The Invisible Line (12 page)

While Hart set himself apart as different, he thrived in New England's cultural ferment, responding to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call to “affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times.” Unlike his fellow Southerners, Hart showed a willingness to criticize the South, a rare candor that intrigued his Northern classmates. “While our Yankee brethren are unable to rival us in statesmanship and popular oratory,” he wrote, “we are far, too far, behind them in polite literature and science.” When it came to issues of culture and education in the South, Hart tended to express himself like a New England reformer. “Our failure lies in the fact that we have no complete and permanently established system of universal popular education,” he wrote, “and the consequence is that knowledge which should be as free as the air we breathe, is conditional upon wealth and is thus placed beyond the reach of the greater part of our people.”
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Hart's goal—of a culturally enlightened South that could “contend” with the North for “supremacy in History, Poetry, Painting, Sculpture, and the sciences”—was naïvely romantic. Yet he couched his idealism in terms that echoed modern notions of capitalism, the spirit that was making New Haven a rich and powerful city. “Much stress is laid in Political Economy on the law of ‘supply & demand,' ” he wrote his father. “It will be found I think that this principle operates with perhaps more force and universality in the intellectual than physical world.” As he imagined it, public education in the South would create a “permanent demand” that would allow literature to be “pursued and cultivated successfully as a profession.” Culture, in Hart's mind, was a commodity to be bought and sold, fostering a regional economy staffed by teachers and professors and sustained by their expertise. It was a vision that more closely resembled New Haven than New Orleans. Whether he was being grandiose or practical, Hart spoke a language that connected with his Northern classmates.
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Just beneath the surface of Hart's undergraduate idealism was an appetite for success in the real world. For much of his senior year, he had been attending a series of private lectures by his metaphysics professor on continuing one's education after graduation. It was a subject, Hart wrote, “of vast practical importance to myself, as well as to those who go before and those who are to come after me.” The professor urged a course of miscellaneous reading, followed by “the acquisition of Modern languages,” training in a profession, and finally travel abroad. The goal was “to make an accomplished scholar and gentleman.” But Hart was left dissatisfied— what he really wanted were lectures that would “enable one to get the upper hand of the bustling activities of our progressive & expanding Republic.” Just what he meant by getting the “upper hand” was suggested in an 1854 letter by his older brother Randall, who was traveling at the time down the East Coast. “Washington of all cities attracted my attention,” Randall wrote Hart. “There are several very handsome residences in Washington that would suit you very well, but the White House in particular I would recommend.”
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ON MARCH 21, 1855, Hart Gibson dressed with special excitement for an evening in town. Throughout the winter he had cheerfully attended the “People's Course of Lectures” organized by the New Haven Lyceum, a civic group dedicated to adult education. Even though the talks had been designed “chiefly with a view to aid the anti-slavery agitation,” Gibson delighted in the opportunity to see up close some of the great enemies of the South. John Parker Hale of New Hampshire, the first of the new breed of antislavery senators who were roiling the floor debates in the Capitol, did not just talk of abolition—he had served as lawyer for fugitive slaves and vigilantes who had interfered with their recapture. Unitarian minister Theodore Parker railed against the pervasive and corrupting governmental influence of the “Slave Power” and urged Northerners to “annihilate” the “monster” of slavery. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother, was a consummate showman who had been raising thousands of dollars to free individual slaves by holding “auctions” that shocked and thrilled his New York congregation. Perhaps most dangerous of all was Cassius Marcellus Clay, a Kentuckian from Gibson's social circle who had been converted to abolitionism as a Yale undergraduate after hearing William Lloyd Garrison speak. Clay proudly remembered being described as someone with a “white skin” but “a very black heart.”
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While many Southerners responded violently to these abolitionist firebrands—during an 1848 congressional debate, Senator Henry Foote invited Hale to “visit the good state of Mississippi” so that he could “grace one of the tallest trees of the forest, with a rope around his neck . . . [I]f necessary I should myself assist in the operation”—Hart Gibson did not seem remotely threatened. With a light touch he wrote his father that the lectures had been “very edifying and instructive.” Just as casually, he refused to be swayed by them. “I need scarcely mention the burden of their song,” he said.
