The Making of the American South: A Short History, 1500-1877 (Problems in American History)

THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH A Short History, 1500–1877

J. William Harris

‘‘J. William Harris’s text offers an excellent and long overdue synthesis of recent scholarship on many different aspects of Southern history from the early sixteenth century through the era of Civil War and Reconstruction. Sensibly organized and beautifully written, it is a work that students will find readily accessible. It is a must for the classroom.’’ B.C. Wood, University of Cambridge

‘‘This slim volume provides a crisp, up-to-date account of the South’s emergence as a distinctive, self-conscious region. Harris writes an engrossing narrative that is as convincing as it is readable.’’ Jane T. Censer, George Mason University

‘‘An uncommonly good book by an especially talented historian, J. William Harris’s The Making of the American South is the panoramic story of many Souths told crisply and elegantly and with searching clarity. Gracefully written and thoroughly edifying, it is a terrific read.’’ Mark M. Smith, University of South Carolina

‘‘This rich and readable introduction to the South from early exploration through the Civil War and Reconstruction deserves a wide audience of both students and general readers. Full of fresh insights and reflecting the latest scholarship on the region, J. William Harris’s narrative is concise and fast-paced, yet never shirks from the complexity or diversity that has always made the southern past so intriguing.’’ John C. Inscoe, University of Georgia

Problems in American History Series Editor: Jack P. Greene Each volume focuses on a central theme in American history and provides greater analytical depth and historiographic coverage than standard textbook discussions normally allow. The intent of the series is to present in highly interpretive texts the unresolved questions in American history that are central to current debates and concerns. The texts will be concise enough to be supplemented with primary readings or core textbooks and are intended to provide brief syntheses to large subjects. 1 2

Jacqueline Jones Robert Buzzanco

3

Ronald Edsforth

4 5

Frank Ninkovich Peter Onuf and Leonard Sadosky Fraser Harbutt Donna Gabaccia J. William Harris

6 7 8

A Social History of the Laboring Classes Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life The New Deal: America’s Response to the Great Depression The United States and Imperialism Jeffersonian America The Cold War Era Immigration and American Diversity The Making of the American South: A Short History, 1500–1877

THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH A Short History, 1500–1877

J. William Harris

ß 2006 by J. William Harris blackwell publishing 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of J. William Harris to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2006 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harris, J. William, 1946The making of the American South: a short history, 1500–1877/by J. William Harris. p. cm.–(Problems in American history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-631-20963-8 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-631-20963-8 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-631-20964-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-631-20964-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Southern States–History–16th century. 2. Southern States–History–Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775. 3. Southern States–History–1775–1865. 4. Southern States–History–1865–1877. I. Title. II. Series. F209.H24 2006 975’.09’031–dc22

2005017900 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in Sabon 10/12.5pt by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall. The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acidfree and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com

For Kate, Logan, and Hannah

Contents

Acknowledgments

viii

Map: The United States in 1860

ix

Prologue

x

Part I Before Southern History 1

Before the South

2

Colonials Become Americans

39

3

Southern Power in the New Nation

69

Part II

3

Making the Old South

4

An American Slave Society

5

The Politics of Slavery and the Road to Secession

144

97

6

Civil Wars

184

7

The Reconstruction of the South and the Construction of Southern History

223

Notes

249

Bibliographical Note

273

Index

278

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for financial support from the University of New Hampshire that provided time for research and writing, including a sabbatical at an early stage of the project and a fellowship from Center for the Humanities near the end. Funds provided by the Carpenter Professorship helped in several ways. Susan Rabinowitz at Blackwell asked me to undertake this project, and Ken Provencher of Blackwell has waited patiently and given encouragement while it came to fruition. Debbie Seymour’s expert copy-editing improved the manuscript in many places. Chandra Manning allowed me to quote from an unpublished paper, Kurk Dorsey, Marjorie McDonald, and Claire Austin pointed me to sources I would otherwise have missed, and Shawn Rosa’s fact-checking saved me from a number of errors. Jeffrey Bolster, Eliga Gould, and John Mayfield carefully read a draft of the earlier chapters, and Peter Wallenstein, Jane Turner Censer, and an anonymous reader for Blackwell did so for the entire manuscript. All gave good advice about things large and small; it is not their fault if I did not always take it. The superb editorial skills of Jeannette Hopkins improved the manuscript throughout. Terry Kay Rockefeller read the manuscript with her critical eye and helped in many other, more important, ways. My daughters, Kate, Hannah, and Logan, have not read any of it; the dedication is small thanks for different kinds of contributions.

The United States in 1860 New Hampshire Maine Vermont

Washington Territory Unorganized Territory Minnesota Wisconsin Nebraska Territory

Oregon

Massachusetts New York

Michigan

Pennsylvania

Iowa Illinois Indiana

Utah Territory Kansas Territory

California

New Mexico Territory

Ohio

New Jersey Virginia

Missouri

Kentucky

North Carolina

Tennessee

Unorganized Territory Arkansas

South Carolina Mississippi Alabama

Georgia

Texas Louisiana

Slave state

Source: Designed by Bill Nelson.

Rhode Island Connecticut

Florida

Delaware Maryland Washington, DC

Prologue

In the 1890s, white southerners gathered each spring to decorate the graves of Confederate soldiers and hear elegies for the ‘‘Lost Cause.’’ This was the time when, in the words of one small-town Georgia politician in 1893, the professional man had ‘‘left his office, the mechanic his shop, the blacksmith his forge, the merchant his store, and the farmer his plow’’ to fight for Confederate independence. All of them were motivated, he said, by their love of country and their desire to protect ‘‘constitutional government’’ in the tradition of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. After the war, the remnant of ‘‘Southern Chivalry’’ returned home to devastation, ashes, ruins, and, even worse, ‘‘our country overrun with a new creature under the sun. . . . the carpet bagger.’’ That creature ‘‘had taken possession of our Government, but the unconquerable spirit of the South’’ had driven him out; the love of liberty and ‘‘the doctrine of self-government’’ that had inspired the Confederacy was thereby redeemed.1 This story of the Lost Cause helped to justify the rise of new forms of white supremacy in the 1890s, expressed in segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching. As later elaborated in romantic versions such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, it influenced generations of white Americans’ understanding of their history. It would be an exaggeration to say that scholarly historians of the era fully accepted this view of the southern past, but many of them did provide support for it in writings that described the slave plantation as a benign school for uncivilized savages and Reconstruction as a time of folly, when inferior African Americans had been allowed to vote and hold office.

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Historians of the past two generations, however, have dismantled the vestiges of this mythic view of the southern past. They have explored with new depth and sophistication traditional topics such as the rise of the secession movement and the political conflicts after the war, and they have illuminated as never before the worlds of black southerners, both slave and free, of southern women, both black and white, and of the white majority of yeomen, laborers, and artisans who owned no slaves. The work of these historians makes it possible for us to understand the many aspects of southern history ignored and distorted by the Lost Cause myth, especially the ways in which plantation slavery was central to the southern economy, to southern social relations, and to the southern movement toward secession. Their work has also taught us about the tens of thousands of former slaves and southern whites who fought for the Union (quite aside from the hundreds of thousands of men from the border slave states who did so), about the desertions that wilted Confederate armies, about the bitter conflicts among southern whites themselves during Reconstruction, and about the ugly violence it took to suppress black rights and maintain white supremacy after the war. The Making of the American South draws on this work to offer an introduction to the history of the ‘‘Old South,’’ from its development out of a group of English colonies planted in the seventeenth century to its destruction, or, perhaps more accurately, its transformation into a ‘‘New South.’’ But I have tried to avoid the inevitable tendency to see the story of the Old South primarily from the vantage point of the war that ended it. One of America’s greatest story tellers, Mark Twain, wrote, in 1882, that for southern whites, ‘‘the War is what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it.’’ The same might be said of much writing about southern history: that everything before 1861 is understood and interpreted in the light of the war to come. In 1882, when Twain wrote, that was understandable, but, for historians, too close a focus on the Civil War as the defining moment in all of southern history tends to make the South seem more uniform and unified than it ever was, and also seem more different from the rest of the United States than it had become even at the moment of secession. The distortion becomes more severe the further back in time one goes. It is a central argument of this book that there was no common story, no single ‘‘South,’’ and hence no true southern history for the

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first two centuries after the founding of the first English North American colony in Virginia. Certainly, the foundations for a common story were laid with the settlement of European colonies— Spanish and French as well as English. In time, the development of plantation agriculture based on African slave labor distinguished the southern British colonies, and then the southern states, from those to their north. Still, if the leaders of the southern states had found a way to end slavery in the early national period, as those in the northern states were able to do, it is not clear that there would ever have been such a subject as ‘‘southern history.’’ Only after the Missouri crisis of 1819–20 did a common dependence on slavery and a developing political conflict with nonslave states become the unifying factor that shaped the consciousness of southern whites and create in many of them a new kind of loyalty to ‘‘the South.’’ Before then—‘‘before southern history,’’ as I have titled Part I—the geographical region bounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the Ohio and Mississippi River system, and the Gulf of Mexico was a place of many peoples and many stories, and I have tried to touch on some of them in this volume. In Part II, I examine the nature of antebellum southern society, the political conflicts leading to secession, the deep divisions produced by the war, and the reassertion of white supremacy after the war. Even after 1820, the rise of southern sectionalism and the eventual flowering of a secessionist movement is only part of the story of the antebellum South. The South remained a complex and diverse region, shaped not only by a distinctive social institution and political history, but also by many of the same forces of technological development and cultural change that were transforming other regions of the United States. Sectionalism and secession divided the South even as they united it; the resulting divisions, in my opinion, doomed the Confederate effort to win independence almost as soon as it had begun. Only the war itself, together with the experiences of occupation and reconstruction that followed, finally gave white southerners the unity of purpose and consciousness that we now associate with ‘‘southern history.’’ To tell this story in brief compass and to summarize the immense volume of outstanding scholarship on virtually every phase of that story necessarily requires difficult choices about emphasis, inclusion, and exclusion. Other historians would make different choices, and, undoubtedly, some will disagree with my interpretations of

Prologue

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particular issues. I make no claim to a definitive interpretation, and I will be well satisfied if I can convey some sense of the experiences of the peoples who made southern history and of the rich and varied historical literature about them.

PART I

Before Southern History

1 Before the South

When did southern history begin? Asked the question in 1860, a Virginian would have answered, May 1607. That was the year a hundred-odd Englishmen arrived to establish the fortified village of Jamestown, on the James River, in what they called ‘‘Virginia’’ (named after Elizabeth, the ‘‘virgin queen’’), not far upstream from the still-uncharted Chesapeake Bay. Although nothing remains of Jamestown today except an archeological site, it was the original settlement of what would become the largest British colony in North America, a leading state in the new United States after 1776, and the most important of the Confederate States of America in 1861. But it would have made no sense in 1607 to call Virginia, or any other part of the southeastern corner of North America, ‘‘the South,’’ and no one did. In 1607, ‘‘Virginia’’ was the land of a chiefdom, named by the English for its paramount chief, Powhatan—‘‘Indians,’’ as the Europeans had come to call them after a famous mistake by Christopher Columbus, who thought he had landed in the East Indies in 1492. The Powhatans shared practices and values with hundreds of Indian communities to the south and west, which archeologists call the ‘‘Mississippian’’ culture. All had settled village economies based on growing corn, beans, squash, and other crops. Indian men cleared the forest by ‘‘girdling’’ the trees (cutting out a circle of bark) and burning the underbrush, but Indian women did most of the ongoing work of sowing the seeds and tending the plants. In season, the men hunted deer and other game to supplement the food supply and provide skins and bones for clothing and tools. The men also carried on warfare, endemic in Mississippian culture.

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Before the South

Chiefdoms and towns sometimes warred with one another over access to fields or hunting grounds, more often to seize captives. When a member of a warrior’s clan was killed, cultural traditions required revenge, so the clan would seek to kill or kidnap a member of the guilty group. A captured warrior could be exchanged for payment, or eventually adopted as a member of the capturing chiefdom, or, perhaps, in a ritual that horrified and mystified Englishmen, tortured to death. A captive who showed his bravery under torture, for example by heaping abuse on the torturers while he seemingly ignored his pain, would do honor both to his own group and to the one that had captured him. The Indians of 1607 knew about Europeans; the Spanish had been there already. As early as 1513, Ponce de Leo´n had explored the peninsula of Florida, looking for gold and for a spring that was rumored to make people young again. In 1539, Hernando de Soto, an enterprising and ruthless soldier, landed near present-day Tampa, Florida with 700 men (some of them black slaves) to search for rumored stores of gold. For three years, de Soto led his band through parts of six modern U.S. states, encountering dozens of villages and towns inhabited by tribes speaking diverse languages. If the residents greeted him peacefully, he talked and traded, but he also sometimes forced hundreds of natives to come with him as porters. If he met resistance, he fought, and the Spanish, with their horses and steel weapons and armor, slaughtered large numbers of men, women, and children. De Soto veered this way and that, fruitlessly searching for gold, until he succumbed in 1542 to disease; only about half of his original party made their way back to Mexico. The Spanish kept looking for ways to profit from the lands of North America. Spurred by stories of a passage through the continent to the Orient, and by descriptions of a land flowing with milk and honey, as beautiful and bountiful as the province of Andalucia in Spain, Luis Va´zquez Ayllo´n sponsored expeditions along the Atlantic coast. Two of his expeditions led to settlements in present-day South Carolina and Georgia, but both ended badly, with most settlers dying and survivors departing. In 1563 the Spanish planned an expedition to the Chesapeake Bay, and in 1565 they established the first permanent European settlement in the future ‘‘South’’ at St. Augustine. St. Augustine was a response to a French attempt, under Jean Ribault, to plant a small colony at Fort Caroline, near what is now

Before the South

5

Jacksonville. Pedro Mene´ndez de Avile´s led a Spanish attack on Fort Caroline in September 1565, routed the defenders, killed the survivors, and hunted down and killed Ribault, who had put out to sea. Avile´s built St. Augustine as a military post. Spanish missionaries followed to build more outposts to the west, where they planted crops and tried, with some success, to convert Indians to Christianity. The Spanish might have tried to destroy the English colony at Jamestown as well, if it had been closer to Florida, but they unintentionally had made a major contribution to English plans for Virginia. They had brought with them microbes common in Europe and Asia but previously unknown in the Americas—influenza, measles, smallpox, and others. The indigenous peoples had not built up natural immunities to these, and the consequences were catastrophic. Hundreds, then thousands, and, ultimately, millions of Indians died in epidemics that often reached interior groups before the Spanish did, devastating cultures as well as populations. When de Soto traveled through the chiefdom of Cofitachequi (in present-day South Carolina) he visited one large and prosperous town of many houses, tall mounds, a well-stocked armory, and huge caches of pearls, but nearby were several towns abandoned because of a ‘‘great pestilence’’—probably originating from earlier Spanish contacts far away on the coast.1 No one knows precisely how many people lived in the western hemisphere before Columbus came, so the mortality rate is only an educated guess, but the besteducated of these guesses is that up to 90 percent of the total population may have been wiped out by disease. Survivors migrated, consolidated, and formed new villages and confederations such as the Cherokees and Creeks. Eurasian germs had certainly reached the shores of the Chesapeake well before the English, so the number of Powhatans, and, perhaps more to the point, the number of Powhatan warriors, was much smaller when the English landed than it would have been a century earlier.

Englishmen and the Search for Wealth The English had watched jealously as Spain brought back vast riches from the New World. English writers—especially two cousins, both named Richard Hakluyt—collected information,

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Before the South

genuine and legendary, about America, and enthusiastically promoted English colonies to spread English glory and to fortify the true, Protestant, religion against the threats of the Spanish Catholic ‘‘Antichrist.’’ The English hoped, also, to find a water passage to the South Seas through the largely unknown continent or to colonize the ‘‘New Andalucia,’’ predicting that sugar, silk, olives, cotton, and other valuable crops would swell English trade and that colonists might find gold and silver or, if not these, copper or iron. In 1585, led by Sir Walter Raleigh, Englishmen dispatched a scouting party, and then a more substantial group, to establish an outpost on Roanoke Island (in present-day North Carolina) where ships could sneak out into Spanish shipping lanes to seize their gold and silver. Ships big enough to threaten Spanish shipping, they discovered, were too big to navigate the treacherous waters around Roanoke, and, after the first winter, the survivors packed up and went home. The Roanoke investors tried again in 1587, sending families to plant crops to sustain the little colony. (They had intended to go further north to the Chesapeake, but their Portuguese captain landed them back in Roanoke.) Their leader, John White, left in the fall to fetch more supplies, but storms and the attempt of the Spanish Armada to invade Britain in 1588 delayed his return. When a ship made it back to Roanoke in 1590, its crew found a few signs of habitation, a mysterious carving on a tree that said ‘‘CROATAN’’ (the name of a nearby Indian group), but no Englishmen. What happened to the ‘‘Lost Colony’’ has never been established, although, since the evidence suggests an orderly departure, recent historians believe the surviving settlers may have merged into an Indian tribe. In 1606, seven English investors received a charter from James I granting the exclusive right to plant colonies in the southern half of North America. The Virginia Company sold stock to finance the venture, purchased supplies, and recruited a mix of laborers, artisans and ‘‘gentlemen’’ to establish what would become Jamestown. Seven colonists were named to a governing council charged with protecting the stockholders’ interests. Stockholders hoped the colonists would quickly discover gold or other riches, pay off the initial investments, and enrich the company, but the settlers found no gold, the councilors quarreled with one another, and few gentlemen were willing to undertake such mundane tasks as raising food.

Before the South

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One historian has written that ‘‘Virginia survived not because of its first settlers but in spite of them.’’2 The colonists had made a serious mistake in selecting the location of Jamestown on a peninsula in the river. Although it was easily fortified against Indian attacks, it was surrounded by swamps and too close to the mouth of the river; salt water backed up to the town at high tide, trapping the garbage and human waste settlers had dumped into the river. Within two months, the little population began to sicken and die, rations ran short, and survivors grew too weak to hunt, fish, or work in the fields. ‘‘Though there be fish in the Sea, foules in the ayre, and Beasts in the woods, their bounds are so large, they so wild, and we so weake and ignorant, we cannot much trouble them,’’ Captain John Smith later wrote. There was ‘‘such famin and sicknes that the living were scarce able to bury the dead.’’ By September half the company had died of disease, malnutrition, or Indian attacks. The following winter was unusually cold, and none of the settlers might have survived if local Indians had not shared their corn harvest. When, on January 2, 1608, a supply ship finally arrived, just 38 of the more than 100 original colonists were alive to greet it. But its passenger list was again overstocked with gentlemen and artisans of the luxury trade like goldsmiths; reports of ‘‘guilded durt’’ sent colonists into such a frenzy of gold hunting, Smith wrote, that ‘‘there was no talke, no hope, no worke, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, loade gold.’’3 The colony did better in its second year, when Captain Smith was chosen as council president. He ran the settlement with military efficiency, making sure that shelters were built and food planted. Yet the Virginia Company, in its second supply expedition in the fall of 1608, again dispatched gentlemen, goldsmiths, and glass workers, not the farmers needed for the colony’s longterm survival. In 1609, with its plans failing, the company received a revised charter providing for rule by a governor rather than a council. It selected Lord De La Warr as governor and sent over the biggest expedition yet, more than 500 settlers in nine vessels. Storms and contrary winds delayed the convoy and wrecked the flagship on the island of Bermuda, an outbreak of plague struck the other ships, and when they arrived in August, food supplies were low and it was too late to plant new crops. Smith, injured in an accidental gunpowder explosion, returned to England. The terrible winter that

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followed, known later as the ‘‘starving time,’’ claimed the lives of all but sixty of the total of 500 colonists there in the fall. Thomas Gates, the temporary governor, still in Bermuda, supervised construction of a new pinnace from trees and the wreckage of his ship and made it to Virginia in May 1610. By then, the prospects looked so bleak that he decided to abandon the colony. The colonists were sailing down the James for home when they learned that Lord De La Warr had arrived in the Chesapeake with new supplies, and Virginia and Jamestown were saved, just barely. De La Warr returned to England, leaving lieutenant governor Thomas Dale in charge. Dale governed the colony under a draconian set of Lawes, Divine, Morall and Martiall, dividing the men into work gangs, with their gang leader instructed ‘‘not [to] suffer any of his company to be negligent, and idle, or depart from his worke.’’ The death penalty was prescribed for such crimes as lying or killing a chicken. Someone who stole food could be chained to a tree to starve.4 What Powhatan and his people thought of all this is uncertain, since nearly all the available sources are from the English, but they were willing to trade to some extent, and their corn kept the colonists alive. The English thought the Indian men lazy and unmasculine because they made their women work in the fields; the Indians thought the Englishmen were unmanly because they did till the fields (and pathetically cried ‘‘whe whe’’ under torture).5 Each was potentially a threat, but also potentially useful, to the other. For the Indians, the English were a source of trade goods, especially weapons and other metal objects and textiles, which Powhatans could use to trade with other Indians or to subdue them. For the colonists, the Indians were a source of food, information about valuable resources, and trade in deerskins. They were fit subjects for conversion to Christianity, and perhaps, a source of wives. The most famous of Indian-English encounters in Virginia was related by John Smith, who, in 1607, was leading an exploratory party; Indians attacked the party, killing many of the men and capturing Smith. The Indians were preparing to ‘‘beate out his braines’’ with clubs when Powatan’s favorite daughter, Pocahontas, threw her arms around the Captain’s neck and pleaded for his life. The exact truth of this account cannot be known, though recent historians give it some credence. The most likely scenario, according to one historian, is that ‘‘the ‘execution’ and ‘rescue’ were part

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of an elaborately staged ceremony, designed to establish Powhatan’s life-and-death authority over Smith, to incorporate the English as subordinate people’’ into his realm, with Pocahontas as an intermediary between the two communities.6 A few years later, John Rolfe, a leading settler, fell in love with Pocahontas and married her. For Rolfe and the English, the fact that an important Indian woman married him, accepted baptism, dressed in English clothing, and later accompanied him back to London, symbolized the inevitable victory of English ‘‘civilization’’ over Powhatan ‘‘savagery.’’ Powhatan more likely saw the marriage as a matter of diplomacy; at the time the marriage was proposed and accepted, Lt. Governor Dale was invading Indian territory and burning villages to impose a peace treaty. (While Pocahontas was in London, she became ill and died.) For many years, low-level guerilla warfare continued between the English and Indians. Smith himself called the Indians ‘‘those Barbarians.’’ He enforced peace with bullying and threats and later wrote that the best policy would have been to make ‘‘the treacherous and rebellious Infidels to do all manner of drudgery worke and slavery’’ for the English. During De La Warr’s rule, relations declined. In one atrocity, colonists displeased with Powhatan’s ‘‘prowde and disdaynefull Answeres’’ during some negotiations, attacked an Indian village, killed more than a dozen men, and captured the village queen and her children. They later shot and drowned the children and put the queen to death by sword.7

The Development of the First Plantation Crop: Tobacco The dynamic of Indian-English relationships was altered when the settlers discovered a source of wealth. John Rolfe, who was one of several settlers seeking a crop to satisfy an English market, began to experiment with varieties of West Indian tobacco seed. Tobacco had already circulated in Europe and England, first as a medicine, then as a luxury drug. King James I himself denounced it as a ‘‘noxious weed,’’ calling smoking ‘‘a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, daungerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.’’ The native variety, smoked by Indians in pipes on ceremonial occasions,

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was too harsh for most English tastes. Rolfe shipped his first barrel of the sweeter Orinoco variety to London in 1613. In 1615 Virginia sent 2,000 lbs of tobacco to England; in 1617, 20,000 lbs; in 1622, 60,000 lbs.8 In 1619 the secretary of the colony reported that one man had earned from tobacco in one year the large sum of £200 from his own labor, and in 1622 a resident wrote that ‘‘any laborious honest man may in a shorte time become ritche in this Country.’’ Tobacco’s crop cycle required hand labor over many months: sprouting the seeds in beds, moving seedlings to the fields, weeding, removing insects, harvesting, curing, and packing. The control of labor could multiply wealth; while one man had made £200, another, with six servants to work his crop, had cleared £1,000. Colonists clamored for new sources of people to work their fields at low cost, and the Virginia Company looked for ways to get them.9 In 1618, the company instituted a ‘‘headright’’ system to provide settlers with fifty acres of land for each person they brought with them to Virginia. The next year, the company shipped over a hundred people who had accepted free passage in return for a promise to serve in Virginia for a period of years. At first the company rented out these ‘‘indentured servants’’ (so-called because they signed bonds, or indentures, promising to work), but it learned that the best way to profit from servants was to was to sell the rights to their labor to settlers. A faction of unhappy stockholders took control of the Virginia Company in 1619, and they replaced the Lawes, Divine, Morall and Martiall with a new code, based on English common law, designed to encourage a more positive participation and to give ordinary colonists more control over day-to-day life. The company also established a new assembly in Virginia that incorporated both the old advisory council and a new body of ‘‘burgesses,’’ elected by the ‘‘inhabitants’’ (not further specified). The House of Burgesses could make new laws, subject to the approval of the company; it was the first representative assembly in English North America. It eventually became something like the English Parliament in miniature, though ultimate power lay with the stockholders in England, who also appointed the governor. Virginia continued to be more of a private business than a political entity. Also in 1619, a visiting Dutch trader sold ‘‘twenty Negars’’ to colonists in Jamestown. Slavery had already been well established in Spanish America, but this was the first sale of Africans in English

