislike of Yankees and other outsiders. A caste system as well as a form of labor, slavery elevated all whites to the ruling caste and thereby reduced the potential for class conflict. However poor and illiterate some

63
. From Helper,
Impending Crisis of the South
, as reprinted in Wish, ed.,
Ante-Bellum
, 201, 253, 187, 181, 202.

whites may have been, they were still white. If the fear of "nigger equality" caused most of the northern working class to abhor Republicans even where blacks constituted only 2 or 3 percent of the population, this fear operated at much higher intensity where the proportion of blacks was tenfold greater. But while Helper exaggerated yeoman alienation in the South, so also did many slaveholders who felt a secret foreboding that nonslaveowners in regions like Helper's Carolina upcountry might turn against their regime. Several southern states therefore made it a crime to circulate
The Impending Crisis
. This of course only attracted more attention to the book. A Republican committee raised funds to subsidize an abridged edition in 1859 to be scattered far and wide as a campaign document. The abridgers ensured a spirited southern reaction by adding such captions as "The Stupid Masses of the South" and "Revolution—Peacefully if we can, Violently if we must."
⁶⁴
Sixty-eight Republican congressmen endorsed a circular advertising the book.

One of them was John Sherman of Ohio, a moderate ex-Whig who later confessed that he had signed the endorsement without reading the book. Sherman's signature caused another donnybrook over the election of a speaker of the House when the 36th Congress convened in December 1859. Though Republicans outnumbered Democrats 113 to 101 in the House, upper-South Americans held the balance of power. Republicans nominated Sherman for speaker because he seemed temperate enough to attract a few votes from these former Whigs. But discovery of his endorsement of Helper's book set off an uproar that inhibited slave-state congressmen from voting for him. Through two months and forty-four ballots the House remained deadlocked on the edge of violence. Southerners denounced Helper, his book, and anyone connected with either as "a traitor, a renegade, an apostate . . . infamous . . . abominable . . . mendacious . . . incendiary, insurrectionary."
⁶⁵
Most congressmen came armed to the sessions; the sole exception seemed to be a former New England clergyman who finally gave in and bought a pistol for self-defense. Partisans in the galleries also carried weapons. One southerner reported that a good many slave-state congressmen expected and wanted a shootout on the House floor: they "are willing to fight the question out, and to settle it right there. . . . I can't help

64
. Potter,
Impending Crisis
, 387.

65
.
Ibid
.; Avery O. Craven,
The Growth of Southern Nationalism 1848–1861
(Baton Rouge, 1953), 251; Edward Channing,
A History of the United States
, 6 vols. (New York, 1905–25), VI, 208n.

wishing the Union were dissolved and we had a Southern confederacy." The governor of South Carolina informed one of his state's congressmen on December 20, 1859: "If . . . you upon consultation decide to make the issue of force in Washington, write or telegraph me, and I will have a regiment in or near Washington in the shortest possible time."
⁶⁶