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On the night of March 21, however, the Lyceum was finally sponsoring a public lecture giving “a ‘South Side' view of slavery.” The speaker was an introverted, self-taught country lawyer who had never traveled to the North before—indeed, he rarely left his home in the Virginia Tidewater region. Yet George Fitzhugh would be denounced by William Lloyd Garrison in the pages of the
Liberator
as “the Don Quixote of Slavedom—only still more demented.” In his physical and intellectual isolation, George Fitzhugh had become a proslavery pamphleteer, cultivating like hothouse flowers original ideas that took root across the South and changed the way people thought about slavery.
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Over the previous three decades, in response to abolitionists, Southerners had developed a series of arguments that tended to excuse slavery as a necessary evil, essential for the American economy, sanctioned by the Bible, historically the pathway from savagery to civilization, and regulated by the benevolent self-interest of noble masters. Fitzhugh took such arguments a step further, contrasting slavery with the horrors of free labor and pushing Southerners to “endorse slavery in the abstract.” Slavery, to Fitzhugh, “was morally right, . . . as profitable as it was humane.” In 1854 Fitzhugh published
Sociology for the South
—named, he wrote, for the new science of sociology that was developed to study the countless “afflictions” of industrial, free society. Fitzhugh's book embraced a radical critique of capitalism, a view that “free competition begets a war of the wits . . . quite as destructive to the weak, simple and guileless, as the war of the sword.” As Fitzhugh saw it, in a free society “the negro . . . would be welcome nowhere; meet with thousands of enemies and no friends. If he went North, the white laborers would kick him and cuff him, and drive him out of employment.” By contrast, the plantation offered a more stable, just, prosperous, and happy life for blacks and whites alike. “At the slaveholding South all is peace, quiet, plenty and contentment,” Fitzhugh wrote. “We have no mobs, no trades unions, no strikes for higher wages, no armed resistance to the law, but little jealousy of the rich by the poor . . . We are wholly exempt from the torrent of pauperism, crime, agrarianism, and infidelity” that was ravaging Europe and the North.
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Hart Gibson felt a rush of anticipation at the prospect of seeing this “Mr. Fitzhugh of Va.” speak. Perhaps the presentation would help Gibson's Yankee friends understand his position, even sway a few of them, or at the very least give him more ammunition in the daily verbal battles over slavery. Maybe the evening's speaker would show the South's progress in becoming the equal of the North on the intellectual stage. Hart walked straight down Chapel Street, past the Green and through the downtown. It was a Wednesday after sundown. Flickering gas lamps revealed a slow throng of men and women, finished with their shifts at shops, offices, and factories, making their way home—or to bars, social clubs, or even the People's Lectures—in the dusk.
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Brewster's Hall, built by New Haven's biggest carriage manufacturer, stood just across the street from the train station, an ornate reminder that culture and ideas followed in industry's wake. The packed auditorium rumbled with excited talk about the night's speaker—the local papers had promised a true novelty, a “philosophical Southern” defense of slavery from “the author of what is claimed to be the most vigorous and consistent work on that side of the controversy.” Hart Gibson took his seat among Yale men, professors, and townspeople, rich and poor, young and old. Although he was one of the few Southerners there, he felt comfortable in the crowd. He shared their curiosity, even a certain bemusement at the spectacle.
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When the clock struck eight, the auditorium hushed. The evening's speaker took the podium to make what he called “a metaphysical and statistical argument” proving “free society a failure.” Hair combed forward and across his high forehead, Fitzhugh looked a touch like Napoleon. He relished the large audience's rapt attention, but he had not prepared a speech for the occasion. Instead, he read directly from
Sociology for the South
. “Men are not ‘born entitled to equal rights'!” he proclaimed. In fact, “the weak in mind and body” were better off as Southern slaves than as free people, or rather “under that natural slavery of the weak to the strong, the foolish to the wise and cunning.” “It would be far nearer the truth,” he said, “to say ‘that some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them,'
and the riding does them good
.”