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America, opening the long and tragic development of black slavery in the United States. The scanty records of early Virginia make it impossible to know for sure whether all these ‘‘Negars’’ were considered slaves for life, who could be bought and sold, or indentured servants, to be freed after a term of years. Some of their descendants, in any case, were free by the 1640s. They married both whites and blacks, owned farms, and sometimes purchased their own servants. Most tobacco workers came from England, where, in the first half of the seventeenth century, thousands of poor men and women were on the move in an economy that could not fully support them. Many left their villages in search of work, some landing in the streets of port cities, especially London; some were willing to risk the trip across the ocean. Virginia settlers in turn were willing to finance their journey in exchange for several years of labor. As early as 1619, one colonist who had written that ‘‘all our riches for the present doe consiste in Tobacco’’ corrected himself: ‘‘our principall wealth (I should have said) consisteth in servants.’’ Indentured servants who survived their terms became free men and women, and, with land vastly cheaper in Virginia than in Britain, they might well then be able to buy farm land of their own. Work in the tobacco fields was difficult and tedious, the treatment by masters sometimes harsh, and the death rate of new servants—from disease and overwork—frighteningly high. Many did not survive their terms, but, in a world where the life expectancy even of the wealthy was short and ‘‘freedom’’ a relative, not an absolute, status, the risk seemed worth it to many. These English-born servants cleared most of the fields, planted the tobacco, and made a few of the large landowners rich. A small number of black slaves was imported, but they were expensive investments, and, as late as 1670, there were no more than 3,000 people of African descent in the Chesapeake region, about 6 percent of the total population.10 Tobacco depleted the soil quickly, and after a few years a field’s production dropped sharply. More land was needed to replace it, and, to the English, the supply of land seemed limitless. Not to the Indians, however. As of 1619, there were only about 1,000 English settlers in Virginia, mainly in Jamestown and nearby, and the English, in small numbers, were a source of valuable trading goods to the Powhatans and potential allies against their enemies. But, in the next three years, the Virginia Company sent more than

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3,500 new settlers, and the English, coveting the Indians’ cleared fields, began to spread over the countryside. Englishmen did not consider the Indians as true ‘‘owners’’ of the land, since they did not survey it, divide it up, and parcel it out to individuals and families with a permanent claim on it, to be bought and sold like any other commodity. To be sure, some members of the Virginia Company thought that the Indians could be Christianized and convinced—or forced—to adopt English ways. George Thorpe, a new member of the governor’s council in 1621, hoped that the brother of Powhatan, Opechancanough, who had become the paramount chief after Powhatan’s death, could be convinced to lead his people toward ‘‘civilization’’ as the English understood it. But Opechancanough, apparently, had decided that the colony must be destroyed before it destroyed his chiefdom. In a surprise attack on March 22, 1622, the Powhatans struck colonists on isolated farms; within days, 347 men, women, and children, including George Thorpe, were slain. The English rallied, and over the next three years killed more Indians in retaliation than they had lost. They also took captives, selling many of them into slavery in the West Indies. By 1630 the Indians had been pushed well back from the James River. The Powhatans’ attack had come just as the Virginia Company was beginning to see a profit on its huge investments. After it, profit seemed out of reach. Prompted by the outcry of dissatisfied investors, James I launched an investigation, and in 1625, his successor, Charles I, made Virginia a royal colony, answerable directly to the crown, rather than to a group of stockholders. Within a decade, Virginians were sharing the Chesapeake with English settlers in the new colony of Maryland. Charles I granted control of Maryland to a single proprietor, George Calvert, Lord Baltimore. After Baltimore’s death, the charter passed to his son, Cecilius, who sent over the first Maryland settlers in 1634. Better prepared than Virginia’s first colonists, they endured no early ‘‘starving time.’’ Baltimore’s charter had called for Maryland to have a feudal social organization, and he planned to divide the land into manors, granting the lord of each rights to own the land, collect perpetual rents (‘‘quitrents’’) from the settlers, and govern through his own manorial courts. But Maryland developed along the path already laid out by Virginians. Rule by most of the manorial lords became a mere formality, since few of them crossed

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the ocean and local settlers were not inclined to concede powers that no one was there to enforce. The Calvert family appointed the governor, and the upper house of the colonial council was filled with Calvert’s relations and friends, but the lower house, the Assembly, was elected by the colony’s landowners. While the influence of the Catholic Calverts is evident in Maryland’s Toleration Act of 1649, which allowed Catholics to worship freely and hold office, the overwhelming majority of the immigrant population was, as in Virginia, Protestant and, at least nominally, members of the Church of England. With soil and climate much like Virginia’s and the Chesapeake making shipping easy, the choice of tobacco as the main crop was obvious. Maryland and Virginia quickly became parts of a single Chesapeake economy.

The Chesapeake System of Husbandry and the Age of the Small Planter With tobacco production subject to the boom-or-bust cycle of prices typical of many commodities, growers’ fortunes could fluctuate dramatically from one year to the next. From 1620 to about 1680, however, rising production more than made up for falling prices. The key was rising productivity, which reduced costs and made lower prices possible; lower prices, in turn, helped to expand the market. Improvements in shipping and merchandising accounted for some of the reduction in cost; more important was the increasing productivity of labor. In 1620, a single field worker could raise about 700 pounds of tobacco, by 1680 more than 1800 pounds.11 This growth in productivity depended on what economic historians have called the ‘‘Chesapeake system of husbandry.’’12 A tobacco planter would clear land, following Indian practices of girdling the trees and burning the underbrush. Cleared acres were then planted with tobacco and corn, which Indians had taught the colonists how to grow: with hoes, they molded soil into hills and planted corn seeds or tobacco seedlings in the hilltops. Rounds of weeding with the hoe followed, and, for tobacco, removing insects. Harvesting and preparing the tobacco for market took special care: the leaf must be picked at the right moment, hung up to dry out in tobacco houses, and then carefully packed into barrels. With no

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good roads, the most efficient means to market was to roll the barrels on paths through the forests to a river or inlet, where the water was deep enough to allow ships to dock. Another important part of the Chesapeake system was the raising of cattle and hogs, both allowed to fend for themselves in the woods before being rounded up for slaughter or sale to the West Indies. Since tobacco depleted the soil quickly, and by the fourth year a field no longer produced enough to repay the labor of planting, planters shifted production to nearby fields, leaving the old ones to recover for as long as twenty years. Planters learned to start, if possible, with twenty times the acreage as they and their servants could actually work. The system sometimes appalled observers; one contemporary called it an ‘‘exceeding Ill-Husbandry.’’13 Cattle running in the woods could easily get lost or die; those who survived were scrawny and ugly by English standards. Since planting the crops did not require plowing, most farmers simply left dead, girdled trees standing until they fell, then left the stumps in the field. Ramshackle fences surrounded these seemingly ill-kept fields. Still, the system was well suited to American circumstances. In England, labor was abundant and cheap, land limited and dear, so English farmers expended much labor to improve the land. In America, labor was dear and, because of the toll of European diseases and weapons that had killed or driven off the Indian peoples, land was cheap. The Chesapeake system conserved labor —why root out stumps from a field if three years later the whole field would be put to fallow? The corn and stock fed the planter’s family and work force, and the tobacco was exported to pay for English manufactured goods. The system conserved the long-term fertility of the soil and allowed the planter to build, literally, his family’s wealth, in the form of cleared lands, houses, barns, and fences. From 1660 to 1680, per capita wealth on Maryland’s western Chesapeake shore grew at a rate of 2.5 percent per year, a remarkable record in the preindustrial era.14 For the English men and women who risked the dangerous journey to America to work as indentured servants, the system offered, for about a half century, a way for ordinary people to rise in the world. In the earliest years of the tobacco boom, the benefits went primarily to grasping well-to-do settlers who could profit from their hold on political offices, but the period from 1630 to the 1670s was the ‘‘age of the small planter’’ in the Chesapeake.

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As one historian has written, ‘‘one needed only a few simple tools, a few head of cattle, and about fifty acres of land to set up as an independent planter.’’ A servant just released from indenture could start as a tenant, buy cheap land, and with his labor and that of his wife, and his children, build up a respectable estate.15 Among the many hazards, none was greater than disease. The dispersal of population away from the tidal regions of the James and other rivers reduced the fearsome mortality of the first years, but a new variety of malaria after 1650 made things worse. The estimated death rate of new immigrant servants in the middle of the seventeenth century was 10 percent annually; only about three out of five survived the typical four years of indenture. At mid-century, a man aged 22 could expect to live, on average, about twenty more years. If he lived to fifty he would be an old man, and unusual indeed was the man who saw his grandchildren reach adulthood. But those who survived could do well; most servants who migrated between 1635 and 1660 and escaped death ‘‘achieved considerable property and status and were fully integrated into the community as small planters, masters of families, and participants in local government.’’16 From 1630 to 1680, about 15,000 migrants arrived each decade, between 70 percent and 85 percent of them coming as servants. The overwhelming majority were male (six out of seven in the 1630s, more than two out of three in the 1690s), and most were single and young (about two-thirds between the ages of 15 and 25). Most were farm laborers, textile workers, and the like, poor people unable to find work in Britain. Indentured servants from London included clerks, accountants, and even children of gentry. A minority of propertied settlers arrived with family members and servants, receiving grants of land for each of the migrants under the headright system.17

Carolina and the Rise of a New Plantation Crop As early as 1629, Charles I had granted to one of his political allies a huge area between Virginia and Florida, which he named ‘‘Carolana’’ after himself. About 500 English settlers drifted down from Virginia into the Albemarle Sound in the northeastern part of this grant, but the first grantee made no efforts to send more colonists. In 1663, Charles II granted the entire area (now ‘‘Carolina’’) to

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eight aristocratic allies. After two false starts in the Cape Fear region, they established a permanent settlement at the confluence of two rivers named, after the leading proprietor, the Ashley and the Cooper. Most of the first settlers to arrive in Carolina came from Barbados, an English colony in the Caribbean, like Virginia once dependent on tobacco, but now converting to a more valuable crop, sugar. The most successful Barbadian sugar planters expanded their land holdings and purchased African slaves to work their fields; as land prices soared, many of the remaining whites were eager to emigrate to Carolina, where their chances looked better. The wealthier among the migrants brought African slaves with them. Unlike in Virginia, African slavery was important from the founding of Carolina. Like Lord Baltimore, the eight proprietors of Carolina envisioned a government and society quite different from the one that had evolved in Virginia, with its rough-and-tumble economy, many small free landholders, and a contentious elected assembly of lawmakers. They drew up ‘‘Fundamental Constitutions’’ for a feudal system, with ‘‘seigniorities’’ and ‘‘baronies’’ controlled by nobles called ‘‘landgraves’’ and ‘‘caciques.’’ Ordinary settlers would be ‘‘leetmen’’ who could, at marriage, lease a few acres each. Men who owned at least 50 acres would elect a unicameral legislature, but one with very limited jurisdiction; nearly all power would remain in the hands of the proprietors. The proprietors appointed a governor, and the unicameral assembly was soon divided into a council, appointed by the governor, and a lower house, elected by landholding settlers. Members of the lower house pressed claims to much broader powers than the proprietors anticipated, and, in 1691, the elected assembly became a separate branch of the legislature. The already-settled region around Albemarle Sound was allowed a separate assembly and governor. The population there spread south to Pamlico Sound, and when, in 1729, the crown bought out the rights of the Carolina proprietors, the two governments were formally set apart as South Carolina and North Carolina. The soils of coastal Carolina were unsuitable for tobacco and the winters too cold for sugar cane. Early settlers cut timber and raised cattle for sale in the West Indian islands or tapped pines for resin to make ‘‘naval stores,’’ pitch and tar used to seal wooden ships against the sea. For the first generation, much of

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Carolina was more a rugged frontier than a settled agricultural region, a situation that favored, for a time, less exploitative relationships between blacks and whites than was the case in plantation colonies. Slaves and their owners frequently worked side by side in remote forest camps, accompanied one another on hunting and trading expeditions, and occasionally even fought together against Indians. The colonists also developed trade with Indian peoples. The most important trading commodity was deerskins, in demand in England for clothing and bookbinding. Ranging far inland with caravans of pack animals, South Carolina traders exchanged guns, ammunition, textiles, and other manufactured goods for skins. Carolinians armed the local Savannah Indians to wage war on Virginians’ trade allies, the Westoes, and with the Westoes mostly eliminated, nearly drove Virginians out of the southeastern trade in skins; by the early 1700s, more than 50,000 skins a year were shipped out from Charleston.18 Carolina’s settlers also encouraged their Indian allies to wage war in order to take captives. These captives became another major commodity in the Carolina trade system: Indian slaves. Some were put to work in the colony; in 1708 Indian slaves made up close to one-sixth of South Carolina’s total population. Many more were shipped off to slave markets to the north or in the Caribbean. Indians themselves had long taken captives as a by-product of war. These captives usually became subordinate members in a household of the capturing group, and their descendants could become regular members of the tribe. After Indian slaves became commodities in the English trading system, large-scale raids to seize captives for the trade escalated in frequency and importance, destabilizing Indian life in towns far into the interior. According to some estimates, more than 20,000 Indian slaves may have been shipped out of Charleston during the first four decades of Carolina’s existence.19 White Carolinians preferred African slaves to Indians, since the supply of Africans was more predictable and they could not so easily escape into the forests. The majority of Indian slaves were women, and the majority of Africans, men; over the years, most of the Indian slaves blended into the black population through marriage. After two decades of settlement, South Carolinians found their plantation crop, rice. African slaves may well have helped them

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learn how to grow it, since many of Carolina’s black slaves came from West Central Africa, where rice was extensively cultivated. The market for rice, as for lumber, was good in the Caribbean, where slaveowners preferred to import food and reserve their soil for the more profitable sugar. South Carolina’s warm climate was well suited for rice, and the frequently flooded alluvial areas along the coast provided ideal soil. While the rice plant grows well in many environments, it produces in abundance only when it can be fully irrigated for many weeks of the year. Starting about 1690, Carolina’s coastal planters learned how to harness the waters of swamps that typically formed near the mouths of the rivers, building ditches and dikes to control the flow of water. After 1700, those who could afford it began to buy up coastal land and to import large numbers of African slaves to work on rice plantations. Rice exports climbed from about 268,000 lbs per year at the beginning of the century to over 6 million lbs by the 1720s and 16 million lbs by the 1730s.

Fragments of England Most of the white colonists in the Chesapeake and Carolina thought of themselves as English, but their cultures and societies were in many ways quite different from those of the country they still considered home. In England, Englishmen were proud of their liberties, but in government, in social life, and in families, hierarchies, largely hereditary, ruled. Men in England expected to marry, have children, and dominate their families. At every level, women were expected to defer to their fathers and husbands. A small political class of gentlemen, from well-to-do country squires to immensely wealthy nobles, governed at every level, including Parliament, where one house included hereditary lords and the other rich and educated commoners, representing ‘‘the people’’ but elected by only a tiny portion of them. The Church of England, in effect a branch of government with the king at its head, was the official arbiter of morality. In America, it was impossible to duplicate this complex mix of long-established institutions and social practices. There were few truly rich men in the colonies and virtually no titled nobility. Especially in the first decades, men who became rich were as likely

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to die young as anyone else, often before they could pass along wealth to the next generation. With relatively few women among the early colonists, many men never married, and it was decades before the population began to reproduce itself naturally. At the same time, some poor men of low birth and status accumulated large land holdings and rose to rank among the wealthy few. Women in America had more autonomy and influence than most did in England. They formed a vital part of the work force, and they had many potential choices in marriage. When husbands died, women might inherit substantial estates, which they could then use either to make a favorable remarriage, or, as many did, control the wealth for their own and their children’s benefits. One historian has called early Virginia a ‘‘widowarchy.’’20 So, too, England was a relatively densely populated country, and, as early as 1700, a sixth of its population lived in cities or towns. The population in the southern colonies, by contrast, was thinly dispersed, concentrated near rivers, creeks, and inlets. In the early Chesapeake, except for the seats of government, true towns were virtually nonexistent. South Carolina did develop one genuine city in Charles Town (later, Charleston), but even there the Indian trade, the pursuit of naval stores, and cattle-raising scattered the population into the forests. Since, by English standards, this way of life was hardly civilized, rulers in both the Chesapeake and Carolina promoted largely ineffective efforts to encourage the growth of towns. Yet, there were identifiable neighborhoods, connected by boat and roads (sometimes, mere trails), and men and women walked, rowed, or rode their horses to visit the courthouse and the tavern, to socialize at weddings, to worship on Sundays and to bury the dead. English expectations about order and hierarchy were challenged not only by economic and social conditions, but also in material culture and religious life. On the one hand, many more men and women in America owned their own farms; on the other, they lived meanly by the standards of the homeland. Houses in the Chesapeake were simple wooden affairs, most no more than a room or two, into which all the family crowded to eat and sleep. All but the poorest families back in England would have considered them primitive and small. Poorer householders lived in conditions ‘‘almost unimaginably primitive. . . . Equipment of any kind was so scarce that we must look to aboriginal cultures to find modern

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analogies.’’ According to inventories taken at their deaths, many middling farmers in Maryland at the end of the seventeenth century owned no tables or chairs, and family members slept on straw. By comparison with Englishmen, even wealthy planters in the colonies lived in inadequate houses: modest, made of wood rather than stone or brick, with few amenities. As late as the 1720s, a large majority of Virginia’s wealthiest planters lived in two-room houses, and a foreign visitor noted, in 1715, that Robert Beverly, one of the richest planters in the colony, ‘‘lives well; but though rich, he has nothing in or about his house but what is necessary. He hath good beds in his house, but no curtains; and instead of cane chairs, he hath stools made of wood.’’22 The Church of England could do little to reinforce traditional social practices in the colonies. In many areas there were no churches; historians are uncertain whether a single Anglican church was built in Maryland before 1670. Most church buildings were inconsequential structures. Church affairs were generally controlled by lay vestrymen more likely to be interested in low taxes than in religious enlightenment. There were too few clergymen; one critic complained that just 10 of Virginia’s parishes in 1661 had ministers. Those appointed by the Anglican hierarchy in Britain were often incompetent. Commentators in Virginia’s early decades denounced the colony’s clergymen as ‘‘wretched and blind Idoll shepards,’’ and as ‘‘indecent and slovenly’’ men leading ‘‘wicked and profane lives.’’ In Maryland, a clergyman complained in 1675, ‘‘the lords day is prophaned, Religion despised, and all notorious vices committed.’’ The few Christian clergy had to compete with traditional beliefs in magic and the occult, and colonists were as likely to turn to local specialists or to books on these subjects as they were to orthodox religious leaders or the Bible.23 Government, too, was simpler in ways that made it difficult for elite colonists to get what they conceived of as their proper due. The monarch himself was a remote figure, and no army or navy was nearby to put down trouble. The governors were no kings, and the councilors no lords. The members of the elected assemblies owed their positions in theory to a much larger proportion of the population—probably all of the landowners—than in England. Even the governors were answerable to proprietors or royal officials who had appointed them, their job to promote the visions and material welfare of these distant officials, who knew little about conditions

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in the colonies. To try seriously, for example, to limit tobacco production, as the Virginia Company tried to do in the early 1620s, was to attempt to row upstream. The difficulty was compounded because conditions in the new world, where life was short and the way to wealth lay in quickly accumulating large amounts of land and many servants, encouraged men in office to look first to their personal welfare. The most successful governors, such as William Berkeley of Virginia, sought a balance between doing the bidding of the king or proprietors and deferring to the wishes of the locals, tactfully ignoring orders from England that seemed likely to provoke too much resistance. In the middle of the seventeenth century, a number of families in Virginia emerged as a core of the leading social group, distinguished by their wealth, especially their ownership of servants and slaves. Some, though not as many as later legends have suggested, were the younger sons of English gentry. Others were the sons of families that had built up landholdings with hard work, luck, and clever marriages to rich widows. Over time, the descendants of these political figures would contribute to an Americanborn ruling group, but the widely scattered settlers, with a majority of men having a good deal of economic autonomy, were scarcely likely to be awed by them. The result was an often turbulent politics, and, in all the southern colonies, significant challenges to colonial leadership arose. In Virginia in 1676, North Carolina in 1677, Maryland in 1689, and South Carolina in 1690, revolts broke out led by relatively wealthy men who felt unfairly excluded from power and influence. In Carolina, fierce factional political battles occurred almost immediately, as Anglicans, mostly from Barbados, fought Huguenots from France and religious dissenters from England. Early in Maryland’s history, a ship captain named Richard Ingle and a small group of mercenaries managed to seize St. Mary’s, the capital, on the grounds that the government was exercising ‘‘a Tyrannical power against the Protestants.’’24 It took two years before Governor Leonard Calvert could expel Ingle’s followers and reestablish his own authority. In 1689, in the same colony, a decade and a half of political conflict climaxed in ‘‘Coode’s Rebellion’’ after Parliament in England had deposed Charles II in favor of William and Mary and Maryland’s governor, William Joseph, delayed in recognizing the new monarchs as legitimate. A Protestant Association led by

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John Coode seized control of the colonial government, ostensibly to rescue the colony from the Catholic Calvert family, but more importantly because the revolt’s leaders, most of them young, wealthy, and recent immigrants, were disgruntled about their exclusion from the highest political positions. Coode and his fellow rebels held power in Maryland for more than two years. In 1692, the English government suspended Calvert’s charter and converted the colony to royal rule. Catholics were disfranchised, unable to vote or hold office, and the newly reconstituted Assembly passed a number of laws and rules that, over time, converted it into something much closer to a miniature Parliament. The descendants of the Associators became the ruling elite in Maryland. Meanwhile, the everyday economic and social life of the community continued on much as before. Similar, if less consequential, uprisings temporarily displaced governors in North Carolina in 1677 (‘‘Culpeper’s Rebellion’’) and in South Carolina in 1689. The most dramatic of the colonial revolts was Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1676, which took its name from Nathaniel Bacon, a 29-year-old recent arrival, member of a gentry family. Bacon was a man of ambition, with a high opinion of himself. Because he was (relatively) rich and well-born, he was promptly appointed by Governor Berkeley to the colony’s council. He bought land and planted tobacco near the falls of the James River, a frontier region where Indians were still a force to be reckoned with. A series of disputes with the Susquehannocks, including the killing of several of the tribe by Virginians who mistook them for the killers of an English servant, had produced a dangerous situation, with Indians raiding isolated farmsteads, sometimes killing the inhabitants. Governor Berkeley preferred to deal with Indians through diplomacy and trade, but settlers on the frontier, some of them young, poor, and restless former servants, preferred brute force. Bacon volunteered to raise a force to fight the Susquehannocks, and, when Berkeley refused his offer, Bacon did so anyway. As Berkeley had feared, Bacon’s army made no distinction between hostile and friendly tribes, making war ‘‘against all Indians in generall.’’25 Berkeley proclaimed Bacon guilty of treason and tried to diffuse the conflict by calling a new election for the Assembly, but his strategy was thwarted when Bacon himself was elected. After a brief truce, Bacon raised a second force to attack the Indians. Berkeley attempted to put down this independent army, whereupon

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Bacon marched on Jamestown, forcing Berkeley to flee across the Chesapeake. For a time, Bacon’s ragtag army controlled much of Virginia, and his followers—a mix of poor servants and freemen, ordinary farmers, a good many well-to-do men, and even some slaves, helped themselves to the property of Berkeley’s loyal supporters. Then, Bacon suddenly took sick and died, the English government sent a naval squadron to support Berkeley, and Bacon’s army quickly melted away. A few of Bacon’s more prominent supporters went to the gallows, as a vindictive Berkeley pursued his enemies.The whole episode highlighted the weakness of traditional deference to authority in English America.

The Decline of Indentured Servitude and the Rise of African slavery While in culture and governance, both the Chesapeake and Carolina were creating societies that were more simplified and less hierarchical than English society, in the last third of the century they grew even more distinct from the mother country and more like one another in a profoundly important way—the economies of both became dependent on African slave labor. It was the marriage of African slavery to a plantation economy that set the stage for the creation of a ‘‘South.’’ Between 1619 and 1670, only about 5,000 forced migrants of African descent arrived in the Chesapeake. About 3,000 lived there in 1670, most, almost certainly, slaves for life; others were possibly servants, and still others free. Many of the earliest black migrants had come from the West Indian colonies, where they had been acculturated to some extent to European ways. Others had spent time in New Netherland (later, New York). In the early years of English settlement in the Chesapeake, there were no slave ‘‘codes,’’ no laws spelling out a special subordinate status for Africans and their children. The life experiences of Anthony Johnson illustrate the possibilities for at least some Africans in Virginia at the time. Johnson was brought to the colony in 1621 as a slave named ‘‘Antonio.’’ The details of his life over the next two decades are obscure, but, by 1650, he had won his freedom, married ‘‘Mary, a Negro Woman,’’ and moved to the eastern side of the Chesapeake. He and Mary can

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be traced through local court proceedings—petitioning for tax relief, being praised for their ‘‘hard labor and known service,’’ winning a suit against a white neighbor, and, in general, receiving the same treatment as any other small planter. By Johnson’s death he owned a 250-acre farm and several slaves and servants, and he and Mary had seen their grown sons establish their own families on nearby farms. Anthony Johnson was only the most prominent among a small community of free blacks in Northampton County, Virginia. Perhaps 25 percent of black men there were free, at a time when blacks made up about 10 percent of the county’s adult population.26 A generation after Johnson’s death there were many more blacks in the Chesapeake, and very few had any opportunities to achieve what Johnson had achieved. Within that single generation, the predominant imported labor force had changed from white indentured servants to black slaves brought directly from Africa. In the 1670s, for every slave brought to Virginia or Maryland, four white servants arrived; by the 1690s, the ratio was reversed. In 1700, about 20,000 slaves, half of them born in Africa, lived in the region, making up one-sixth of the population. Few servants were now coming from Britain. Free African-Virginians were now rare, and, as was the case for Anthony Johnson’s descendants, these sometimes dropped out of surviving records altogether. With the rise of African slavery came new legislation to fix its meaning. In Virginia, a series of laws fixed the status of the children of slaves by declaring that they would belong to the owner of the mother (passed in 1662); specified that slaves would not become free on conversion to Christianity (1667); allowed masters to kill their slaves in the course of punishment without being charged with a felony, on the grounds that no man would voluntarily ‘‘destroy his own estate’’ (1669); and allowed whites to kill slave runaways if they resisted capture (1691).27 These laws were brought together in 1705 and updated in a formal slave code. What had happened? In the first place, the tobacco economy in the 1670s had descended into a generation-long decline; production continued to increase, but demand failed to keep up, and the result was lower prices. In England, at the same time, economic conditions had improved for the kinds of people most likely to come to America as servants. Wages rose, and going to America as a servant therefore became less appealing. As a result, Chesapeake planters

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found servants more expensive. At the same time, the prices of African slaves dropped somewhat, and the horrific traffic across the Atlantic became more efficient. The moral horrors of turning people into commodities did not prevent trade in those ‘‘commodities’’ from following economic laws as much as trade in, say, tobacco. As a consequence of these factors, growers of tobacco bought fewer white servants and, from 1680 to 1700, they bought about 15,000 slaves, most brought directly from Africa in English ships. Some historians believe that social factors were perhaps more important in the rise of slavery than the simple economics of supply and demand. Edmund Morgan, in particular, has argued that Bacon’s Rebellion spurred the change from servants to slaves in Virginia. Bacon’s army consisted in large part of property-less men who had been freed from servitude in an economy that no longer allowed them a reasonable chance in life. Many resented the rich planters who ran the colony’s government and who grew ever richer from their servants’ labor. Under the guidance of a well-todo but unscrupulous leader like Bacon, such restless and angry men had very nearly taken over the colony. Morgan and others have argued that the switch to slaves was in significant part a response to the social and political threat posed by these unhappy poor white men. By importing slaves, who had none of the Englishman’s rights to liberty or participation in the government, planters could secure a workforce far easier to control. Slaves served for life; they could not become free, move to the frontier, and gather together under dangerous leaders. By reducing the proportion of poor whites in the colony, elite planter-politicians could better afford to offer other whites some political privileges. By using laws to promote racist distinctions between all whites and all Africans, the wealthy could induce poor whites to see themselves first as white, and only secondarily as poor, to set themselves apart from and above people who otherwise did about the same kinds of work and lived much the same sorts of lives. Yet there are good reasons to doubt such a strong connection between Bacon’s Rebellion and the rise of slavery. Bacon’s own supporters included many members of the elite, and the descriptions of his followers as ‘‘rabble’’ appear mainly in documents left by his opponents. It is also difficult to find links in other colonies between conflicts among whites and the rise of African slavery. In Maryland, for example, the move from servants

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to slaves came well before ‘‘Coode’s Rebellion’’ of 1689, during which, in any case, freed servants played little role. Consciousness of differences between Englishmen and Africans can be found far back in Virginia’s history, indeed, back in England itself. To Englishmen, Africans obviously looked different, and this in a society for which blackness was, in the words of historian Winthrop Jordan, ‘‘the handmaid and symbol of baseness and evil, a sign of danger and repulsion.’’28 Africans came from a continent about which little was known by whites, and much that was ‘‘known’’ was entirely mythical. Englishmen, like most Europeans, looked upon Africa as a place of little more than savagery and cannibalism, even though most Africans came from settled agricultural societies. To Europeans, Africans worshiped strange gods and seemed to know nothing of ‘‘true’’ religion. Although the English sometimes treated certain ‘‘whites’’ like the Irish with great brutality and wrote of them as if they, too, were uncivilized savages, the African difference seemed greater still, and in ways that, in English eyes, made them eligible for a kind of permanent degradation and separateness from which even the Irish were spared. In this, the English were following precedents set by the Spanish, Portuguese, and other European powers; while slavery was, and had long been, a worldwide phenomenon, virtually all Europeans had decided well before 1600 that only non-Europeans ought to be reduced to true slavery.29 As early as 1640, Virginia courts were treating black servants quite differently from whites, and in some of these cases it is clear that some ‘‘negro’’ workers, unlike ‘‘servants,’’ were being held for life. For example, white servants who ran away were punished by having their terms of service extended, but Africans were not, presumably because they were already serving for life. Several Virginia laws dating from 1660 to 1662 clearly recognized ‘‘negro slaves’’ as a distinct group subject to special treatment, and, in 1664, Maryland adopted a slave code declaring ‘‘That all Negroes or other slaves already within the province,’’ as well as all imported in the future, would be slaves for life. By 1680, one English missionary could write that the words ‘‘Negro’’ and ‘‘Slave’’ had ‘‘by custom grown Homogeneous and convertible.’’30 No special fear of poor white servants is required to explain Virginians’, and other Englishmen’s, willingness to buy slaves rather than white indentured servants. In fact, some Virginians worried that the colony

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ought to attract more white servants to keep possibly dangerous Africans from growing too numerous. In Carolina, slavery arrived with the first Englishmen, and from the beginning perhaps a quarter of the colonists were Africans who had been slaves in the West Indies. By 1700, the 2,800 slaves in South Carolina made up about 40 percent of the non-Indian population, a much larger proportion than in the Chesapeake. With the rise of rice, imports of Africans shot up from about 1,000 in the 1690s, to 3,000 in the next decade, to 6,000 between 1710 and 1720. By 1720, African slaves outnumbered Europeans in the colony, with the great majority forced to labor on rice plantations.31 While both South Carolina and the Chesapeake depended on plantation slavery, the differences between rice and tobacco culture were significant and had far-reaching economic and social consequences. Tobacco plantations operated as a connected group of ‘‘quarters,’’ or smaller farms. As plantation land declined in fertility, slaves were shifted to new ‘‘quarters,’’ and the total number in any one place stayed relatively small. Furthermore, since tobacco offered few economies of scale, small white farmers could grow the crop. As a consequence, Virginia’s white population always outnumbered the slave population, and the slave population itself was widely scattered. In contrast, in rice-growing, economies of scale were very important. It was planted in the spring and, over the course of the next several months, depending on the stage of the crop, water was alternately directed into and out of the fields by dykes and trunks. All this was highly coordinated and centrally controlled on each plantation. The rice plantations that hugged the lower reaches of the Carolina rivers were large, their owners few, and their slaves many. The population in some low-country plantation districts was 90 percent black. The working conditions of slaves in the rice fields were appalling. The work itself was difficult, much of it undertaken while slaves literally stood in water, and the disease environment, with standing water breeding disease-bearing insects, added to the African burden of illness and death. Most whites who could afford to abandoned the rice plantations in the spring for Charleston, returning only with the first frost of fall. And yet there were compensations of a sort for black workers in this hellish system. Coastal South Carolina’s heavy concentration of Africans helped them preserve more

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of their original cultures and develop more control over many aspects of day-to-day life than was possible for slaves elsewhere in English America. With a paucity of documentation, it is difficult to know much more about the lives of the slaves themselves in the earliest decades of settlement, although we can be sure that they were, in many respects, horrific. Many had endured terrible conditions in Africa after their capture, usually by other Africans who had been lured by European merchants into the market for slaves. They were marched to coastal prisons, sold, and packed aboard ships for the notorious Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Disease and overcrowding killed perhaps 20 percent before they reached North America, and diseases in the new world quickly killed many of the survivors. In the early eighteenth century more than one out of twenty African slaves arriving in Virginia died before they could be sold, and perhaps half died before they had been in the colony for ten years.32 Carried in chains to a strange land, separated from family and friends, usually knowing nothing of the language of their captors, they were immediately forced into heavy labor, mixed in among peoples from different African regions speaking different languages, unsure of comfort or fellowship among even their fellow slaves, at least at first. Cut off from most of their own religious rituals and from their priests and other religious specialists, they had little of the consolations of religion. Since only one-third of the new slaves were women, many men had little chance of establishing a family life. All too many of their lives fit the description of the contemporary English philosopher Thomas Hobbes of life as ‘‘nasty, brutish, and short.’’ Considering the realities of their lives, the resilience of many of these Africans is all the more remarkable. Shipmates during the Middle Passage sometimes forged a new kind of community that persisted after ships landed and cargoes were sold. The patterns of trade and of demand meant that many Africans ended up with people whose cultures and languages were at least recognizable. The Igbo from Biafra, for example, went mainly to the Chesapeake, while Bantu-speaking peoples from Angola and Congo predominated in Carolina. And, despite the sexual imbalance, many women and men did form lasting partnerships, had children to whom they sometimes gave African names, and passed along African-origin stories about wily rabbits who outwitted stupid bears and wolves.

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In Virginia, custom carried over from treatment of servants meant that most slaves had at least one day of the week without work, time when they could cultivate small gardens, hunt, or fish. In 1680 Virginia officials complained that ‘‘many Masters’’ were allowing Africans to walk ‘‘on broad on Saterdays and Sundays and permitting them to meete in great Numbers,’’ sometimes to attend ‘‘Funeralls for Dead Negroes.’’33 Africans resisted their bondage, sometimes with violence, more often by running away. South Carolina slaves sometimes took off for the Spanish settlements at St. Augustine. Charleston’s marshal regularly sent out to rural parishes lists of runaways captured in the city, noting name, age, sex, and ‘‘notorious marks.’’34 Some Africans also ignored the racial distinctions that colonial elites sought to enforce. Both men and women found sexual partners among whites, especially among white indentured servants, so often that the Virginia assembly in 1691 made all interracial sexual acts illegal, specifying that any white woman who ‘‘shall have a bastard child by any negro or mulatto’’ must pay a fine of £15 sterling or be reduced to servitude for five years, with her child to be a servant for 30 years. The preamble spelled out the legislators’ fear that interracial sex would erode racial difference, condemning the ‘‘abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may encrease in this dominion, as well by negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women.’’ County court records over the next forty years show that more than one-sixth of prosecutions of white servant women for ‘‘bastardy’’ involved nonwhite fathers.35 Elites wanted to encourage racial solidarity among whites in part because the rise of slavery sharpened class differences. As the limits of fresh soil and improving methods of production were reached, the only way to greater wealth for most whites was to increase the number of their African workers, but slaves were too expensive for most small farmers to afford. Thus big planters magnified their advantages, and the wealth of Chesapeake society became more concentrated at the top. As the proportion of men surviving to pass along their wealth to their sons increased, the advantage accumulated across generations. We can see the results in public life. In Maryland, 8 percent of members of the Assembly and Council between 1660 and 1689 had arrived as indentured servants; in the first fifteen years of the next century just 2 percent had been

30

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servants. And white skin made a difference. Such privileges as the right to carry a gun and, for even small landholders, to vote for representatives, set white men off from blacks. In 1722, Robert Beverly of Virginia wrote that ‘‘a white woman is rarely or never put to work in the ground, if she be good for anything else,’’ and Virginia’s assembly encouraged this practice by exempting masters from the tax on servants and slaves for white females who did not work in the tobacco fields.36 For the most part, though, poorer whites were left with little more than the ‘‘wages of whiteness,’’ the psychological payoff that came from the knowledge that, however low they were on the scales of wealth or status, they were at least white.

Other ‘‘Souths’’: Spain and France in the Southeast The growing English colonies in the Chesapeake and Carolina controlled only a small part of southeastern North America. Away from the coast, most of the region remained primarily an Indian country. Spain maintained its presence in Florida, and, after 1700, France again entered the competition for empire. In the seventeenth century, Spain was Britain’s only European competitor in the southeast. St. Augustine was primarily a military outpost, and few Spanish settlers came to Florida, but Franciscan friars established as many as 130 separate missions, radiating northward along the coast (known as Guale) and westward toward the Gulf of Mexico. Some disappeared quickly; others were more lasting. A typical mission complex included a church, a residence for the missionaries, gardens, and a cookhouse, all protected by a stockade and defended by Spanish soldiers. Around most of these missions were satellite towns of tributary Indians. The missionaries commanded Indians’ labor to grow their food and haul supplies back and forth to St. Augustine. They succeeded in Christianizing many Indians, though how much was due to genuine conversion, and how much to Spanish military power, is impossible to tell. While Franciscans reported that ‘‘the younger generation derides and laughs’’ at those who still followed traditional religious practices,’’ they faced a revolt in Guale because, according to one complaint, the Franciscans ‘‘prohibit us . . . our dances, banquets, feasts, celebrations, games and war. . . . [They] prosecute our old

Before the South 37

31

men, calling them wizards.’’ Many of the missions in central Florida were abandoned after a series of rebellions and epidemics of smallpox and measles. Missions in Apalachee towns along the Gulf Coast lasted longest, but these towns, and the missionary system of which they were a part, were destroyed by raids of South Carolinians and their Indian allies in 1702–4. Hundreds of Apalachees were killed, and nearly a thousand were captured and sold into slavery. Afterwards the Spanish withdrew to St. Augustine and the fortified town of Pensacola, which together included about 1,500 Spanish soldiers and settlers. In 1700 about 10,000 Indians lived under Spanish rule in Florida; fifteen years later this number had fallen by two-thirds.38 By then, France, a formidable military power, had moved to establish new colonies on the Gulf of Mexico. Pierre Le Moyne D’Iberville was commissioned by France to make good its claim to the valley of the Mississippi River, asserted in 1682 by Robert La Salle, who had named the lower valley Louisiana, after King Louis XIV. With his brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, Iberville explored the coast, entered the Mississippi from the Gulf, and established settlements in 1699 on the Gulf at Biloxi Bay (contemporary Mississippi) and in 1702 on Mobile Bay (Alabama). The French had great hopes for Louisiana: they expected to find gold and silver, raise valuable crops, and trade with the Indians for furs and other valuable commodities. Iberville established trading ties with the powerful Choctaw confederacy near Mobile, but Louisiana proved to be more of a drain on, than a contribution to, French finances. It was difficult to grow crops wanted in France. The first French settlers found no gold or silver, quarreled contentiously, and died in large numbers. In 1708 Louisiana had about 200 French settlers, more than half of them soldiers. Another sixty ‘‘wandering Canadians’’ were ‘‘in the Indian villages . . . without the permission of any governor;’’ ‘‘their bad and libertine conduct with the Indian women’’ was destroying ‘‘all that the missionaries and others teach the savages about the divine mysteries of the Christian Religion.’’39 In 1712, a merchant, Antoine Crozat, convinced Louis XIV to turn Louisiana over to him for 15 years, promising to send over two shiploads of colonists per year and to turn the colony into a profitable enterprise. Crozat’s experience was so discouraging that he gave up the grant after five years, after which France granted a new

32

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charter to a Scotsman, John Law. Law set up a stock company, mounted a propaganda campaign aimed at investors and potential colonists, and set about building up Louisiana with slave labor. This effort, too, ended badly. Law had tied his Company of the Indies to a new bank whose stock quickly caught on with the public and soared in price. When it became clear that Louisiana would not, after all, be a source of great wealth, the bubble burst, wiping out speculators, the bank, and Law’s French career. Law fled to Italy, but in Louisiana itself, his company held on longer. The company sent over some 7,000 colonists from France in its first four years of operation, roughly one-sixth of them soldiers, and another one-fifth prisoners, smugglers, and other undesirables forced into exile. After 1721, immigration from France slowed to a trickle, and, by 1732, diseases had reduced the number of Europeans to just 1,720. Nevertheless, this number was sufficient to turn Louisiana into something more than a mere military outpost, and its population began to increase naturally. In 1732 more than half the French colonists lived in or near New Orleans, established in 1718, about 110 miles upstream on the Mississippi River. The Company of the Indies also sent 5,800 Africans to Louisiana between 1719 and 1732. Africans, like Europeans, suffered high mortality, but they still outnumbered Europeans in Louisiana by two-to-one in 1732; by 1746, though only a single slave ship had arrived in the past 15 years, blacks outnumbered whites there by 4,730 to 3,200.40 The Company imported slaves because it hoped to duplicate the success of France’s Caribbean colonies in growing valuable crops. Slaves (and a small number of white indentured servants) were put to work growing tobacco and indigo or sent into the forests to tap pines for naval stores, but production was never sufficient to produce profits. The company suffered a grievous blow in 1729 at its settlement near present-day Natchez, Mississippi, where about 430 French settlers raised tobacco with about 280 slaves, surrounded by Natchez Indians with whom the French had alternately traded and fought. The Natchez enlisted the cooperation of some of the slaves and launched a surprise attack in November, killing three-fourths of the French men and about a hundred women and children. Other French women and children and some of the slaves were captured, to be either sold or adopted into the tribe. The French, supported by a large contingent of

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Choctaw warriors, counterattacked in January, freeing many of the captives, and capturing and burning alive some of the rebel Africans. Typical of the shifting nature of alliances in North America, Indians and African slaves fought on both sides of this conflict. Investors of the company had had enough, and in 1731 Louisiana reverted to royal rule.

Other ‘‘Souths’’: The Persistence of Indian Power The growing populations in the English colonies pushed Indians away from the Atlantic coast, but the English, like the French and Spanish, continued to form trading and military alliances with Indian groups. The most important of these groups in South Carolina in the early eighteenth century was the Yamassee. The Yamassees crushed Spanish-allied Indians in Florida in 1704 and proved to be valuable allies in 1712–14, when they helped South Carolina troops who had gone to the aid of white settlers in Albemarle Sound during their war with Tuscarora Indians. South Carolina’s colonial legislature, in 1707, granted ‘‘permanent’’ ownership to the Yamassees of the land in the vicinity of Port Royal, between the Combahee and Savannah Rivers, but Carolinians coveted the lower reaches of those rivers for their rice plantations. The Yamassees suffered from grossly unfair treatment by white traders, who made a practice of getting Indians drunk and manipulating them into running up massive debts, which could then be paid off only by slave raiding. Perhaps inspired by the example of the Tuscaroras, whom the colonists had been unable to suppress on their own, the Yamassees enlisted aid from towns in the powerful Creek confederacy and, in 1715, launched attacks against the white settlers. The first victims were traders and trade commissioners living among the Indians, some of whom were slowly tortured to death. Europeans were forced back into Charles Town and its immediate surroundings, but they were able to forge an alliance with the Cherokees against the Creeks and to defeat their Indian enemies. The Yamassees were killed, enslaved, or dispersed, disappearing as a distinct group. South Carolinians suffered some 400 casualties in the Yamassee War, making it one of the bloodiest in proportion to population in the history of English North America.

34

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The Yamassee War also led to a final break between South Carolina’s proprietors and its local elites, who blamed their troubles on ‘‘the Inability of the Lords Proprietors to protect their Colony. . . . , and their Reluctance to advance any Money out of their Estates in England.’’41 Local elites overthrew the proprietors’ governor in 1719 and appealed to the king to take over the colony. After a period of rule by the Privy Council in England, the king in 1729 bought out the proprietors and turned North and South Carolina into royal colonies. The few remaining Indian groups remaining near the coast came to terms with English power. The Catawba Indians, who had fought on the side of the Yamassees, agreed to terms of peace that required them to fight with white South Carolinians in future conflicts and to return runaway slaves, in return for control of what was, in effect, a reservation on the frontier. The Catawba enclave served as a buffer between Carolinians and the powerful confederacies that still controlled the vast spaces between the lower Mississippi River and the Appalachian mountains. These so-called tribes were not fixed populations with sharp boundaries, but relatively new political formations made up of various peoples whose populations had been decimated by disease and warfare. The Creeks, for example, included groups from different language groups and were divided into Upper Creek and Lower Creek federations that pursued independent diplomatic strategies, balancing the growing power of the English by forming ties with the Spanish or the French. Indians continued to depend on a mixed economy, with most of their food coming from crops still grown by women. Indians’ important place in the trade and political rivalries of Spain, France, and England made them, collectively, the fourth power in an international system. The English offered the best trade goods at the lowest prices, so they benefited most from alliances with Indians and controlled most of the trade with the Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickasaws. Some English and Scottish merchants moved more or less permanently into Indian country, married Indian women, and adopted Indian customs and dress. The Choctaws, near Louisiana, wanted allies against the other confederacies and traded mainly with the French. The Spanish, with few trade goods and a tiny population, had less presence in the southeastern interior. Trade was a matter of diplomacy as well as economics; Indian groups shifted alliances with the French, the

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35

English, and each other in order to protect their territories and traditional hunting grounds. Native American peoples continued to suffer sweeping epidemics. In 1685, the total population of Indians in the southeast was about 200,000, outnumbering all Europeans by four to one. The Indian population fell to 131,000 by 1700 and to 67,000 by 1730, only about 5,000 of whom lived east of the Appalachians. By that date, Europeans outnumbered all Indians in the southeast by two to one, and African slaves, too, outnumbered Indians. But by 1730, Indian populations had stabilized as they developed greater immunity to imported germs.42 Because they still controlled most of the interior, Indians were essential allies in the colonial conflicts among European powers, which gave them considerable room for maneuver. From their point of view, the trading system was in rough equilibrium, but the roots of future conflict and decline were already visible. As Indians grew more dependent on European goods, they became less self-sufficient in the production of goods needed for everyday life. European demand for furs, skins, and other products escalated, gradually exhausting the once seemingly endless supplies of deer and beaver. As Indian hunters and trappers went further afield, they came into conflict with other groups. Missionaries in some areas undercut traditional religious beliefs and ceremonies. White traders’ alcohol undermined Indians’ capacity for self-control, and white traders’ sometimes dishonest dealings manipulated them into debt in an economic system that, without literacy and knowledge of bookkeeping, Indians never truly mastered. By 1730, a trickle of European population was beginning to move farther up the rivers from the coast and through the Shenandoah Valley from Pennsylvania into the forested back country, walking or riding horses, bringing their household goods and farming implements. In the circumstances, a contest with Indians over land was destined to recur.