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Fitzhugh kept reading. Minutes turned to hours, and for a fidgety audience the “profound sensation” of his words gave way to cross-eyed tedium. By ten p.m. Fitzhugh had declared that Thomas Jefferson was little more than an “enthusiastic speculative philosopher” whose ideas “would subvert every government on earth.” Benjamin Franklin was “too utilitarian and material in his doctrines, to be relied on in matters of morals or government.” The Declaration of Independence was “verbose, new-born, false and unmeaning”—after all, soldiers and sailors, apprentices and wards, and “the wives in all America” had long alienated “both liberty and life.” Moreover, “all crimes are notoriously committed in the pursuit of happiness.”
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Finally, Fitzhugh declared that free society was “theoretically impracticable,” “afflicted with disease,” and proven a failure “from history and statistics.” He stepped back and basked in the applause. If he had expected a hostile reception from an auditorium full of Yankees, he was pleasantly surprised to be “listened to politely throughout.” Afterward he received the congratulations of various New Havenites and Yale professors, mostly of the abolitionist stripe. In truth, Fitzhugh had bored the crowd into submission. The next day a local paper offered that “no one was convinced by his attempted arguments; many were amused by their novelty; a few were saddened that a man whom nature evidently intended for a genial gentleman, possessing common sense, and ordinary mental ability, should have the end of his production thwarted by the mere fact of topical location under the influences of slavery.”
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Hart Gibson watched agog as the slavery question—a struggle that everyone knew portended national tragedy—unraveled into farce. In Gibson's delicate phrasing, Fitzhugh was “a very gentlemanly looking man but it was obvious that neither nature or art intended him for a public speaker.” A less secure man might have despaired at Fitzhugh's debacle or felt compelled to defend him. But Gibson, ever the aristocrat, was able to consider the speech with something approaching critical distance. “A more hopeless & enormous failure can not easily be conceived,” he wrote.

Fitzhugh's contrast between the free market's horrors and slavery's caring community rang false to the sugar planter's son. Perhaps the slavery Fitzhugh knew in the Virginia Tidewater was different from what Gibson had seen at Bayou Black. More important, the plantation life that Gibson knew was aggressively capitalist. Regardless of whether blacks were economic actors, the Gibsons were constantly competing with whites in markets for land, slaves, and sugar. And they had won. Hart Gibson walked back up Chapel Street to Brick Row, one of many Yalies chuckling over the evening's events.
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The next night Gibson returned to Brewster's Hall, joined in the audience by George Fitzhugh, to hear a rebuttal by the eminent abolitionist Wendell Phillips. The Boston lawyer dismissed Fitzhugh's argument with a rhetorical flick of the hand. “He who looks backward upon the past and present of Virginia,” Phillips said, “and thinks that her sociality is sound, or that the ulcer eating into her prosperity is Free Trade and not Slavery, is like the old sailor who complaining of the effects of his grog, found the fault not in his rum, but in his water!” Phillips made a fiery call for “all men [to] have their rights—no matter whether the Union goes to pieces or not!” and he attacked the political conservatism of American religion, declaring that “a Church at peace in the presence of oppression is not the Church of Christ.”
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While Fitzhugh pronounced Phillips's speech to be “flat treason and blasphemy—nothing else,” Hart Gibson was enthralled. Part of what made Phillips so appealing was that his brand of antislavery belief did not engage in the wishful thinking, all too common among abolitionists, that the Constitution outlawed slavery. Rather, Phillips relied on blunt realism to explain the stranglehold that the “slave power” had on American politics and life. Like Gibson, he recognized that Americans were a “new people” driven by wealth. “I find no fault with this,” he said. “I do not whine over it . . . There is much to be done. There are roads to build; there are hundreds of interests to be provided for, and material prosperity is the mission of the age.”