Plantation Slavery: The Distinctive Southern Colonial Institution In the generation after 1680, Britain’s Chesapeake colonies became, in the words of historian Jack Greene, ‘‘more settled, cohesive, and coherent;’’ by 1715, the same could be said about South Carolina.43

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In both places, a cohesive planter gentry, whose wealth depended on African slavery, had become an entrenched ruling elite by 1720. From the 1680s to the 1710s, stagnant tobacco prices and the rise of slavery reshaped the Chesapeake. In the heart of the tobacco region, society was dominated by wealthy slave owners with large landed estates. Where poorer soil supported the cultivation of only lower grades of cheap tobacco, planters began to diversify, focusing on grains, livestock, naval stores, and wood products, sending their exports to the West Indies as well as England. After about 1720, tobacco prices began to rise again and tobacco production spread to the south and west, an expansion that continued, with interruptions, for the next half-century. The new tobacco boom helped to cement the social and economic position of the slaveholding planters. These planters intermarried with one another, passed on their wealth to their children, and dominated local politics, becoming more distinctively American with each generation. An example is William Byrd II (1674–1744), whose father came to Virginia in 1671. From the middling gentry, well educated and benefiting from an inheritance from an uncle, William Byrd I made a favorable marriage to a wealthy widow. He served in the House of Burgesses and the Governor’s Council, and his political connections helped him build up vast landholdings throughout the colony. William II was born in Virginia in 1674, educated as a lawyer in England, and after his father’s death returned to Virginia, where he, too, served on the Council. He speculated in backcountry land, founded the city of Richmond, and owned, at his death, more than 175,000 acres. At his home estate, Westover, he built an imposing mansion that, like similar ‘‘great houses,’’ symbolized and displayed his status and social authority. Facing the river, surrounded by gardens and lesser structures (the ‘‘dependencies’’), it was described by one observer as having ‘‘the appearance of a small town and [forming] a most delightful prospect.’’44 His wife, Lucy Parke Byrd, could specialize in the domestic tasks of raising children, ensuring that the household was ready for guests, and supervising slaves who cooked, cleaned, and sewed. In a diary entry William II described himself with satisfaction in 1726: Like one of the patriarchs, I have my flocks and my herds, my bondmen, and bond-women, and every soart of trade amongst my own

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servants, so that I live in a kind of independence on every one, but Providence. However tho’ this soart of life is without expence yet it is attended with a great deal of trouble. I must take care to keep all my people to their duty, to set all the springs in motion, and to make every one draw his equal share to carry the machine forward.45

South Carolina’s ruling elite was of more recent vintage than Virginia’s, but, because of rice, becoming even wealthier. By 1720, rice exports were worth £20,000 annually and rice had become ‘‘the chief support’’ of South Carolina and ‘‘its great source of prosperity.’’46 A rice planter could expect a return of more than 20 percent each year on an investment in slaves; a Virginia planter, by contrast, perhaps a 5 to 10 percent return.47 Naval stores, corn, and barrel staves contributed to Carolina’s export boom. Slaves were a majority in the colony by 1710 and outnumbered whites by more than two to one in 1730; by comparison, in Virginia, whites outnumbered slaves by two to one in 1730.48 As in Virginia, children of South Carolina’s great planters intermarried to form an American-born ruling elite, though in Carolina prosperity spread well below the big planters; nearly 80 percent of white men in the low country rice region became slave owners. By every measure, South Carolina was even more dependent on slavery than the Chesapeake. Outside of the best plantation areas in both Carolina and the Chesapeake, farmers focused more on subsistence than on export crops; slaves were comparatively few and whites much less wealthy. In North Carolina, outside the Cape Fear region, the climate and soil and the scarcity of good ports limited commercial opportunities. In 1730 North and South Carolina had about the same populations, roughly 34,000, but North Carolina was 78 percent white, and South Carolina 29 percent white (in each, about 6 percent were Indians.) Slavery was even less important throughout the thinly populated back country, where transportation difficulties and the presence of powerful Indian groups limited the potential for commercial agriculture. The gentry found its political expression in the popularly elected colonial assemblies. By English standards, voting privileges were widespread since so many white men owned enough land to qualify for the franchise. The representatives themselves were overwhelmingly from the gentry, partly because office holding, unlike voting,

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was limited to those with substantial property, partly because most voters deferred to those with greater wealth and status. In their assemblies, the gentry was already gathering powers to rule the colonies that the English government had never intended. The southeastern colonies from Maryland to South Carolina were distinct in British North America because of the dominant economic role of plantation slavery and the corresponding political and social role of planters. Still, no one then thought of a ‘‘South,’’ since these colonies shared a great deal with the other British colonies. All were growing and prospering in the first third of the eighteenth century, and all had developed, in comparison to the mother country, relatively popular political institutions. There were African slaves in all the colonies, and, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, wealthy landholders relied on slaves to tend crops and perform other labor. On Manhattan, about one-sixth of the population was enslaved in 1720, not much different from the proportion in North Carolina. South Carolina belonged perhaps more to a ‘‘greater Caribbean’’ of majority-black, plantation-based economies, including Barbados and Jamaica, than it did to a North American ‘‘South.’’ Although the coastal trade, largely controlled by New England shippers, connected the colonies to one another, most South Carolinians knew little of Virginia and vice versa. Colonists felt the strongest connection to England—either to the regions of their family origins or to London. To England the biggest ships sailed and from England they returned. In London the king sat, the news originated, the questions of war and peace were decided, the standards for education, books, and clothing were set. The planters who ruled in the southern colonies felt greater kinship with distant Englishmen than with the Scots-Irish and German migrants who were beginning to trickle south from Pennsylvania. The French in the Mississippi Valley and the Spanish along the Gulf Coast were neighbors of a sort, but they remained hostile to the English and to each other. The Spanish, French, and English all competed for influence and trading privileges with the tens of thousands of Native Americans who controlled the vast southeastern interior. In 1720 the ultimate shape of the society that would populate this region was not yet decided, and the American South was still a development of the future.

2 Colonials Become Americans

In the decades after 1720, the British colonies expanded to the south and west, flourished economically, and soared in population. The white population of the southern colonies rose from 100,000 in 1700 to almost 600,000 by 1776. Although this growth was fueled by continuing migration from Europe, Ireland, and Britain, natural population increase was the main factor; most of the white colonial population was now a creole people, conscious of a European heritage, but born in America. The enslaved population expanded even faster, from 16,000 to more than 400,000 by 1776; though boosted by forced migration across the Atlantic, the black population, too, was mainly creole.1 This growing population helped to ensure a British victory in the continuing contests for land and power in North America among multiple peoples of European, African, and Native American origins. White men and women in the southern colonies grew to be more like Britons back home, and also more like colonial Americans to the north and east. In 1776, they joined other Americans to fight for, and win, their independence. A Virginian drafted a Declaration justifying the revolt with a stirring appeal to the ‘‘truths’’ that ‘‘all men are created equal’’ with rights to ‘‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’’ That Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, a large slaveholder, embodied the great irony that slavery had helped make possible the growth of the southern colonies in power and prosperity, making it possible for them to join with other colonies to defy Parliament and king. By 1776, the southern colonies-turnedstates were set apart from those to the north, not by slavery in itself (which existed in all the colonies), but by the centrality of

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plantation slavery from Maryland to Georgia; the economic and social foundations for the creation of the South were in place. British North America had reached a new stability and permanence by 1730. While disease still raged, the population was now healthier and more evenly balanced between men and women than in the previous century. Families raised most of their children to adulthood. Between 1730 and 1760, Virginia’s white population nearly doubled, from 103,000 to 196,000, North Carolina’s more than doubled (to 84,500), and South Carolina’s more than tripled (to 39,000). By comparison, the French and Spanish white populations in Louisiana and Florida were tiny—fewer than 7,000 in 1760. The tobacco industry, stagnant for two generations, expanded after 1730, as a growing and more orderly European market helped demand grow faster than supply, raising prices over the long term. Chesapeake tobacco planters moved steadily westward into areas of fresh soil; in the older regions, tobacco planters converted their acreage to wheat for sale to New England, Europe, and the West Indies. The towns of Baltimore, Norfolk, and Richmond prospered from flour milling and trade, and these soon surpassed the capital cities of Williamsburg and Annapolis in size and importance. South Carolina’s exports to England, mainly of rice, multiplied from £12,000 in 1700 to £186,000 annually by 1750, then, helped by the development of indigo, nearly doubled in value again by 1770. South Carolina became the wealthiest of all Britain’s North American colonies.2 In the Chesapeake and the Carolinas, plantation-grown commodities underwrote the consolidation of the gentry class. Big tobacco and rice planters expanded their acreage and slaveholdings and built mansions that still stand along Virginia and South Carolina rivers, though in South Carolina, where many owners fled their plantations in mosquito season, they built their most luxurious mansions in Charleston. The gentry dominated provincial politics, with most gentry families related to one another in a tangle of cousins and inlaws. In South Carolina at mid-century, members of only six intermarried families filled one-third of seats on the provincial Council. In Virginia between 1720 and 1776, a core group of 110 men held most of the positions of greatest power and influence.3 At the same time, women lost ground in influence and power. Since most white parents and spouses survived, men could rule their households over a lifetime and women were now less likely to

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inherit slaves and land. In Virginia, wills more often than in the previous century named an elder son rather than a widow as estate executor, and courts more frequently limited the property rights of widows. Women in elite households were increasingly expected to focus on the care of their husbands and the nurturing of their children. Newspapers portrayed ideal women as ‘‘great Instruments of Good, and the Prettiness of Society’’; virtues of ‘‘Innocence, Piety, Good-Humour and Truth’’ would make them good wives and mothers. According to one writer, ‘‘a good Wife is the greatest Blessing, and the most valuable Possession’’ of her husband, ‘‘Man’s best Companion in Prosperity. . . a faithful Advisor in Distress, a Comforter in Affliction, and a prudent Manager of all his Domestic Affairs.’’4 Exceptional women could transcend this restrictive ideal. Eliza Lucas grew up in Antigua, was sent to England to be educated, then moved to South Carolina in 1738 with her father, a British army officer. Colonel Lucas purchased three plantations, then left for duty in the West Indies, leaving behind Eliza, just sixteen years old, to manage the plantations. Her experiments with indigo helped spark that new industry in South Carolina. Neighbors warned that she might ‘‘read [her] self mad’’ and, thereby, ruin her chances for marriage, but, in 1744, she married a widower, Charles Pinckney. For twelve years, she reverted to a domestic role, ‘‘Making it the business of my life,’’ as she put it, ‘‘to please a man of Mr. Pinckney’s merrit even in triffles,’’ but, after Charles died in 1758, she assumed active management of her extensive properties.5 Other women, though a small minority, also worked in the ‘‘public’’ sphere, running taverns, operating schools, or owning shops in the towns and cities. The founding of Georgia in 1732 opened new opportunities in the southern colonies for poor men. George II granted Georgia to an idealistic group of ‘‘Trustees’’ led by James Oglethorpe, who envisioned Georgia as a valuable buffer between Florida and South Carolina and also as a place of refuge for imprisoned debtors. The trustees banned importation of slaves so that Georgia should be a place for ordinary farmers and so that discontented slaves would not make it more difficult to defend the colony against Spain. Oglethorpe laid out the new town of Savannah, and Carolina merchants helped to build a new trading center at Augusta that soon became the heart of the southeastern trading system. Georgia

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soon attracted settlers from Britain, Switzerland, Germany, and, especially, from South Carolina. The colony was to be closely regulated by the trustees. Settlers were to live in Savannah or other towns and tend gardens in assigned town plots. They would operate, but not own, 45-acre farms in the countryside. To produce valuable crops without slaves, every farmer was required to plant mulberry trees for silk worms. Importation of rum was outlawed. These dreams of the trustees came no closer to reality than the feudal dreams of Carolina’s and Maryland’s proprietors. The restrictions against rum, a major article in the Indian trade, were unenforceable. Mulberry trees did not flourish, nor did vineyards, olive trees, or other experimental crops. As early as 1738, a petition to the trustees demanded the right to buy land and slaves, as only cheap labor would end the colonists’ ‘‘Misfortunes and Calamities.’’6 Restrictions on land ownership fell away, though trustees held on longer to the prohibition of slavery. Trustees and some settlers as well, notably communities of Highland Scots and Swiss Salzburgers, were convinced that slavery would destroy the vision of Georgia as a yeoman’s paradise, but, in 1750, a majority of trustees voted to make slavery legal. A number of South Carolina planters quickly acquired prime rice land in Georgia and brought in slaves to clear and build plantations. By its charter, Georgia was to be turned over to the king in 1753, but the disillusioned trustees gave up a year early, and, in 1752, Georgia came under royal rule. The frontier moved toward the west as well as farther south. During the eighteenth century, indentured servants from Britain, Ulster, and Germany continued to come to America, but most went to Pennsylvania or New York—Georgians clamored for slaves partly because it was so difficult to get white servants to come there. Many of these servants, once freed from their indentures, moved south through the Shenandoah Valley to search for land in the southeastern back country that stretched from western Maryland to Georgia. By 1775, the southern back country was home to more than a quarter million people, including 40,000 slaves. Back country whites were relatively isolated from access to markets and most owned few or no servants or slaves. Many differed in religion and language from the predominantly English population near the coast. Charles Woodmason, an Anglican minister toiling in South Carolina, left a condescending portrait of the Scots-Irish

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there: ‘‘very Poor—owing to their extreme Indolence. . . . They delight in their present low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish Life, and seem not desirous of changing it.’’ ‘‘Among the low Class,’’ he complained, the sabbath ‘‘is abus’d by Hunting, fishing, fowling and Racing—By the women in frolicing and Wantoness’’; those who did come to church brought their ‘‘very troublesome’’ dogs along and displayed a ‘‘rude, indecent Custom of Chewing or of Spitting.’’ Many others in the more settled eastern regions held similar denigrating views, giving a sharp edge to later political conflicts between the coastal elites and settlers to the west.7

Africans to African Americans The wealth of the southern colonial gentry was dependent on the labor of African slaves who cleared their plantations, worked their fields, and helped to build their houses; the gentry style of life depended on slaves who cooked their meals, served at their tables, and helped to care for their children. Between 1700 and 1770, Virginia imported 73,000 Africans, and South Carolina 84,000, but the greatest growth in the slave population came, not from importation, but from an excess of births over deaths. By 1770, slaves made up about a third of the population of Maryland and North Carolina, two-fifths of Virginia and Georgia, and nearly three-fifths of South Carolina.8 The natural population growth of slaves was unique in the Americas. In the Caribbean and Brazil, slaves died faster than they reproduced and slave populations there grew only through massive imports. Colder North American winters killed off pathogens and disease-bearing insects, though in the rice swamps of Carolina and Georgia mortality remained high. Nutrition may have been better in North America, and staple crops less difficult to work. Sugar, the principal crop of the Caribbean and Brazil, was a great killer; when Louisiana became a sugar producer in the next century, its slaves, too, failed to reproduce themselves naturally.9 As more slaves were born in North America, the resulting rough balance between men and women also promoted families and natural growth. By mid-century, most slaves could grow up in families, and, on larger plantations, in communities of fellow blacks. Slave children learned English and

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observed European ways; some young slaves (almost always boys) were trained in artisan skills. A small proportion of slaves converted to Christianity, though incorporating African traditions. Slaves, like whites, were becoming creoles, combining cultural traditions from both Africa and Britain into new forms. There remained significant differences between slavery in Carolina and in the Chesapeake. In Virginia, by 1730, American-born slaves outnumbered African-born slaves, and by the American Revolution, fewer than 10 percent had been born in Africa. In South Carolina, however, natural growth was slow, African slave imports high; in 1730, 63 percent of South Carolina’s slaves had been born in Africa, and, even as late as 1770, more than 33 percent.10 Slaves made up an absolute majority of South Carolina’s population and more than 90 percent in the rice districts. As a consequence, compared with Virginia’s, South Carolina’s slave culture was more heavily influenced by African traditions. One illustration is the ‘‘ring shout,’’ an African ritual later grafted on to Christian services, another the vocabulary and speech patterns of the distinctive Gullah dialect that developed in the Carolina and Georgia low country. Work patterns distinctive to particular crops enhanced these demographic differences. In Virginia, where tobacco ruled, most slaves lived among just a few others on small farms or isolated plantation quarters, rising at dawn and working until dusk under direction of a white owner or overseer. In the Carolina rice fields, each slave was given a daily ‘‘task,’’ such as harvesting a certain acreage of rice, calibrated to the slave’s age, sex, and health. When the assigned task was done, so was the slave’s work day—or, at least, work-forowner day. A healthy slave man or woman could complete a task by mid-afternoon and, in the remaining ‘‘free time,’’ raise vegetables in small gardens, tend their own chickens, or hunt. Some of their extra produce and meat was sold to their master or to neighbors and residents of local towns. In Charleston, slave women sold oysters, fruits, baked goods; the city’s grand jury complained in 1768 about the ‘‘many idle Negro Wenches, selling dry goods, cakes, rice, etc., in the markets.’’11 Women and men wove baskets and carved canoes from tree trunks for sale, and some accumulated substantial property. Independent earning power and time away from the master’s eye added to the relative autonomy of slave life in South Carolina compared to Virginia, though slaves in South Carolina suffered

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from the disease and discomfort attendant on long hours of working, sometimes knee-deep in water, amidst swarms of malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and the masters on rice plantations controlled vast areas of slave life and enforced obedience with force often brutal. In comparing slave life in these two colonies, ‘‘better’’ and ‘‘worse’’ simply describe different forms of a degrading servitude. The African populations of the booming British colonies far outnumbered those of the Spanish and French. Spanish-held Florida remained a military outpost, with just a few hundred slaves. French-held Louisiana, a more substantial colony, had, by the 1760s, about 5,000 slaves and an equal number of free colonists.12 Louisiana’s slaveowners did not, before 1790, develop any profitable staple crop, although large plantations near New Orleans did grow food for the colony, raise indigo and tobacco for export to France, and supply lumber for the West Indies. Louisiana after 1731 was not profitable enough to support a trade in African slaves; the slave population there experienced slow natural growth in a process of creolization similar to that on the Atlantic coast. African and creole slaves resisted bondage in ways that often exasperated, and sometimes frightened, their masters. In Virginia in 1730, whites were alarmed by reports of ‘‘many meetings and consultations of the Negros . . . in order to obtain their freedom.’’13 Five leaders of this alleged conspiracy were hanged. Nine years later, in a rebellion near the Stono River in South Carolina, about 20 native Africans, probably from Kongo (modern Angola), who shared a language and culture and the horror of the Middle Passage, attacked a store and headed south, leaving the heads of the storekeepers on the store steps. The rebels may have been headed for Florida, where the Spanish welcomed runaway slaves willing to accept Catholicism, and where about 100 such former slaves lived in a fortified settlement called Mose and helped to defend St. Augustine against British attacks. It was probably not a coincidence that just before the Stono rebellion word reached South Carolina that Britain and Spain were at war. After traveling about 10 miles, the rebels halted, though not before adding slave recruits and killing more whites (sparing a tavern keeper, Mr. Wallace, because ‘‘he was a good Man and kind to his slaves’’).14 Meanwhile, South Carolina’s whites had rallied and caught up with the rebels; they attacked and shot down every slave they captured alive. Some two dozen whites and about three dozen slaves were killed.

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Stono was exceptional. Armed rebellion required a combination of organization, communication, discipline, secrecy, and access to weapons that made success almost impossible. Slaves nevertheless resisted in other, less spectacular ways. Assaults against and murders of overseers and masters dot the colonial court records; one Carolina resident reported that ‘‘instances of Negroes murdering, scorching, and burning their own masters or overseers are not rare.’’15 A more common form of resistance was escape. Many African-born slaves ran away in groups, sometimes with shipmates from the Middle Passage, while American-born slaves were more likely to run off alone or with one or two companions. Some slaves escaped with their children; others, after being sold or carried off to a new plantation, left to try to visit or reunite with family members—many advertisements for runaways mentioned that a fugitive was probably with friends or relatives. Slaves who knew English and had special skills sometimes took their tools to distant towns, hoping to find work. Most, doubtless, had more pressing or immediate intentions: to avoid overwork or to escape the cruelties of an overseer or master. Some were killed; more were captured; most returned voluntarily when they got too hungry or cold, or missed their families, or heard from a master that they would be taken back with little or no punishment. Permanent escape from bondage was difficult and rare. An unknown black man or woman who showed up in a neighborhood immediately raised white suspicions. No stranger, white or black, could easily maintain anonymity in the small colonial towns. In the forests and mountains to the west, Indians were potentially dangerous adversaries, many of whom hunted down runaways for white slaveowners. Yet, a number of communities of escaped slaves (called maroons) succeeded in maintaining their freedom for years in swamps or heavily wooded and infrequently traveled areas. Maroon communities were more common in South Carolina than in Virginia, and more common still in Louisiana, where the small white population was surrounded by swampy forests. Withdrawal of work was the runaway’s bargaining strength; humiliation, infliction of pain, and sale were the master’s. Whipping was the usual punishment, but fugitives and other slaves who resisted or otherwise annoyed or enraged their masters could receive almost any punishment, and masters had almost complete immunity from the law. In South Carolina, any white could

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demand to see from any black a ticket granting permission to be away, and, if there was no ticket, administer a ‘‘moderate whipping.’’ Any white could kill any black man or woman who resisted. Persistent runaways might be shackled, branded, or mutilated, or all of these. The French Code Noir that governed slavery in Louisiana allowed branding and cutting off the ears of a runaway absent for a month and severing the hamstrings for a second offense. In Maryland, one small planter who killed a slave by hanging him from beams and whipping him brutally over several hours was acquitted of murder by a jury. Robert Carter, Virginia’s largest slaveowner, lost patience with a chronic runaway in 1727 and told his overseer to cut off the man’s toes, telling him that ‘‘I have cured many a negro of running away by this means.’’16

Empires: Cultural and Political The growing importance of plantation slavery distinguished the southern colonies from those to the north and east, but the profits of slavery paid for goods in a trade that shaped colonial culture in the same broad directions in all regions. In 1762, Robert Beverley of Virginia wrote to London for advice on ‘‘the present Fashion,’’ because ‘‘you know that foolish Passion has made its bray, even into this remote region.’’ Following ‘‘foolish Passion’’ in pursuit of ‘‘present Fashion’’ was characteristic of a new consumer revolution in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. The tobacco, rice, and deerskins shipped to England returned as clothing, tea sets, carved furniture, and window glass for the mansions of the new gentry, and as chairs, pottery, and cooking pots for lesser folk. Colonists, sharply conscious of the latest styles, did not want to appear less current than their neighbors. In 1760, George Washington complained to a British merchant that ‘‘instead of getting things good and fashionable in their several kinds we often have Articles sent Us that coud only have been usd by our Forefathers in the days of yore.’’ A visitor to Annapolis wrote, ‘‘I am almost inclined to believe that a new fashion is adopted earlier by the polished and affluent American than by many opulent persons in the great metropolis [of London].’’ Merchants advertised arrivals of ships with long lists of new merchandise and enticed their customers with new stores set up to display their goods. Reflecting the roles of women as consumers,

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one Maryland merchant wrote, ‘‘You know, the influence of the Wives upon their Husbands, & it is but a trifle that wins ’em over, they must be taken notice of or there will be nothing done with them.’’ Women also sold the new fashions; in the 1770s at least 17 female milliners or mantua makers had shops in Charleston, and at least eight in Williamsburg.17 Colonists produced goods themselves for the widening internal markets. The number of artisans, especially in the luxury trades, rose sharply in the small cities and towns of the southern colonies. In the countryside, local networks of exchange included grains, butter, and cider, thread and cloth, shoes made by local shoemakers, and leather tanned by local tanners. Women usually made the butter and cider, spun the thread and yarn, and wove the fabrics. The new consumerism that marked what has been called the Empire of Goods did not reach the poorest whites in the isolated backcountry. Rev. Charles Woodmason wrote in 1768, that in South Carolina ‘‘in many Places they have nought but a Gourd to drink out off Not a Plate Knive or Spoon, a Glass, Cup, or any thing.’’ Yet the desire to own, and the ability to buy, the latest goods reached ordinary people. Virginia’s lieutenant-governor noted that ‘‘the common planters’’ of the colony were ‘‘dressing themselves in the manufactures of Great Britain altogether.’’ By the American Revolution, tea cups and teapots, almost unknown in the colonies at the beginning of the century, were almost universally found in the homes of not only the gentry, but also of poor residents in towns.18 Even houses still ‘‘meane and little’’ by English standards might now have glass windows, plaster finishes, or wood paneling. These new patterns of consumption were just one sign that Americans were being drawn ‘‘ever closer into the ambit of British life during the eighteenth century.’’ Whites were proud to be part of a rising empire and with liberty unmatched elsewhere. Most read the things that Britons read, and much of their ‘‘news’’ was copied from the London papers. Colonists who could afford it sent their sons to be educated in London. But many Americans who sought to meet the standards of the mother country knew that they fell short. When Charles Carroll of Maryland, son of one of the richest men in America, was attending school in London in the 1760s, he fretted that he would not find a wife willing ‘‘to leave her Home, her friends & relations & follow me to a barbarous uncivilised

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country.’’ Americans were, after all, provincials, at the margins of the Empire.19 Empire of course was a matter of political power as well as material culture, and the politics of the British Empire shaped all British Americans. From 1689 to 1713, when Britain was intermittently at war with Spain and France, all three of these contending powers formed alliances with Indian groups. For the following 25 years, a state of relative peace and a rough balance of power helped to undergird economic growth. Indians’ own diplomacy was deliberately designed to balance the European powers against one another. Without such a balance they stood little chance of defeating a determined European army or militia, superior in numbers and weapons and willing to engage in scorched-earth tactics, killing women and children as well as men, and sending off captives as slaves to the West Indies. A comment by a New York official could have applied to Indian diplomacy in the southeast, as well: ‘‘to preserve the balance between us and the French is the great ruling principal of the modern Indian politics.’’ The Choctaws maintained close ties with the French, who kept a scattering of fortified settlements in Louisiana and up the Mississippi River, far into the interior. The powerful Cherokees and Creeks and the smaller population of Chickasaws allied closely with the British, who supplied them with the best and cheapest trade goods. But no alliance was exclusive, and rivalries among the British colonies helped to maintain a balance. So, for example, the Cherokees, whose heartland was in the southern Appalachians, traded primarily with Virginians, but different factions among the ‘‘Overhill,’’ ‘‘Valley,’’ and ‘‘Lower’’ Cherokees would trade at times with competing South Carolinians and French. The Creeks, west and south of Georgia, the most powerful southeastern confederacy, attracted many members of smaller groups that had been decimated by disease or warfare. They were heavily dependent on trade through Augusta, where up to a million deerskins were funneled across the Atlantic during the century. The Lower Creeks kept ties with the Spanish in Florida, while some Upper-Creek towns encouraged the French to build a fort on the Alabama River. The Choctaws were the firmest allies of the French, but one Choctaw faction was pro-British.20 The relentless expansion of the British colonies by mid-century built up pressure on Indian populations as the back country began to fill with settlers. By 1760, the non-Indian population in fledgling

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Georgia was already triple that of Florida, and the Creeks, dependent on trade at Augusta, called Georgians the ‘‘People greedily grasping after the lands of the Red people.’’21 In the interlude of peace from 1713 to 1738, the hand of the King’s government in England weighed lightly in colonial capitals and the popular assemblies in the colonies gradually gained more power to shape provincial policies. Most importantly, the assemblies gained almost exclusive control over raising money in the colonies. The preeminent public locus of the colonial gentry, these assemblies came to think of themselves as small versions of the British House of Commons—the only true representatives of the people of their own colony, and protectors of the people’s rights as Englishmen. They were encouraged in this interpretation of their rights and duties by theories about the British (unwritten) constitution that originated in the home country, but became far more popular in provincial America. Most Englishmen considered their country uniquely free, with the people enjoying political liberties and power that, in other countries, were retained by monarchs and hereditary nobles. They believed that their liberty depended on a careful balance of authority among the King, House of Lords, and House of Commons, a balance struck in 1688, when Charles II was deposed and replaced by William of Orange and his wife, Mary in a ‘‘Glorious Revolution’’ that confirmed that the King’s authority was not absolute and that Parliament was the final protector of English liberty. By the eighteenth century, some English writers and politicians began to argue that the system had gone askew, that the King, abetted by unscrupulous political allies, had corrupted Parliament by bribes so that he could get almost any legislation approved. The critics cited, as key instruments in this corruption, the rise of complex new government institutions, especially the Bank of England. These ‘‘commonwealthmen’’ insisted that only the vigilance of virtuous citizens could guarantee British liberties against such corruption; citizens must elect honest and independent representatives who would place the public good above their own private interests, but the commonwealthmen feared that the virtues of Britons themselves were being corrupted by the desire for new luxuries made available by the consumer revolution. This stinging critique of British corruption would powerfully inform the responses of American political leaders during their conflicts with the mother country after 1764.

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Wars for Empire Peace among the European powers broke down in 1739, when Britain declared war on Spain. During the war, Georgians and South Carolinians failed in an attempt to capture St. Augustine, though Georgians managed to fend off a Spanish invasion of their colony. In 1743, France declared war on England (called, in America, ‘‘King George’s War’’). South Carolina was attacked by French and Spanish privateers all along its coast. South Carolina’s Governor James Glen failed to convince Cherokees and Creeks to fight on England’s side but succeeded in forming an alliance with a Choctaw headman, Red Shoes, to try to drive France from Louisiana. Glen, however, tried to monopolize the new trade with the Choctaws, antagonizing both Indians and competing traders, and the alliance ran aground in the colonial legislature because of disagreements on financing the campaign. The long conflict among European powers in North America climaxed in a worldwide contest for supremacy between Britain and France, called by Americans the French and Indian War. Virginians touched that war off in 1754, by sending an expedition under George Washington to capture a French fort at the junction of the Ohio River. (Washington had a personal interest in the matter; he was an investor in the Ohio Company, which had received a grant of 200,000 acres on the river.) The expedition ended in fiasco, as did a much larger invasion the next year by British General Edward Braddock, with Washington in command of Virginia troops. Thereafter, southern colonists played relatively little role in the war for the next four years, until South Carolina became embroiled in an Indian conflict that spread throughout the southeastern frontier. The conflict began with disputes over trade and frontier killings by both sides. British invasions in 1760 and 1761 destroyed Cherokee villages; after losing between 5,000 and 10,000 of their population of 20,000, the Cherokees agreed to terms, but refused to turn over four chiefs for execution. A sullen Carolina assembly complained that the treaty had ‘‘not produced any Real advantage in favour of this province.’’22 Ultimately, the British triumphed decisively. From the perspective of American colonists, the most important result was the expulsion of the French from the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. Most of

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France’s Louisiana territory was handed over to a weak Spain; Britain took over Florida. The Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Creeks were weakened because they now had much less ability to play one European rival off against another. Yet, to their surprise, it was the victorious British colonists who were confounded by a victory that had brought them unprecedented security but seemed to have diminished their freedom to control their own affairs.

The Coming of the Revolution Following its victory over France, the British government in London embarked on reforms designed to help pay for the war, to bring order and stability to the frontier, and to rationalize and tighten control over colonial trade. Permanent troops were stationed in Indian country, and, to avoid clashes between Indians and whites, new settlement west of the Appalachians was forbidden. London appointed superintendents of Indian affairs to regulate trade and enforce the peace. New taxes and administrative reforms were to raise money and also better regulate trade. A Currency Act sought to drive out paper money that several colonial assemblies had issued. Most unpopular of these new British measures was a 1765 Stamp Tax on all newspapers and legal documents, intended to help pay for stationing troops along the frontier. Protests erupted immediately throughout the colonies against what was considered a violation of a fundamental principle of English government, that no taxes be levied without the consent of the people’s representatives. London claimed that Parliament represented the colonists. An outpouring of pamphlets and legislative resolutions answered that their colonial assemblies alone could represent them. Virginia’s House of Burgesses denounced the Stamp Act in resolutions introduced by a firebrand named Patrick Henry. Virginians had brought from England ‘‘all the liberties, privileges, franchises, and immunities’’ that belonged by right to the people of Great Britain, the resolutions said; ‘‘the distinguishing characteristick of British freedom’’ was ‘‘taxation of the people by themselves, or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them.’’ The final resolution declared that an attempt of anyone other than Virginia’s own assembly to raise taxes ‘‘has a manifest tendency to destroy British

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as well as American freedom.’’ The burgesses did not accept two more extreme proposed resolutions, essentially calling on Americans to resist the new tax, but the two rejected resolutions circulated to other colonies as if they, too, had also been adopted. The assemblies in eight other colonies promptly endorsed Virginia’s defiance. By the time the Stamp Act came into effect on November 1, 1765, no one dared enforce it. In Maryland, stamp distributor Zachariah Hood had to sneak ashore in Annapolis to avoid a raging crowd and later watched as mobs burned and hanged him in effigy. Only in Georgia, a small and vulnerable colony, and Florida, recently taken from Spain and with few British residents, were the stamps sold and used. Pamphlets and sermons denounced the new British policies as part of a broad conspiracy by a corrupt government to destroy Americans’ liberties and reduce them to ‘‘slavery.’’ The ‘‘commonwealthmen’’ had been making a similar critique at home of the British government for decades. The Stamp Tax was repealed in 1766, but a new series of taxes on imports the next year provoked more protests and a widespread boycott of British goods. These duties, too, were largely repealed, but Parliament maintained, as a point of principle, a tax on tea, which ultimately provoked the famous Tea Party in Boston harbor in December 1773. In response, the British closed the port of Boston and restricted self-government in Massachusetts, measures that spurred American colonists to resist, by force, the ‘‘plot’’ to undermine their liberty and, finally, to declare their independence on July 4, 1776, rejecting not just King George, but the very idea of rule by a king. Why a dispute over modest taxes escalated into a war may seem a puzzle, especially taxes to pay for such things as protection of colonists from Indian attacks. Further, in the southern colonies, resistance was led by wealthy aristocrats, among them Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who had much to lose. Revolutions are rarely undertaken by ruling elites. Yet, these wealthy planters were less confident, secure, and independent than they appeared. Ordinary white men were showing less deference to the gentry, as an evangelical revolt was undermining the authority of the established Church of England and movements in the backcountry of North and South Carolina challenged gentry political dominance. As early as the 1740s, religious reformers had been attracting whites and blacks, including slaves, to their emotional gatherings, sometimes

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in churches, and sometimes out of doors. Methodists wanted to reform the established church, Baptists to leave it altogether. In the 1750s, this evangelical movement gained many more followers, especially in the back country regions where there were relatively few slaves. On Virginia’s southern frontier, Baptist preachers attracted many poor whites and slaves, denouncing worldly vanity and encouraging strict personal morality. Neither Baptist preachers nor their converts were inclined to defer to haughty planters or to provide tax support to the Anglican Church. One Anglican minister there complained in 1759 that the Baptists ‘‘gain Proselytes every Day, and unless the Principal Persons concerned in this Delusion are apprehended or otherwise restrained from proceeding further, the consequences will be fatal.’’ Some planters did try to ‘‘restrain’’ the troublesome evangelicals, invading meetings to disperse the crowds and rough up the preachers.24 In the Carolinas, the eastern political elites who dominated provincial politics responded to challenges raised on more secular grounds. In South Carolina from 1767–9, and in North Carolina from 1768–71, backcounty residents adopted the name of ‘‘Regulators’’ and took up arms to press their grievances. South Carolina’s Regulators included substantial farmers and slaveowners concerned about the lack of law and order in counties with no local courts or sheriffs. They complained that ‘‘Outcasts of Virginia and North Carolina’’ had formed gangs of bandits, including women, and that ‘‘Runaway negroes, free mulattoes and other mix’d Blood,’’ were stealing and looting property.25 Regulators’ militias inflicted vigilante justice on bandits, and even targeted officers of the courts, but the colony’s legislature satisfied most of the Regulators’ demands by establishing new circuit courts, sheriffs, and jails in the back country. In North Carolina, Regulators declared that they would ‘‘pay no Taxes until [they were] satisfied they are agreeable to Law’’ and denounced the ‘‘nefarious and designing men’’—the justices and other officials appointed by the legislature—who managed to ‘‘squeeze and extort from the wretched Poor.’’26 In Hillsborough, Regulators disrupted court proceedings and dragged through the streets a friend of the governor notorious for abuse of his offices. An alarmed Governor Tryon convinced the legislature to pass a draconian anti-riot law, called out the militia, and defeated the Regulators in March 1771, in the ‘‘Battle of Alamance.’’ Six Regulators were later hanged for treason.

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Disturbed as they were by challenges from poorer whites, wealthy southern planters also considered British policies a threat to their material well-being. In Virginia, big planters had accumulated debts to merchants who controlled the tobacco trade. Some planters faced ruin, and one of them, William Byrd III, who had run into the ground the huge estate built up by his father and grandfather, committed suicide. A great scandal was exposed upon the death in 1766 of John Robinson, the treasurer and Speaker of the House in Virginia, who had lent out from the public treasury the enormous sum of £100,000 to himself and his friends. Robinson’s malfeasance threatened immediate financial ruin for several wealthy planters and suggested that ‘‘luxury’’ and ‘‘corruption’’ were infecting Americans as well as Englishmen. The boycotts against British imports organized as protests against British tax policies allowed the gentry to cut back on expensive purchases and reduce their debts without loss of status. Many Virginia planters were also deeply disturbed by London’s attempts to separate whites from Indians. A Royal Proclamation in 1763 drew a line at the crest of the Appalachians and declared that west of it, ‘‘the several nations or tribes of Indians . . . should not be molested or disturbed in the possession’’ of their lands. The hopes of many planters to expand their fortunes with land speculation were thereby stymied. A treaty in 1768 modified the boundary, but many Virginia planters, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, had received patents for much of the land set aside in the treaty for the Cherokees.27 Strict enforcement of trade regulations added to planters’ economic woes. Landon Carter, one of Virginia’s largest planters, wrote, in 1774, that colonists suffered because navigation acts forced them to ‘‘deal nowhere else but with those who have both the opportunity to take our Commodities for what they please and send theirs to us at their own price.’’28 The British attempts to regulate or even eliminate paper currency in the colonies compounded the problems, since there was so little specie (metal currency) available to pay off debts. But, of all southern planters’ concerns, perhaps the most serious was a potential threat to slavery. As early as April 1775 (when fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord), Virginia’s Governor Dunmore threatened to arm slaves to defend the King’s rights, and, in the following months, he recruited hundreds of slave runaways to fight for the British. In May, rumors flew in Charleston that the

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British would ‘‘grant freedom to such Slaves as should desert their Masters and join the King’s troops.’’ The South Carolina militia was called out ‘‘principally to guard against any hostile attempts that might be made by our domesticks.’’ In November Governor Dunmore issued a formal proclamation emancipating ‘‘all indented Servants, Negroes, or others’’ who belonged to American rebels and were willing to join ‘‘HIS MAJESTY’S Troops.’’ At about the same time, slave runaways were gathering on Sullivan’s Island in Charleston harbor, protected there by the British fleet. An American attack against the island killed several slave fugitives, making them the first victims of battle during the Revolutionary War in the Low Country. In March 1776, when South Carolinians declared their state’s independence from Britain, they cited as one cause that the British had ‘‘excited domestic insurrections—proclaimed freedom to servants and slaves, enticed and stolen them from, and armed them against their masters.’’ If loyalty to King George meant siding with slaves against their own neighbors, the choice was clear.29

Revolutionary War and Civil War Legislatures throughout the colonies now declared themselves independent assemblies and named special bodies, like Virginia’s ‘‘Council of Safety,’’ to run provincial affairs. The councils recruited soldiers, appointed officers, and readied for a fight. In the same April week in 1775 as Lexington and Concord, Virginia militiamen considered attacking to recover powder Governor Dunmore had seized, and South Carolinians confiscated weapons and powder from the public magazine. Each southern colony forced its British governor to leave, with varying amounts of violence. The feisty Dunmore put up the biggest fight; from British navy ships in the Chesapeake, he rallied some loyalists (including slaves) to his side, tried to stir up Indians on the Virginia frontier, and occupied some coastal towns. In December, Virginia’s Council of Safety sent a force of militia to expel Dunmore from Norfolk, after which they razed the remaining buildings in the city. In North Carolina, Governor Josiah Martin called on loyalist ‘‘Tories’’ to help him put down the ‘‘most daring, horrid, and unnatural rebellion,’’ but a force of Whigs (as the American patriots called themselves) defeated them at Moore’s Creek in January 1776. In South Carolina

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and Georgia, Tories and Whigs (as the loyalists and rebels were respectively called after British political parties) battled in the back country. After an inconclusive battle at Ninety-Six, South Carolina, in November 1775, Whigs captured several Loyalist leaders and suppressed resistance. Already experiencing war, the southern colonists were among those pressing hardest in the Continental Congress for a declaration of independence.30 In the summer of 1776, a British fleet failed in an attempt to take Charleston. Over the next two years, southern states (no longer colonies) saw little fighting, and the Continental Army under Virginian George Washington suffered humiliating losses in the middle colonies, though managing to stave off total defeat. When France entered the war on the American side in 1778, British commander General Sir Henry Clinton, who was convinced that Georgia and South Carolina loyalists would rise to overthrow the rebels if they had British protection, decided on a southern strategy. A British invasion force seized Savannah, then Augusta, and hundreds of Tories flocked to their side. After fending off a combined American and French attack on Savannah, the British took Charleston in May 1780, and inspired North Carolina Tories raised a force of militia. Clinton’s plan seemed to be working, but his proclamation requiring prisoners of war to swear allegiance to the king alienated potential supporters in South Carolina, and British troops and Tories committed so many outrages that opinion tipped toward the patriot side. Patriot militias began a steady guerilla harassment, a patriot force routed the North Carolina Tory militia, and Washington sent help from the regular Continental Army. Even with help from these regulars, however, patriot forces were routed by the British at Camden, South Carolina, in August 1780. But the British had overestimated their support, and their new commander, Lord Cornwallis, was unable to subdue the rebels. In South Carolina, patriot riflemen destroyed a loyalist force at King’s Mountain in October 1780, and an outnumbered force of militia and Continentals decisively defeated British regulars at Cowpens in January 1781. Cornwallis defeated General Nathaniel Greene at Guilford Court House, North Carolina, in March 1781, but his 532 casualties made up more than a quarter of his army, while Greene suffered only 261 dead or wounded.31 A more prudent commander would have returned to his base at Charleston, but Cornwallis headed north toward the Chesapeake. Greene,

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remaining in South Carolina, picked off scattered British outposts one at a time until, by October, the British south of Virginia were confined to the ports of Savannah, Charleston, and Wilmington. Washington collaborated with the French fleet to bottle Cornwallis up at Yorktown, Virginia, forcing his surrender on October 19, 1781. A peace treaty would not be signed until 1783, but, as far as the major fighting was concerned, the American Revolutionary War was over. The Revolution pitted colonist against colonist but it also drew in Indian peoples and Africans, each with their own stakes in the outcome. One historian has written that the war in the Georgia backcountry ‘‘was, from start to finish, an Indian war.’’32 One group of ‘‘liberty boys’’ from Augusta seized Thomas Brown, a wealthy Tory planter, beat him, tarred and feathered him, and applied burning brands to his feet. Escaping to Florida, Brown raised a band of loyalists and Indians, the East Florida Rangers, to fight for the British. After Cherokees attacked South Carolina settlements in 1776, expeditions by U.S. and state troops devastated Cherokee territories, following as best they could South Carolina leader William Henry Drayton’s admonition to ‘‘burn every Indian town’’ and kill or enslave every Indian, until ‘‘the nation be extirpated.’’33 Creeks and Choctaws avoided similar destruction, but all Indian groups were torn between militants who wanted to ally with Britain and perhaps regain their land, and more cautious leaders who feared what intervention might bring. The Revolution has also been called the occasion of ‘‘the largest slave uprising in our history.’’34 African and African-American slaves, like Indians, had good reason to see the British as representing the side of liberty. Thousands of slaves in Virginia, including 20 belonging to Jefferson, fled their masters during the war, and many of those joined the British. In Carolina, thousands came into British lines at Charleston, where General Clinton promised freedom to any slaves belonging to rebellious owners if they faithfully served ‘‘the public.’’ American Whigs, for obvious reasons of self-interest, wanted to avoid using slaves as soldiers, but the need for manpower overcame the reluctance of many southerners. James Madison urged Virginia to enlist and free slaves, and Maryland, in 1780, explicitly called for recruitment of slaves. In March 1779, Congress authorized a plan to free and arm 3,000 slaves to defend Georgia and South

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Carolina and appointed John Laurens, son of one of the biggest slaveowners in South Carolina, to take the proposal to that state. Slaveowners’ opposition to emancipating and arming slaves scotched these proposals, but some slaves did enlist, passing themselves off as free or serving as substitutes for their masters, and a few earned their freedom fighting for the patriot army. Others served as laborers, scouts, pilots or mariners. More slaves simply ran away than volunteered to fight for either side. About one third of Georgia’s 15,000 bondsmen and more than 20,000 of South Carolina’s ran away, if not to British lines, to Florida, to the woods and mountains, or to the cities. Some were seized by British officers as private property and sold off in the West Indies. Many died of malnutrition and disease, especially smallpox. More than 8,500 left with the British when they evacuated Savannah and Charleston, going on to freedom in East Florida, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and the Bahamas. A number headed to the back country, where they joined outlaw gangs and resisted capture for years. As of 1786, as many as 100 runaway slaves lived in a community on an island in the Savannah River above Savannah and repelled two attempts of white militia to capture them before fleeing a third.35 The partisan war that grew out of this volatile mix of peoples and cross-cutting loyalties was marked by atrocities. One British officer called Thomas Brown’s East Florida Rangers ‘‘a mere Rabble of undisciplined Freebooters,’’ while a Whig officer in North Carolina described one of his own militia groups as ‘‘an independent company for the Special purpose of stealing and plundering.’’ Tories and patriots alike executed prisoners, and much of the fighting amounted to little more than ‘‘Plundering . . . by Persons who go under the denomination of Volunteers.’’ No wonder that many men wanted to stay out of the fighting altogether. In one North Carolina neighborhood, ‘‘so great was the aversion to military service . . . that out of fifty-eight persons fifty-six were found to have artificial hernia.’’ A traveler in South Carolina at the end of the war described scenes of ‘‘desolation. . . . Every field, every plantation, showed marks of ruin and devastation. Not a person was to be met with in the roads. . . . The people that remain have been peeled, pillaged, and plundered. . . . A dark melancholy gloom appears everywhere, and the morals of the people are almost entirely extirpated.’’36

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Meanings for Equality In the stirring words of the Declaration, American independence was founded on the ‘‘self-evident’’ truths that ‘‘all men are created equal’’ and have rights to ‘‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’’ Virginia’s constitution opened with the assertion that ‘‘all men are by nature equally free and independent,’’ and that all power was ‘‘vested in, and consequently derived from, the people.’’ But if such sweeping claims were true how could racial slavery continue, and how could elites command deference from the poor? Must all hierarchies based on law or tradition, such as the established church, be swept away? And if ‘‘men’’ really meant humankind, why should men continue to rule over women? But most men in America did not dream that women ought to be considered their equals, most slaveowners did not think Revolutionary ideals required them to emancipate their bondspeople, and most in the gentry continued to expect deference from lesser folk. Except for those Loyalists who had left the U.S., those in power before the Revolution continued to rule. Some things did change, however. One official institution to topple was the established church. North Carolina and Georgia disestablished the Anglican Church during the Revolution. In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson fought hard to cut off the church from all government support in that state, and, with the help of James Madison and popular backing from the growing number of Baptists, he succeeded in 1786. Jefferson considered his authorship of Virginia’s Statute on Religious Liberty, which exemplified one of the leveling tendencies of the Revolution, one of his finest achievements. Still, there were clear limits to the changes the established gentry was willing to accept. The Revolution did not extend the idea of political equality to women, despite women’s political activities during the Revolutionary crisis. As consumers, women had boycotted ‘‘luxuries’’ imported from Britain; as producers, they had spun yarn and woven cloth to replace those imports. For the first time, women had published essays in American newspapers on political topics, claiming a place in the public sphere as authors and citizens. One poem in the Virginia Gazette in 1773 called on women to put away the tea table, lest tea drinking ‘‘fashion Slavish Chains upon my

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Country.’’ In October 1774, 51 women in Edenton, North Carolina took the unprecedented step of signing a petition in support of the boycott. As men went off to war, women managed their plantations, farms, and shops, and coped with shortages, higher taxes, and inflation. Women faced, or faced down, the depredations of partisans and bandits. There were reports of Tory women riding ‘‘the best Horses and Side Saddles, and Drest in the fines and best cloaths that could be taken from the Inhabitants,’’ and of Whig women who ‘‘talk as familiarly of sheding blood & destroying the Tories as the men do.’’ Other women boarded prisoners or served as nurses or, like Jefferson’s wife Martha, organized women to raise funds to support the soldiers.37 After the Revolution, southern women, with some success, laid claim to greater independence. Occasional essays and poems circulated in the southern states, bemoaning the ‘‘hard fate’’ of women or denouncing the idea of unconditional obedience to husbands. South Carolina changed its rules of inheritance to give daughters the same rights as sons, and wives the same rights as husbands, but South Carolina was the exception, and few American women expressed agreement with the radical English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, called for full equality of the sexes. Alice DeLancey Izard, from a wealthy South Carolina family, considered Wollstonecraft ‘‘a vulgar, impudent Hussy.’’ ‘‘The great author of Nature,’’ Izard told her daughter, had given the sexes different characters, and each ‘‘ought to be cultivated in a distinct manner to make each equally useful & equally amiable.’’ She would have agreed with Jefferson when, as President, he rejected out of hand a suggestion that he name talented women to some positions, replying that ‘‘The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.’’38 Opinion in elite circles did become open to more education for women within the bounds of their ‘‘distinct’’ character. This was in part because of the trend, shared with northern states, toward the concept that marriage should be based on mutual affection between companions, and that women should take responsibility for educating their children to take their own places as virtuous citizens in the next generation. Jefferson himself understood a marriage as a partnership based on affection; he told one correspondent in 1790 that, when it came to choosing a husband, ‘‘According to the usage

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of my country, I scrupulously suppressed my wishes, that my daughter might indulge her own sentiments freely.’’ Still, he told his daughter that she must learn to ‘‘manage the kitchen, the dairy, the garden, and other appendages of the household.’’39 The most glaring contradiction to the Revolution’s commitment to equality and liberty was African slavery. In the New England states and in Pennsylvania, the contradiction led to the abolition of slavery, either through the actions of courts in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, or through legislation requiring gradual emancipation, in Pennsylvania in 1780, and in Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784. In the colonies dependent on plantation slave labor, however, slavery continued. Jefferson, as with so many other aspects of early America, exemplifies the contradictions. Jefferson opposed the idea of slavery. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1781, he condemned slavery as unjust to slaves and as a corrupting influence on white masters—transforming half the population into ‘‘despots,’’ and the other half into ‘‘enemies.’’ In any future ‘‘contest’’ between masters and slaves, he added, ‘‘The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us.’’ Jefferson even proposed legislation to end slavery gradually in Virginia. But Jefferson did not act to carry out his proposal or translate his ideas into action, either as a public or as a private man. He introduced no legislation to end slavery, nor did he try to lead either his state or country toward emancipation. Compared to his neighbors in Virginia, Jefferson seems to have treated his own slaves relatively well; at least, that is what some of his former slaves remembered in their old age. There is no evidence that he ever personally whipped a slave, nor did he separate husbands from wives or mothers from small children, and at times he sold or bought slaves in order to unite families. Some of his highly skilled slaves, such as Joseph Fosset, his blacksmith, worked virtually on their own and without supervision. But Jefferson did expect his slaves to work for him; he did hunt down runaways; he did separate teenagers from their families; he did sell slaves ‘‘for delinquincy’’ or to help pay his debts. Genetic evidence points to Jefferson as the father of at least one child, and very likely more, with his slave Sally Hemings, who, like Fosset, was a member of a favored slave family, though the precise nature of his relationship with Hemings is unknown. Except for some members of the Hemings-Fosset family, he did not free his slaves—he was so deeply

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in debt at his death in 1826 that nearly all his slaves had to be sold and dispersed. Joseph Fossett was among the small number freed in Jefferson’s will, but he had to watch as his wife, two infant children, and two teenage daughters were auctioned off to three different bidders. Virginia did make it much easier for individual owners to free their slaves, and some did so, including Washington, who freed his slaves in his will. Unlike Washington, most of the emancipating slaveowners appear to have been motivated more by religious convictions than by the liberal ideals of the Revolution itself. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism in England, had called slavery the ‘‘execrable sum of all villainies,’’ and George Whitefield, the British preacher who had helped to touch off the evangelical movement in South Carolina in 1738, had been deeply disturbed by what he saw on slave plantations. In ‘‘An Open Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina,’’ Whitefield had written that ‘‘I think that God has a quarrel with you for your abuse and cruelty to the poor Negroes.’’ In 1784, when the Methodists broke off from the Episcopal Church (organized from the remnants of the Anglicans), they resolved to take steps to ‘‘extirpate this abomination [of slavery] from among us’’ and to require members to begin manumitting their slaves. Baptists, too, opposed slavery; in 1785, the General Committee of Virginia Baptists labeled slavery as ‘‘contrary to the word of God’’ and five years later condemned it as ‘‘a violent deprivation of the rights of nature, and inconsistent with republican government.’’40 Under such influences, a number of pious masters freed their slaves. Perhaps the most remarkable example is Robert Carter, who, with about 500 slaves, was among the richest of all Virginians. After a day in 1778 when he felt the presence of Jesus, he became increasingly troubled about slavery, and Carter told a Baptist elder that ‘‘tolerating Slavery indicates great depravity.’’ He wrote letters to his overseers criticizing them for excessive punishment. He sent his three children out of the state to Baptist schools so they might be educated away from ‘‘the most abject State of Slavery in this Commonwealth.’’ In 1791, he wrote a ‘‘Deed of Gift’’ in which he declared slavery ‘‘contrary to the true Principles of Religion and Justice’’ and laid out a schedule under which all of his slaves would eventually be freed. It took years, but, much to the disgust of his sons and sons-in-law, who watched themselves being disinherited

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year by year, Carter followed through, then rented out land to many of those he freed, or hired them for wages.41 Southern owners who freed their slaves were, however, exceptions. While the population of free blacks in Virginia soared to more than 20,000 by 1800, they were outnumbered by those remaining in slavery by seventeen to one. Hostile reaction from slaveowners, moreover, soon suppressed the antislavery impulse among the leading evangelical denominations. After Reverend Thomas Coke, a Methodist, preached against slavery in Virginia in 1785, a ‘‘fashionable’’ lady offered 50 pounds to anyone who ‘‘would seize the preacher, and give him one hundred lashes’’; no one took her up on this offer, but the next day a large share of Coke’s audience came ‘‘armed with staves and clubs.’’42 Religious leaders who petitioned the Virginia Assembly to pass a gradual emancipation law were countered by proslavery petitioners from areas of the state with growing slave populations. The proslavery petitions denounced antislavery activists as ‘‘Enemies of our Country’’ and ‘‘deluded Men’’ attempting ‘‘to deprive us of a very important Part of our Property,’’ cited the Old Testament and Paul’s Epistles to demonstrate that slavery was ‘‘permitted by the Deity himself,’’ and predicted that emancipation would bring not only ‘‘Want, Poverty, Distress, and Ruin to the Free Citizen,’’ but also ‘‘the Horrors of all the Rapes, Murders, and Outrages, which a vast Multitude of unprincipled, unpropertied, vindictive, and remorseless Benditti are capable of perpetrating.’’43 Hostility to antislavery in the lower South was greater still. In Charleston in 1788, young men from planter families stoned homes where visiting Methodists were preaching. As the language of the Virginia proslavery petitions shows, two great obstacles stood in the way of a general emancipation in the southern states: economic interest and racism. Virginia’s economy, despite its troubles in the decade after the Revolution and the exhaustion of good tobacco soils in the east, remained tied to slavery. Tidewater and Piedmont planters had continued the trend of switching from tobacco to grains, and, since grain culture required fewer workers, they could sell off surplus bondspeople to the growing slave trade. Some of these slaves were sold to planters in Virginia’s ‘‘Southside’’ on the border with North Carolina, where tobacco production increased by 50 percent in the five years after 1785; by 1800, the population of the Southside was 57 percent enslaved.44

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Economic interest and greed alone do not explain the South’s resistance to emancipation; racist prejudice and fears played an important role. Most white southerners believed that large numbers of Africans and Europeans could not, and never would, live together in peace. Jefferson, in the same Notes on the State of Virginia in which he condemned slavery, pioneered a modern, ‘‘scientific,’’ form of racism. Many slaves had by now converted to Christianity, learned to read and write, and mastered difficult artisan skills, so slavery could no longer be justified on the grounds of ‘‘heathenism,’’ or ‘‘barbarism.’’ Instead, Jefferson appealed to what he claimed to be empirical observations, that Africans were ugly (marked by ‘‘that eternal monotony, of black’’) and unintelligent (‘‘in reason much inferior’’). He did hedge somewhat, concluding that it was his ‘‘suspicion only, that the blacks . . . are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.’’ Yet even if his ‘‘suspicion’’ were proved wrong, Jefferson refused to concede that blacks and whites could live together as equals. A sudden emancipation, he claimed, would result in a race war between whites with their ‘‘deep rooted prejudices’’ and blacks with their ‘‘ten thousand recollections . . . of the injuries they have sustained.’’ Thus, every emancipation scheme Jefferson contemplated provided for the permanent removal of the freed slaves from the United States.

Southern States in a New Nation The Revolution brought destruction and suffering, but it also transformed colonies into states and separate states into a new federation, the United States of America. The states’ new constitutions firmly rejected monarchy and hereditary aristocracy in favor of republican institutions and imposed severe limits on independent executive power. Most, like Virginia’s, located nearly all power in a popularly elected Assembly, which chose the governor. But this republicanism was not unfettered democracy. Americans feared that democracy might quickly degenerate into anarchy and the reestablishment of rule by a tyrant. They believed that republics could flourish only where virtue also flourished, virtue, that is, in the sense of a willingness to place the public good ahead of private advantage. Such political virtue rested on independent property ownership. Most political leaders of the time believed that

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only property-owning men (not women) ought to be allowed to vote and hold office. All the southern states limited voting rights to male property holders or taxpayers. In Maryland, members of the legislature had to own property worth at least £500. In South Carolina, state senators had to own at least £2,000 worth of property. In all the southern states, especially in Maryland and South Carolina, representation was apportioned to ensure that the older and wealthier eastern regions dominated the assemblies. Except in Georgia, most local officials were chosen by the legislature rather than by voters. In Virginia, for example, local power remained in the hands of county justices of the peace who served for life; these unelected, largely self-perpetuating bodies of local gentry made most of the governmental decisions that affected the daily lives of all Virginians. All the new states, north and south, determined to create a ‘‘firm league of friendship’’ among themselves. In 1777, they drew up Articles of Confederation that were finally ratified in 1781. Conflicts of interest between southern states and those further north surfaced in the deliberations of the Continental Congress both before and after the ratification of the Articles; such conflicts often focused on the vital place of slavery in the southern states. Delegates to the Congress had disagreed on how to treat slavery in apportioning assessments against the states to pay for the central government, with delegates from northern states arguing for assessments based on total population, and those from four of the southern states wanting to exclude slaves (Georgia was divided). In the final version of the Articles, assessments were based on the value of real estate only, a victory for slaveowners. But, it soon became clear that it was too difficult to measure the value of real estate consistently, and, in 1783, Congress considered an amendment to shift the basis for state assessments to population. Delegates from states with large slave populations again wanted to exclude slaves in determining apportionment, and those from other states wanted to include them. They settled on a compromise under which threefifths of the slaves would be counted, a compromise that had nothing to do with ideas about race as such, or with a notion that Africans were only ‘‘three-fifths human.’’ Rather, the rationale was that taxation should be proportional to wealth, that a count of the people who produced wealth was the simplest way to measure it, and that slaves, which, southern delegates argued, were less pro-

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ductive than free people, should be counted only fractionally. Ultimately, the compromise taxation proposal was not adopted because four states failed to ratify the amendment, but the three-fifths formula became a precedent for the more famous three-fifths clause in the later U.S. Constitution. By creating the new United States, the American Revolution also had made possible the existence of ‘‘the South.’’ Only then was the region from Maryland to Georgia south of something. The era’s political leaders at times saw these states as having distinct interests based on slavery. For example, William Henry Drayton of South Carolina had objected to ratification of the Articles on the grounds that ‘‘the most important transactions in congress, may be done contrary to the united opposition of Virginia, the two Carolinas and Georgia. . . . forming, as I may say, the body of the southern interest. . . . the honor, interest and sovereignty of the south, are in effect delivered up to the care of the north.’’45 But the Revolution had done far more to unite the regions than to separate them. Contemporaries commented on what they saw as differences in character between the people of the southern states and those of the north (or, as often, the ‘‘east’’). Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts wrote in 1773, for example, that Virginia was pervaded by ‘‘aristocratical spirit and principle.’’46 Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1785 to a French correspondent, contrasted people in the North, who were ‘‘cool,’’ ‘‘persevering,’’ ‘‘chicaning,’’ ‘‘jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others,’’ with those in the South, who were ‘‘fiery,’’ ‘‘unsteady,’’ ‘‘candid,’’ and ‘‘zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others.’’47 But even Jefferson did not distinguish sharply between ‘‘a’’ South and ‘‘a’’ North, rather arguing that the characteristics of each region ‘‘grow weaker and weaker by gradation from North to South and South to North, insomuch that an observing traveler, without the aid of the quadrant may always know his latitude by the character of the people.’’ Jefferson recognized that the southern states differed between and within themselves in culture, population, and economy. Later historians have also recognized the great variation in southern regions. Comparing the colonial Chesapeake, Carolina, and back county regions, one wrote that the southern colonies as a whole were ‘‘without question the least homogeneous human group in all America,’’ and that ‘‘in 1776 there was no South; there never had been a South.’’ Furthermore, at the same time

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that the Revolution was making possible a geographical ‘‘South,’’ it was simultaneously creating a new sense of national unity that tied Virginia firmly to Massachusetts and New York as well as to Georgia and South Carolina. In the congress called to protest the Stamp Act in 1765, Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina had said ‘‘There ought to be no New England man; no New Yorker, known on the continent, but all of us are Americans.’’48 During the eighteenth century, the states south of Pennsylvania had become more distinctive as they built up their economies on plantations worked by African slaves, but, as delegates from the states gathered in 1788 to draw up a new Constitution for the young nation, slavery was still legal in New Jersey and New York, and large stretches of the southern states included very few slaves. ‘‘The South’’ remained an idea whose time had not yet come.

3 Southern Power in the New Nation

The disruptions of the War of Independence, the flight of slaves, and the loss of protected trade with Britain severely damaged the economies of the southern states. In the first decade after the war, exports per capita fell by nearly half. Politically, as well as economically, the new nation was at risk; could the fractious peoples of the 13 states reconcile their conflicting interests and defend themselves against foreign powers? The loose confederation of states established during the Revolution reflected the almost universal fear among Americans that a strong central government might, like the old British government, descend into tyranny. Under the Articles of Confederation, the national government had no real executive and no real power to tax. Individual states thwarted measures to raise funds and warred with one another commercially. In response, in 1787, a convention of delegates from the states, including several members of the southern slaveholding elite, met in Philadelphia and wrote an entirely new Constitution, one that created a much more powerful central government with a strong executive and definitive authority over a wide range of commercial activities and nearly all foreign relations. Delegates to the convention from southern states sometimes spoke of themselves and thought of themselves as members of a common, distinct group. Thus, in debates on how to apportion representation in the new Congress, James Madison of Virginia spoke of a need to balance the ‘‘Southern scale’’ and the ‘‘Northern scale.’’1 The delegates agreed to the famous compromise that allotted every state equal representation in the new Senate, with representation for each state in the new House of Representatives to be proportional to the number of free persons plus three-fifths of ‘‘all

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other persons,’’ that is, slaves. Debates over the ‘‘three-fifths clause’’ elicited the convention’s most pronounced attack on slavery. Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania denounced the clause on the grounds that ‘‘the inhabitant of Georgia and S.C. who . . . tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage,’’ should not have more votes than Pennsylvanians.2 The institution of slavery appeared in the final document (though not by name), not only in the threefifths clause, but also in a clause prohibiting Congress from interfering with the African slave trade to the U.S. before 1808, and in another clause requiring states not to interfere with attempts to return ‘‘persons held to labor’’ who had run away across state lines. The North–South division over slavery was not the most important split in the convention, nor were the southern states united on all issues related to slavery. Most of the debates over slavery occurred in the context of solving other important questions, the three-fifths compromise a by-product of disputes over representation. Madison and other members from large states wanted representation in both houses to be based on population, while those from small states wanted every state to have an equal vote. Once the key compromise settled on a Senate with equal votes for each state and a House of Representatives based on population, it became necessary to decide how to count the population. The southern states, with large slave populations, wanted to count slaves fully; most northern delegates wanted to count them not at all. The final compromise of three-fifths fell back on the formula established during earlier debates under the Articles of Confederation, on how to apportion assessments. At that time, the stance of the southern and northern representatives had been exactly the opposite—southern states, seeking to keep their assessments low, argued that slaves not be counted, northern states that slaves count as equal to free people. The clause forbidding Congress from interfering with the African slave trade for 20 years came up as a side issue during debates on whether the new government should be allowed to regulate foreign commerce, as favored by the New England states. A number of southern delegates, who saw such regulatory power as a potential threat to their own interests, proposed to limit it by requiring a two-thirds vote in Congress to pass any navigation acts and by forbidding Congress to levy taxes on exports (such as tobacco) or to interfere with the importation of slaves. In the end, the two-

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thirds vote requirement on navigation acts was rejected, the ban on export taxes accepted, and the prohibition on interference with the slave trade limited to 20 years. As historian Donald Fehrenbacher has pointed out, while ‘‘slavery, as a brooding presence in the land, significantly influenced the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention,’’ it entered the debates explicitly only as a ‘‘side effect of progress toward a new constitutional design.’’3 Southern delegates themselves were not united on issues of slavery. Delegates from Virginia and Maryland wanted to outlaw the African slave trade, George Mason of Virginia denouncing it as an ‘‘infernal traffic,’’ and Luther Martin of Maryland calling it ‘‘inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution.’’ Here, morality coincided with interest, since the upper South had a surplus of slaves who could be sold to the lower South, and outlawing the African trade would keep slave prices high. But Mason’s and Martin’s language was not uncommon among white southerners of this era. They saw slavery as an important interest to protect—in fact, Mason himself thought that ‘‘there ought to be a clause’’ in the constitution ‘‘to secure us’’ property in slaves.4 Still, they hoped slavery would end somehow in the future and did not assume that it would be a source of permanent conflict between ‘‘free’’ and ‘‘slave’’ states. Ratification of the new constitution by the southern states was by no means certain, in any case. Georgia and Maryland overwhelmingly favored the new constitution, but in other states both leaders and ordinary voters were suspicious of attempts to give the central government such broad new powers. The ‘‘anti-Federalists,’’ who were opposed to the Constitution, were concentrated in the back country of Virginia and the Carolinas. In South Carolina, this made little difference because the back country was grossly underrepresented in the state’s ratifying convention. In Virginia, however, the debate was fierce and the vote close, and North Carolina did not finally ratify until George Washington had become president. Ratification, not slavery, was the crucial issue during the debates.

Domesticating Slavery The Constitution did recognize the rights of slaveowners, but developments in the first years of the new republic sharpened a growing distinction between a free North and a slave South. New

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York, in 1799, and New Jersey, in 1804, followed the precedent set by Pennsylvania in 1780 and legislated the gradual emancipation of their slaves. Further south, slavery’s grip grew stronger, not weaker, as the economic returns from slavery in Georgia and South Carolina leaped ahead when cotton began its rise as the South’s premier crop. Britain’s new steam-driven textile factories created a voracious demand for cotton, and although planters on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina had already begun to grow their famed long-staple variety, away from the islands only the shortstaple or ‘‘upland’’ variety of cotton grew well. Farmers knew that large profits depended on eliminating the bottleneck in production for upland cotton: separating the sticky seeds from the fibers of the cotton boll. The first workable ‘‘gin’’ to do this was fashioned in 1793 by Eli Whitney, a northern visitor working on a Georgia plantation. Whitney’s design for a cotton ‘‘gin’’ was quickly copied and improved on by others. Soon cotton had become the main cash crop in upper Georgia and South Carolina. To satisfy the resulting increase in demand for slaves, South Carolina, after having banned the slave trade to Africa in 1787, reopened it. Between 1804 and 1808, when external trade in slaves was outlawed by Congress, almost 40,000 enslaved Africans were shipped into Charleston.5 Meanwhile, the antislavery tide of the revolutionary era was clearly ebbing. Methodists and Baptists accommodated to slavery and concentrated their efforts on converting slaves to Christianity instead of gaining their freedom. Evangelical preachers began to win favor from slave owners by imploring slaves to avoid the sins of theft and resistance and to wait for their rewards in heaven. In the face of slaveholders’ hostility, evangelical leaders in the South gradually abandoned open opposition to slavery. In 1793, Virginia Baptists prudently decided that slavery should be considered a political and not a religious issue. By 1800, Methodists no longer insisted that their preachers free their own slaves if this was not ‘‘practicable.’’ In 1802, a mob in Charleston burned antislavery literature that had been sent from the northeast to a Methodist conference, and, six years later, the Methodists decided that different states could each ‘‘form [its] own regulations, relative to buying and selling slaves.’’6 Evangelicals sought to convince reluctant slave owners that it was safe to convert their slaves, indeed, that ‘‘one of the best Securities we have to the domestic Peace & Safety of the State,’’

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was ‘‘the Sentiments’’ slaves would ‘‘derive from the Bible.’’ Charles Pinckney of South Carolina told fellow planters in 1829 that if slaves were given ‘‘true religion’’ this would reduce ‘‘the cases of feigned sickness so harassing the planter’’ and, thus, augment production; religion would ‘‘render [slaves] more contented with their situation, and more anxious to promote their owner’s welfare.’’ For southern whites, Christian morality had made a convenient marriage with the slave holders’ material interests.7 Fear and racism also fueled legal attacks against free people of color in the southern states. Even as the impulse of the Revolution prompted some slaveowners to free their slaves, southern legislatures enacted legislation to control the movements of free blacks, to deprive them of basic civil liberties, and to restrict their contacts with slaves. The details varied from state to state, but such laws generally required free blacks to register with local authorities, forbade them to immigrate from other states, refused to allow them to testify against whites in court, and denied them the right to vote. The thrust of these laws was to draw a bold line, not only between freedom and slavery, but between all blacks and all whites. Upper South states, where Quakers had founded local abolition societies, passed legislation to curb the societies’ activities and to make it more difficult for slaves to sue in court for their freedom. Southern fears rose sharply when the French Revolution sparked a rebellion of free mulattos in 1791 in the French colony of St. Domingue (Haiti), a rebellion that, in turn, precipitated a slave uprising and a horrific race war that ended slavery. By 1800, it was clear that whites would not soon end slavery in the southern states. In that year, slaves in Virginia under the leadership of a blacksmith, Gabriel Prosser, organized to free themselves. Prosser, though a slave, was an heir to ideas of the American Revolution as much as any white Virginian. ‘‘Gabriel’s Insurrection,’’ as it became known, was undone by bad weather and bad luck (a heavy rainstorm washed out a bridge, delaying a planned attack on Richmond), and by a problem that threatened all largescale slave conspiracies: slave informers who alerted officials to the plot. Prosser himself, captured while trying to escape by ship, went to the gallows in silence, but other participants said his plan was to seize weapons from an armory, take Governor James Monroe hostage, and kill local slaveholders, sparing ‘‘the Quakers, the Methodists, and the Frenchmen . . . on account as they conceived

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of their being friendly to liberty.’’ The other leaders of the conspiracy included slaves who, like Prosser, were highly skilled, mobile, and familiar with urban life. Many were evangelical Christians who recruited conspirators from Baptist meeting houses. Though probably hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slaves in and near Richmond knew of the conspiracy, no one knows how many were truly committed to fight.8 The backlash from Gabriel’s Insurrection led to further limits to the Revolution’s impulse toward emancipation. In 1800, South Carolina forbade assemblies of slaves in which no whites were present and required approval from the legislature for a master to free a slave; Georgia followed suit in 1802, requiring legislative approval for private emancipations. While Virginia, like other upper-South states, continued to allow private emancipations, an 1806 law compelled newly emancipated slaves to leave the state. As they narrowed the possibilities for freedom, southern legislatures also passed laws to ameliorate the conditions of those who remained as slaves and to acknowledge, in some respects, slaves’ humanity. Before 1800, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina had made the willful killing of a slave murder; other states followed in the next decades. Between 1706 and 1785, courts in Virginia had sentenced hundreds of slaves to death for theft, but hangings for theft averaged fewer than one slave per year over the next eighty years. Louisiana in 1806 outlawed ‘‘cruel punishments’’ for slaves, and Georgia in 1816 prohibited ‘‘unnecessary and excessive whipping.’’ A few white men were punished, some hanged, for murdering a slave. The laws indicate a change in sensibility among slaveowners, at least in the public sphere, but conceding some measure of humanity to slaves was part of a movement away from, not toward, a general emancipation.9

National Leadership by the Southern Elite No large country had ever long survived as a republic, and, in the first decade of its existence, the survival of the new United States seemed precarious to many. It had been easy to agree on Virginian George Washington as the first president, but, as representatives and senators gathered in New York, the first capital, they immediately quarreled over the extent and purposes of the new govern-

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ment’s powers. The ‘‘Federalists’’ followed the leadership of Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. He wanted the government to assume state debts accumulated during the Revolutionary war, to protect and promote American manufacturing with bounties and tariffs on imports, to tax commodities, like whiskey, to support the government and pay its debts, and to establish a national bank to help regulate the supply of money and manage national finances. In large part because Washington, too, favored these policies, Hamilton’s program prevailed despite strong opposition led by Jefferson, the first Secretary of State, and Madison in the House of Representatives, both alarmed by what they saw as an attempt to recreate in America the British system of centralized power built on corruption. Jefferson, especially, feared that Hamilton’s program would lead to a permanent aristocracy of wealth, if not an actual monarchy. Jefferson also distrusted manufacturers and the big cities they were helping to create in Europe. (In his Notes on the State of Virginia he had compared cities to ‘‘sores’’ on the human body.) Because most white men in America were independent farmers (‘‘the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people’’), Jefferson believed they could be trusted to share in governance. Neither Madison nor Jefferson equated ‘‘independence’’ with literal self-sufficiency; they expected American, and especially southern, farmers to prosper by selling commodities like tobacco on world markets. The U.S. needed its merchants and enough artisans to supply necessary products to farms and plantations—Jefferson started a nail factory at Monticello with his slaves—but he wanted Americans to buy any ‘‘unnecessary’’ manufactures from Europe and avoid the social problems of large manufacturing cities. Such views were popular with southern voters, most of whom depended on agriculture and few of whom lived in cities; they favored low taxes and little regulation, even as they wanted to sell their crops to Europe and the West Indies. After the French Revolution erupted in 1789, the conflicts between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians became more pointed. France had been the United States’ most important ally in their own revolution, and, to Jefferson, France’s revolution signaled a new triumph of republican government over monarchy. Throughout the U.S., ‘‘Democratic Societies’’ sprang up in honor of the French republic. Federalists, though, were highly suspicious of the new French government, and their suspicions grew into intense

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opposition after the execution of the French king and his queen. Richard Furman, slave-owning pastor of the First Baptist Church in Charleston and a staunch Federalist, wrote that the French were defining liberty as ‘‘Liberty to act the Infernal.’’ Social conservatives like Furman saw the revolution in France as inspired by atheistic ideas that, as the 1791 revolt in Haiti showed, were too dangerous for a society with slaves.10 Federalists still looked on Britain as a properly ordered society able to protect liberties without anarchy. Once war broke out between France and Britain in 1793, merchants profited by trading with both sides, but the French and British fleets attacked U.S. ships trading with the other. Hamilton and his followers favored a pro-British foreign policy and measures to build up the army and navy. Jefferson, the most prominent of those who disagreed, became the preferred presidential candidate for the election of 1796 among those who began to call themselves Democratic-Republicans, or just Republicans. Finishing second in the electoral college, Jefferson became the Vice President under the winner, Federalist John Adams of Massachusetts. During Adams’s term, conflicts between Federalists and Republicans escalated as both organized to rally public opinion, subsidizing newspapers, corresponding with supporters, and recruiting candidates for office. Candidates did not openly solicit votes, and the very notion of ‘‘party’’ was suspect, suggesting a purely factional motivation for seeking office, instead of a virtuous concern for the public good. Jefferson himself claimed that only the Federalists were a party, and that his own Republican followers represented ‘‘the people.’’ The Federalist-Republican conflict reached its most intense phase between 1798 and 1800, when Adams, backed by a Federalist congressional majority, authorized an undeclared naval war against France in the West Indies. In the face of bitter assaults on this policy from Republicans, Federalists passed measures to curb dissent: a new Naturalization Act that targeted recent immigrants, who tended to support the Republicans, and a Sedition Act that made it illegal for even American citizens to assemble ‘‘with intent to oppose any measure . . . of the government’’ or to ‘‘print, utter, or publish . . . false, scandalous, and malicious writing’’ against the government. Newspaper editors, and even a congressman, were prosecuted under this law. Alarmed Republicans rallied against these curbs on civil liberties, with Jefferson and Madison again in the lead. Jefferson drafted a resolution, passed by the legislature of

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the new state of Kentucky in 1798, affirming that each state could judge the constitutionality of any national law not explicitly authorized by the Constitution itself. A second Kentucky Resolution in 1799 (also Jefferson’s language) argued that ‘‘a nullification . . . of all unauthorized acts’’ by the ‘‘sovereign and independent’’ states was the ‘‘rightful remedy,’’ although it did not spell out what a ‘‘nullification’’ might mean in practice. Madison drafted a similar Virginia Resolution in 1798, stating that the states ‘‘have the right, and are in duty bound to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil’’ when the federal government exercised powers not granted in the Constitution. These forthright claims in favor of state sovereignty and strict limitations on national power became known as the ‘‘Principles of ’98’’ to Jefferson’s most ardent Republican followers. Most southern voters supported Republican candidates, though many prominent southerners were Federalists, including Virginians Washington, Governor Henry Lee, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall, as well as Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina, the Federalist candidate for president in 1804 and 1808. Federalists were strong in the South’s few cities, especially ports, whose merchants favored strong ties with Great Britain, but they also did well in many of the older plantation areas along the Atlantic coast, from the eastern shore of Maryland to the rice regions of the Carolinas. In 1796, Jefferson won 54 of the South’s 63 electoral votes, and, in 1800, he defeated Adams, with 53 of his 73 electoral votes coming from southern states. The Republicans continued to dominate politics in most southern states from 1800 to 1820. A ‘‘Virginia Dynasty’’ controlled the Presidency, with Jefferson’s reelection in 1804 followed by two terms for James Madison and two for James Monroe, all with overwhelming support from southern electors. In the U.S. House of Representatives, the Federalists did well in Maryland, but otherwise declined sharply in the number of southern seats they held after 1800. In state elections, Federalists attracted about 40 percent of the voters in North Carolina, 25 percent in Virginia, and fewer in all the other southern states.11 The issues that attracted southern voters to the Republicans were not, in themselves, sectional. Many wealthy southern conservatives who were suspicious of popular rule liked Jefferson’s support for a frugal government. Jefferson’s ideal, as he said in his First Inaugural

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Address, was a government ‘‘which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.’’

A White Man’s Country The 1783 treaty that ended the Revolutionary War gave the new country a vast expanse of land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. Even during the war, tens of thousands of colonists had moved west of the Appalachians. In 1776, Virginia organized the area to its west as a county, Kentucky, and by the end of the war—despite running battles with Indians—about 30,000 whites and blacks lived there. By 1790, Kentucky counted almost 74,000 residents and in 1792 it was admitted as a state. In Kentucky’s constitutional convention, a faction led by clergymen advocated gradual emancipation of Kentucky’s 13,000 slaves, universal suffrage for white adults, including women, and a simplified legal system, but the convention rejected all three ideas and, instead, wrote protections for slavery into the constitution. Coming just five years after Congress under the Articles of Confederation had banned slavery in territories north of the Ohio River, and just when states in the northeast were accepting gradual emancipation, the state’s convention ensured that Kentucky would become a part of the South and that the South itself would expand to the west. The region south of Kentucky also attracted settlers, some moving up the river valleys of North Carolina’s far west, and others jumping past the mountains to build Nashborough (later Nashville) on the Cumberland River. Between 1784 and 1788, one faction in this region claimed to have established the ‘‘free state’’ of Franklin, but North Carolina successfully resisted those claims. North Carolina ceded the territory to the new national government in 1790. By then, it already had 35,000 residents, and in 1796 it was admitted as the state of Tennessee. Land speculators had targeted Georgia, a small state with large claims to the land of most of present-day Alabama and Mississippi, and, in 1795, Georgia’s legislators, encouraged by large bribes, sold 35 million acres (known as the Yazoo land grants) to companies financed by Pennsylvanians and New Englanders. These land com-

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panies quickly began to sell off their claims for a profit. Wherever there was good land and good transportation, and where Indian claims could be extinguished or safely ignored, pioneer settlers, including both poor families and wealthy slaveowners, moved in. Around Natchez, on the Mississippi River, a cotton gin appeared just two years after Whitney’s first working model, and by 1800 a Natchez resident wrote that ‘‘cotton is at present the staple of the territory.’’12 Cotton planters from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia also moved to the Great Bend of the Tennessee River in present-day northern Alabama and to the banks of the Tombigbee in the heart of Mississippi Territory. Federalist policy under President Washington was to protect Indian land claims and strictly regulate Indian trade, with a longterm goal of ‘‘civilizing’’ the Indians. Benjamin Hawkins, federal agent for the Creeks who still occupied most of western Georgia, encouraged Creek women to take up ‘‘proper’’ domestic tasks and learn to spin and weave, so men would be ‘‘obliged to handle the ax & the plough, and assist the women in the laborious task of the fields.’’ Women should also give up the ‘‘absolut rule’’ they exerted over their children and allow their husbands to take over the role of governing the family.13 Some of these ideas were shared by Jefferson, but he and his fellow Republicans were less optimistic than Hawkins about the capacity of Indians to change and less willing to wait until they did. Jefferson had little sympathy for their claims to the land and looked forward to the expansion westward of an American ‘‘Empire of Liberty,’’ where ‘‘unoccupied’’ land would ensure that most American men could continue to be independent farmers, who ought to form the backbone of any republican government. The ‘‘Empire of Liberty’’ would be a benign association of federated states, each replicating the free institutions of the original thirteen. Jefferson wrote at times of the nobility of Indians, but he never doubted that white Europeans were at a higher stage of civilization and ought not to be prevented by Indians from moving west. He did tell one Indian leader that if Indians would give up their tyranny over their women and ‘‘give up the deer and buffalo, live in peace, and cultivate the earth,’’ they might then be ready ‘‘to join us in our government, to mix with us in society.’’ If the Indians refused—and Jefferson probably thought they would—the alternatives were, as he wrote in 1780, ‘‘extermination, or their removal beyond the

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lakes of the Illinois River. The same world will scarcely do for them and us.’’14 Many Indians did ‘‘mix with’’ whites. The leaders among them were mestizos—children of mixed parentage. The most prominent among the Creeks was Alexander McGillivray, son of Creek woman and a prominent Scottish merchant, who, as a child, lived both with his mother and on his father’s Georgia plantation. McGillivray sided with the British during the Revolution, returning afterwards to the Creek confederacy and identifying himself as Creek. McGillivray built up a cotton plantation in Mississippi Territory and bought slaves to work it. He also tried to steer the Creeks toward a new concept of government, with greater central control than their existing loose confederation of towns. The new government might then negotiate a permanent peace with the United States and, perhaps, even enter the union as a Creek state. His ambitions for his people were cut short when he died in 1793. Other Indians, including a large faction of Creeks hostile to white expansion, rejected McGillivray’s middle path and looked for allies in Spanish Florida and Louisiana, or among British merchants who dominated the Indian trade from their post in Florida. Some joined the project of Tecumseh, a Shawnee from the Ohio River Valley, who hoped to unite Indians to resist further white encroachments. Many disaffected Creeks moved south into Florida, where they blended with remnants of other groups and with runaway slaves to become a separate group, the Seminoles, that rejected changes in their traditional way of life and further cessions of land to America. President Jefferson and his cabinet pressed Indians, in Jefferson’s words, ‘‘as steadily and strenuously as they can bear’’ to transfer land to pay off debts to traders. (‘‘We are,’’ he wrote, ‘‘willing to buy on reasonable terms.’’) Indians ‘‘foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet’’ should be ‘‘driven across the Mississippi.’’15 Jefferson could envision no society in which nonwhites of any color shared power with men like himself.

An Empire for Liberty and Slavery In 1803 Jefferson added more territory to his ‘‘Empire of Liberty’’ by purchasing Louisiana. Louisiana had expanded slowly under French rule. In 1763, it was transferred from France to Spain, and

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her Spanish governors worked hard to attract new settlers, among them French-speaking people expelled from Acadia (modern Nova Scotia) by the British during the Seven Years War, many of whom settled west of New Orleans as a distinct enclave within the colonial population, ‘‘Acadians’’ evolving into ‘‘Cajuns.’’ The Spanish also attracted settlers from the Canary Islands, Germany, and France itself. Spanish authorities also reopened the slave trade, and shipments of captives from Africa had kept the slave population growing almost as fast as the free. In the 1790s, Louisiana’s planters learned to adapt Caribbean techniques for growing sugar, and a thriving sugar industry soon accelerated the demand for slaves. Between 1763 and 1800, the population of Louisiana, with a slave majority, multiplied more than five times to 44,000.16 In Louisiana, as in every slave society, slaveowners faced continuing resistance. Escaped slaves, or maroons, sought cover in nearby swamps and forests. One maroon community of several dozen men and women, under the leadership of a slave named San Malo, killed several Americans in a forest camp, stole food from warehouses, and repelled one attack before San Malo was captured and hanged in 1784. A more serious threat was put down in 1795, when a slave conspiracy, possibly inspired by the French Revolution, was uncovered in Point Coupe´e, a hundred miles north of New Orleans. Thirteen slaves were executed, with the hangings spread out along the river levee between Point Coupe´e and New Orleans to demonstrate Spanish power to other slaves; the heads of four of the leaders were nailed to posts. Nervous authorities also convicted two white men of participating in the conspiracy, shipping them off to prison in Cuba, and banished another white man and two free blacks for loose talk.17 Still, both by custom and law, Spanish and French colonies drew less rigid boundaries based on race than the English. Culture and the demographic imbalance in Louisiana encouraged more open acceptance of sexual liaisons between whites and Africans—or, at least, between white men and African women—liaisons that, in turn, sometimes led to freedom for slave concubines or their children. Although laws governing slavery were severe and slaves were exploited as elsewhere in North America, Spanish law demonstrated more friendliness to freedom. Unlike law in most British colonies, there were no legal barriers to freeing slaves, and slaves

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had a legal right (known as coartacio´n) to accumulate property in order to buy their own freedom. The story of Marie The´re`ze, known by her African name of Coincoin, shows how the law opened opportunities for exceptional slaves.18 Coincoin, born in 1742, the child of African-born slaves, bore four children with another slave before the age of 23 (nothing else is known about the father of these children). At 25, she became the concubine of a French merchant named Claude Metoyer. During their alliance, Metoyer freed Coincoin, and, in 1786, he formally ended the alliance with an agreement that included a transfer of land along the Cane River and a promise to pay Coincoin an annual stipend. Coincoin made her modest land grant the foundation of a formidable estate, planting tobacco, raising cattle, accumulating property, and using her profits to purchase the freedom of all her children by both fathers. By her death in 1816, she had built a plantation, added new land, and purchased more than a dozen slaves to work her fields. Coincoin’s descendants lived on in this little colony along the Cane River, marrying other light-skinned mulattoes, raising cotton, and buying new slaves; in the 1830s two of her children each owned more than 50 slaves, making them richer by far than most whites in Louisiana. In New Orleans under Spanish rule, almost 2,000 slaves were freed, some by lovers, others by their fathers, but most by selfpurchase or purchase by their black relatives. At the time of Jefferson’s purchase in 1803, about one-sixth of Louisiana’s people of African descent were free. Their numbers were later augmented by mixed-race refugees from Haiti. Many of these libres were lightskinned, many were artisans and tradesmen. A few became wealthy planters and slaveowners themselves. Under Spanish rule, these gens du couleur formed militia companies, and sometimes helped recapture runaway slaves. New Orleans and southern Louisiana developed, to a limited extent, a version of the ‘‘three caste’’ social structure of the Caribbean, with mixed-race people recognized as a distinct group, neither ‘‘white’’ nor ‘‘black.’’ Spain’s North American colonies also included Florida, given back to her by Britain in 1783. Taking both Louisiana and Florida from Spain then became a priority for Americans in the west, or, alternatively some westerners schemed with the Spanish in Louisiana to break away and set up a new independent country in the interior of the continent. For white Americans beyond the Appa-

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lachians, no issue seemed more important than free navigation down the Mississippi River, their only outlet for agricultural commodities. Spain controlled the lower reaches of the river and its premier port at New Orleans. A treaty with Spain in 1795 provided for free navigation of the river and gave Americans the right to store goods in New Orleans without paying duties, but this right of deposit was not made permanent. At the center of many plans for Louisiana was James Wilkinson, a veteran of the American Revolution, a land speculator and merchant in Kentucky, and an unscrupulous and tireless conspirator. As early as the late 1780s, Wilkinson, intriguing with the Spanish governor of Louisiana, swore an oath of allegiance to the King of Spain and made vague promises to encourage Kentucky to split off from the United States and become a Spanish protectorate. Clearly a man of considerable persuasion, Wilkinson in 1791 was appointed to command of a garrison in Ohio by President Washington, and, in 1805, made governor of Louisiana territory by Jefferson. Washington’s appointment did not prevent Wilkinson from accepting a regular pension from Spain, nor prevent him from continuing his plots with Spanish governors in Louisiana, including one involving Spanish money shipped upstream concealed in barrels of sugar and coffee. At first, Jefferson’s goal of taking over Louisiana seemed thwarted when Spain transferred the colony back to France, since Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte saw Louisiana as an important part of a revived Caribbean empire, anchored by a reconquered colony of St. Domingue (now independent Haiti). When Napoleon’s attempt to take back Haiti failed, Louisiana was no longer useful to him, and he agreed to sell it to the United States for $15,000,000. The Constitution was silent about territorial expansion of any sort, but Jefferson, despite some qualms, decided to stretch the meaning of the Constitution and quickly accepted the offer. Getting rid of the Spanish would guarantee American access to the Mississippi River, open new areas with rich soil to settlement by Americans, and eliminate an ally of the Indians. Even the Louisiana Purchase did not end Wilkinson’s conspiracies. After Jefferson appointed him governor of Louisiana, Wilkinson made an agreement with his most famous coconspirator, Aaron Burr, the New York politician who served as Jefferson’s Vice President before killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel in

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1804. Burr sought to organize a military expedition, ostensibly to invade Texas and free it from Spanish rule but perhaps also to make New Orleans the capital of a new country in the southwest. In 1806, Burr launched his effort, gathering men and supplies to float down the Mississippi to New Orleans, but, when news of Burr’s expedition circulated, the opportunistic Wilkinson switched sides and sent soldiers to arrest him. (Burr escaped, but he was later arrested in Mississippi Territory and sent to Richmond, where he was tried and acquitted of treason.) With the Louisiana Purchase opening yet more territory to white American settlement, southern whites considered greedily the chance to speculate on real estate or to move, with or without slaves, onto new soils. Short-staple cotton, becoming the South’s most important crop, could be grown profitably in any area with good soil and a growing season of 200 frost-free days; most of the new southwestern territories fit the bill. By 1810, Tennessee had more than 215,000 whites and 44,000 slaves, the Mississippi Territory (including most of present-day Alabama) more than 23,000 whites and 17,000 slaves, and the recently acquired Louisiana, almost 35,000 whites and 35,000 slaves, plus 7,585 free blacks. Jefferson’s ‘‘Empire of Liberty’’ was rapidly becoming an ‘‘Empire of Slavery.’’

The Wars of 1812: Britain, Spain, and Indians Jefferson’s empire was sealed under American control after the second war with Britain, of 1812 to 1815. In the southwest, this included war against Creek Indians and an invasion of Spanish Florida. The War of 1812 grew out of renewed conflict between Britain and France, with each of these powers trying to sever trade between the United States and its enemy as in the 1790s. The British challenged American pride and honor by insisting on the right to board American ships in search of alleged deserters to impress them into the British navy. Jefferson, who opposed high taxes and large armies and navies, tried to coerce the belligerent powers through commerce; he convinced Congress to halt all foreign trade from U.S. ports with the Embargo Act of 1807, in the belief that both France and Britain would capitulate because of their dependence on American products. Ruinous to commercial interests and devastat-

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ing to New England’s economy, the embargo was repealed without achieving its goals, and Jefferson left office in 1809 a much less popular man than when he entered it. James Madison’s administration followed a similar policy with a Non-Intercourse Act, an unenforceable attempt to limit trade with France and Britain, but, in the fall of 1811, a group of young Congressmen pressed Madison to declare war as the only way to win concessions, preserve American honor, and demonstrate that a republic could successfully defend itself. These ‘‘War Hawks’’ were led by southerners and westerners, notably Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, both elected in 1810 to the House of Representatives, and both to play giant roles in the politics of the South and the nation during the next 40 years. Born in Virginia during the Revolution, Clay, just 34 years old in 1811, had already so impressed his colleagues that he was elected Speaker of the House. Clay had grown up in comfortable circumstances, received a sound education in local schools, studied law, and been admitted to the bar before he headed west to Lexington, Kentucky, where he made his fortune, bought slaves, established a plantation, and entered politics. Clay possessed a remarkable combination of intelligence, charm, and eloquence and won renown as perhaps the greatest orator in an age of oratory. In later years, thousands came to hear him; when word spread that he would speak in Congress, people came early to get seats in the galleries. But Clay was equally effective at dinner parties, gambling tables, and backroom gatherings, useful skills for an outstanding legislator. Though his sharp tongue at times got him into difficulties—he was slightly wounded in two duels—he could hurl a nasty insult in debate at one moment, then make up with a witty and gracious remark in private a few minutes later. His opponent in the second duel, Virginian John Randolph, was supposed to have said ‘‘I prefer to be killed by Clay to any other death.’’19 Calhoun, descendant of Scots–Irish migrants into the South Carolina back country, was just 29 when he won his seat in Congress. His father was a prosperous slaveowner and planter who fought in the Revolution. A brother financed his education at Yale and a law school in Connecticut. Calhoun practiced law in Charleston, but moved back to his family’s upcountry neighborhood to escape its ‘‘intemperance and debaucheries.’’ The most famous description of Calhoun comes from Harriet Martineau, a noted traveler from

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England, who called him ‘‘the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born.’’ Others found him charming, at least in private, though no one remembered his telling a joke. Even a political associate called him ‘‘too intellectual, too industrious, too intent in the struggle of politics. . . . There is no relaxation with him.’’20 In 1811, Calhoun, Clay, and other War Hawks argued that military action would vindicate the nation’s honor and open the way to seize new territory. Clay told Congress that the ‘‘conquest of Canada’’ was within their grasp; many southerners saw the war as an opportunity to take Florida from Spain. When Madison asked Congress in 1812 for a declaration of war, slave-state representatives voted 45 to 12 in favor, free-state representatives 37 to 34 against.21 Attempts to invade Canada ended in fiasco, and the British captured Washington, D.C. and burned the White House. The only real successes of American armies came in the southwest, under Andrew Jackson, a third southerner whose national career was launched by the war, and, like Calhoun, a product of the Scots– Irish migration into the Carolina back country. Jackson’s family was less prosperous than Calhoun’s, and he was born in 1767, soon enough to fight in the Revolution. Jackson and his brother were captured in the Revolutionary War and contracted smallpox; his brother died, and his mother died of cholera while nursing prisoners. Jackson was left with an abiding hatred of Britain and strong sense of nationalism. Intelligent and fiercely ambitious, Jackson, like Clay, moved west (to Tennessee) after being admitted to the bar. He slowly built up a fortune practicing law, operating a store, buying slaves, and establishing a cotton plantation. He attracted followers with his charm and personal charisma, though he could respond with rage against anyone who crossed him or, as he saw it, insulted him. He fought three duels, including one after an argument growing out of a horse race wager, and suffered two gunshot wounds in a barroom brawl. A reputation as a duelist and fighter was no handicap to a political career in Tennessee, and, helped by the patronage of territorial governor William Blount, Jackson rose quickly to become the new state’s first U.S. Representative and serve briefly in the U.S. Senate. But his most important office was major general in the Tennessee militia, a post selected by vote of the state legislature. This post made Jackson the choice to lead U.S. forces in the southwest in 1812. To his Tennessee volunteers, the war repre-

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sented a golden opportunity not only to fight the British, but also to expel Indians from valuable land and take Florida from Spain. The U.S. war in the region in 1812–13 is more properly known as the ‘‘Creek War,’’ because Jackson’s main enemy was a Creek faction known as the ‘‘Red Sticks.’’ Red Stick warriors rejected the ‘‘new order’’ of Alexander McGillivray and his successors and demanded a return to the old ways. In 1813, Red Sticks attacked plantations of meztizo Creeks in Florida and overran Ft. Mims (in present-day Alabama), killing several hundred settlers, many of them mestizos or their wives. Jackson’s army, aided by Creek enemies of the Red Sticks, invaded from the north, burning one village and shooting all the men down ‘‘like dogs,’’ in the words of David Crockett. Jackson then stormed the fortified town of Horseshoe Bend, where his men systematically killed every warrior they could, along with many women and children; 750 of 800 Red Stick warriors were killed. Five months later, in August 1814, in the Treaty of Fort Jackson, Jackson forced the remaining Creek leaders to turn over some 22 million acres in Georgia and Alabama, much to the horror of the friendly Creeks who had fought with him and who had expected to be rewarded as allies. Jackson embodied the westerners’ harsh version of Thomas Jefferson’s conviction that Indians must be removed across the Mississippi. Even those Indians who had adapted to European ways were, to him, nothing more than ‘‘designing half-breeds.’’ He insisted that ‘‘the people of the west will never suffer any Indian to inhabit this country again.’’22 Jackson next led an invasion of Florida and seized Pensacola, then moved to head off a British landing in Louisiana. At New Orleans, his forces—including a regiment of free gens de couleur from the city—inflicted 2,000 British deaths, including the commanding general; just 13 Americans were killed. Federalists had opposed the war from the beginning. Virginia’s Federalist Henry Lee, a Revolutionary War hero, was almost beaten to death by a Republican mob in Baltimore, but the disastrous early months of the war boosted Federalist representation from the South in Congress. Having contested only four of forty-six seats in states below Maryland in 1806, they elected nine representatives in 1812. Federalist strength surged even more in New England, where the war was truly unpopular. A Federalist convention at Hartford, Connecticut in 1814 proposed constitutional amendments to rein

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in the power of the national government and strengthen the autonomy of the states. A minority of the convention wanted to threaten secession of New England if the war did not end. Since the Hartford Convention adjourned just three days before the Battle of New Orleans and after the peace treaty had been signed (but without the news yet reaching America), the Convention made the Federalists look ridiculous to many Americans, treasonous to others. The editor of the Richmond Enquirer wrote that secession of a state was impossible without the approval of a majority of the other states, and that any attempt ‘‘to dissolve the Union . . . is Treason.’’23 The war cemented the dominance of the Republicans, and thus of the southern states, in national affairs. The Federalists never again had a real chance to regain national power, and, after 1816, they no longer even ran a candidate for the presidency. The South seemed politically more powerful than ever.

‘‘National Greatness and Prosperity’’ The Federalist Party disappeared, but Federalist policies did not. The war, and especially the humiliating seizure of the capital at Washington, had exposed the weakness of the national government after 12 years of Republican control. Clay and Calhoun were now among the Republicans ready to adapt old Hamiltonian policies to promote, in Clay’s words, ‘‘national greatness and prosperity’’ by harnessing ‘‘the whole physical power of the country.’’24 With the charter of the first Bank of the United States having expired, a committee chaired by Calhoun wrote legislation to create a second Bank of the United States. So, too, like most Republicans, Clay and Calhoun supported new tariffs on imports to protect American manufacturers from foreign competition and wanted the national government to pay for transportation projects and other ‘‘internal improvements.’’ Perhaps with the recent experience of the Hartford Convention in mind, Calhoun argued that ‘‘a perfect system of roads and canals’’ paid for by the federal government would ‘‘bind the republic together’’ and prevent the ‘‘greatest of calamities—disunion.’’25 Only a small group of dissenting Republicans, led by John Randolph of Virginia, denounced this nationalist program as a betrayal of genuine Jeffersonian principles of limited government

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and low taxation. Calling themselves the ‘‘Old Republicans,’’ they claimed to be the true champions of the ‘‘principles of ’98,’’ as expressed in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. President Madison accepted the new National Bank and the 1816 tariff law, but vetoed Calhoun’s bill on internal improvements on the grounds that the Constitution should be first amended to allow the federal government to spend money on canals and roads. Rising national power intersected with southern interests more concretely in the southwestern territories. At the end of the war, much of the southwest was still controlled by Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickasaws, and Florida remained under Spanish rule, although Madison in 1813 seized the area west of the Perdido River (including Mobile), calling it part of the Louisiana Purchase. With Jackson again taking the lead, both Florida and most of Indian territory were brought under U.S. control. Between 1816 and 1820, Jackson, as a U.S. Indian Commissioner, negotiated a series of treaties to take over Indian land in exchange for territories west of the Mississippi. With a combination of cajolery, bribery, strategic use of alcohol, and, especially, with threats of force, Jackson achieved his goals. His message was simple: your choice is between removal or extinction as a tribe. In 1816 and 1818, the Chickasaws yielded their claims in western Tennessee and parts of Mississippi Territory; in 1820, Choctaws did the same in west-central Mississippi, and Cherokees conceded smaller areas in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. But Florida belonged to Spain and it was inhabited by Seminole Indians determined to resist American encroachments. The Seminoles rejected concessions of territory and frequently took in runaway slaves, some of whom blended in with the population, while others formed separate communities. In 1816, a U.S. naval expedition destroyed a ‘‘Negro Fort’’ at Prospect Point, where many African Americans had taken up residence, and in 1818 Jackson led an expedition against the Seminoles on the U.S. side of the border to suppress the tribe and stop their ‘‘slave-stealing.’’26 Broadly interpreting vague instructions from President James Monroe, Jackson pursued the Seminoles well into Spanish Florida, seizing a Spanish fort and overrunning Bowlegs Town on the Suwannee River, populated mainly by runaway slaves. He never caught up with significant numbers of Seminoles, but he did hang two captured Seminole leaders and two British citizens on the

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grounds that they had stirred up the Indians. He again captured Pensacola, the only substantial Spanish town on the Gulf Coast. Monroe refused to accept this straightforward conquest of territory, but it gave Secretary of State John Quincy Adams the leverage he needed to conclude a treaty with Spain in 1819 (ratified in 1821), transferring all of Florida to the United States and establishing the boundary between Louisiana and Texas.27 Jackson’s successes opened vast stretches of land from Georgia to the Texas border to U.S. settlement. Some of the land—for example, the ‘‘black belt’’ of rich soil that cut a wide crescent through Alabama and the alluvial deposits in the Mississippi River Valley— was especially rich cotton soil, and as the price of cotton soared, migration surged with it. A North Carolina planter wrote in 1817 that ‘‘The Alabama Feaver rages here with great violence. . . . as soon as one neighbour visits another who has just returned from the Alabama he immediately discovers the same symptoms. . . . Some of our oldest and most wealthy men are offering their possessions for sale and desirous of removing to this new country.’’28 Planters who did not wish to uproot their families bought up land to resell or to give to their sons. Others profited by selling valuable young slaves to work the southwestern cotton lands. Perhaps 40,000 slaves in the upper South were sold off to slave traders in the 1810s alone to be taken to the southwest.29 In that decade the population in Mississippi Territory soared from 40,000 to more than 200,000 (including 76,000 slaves), and the new slave states of Mississippi (1817) and Alabama (1819) were carved out of it and admitted to the union.

‘‘A Fire Bell in the Night’’ By 1819, the entire region between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River was formally organized into states, and the acquisition of Florida the same year ensured that the United States would embrace the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Also in 1819, thinly settled Arkansas became a separate territory as part of Missouri’s application for admission as a state. Of the states that, four decades later, would attempt to establish an independent southern Confederacy, only Texas was not a part of the United States. From the vantage point of the future, ‘‘the South’’ had taken geographical form.

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And yet, a historian of the era who had been asked to write a ‘‘history of the South’’ in early 1819 would probably have been puzzled by the assignment. What could be the central story of such a history? What tied this immense territory together that did not also tie it to the rest of the Union? It might seem obvious that the rise and progress of a plantation slave society formed the backbone of an authentic history of ‘‘the South,’’ but, while in some southern coastal regions, slaves outnumbered whites by ten to one, in the interior highlands, slaves were few. States north of Maryland had only recently set about to abolish slavery, and, as late as 1810, there were still almost as many slaves in New York as in the Mississippi Territory. Nor was it clear that a border between slavery and freedom had been fixed. In Maryland, a rapid increase in manumissions, many by self-purchase, had freed almost a third of the African-American population, and Maryland seemed likely to follow neighboring Pennsylvania on the road toward emancipation. Whites in the southern states hardly provided material for a simple narrative of their own. In the early pages of his History of South Carolina, published in 1808, David Ramsay wrote, in reference to his state’s settlement by English, Barbadians, Dutch, French Huguenots, Scots-Irish, and Germans, among others, that ‘‘so many and so various have been the sources from which Carolina has derived her population, that a considerable period must elapse, before the people amalgamate into a mass possessing an uniform national character.’’30 If this was true for the small state of South Carolina after 140 years of European settlement, what could unite those disparate peoples with the Creoles, Cajuns, and Canary Islanders of Louisiana, the Irish immigrants in fast-growing Baltimore, or the Moravians in North Carolina? If anything could, it was a common history dating from the American Revolution, but that same history also united them with people in the states to the north and east. The political history of the southern states before 1819 was, by and large, virtually seamless with the history of the country as a whole. If any section deserved a separate history, it was New England, with its relatively homogeneous population, its Puritan and dissenting past, its hostility to the policies of Jefferson and Madison, and its leadership by elite Federalists, some of whom quite recently had wanted to establish their region as an independent country. (In fact, Hannah Adams of Massachusetts had written just such A Summary History of New England in 1799.)

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But events in 1819 began to change the nature of national politics and create new forms of sectional consciousness. An indirect cause was economic: a drop in the price of cotton, which led in turn to a steep decline in land values in the southwest. Planters’ incomes fell; speculators went bankrupt; the sense of heady optimism throughout the southeast faded. But more directly responsible was an erupting controversy over slavery in the territory of Missouri, part of the Louisiana Purchase, across the Mississippi River from Illinois and Kentucky. In 1818, when Missouri’s people applied for admission as a state, its population of 66,000 included 10,000 slaves. When the bill for admission came up for a vote in Congress in 1819, James Tallmadge, Jr., a representative from New York, moved two amendments, one, forbidding ‘‘the further introduction of slavery’’ into Missouri, and the second, specifying that all slaves born there after statehood would become free at age 25. After sharp debate, the House of Representatives passed the first bill, 87 to 76, and the second, 82 to 78, by almost entirely sectional votes: free state representatives voted 86 to 10 and 80 to 14 in favor, slave state representatives 66 to 1 and 64 to 2 against. Some votes for slavery restriction came from those who opposed slavery mainly on moral grounds, others, perhaps most, from northerners unhappy with the disproportionate political power the slave states wielded because of the Constitution’s three-fifths clause. The southern states held about one-third more seats in the House of Representatives than they would have from their free populations alone, with corresponding additional presidential electoral votes and increased influence in party caucuses, where voting followed the federal formula. In the election of 1800, for example, John Adams would have defeated Jefferson if the southern states had not had the extra electoral votes from the three-fifths clause. Southern representatives, for their part, were incensed by the proposed restrictions on slavery in Missouri; Representative Thomas Cobb of Georgia told Tallmadge, ‘‘if you persist, the Union will be dissolved.’’31 When the Senate, where the slave states had equal representation, refused to go along with the Tallmadge amendments, the admission bill stalled, and the debates continued until a compromise, engineered principally by Henry Clay, was reached. Under Clay’s plan of 1820, Missouri was admitted as a slave state and, at the same time, Maine was admitted as a nonslave state, thus keeping the balance in the Senate. A second part of the compromise

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excluded slavery in the future from all territory in the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri’s southern boundary of 368 30’. In the debates on Missouri, southerners focused mainly on constitutional issues, maintaining that the people of Missouri ought to have the same rights as the people of every other state to determine their institutions; restriction of slavery would be ‘‘a breach of the constitution which we have sworn to support.’’ Certainly Jefferson felt this way, telling one correspondent that the Tallmadge amendment was merely an attempt by the Federalists to return to power under the guise of pretended moral objections to slavery. Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Richmond Enquirer, perhaps the leading newspaper in any southern state, far from defending slavery, declared that ‘‘we wish no slave had touched our soil; . . . . As republicans, we frankly declare before our God and our country, that we abhor its institution.’’ But he also argued that restrictions against expansion would make it harder, not easier, to end slavery, since states like Virginia could emancipate their slaves only after the proportion of blacks in the population had been reduced by sending slaves to the west. Thus, John Tyler of Virginia, a future president, called slavery a ‘‘dark cloud’’ over the South that must be dispersed, but added that, if slavery were allowed in Missouri, it would ‘‘add much to the prospect of emancipation and the total extinction of slavery.’’32 But other southern Congressmen, for the first time in significant political debates, openly defended slavery as a benevolent institution. Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina told his fellow Senators that he wished they ‘‘would go home with me . . . and witness the meeting between the slaves and the owner, and see the glad faces and hearty shaking of hands.’’ Senator William Smith of South Carolina claimed that ‘‘no class of laboring people in any country upon the globe are better clothed, better fed, or more cheerful, or labor less’’ than southern slaves. He assured the Senate that ‘‘Christ himself gave a sanction to slavery. . . . the Scriptures teach us that slavery was universally indulged among the holy fathers.’’33 The debates over Missouri marked the origins of a new form of white southern consciousness. Jefferson compared the controversy to a ‘‘fire bell in the night’’ that had awakened him with terror; such ‘‘a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated.’’34 After 1819, the people of the slave

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states did indeed begin to think of themselves as a permanent political minority, since the free states were growing much faster. Fearful that the free-state majority would continue to threaten slavery, southern political leaders turned with renewed conviction to the ‘‘Principles of ’98’’ as a way to limit the power of the national government to interfere with their ‘‘peculiar institution.’’ Nathaniel Macon, himself an Old Republican, had written as early as 1818 that ‘‘If Congress can make canals they can with more propriety emancipate [slaves].’’35 After Missouri, it became more plausible to think that every expansion of the powers of the central government might carry with it a latent potential threat to slavery. One contributor to the Richmond Enquirer in 1819 outlined the case against slavery restriction in Missouri, denouncing the northern majority in the House as an alliance of ‘‘visionary philanthropists’’ and ‘‘designing politicians’’ who, because of their jealousy of southern political power, would ‘‘rob us of our just portion of the territory which has been jointly purchased by the treasures of the nation.’’ He condemned their ‘‘foul aspersions upon the southern character;’’ he predicted that their ‘‘next scheme’’ might well be ‘‘an universal emancipation.’’ While he admitted that an end to slavery was ‘‘desirable in the southern states,’’ he called slavery ‘‘unavoidable’’ and insisted that only a ‘‘dispersion’’ of Africans into the western states could make emancipation feasible. He concluded with a call to ‘‘contest at the threshold’’ this ‘‘deadly blow at the rights of a part of the nation’’ lest it destroy ‘‘the harmony and tranquility of the whole.’’ He did not sign himself as ‘‘American,’’ as some others in the same paper did, nor even as ‘‘Virginian,’’ nor did he use any of the names of the old Latin or English writers on politics and history that similar commentators typically chose. Instead, he signed himself ‘‘Southron,’’ an early version of ‘‘Southerner.’’ It may have been the first time anyone ever publically identified himself so in political debate.36 Southern identity and sectional consciousness were being forged in political controversy, framed by a paired defense of states’ rights and racial slavery, and Southern history had begun.

PART II

Making the Old South

4 An American Slave Society

In 1861, the British antislavery writer J. E. Cairnes wrote that southern society was divided naturally into ‘‘three classes broadly distinguished from each other and connected by no common interest—the slaves on whom devolves all the regular industry, the slaveholders who reap all its fruits, and an idle and lawless rabble who live dispersed over vast plains little removed from absolute barbarism.’’1 This stereotypical image is familiar to modern readers, in part because popular culture has perpetuated it through such iconic works as the novel and film, Gone with the Wind (though the novel’s masters and mistresses are kind, the slaves happy, and the ‘‘white trash’’ mostly kept out of view), and, partly, because it agrees with an almost instinctive response to slavery as a backward and barbaric institution. By the time Cairnes wrote, this image was well-entrenched. Like most stereotypes, this one is grounded in reality: the slave plantation was central to the preCivil War South, and slavery did make the South different enough to precipitate a war of unprecedented scale and ferocity. But the stereotype also misleads profoundly because it obscures the tremendous complexities and diversities in the antebellum South. Especially, Cairnes’s image of a society of planters, slaves, and ‘‘rabble’’ ignores the majority of white southerners who were neither slaveowners nor ‘‘rabble.’’ Most white southerners lived, in the decades before the Civil War, like white northerners, in families of middling economic standing and social status. The South was much less urbanized than the northeast (36 percent) and somewhat less so than the midwest (14 percent), but the South’s cities and towns were home

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to one in ten southerners in 1860, with a mix of occupations typical of American cities. In a sample of free Richmond families from the 1850 census, 18 percent were professionals or businessmen, and another two-fifths ‘‘in the middling occupations: the petty proprietors, clerical and sales personnel, skilled craftsmen, and semiprofessionals.’’ Two-fifths of Richmond’s white families owned at least one slave, three-fifths owned none, and large slaveholdings were rare.2 Most of the big cities were in the upper South: Baltimore, Louisville, Richmond, and St. Louis; except for New Orleans, cities in the lower South were relatively small and heavily dependent on the cotton trade. The South’s urban population grew rapidly after 1845, and, like northern cities, southern cities were attracting immigrants from Ireland and Germany, who competed for work with native whites and with free and enslaved blacks. By 1860, about half of Savannah’s adult whites were foreign-born. Successful artisans often purchased their own slaves, and artisans and mechanics in the South did not organize the sort of ‘‘Working Men’s’’ political parties that won large votes in northeastern cities in the 1820s and 1830s.3 Most southerners lived not in cities but on farms and plantations. Among white farmers, about half owned no slaves. The majority of these slaveless farmers were not the ‘‘rabble’’ of Cairnes, but landowners raising crops both for subsistence and for the market. By 1860, it had become almost an article of faith in the North that southern farmers without slaves were ‘‘poorer than the majority of our day-labourers at the North,’’ as the influential writer Frederick Law Olmsted claimed after traveling through the South, but, in fact, the typical nonslaveholding southern farm owner was several times as wealthy as the typical northern rural or urban laborer.4 Seldom dealing in much cash, small farmers purchased goods and exchanged labor, slaves, and tools in local systems of barter and exchange. In the rural areas of the southeastern states, where there was little in-migration after 1800, neighborhoods and churches were bound together by overlapping ties of marriage and descent. North Carolina’s Orange County, according to one careful study, consisted of ‘‘eight isolated, self-contained, tightly knit, rural neighborhoods’’ and measured status ‘‘not in strict economic terms but through family and kinship ties.’’5 And, although the massive movement to the West after 1815 disrupted these networks of neighborhood and kinship, often it did not destroy them; move-

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ment often took the form of chain migrations, with family and neighbors following one another to new places. Jones County, Mississippi was populated in the early nineteenth century in large part by friends and families who had earlier lived near each other in western North Carolina.6 Some historians have maintained that southern small farmers had a quite different mindset from planters who raised commodity crops like cotton and rice. One called the South a ‘‘dual economy,’’ with the largest share of the rural population content with a reasonable subsistence, concentrating on raising crops to feed themselves and their animals and producing only a small surplus for the market to pay for luxuries or needed tools. Although many small farmers were cautious, indeed, about becoming dependent on markets where prices were determined in distant places, and statistical evidence suggests that even middling farmers may have been influenced by such ‘‘safety-first’’ behavior, the weight of the evidence does not sustain a conclusion that the South’s nonslaveholding farmers deliberately avoided market participation. Although economies of scale in production made it impractical for small farmers to grow sugar or rice (sugar required expensive mills and rice extensive systems of dikes), tobacco and cotton could be grown with profit on small farms, and yeomen farmers did raise these crops wherever soil and transportation allowed. In the eastern Georgia Piedmont in 1860, for example, a large majority of small farmers grew cotton, and small farmers were, as a consequence, actually less likely than big planters to be self-sufficient in food production. In northwestern Georgia, relatively few farmers grew cotton in 1850, but cotton production soared in the next decade there after a new railroad penetrated the region. A wide-ranging study of agriculture and slavery in the Appalachian South found that, although farms were smaller and slaves less common than in the rest of the South, 90 percent of farm owners ‘‘produced agricultural surpluses, and the average farm consumed less than onequarter of its total annual grain and livestock production for subsistence.’’ In the piney woods of southern Mississippi, where the soil was too poor for cotton, and the railroad did not arrive before the Civil War, many farmers raised stock for sale in Mobile or Jackson, even though more than half of all small farm owners in some counties were not raising enough grain for their own subsistence.7

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Letters and diaries of these ‘‘plain folk’’ are scarce, but those that have been found reinforce this statistical evidence. Basil Armstrong Thomasson, a nonslaveholding yeoman farmer in North Carolina, devoted his fields mainly to subsistence corn crops, but he invested savings in a local blacksmith shop as a profit-making venture. Matthew Carter, who moved to the southern Mississippi frontier in 1811, wrote home to Georgia to praise ‘‘the convenience of a good market’’ in Mobile, 40 miles away; the river schooners passing nearby ‘‘give a good price for our produce.’’ Carter’s son, William, called southern Mississippi in the 1840s ‘‘a pretty good country for poor people. I suppose our market to be about as good and convenient as any in the Union.’’ Much of the restless migration to the west consisted of such families of small means, in search of fresh, cheap land that would, if cotton prices held up, allow them to enter the ranks of slaveholders.8 Farmers without slaves depended on their own labor and the labor of family members, as well as labor traded back and forth among neighbors for big jobs such as felling trees. Confederate veterans questioned in the early twentieth century about their lives before the Civil War remembered ‘‘hard work was the common lot of the plain folk.’’ One wrote that he ‘‘never [k]new what idleness was and can say the same for my three brothers and all the rest of the family. . . the man or woman or boy or girl who did not do their part was a rare exception.’’ Wives of white farmers seldom did heavy field labor such as plowing, but they raised food in large gardens and sold chickens, eggs, and butter in local markets. Children, especially sons, went to work in the fields as soon as they were big enough, and everyone might help out at harvest time. Families were large; many women bore children about every two years, as frequently as the natural cycle of childbirth and nursing would allow, and families with seven or eight children were not uncommon, despite the toll taken by infant mortality.9

Slaveholding Yeomen The ideal of the yeoman farmer—the man who owned enough land to avoid dependence on others—held a powerful place in nineteenth-century American culture. Most southern slaveholders came closer to this ideal than to the ideal of the gentleman planter.

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In the South as a whole, among the minority of white families who did own slaves, just one in six were planters owning twenty or more slaves, while about half owned five or fewer.10 The ownership of even a single slave is evidence of an orientation toward market production, since slaves were expensive, and an adult slave in good health might be worth as much as his master’s farm. Benton Miller, owner of three slaves in piedmont Georgia, devoted most of the acreage on his small farm to cotton and kept track of the progress in a daily journal on what he called his ‘‘plantation.’’ Much of the year, Miller worked in his fields alongside his two male slaves. While he raised enough corn to meet his family’s needs, the proportion of his slaves’ labor devoted to cotton production on his farm was about the same as the proportion typical of large plantations. A more substantial slaveholder, David Golightly Harris, had 10 slaves working on his farm in the South Carolina upcountry. Harris, unlike Benton Miller, devoted less attention to cotton than most of his neighbors, and more to corn. His detailed farm journal reveals a diligent and ambitious man with an eye on greater opportunities. He sold corn to neighbors who had shortages in the spring. In the words of the editor of Harris’s journal, ‘‘he invented new tools, built a grist mill, a saw mill, a brandy still, an ice-house, anything and everything that might make him money.’’11 The great majority of the South’s farmers, in sum, worked on small farms not unlike the small farms of the North. They raised crops for the market and tried to accumulate enough land or other wealth to give their children a good start in life. They succeeded about as well as northern farmers; the typical southern yeomen (counting as a ‘‘yeoman’’ any farmer owning seven slaves or fewer) had accumulated virtually the same amount of wealth in 1860 as the typical northern farmer.12 Like northern farmers, they were ready to pick up and leave for lands in the west that were better—or at least seemed likely to be better. Yeoman farmers in the South and North did differ in their prospects, because the shortage of low-wage farm labor limited the growth of northern farms. Ambitious, young, rural men in the North tended to look for opportunities in towns and cities. A southern farm was limited in scale only by the credit or capital its owner could command to buy more slaves. The southern yeoman could entertain a realistic ambition of becoming a slaveholding planter.

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Poor Whites About a third of southern white men owned neither slaves nor land. Many worked as unskilled laborers. In Virginia, a state with a diversified economy, about one-fifth of adult free men were listed in the 1850 Census as laborers. In larger southern cities, from onefifth to one-third of free men were unskilled workers. In historians’ studies of local areas in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas, the proportion of unskilled laborers among rural white family heads varied from under 5 percent to more than 25 percent.13 When poor men married, those unable to buy a farm might rent one instead. Because the U.S. Census did not usually identify tenants among farmers, their numbers are hard to measure, but in historians’ studies the proportion of landless tenants among farmers ranged from 10 percent to 25 percent. A comprehensive study of Georgia found that in some counties, as many as 40 percent of farmers rented. Some were tenants only temporarily—operating family farms still owned by their fathers, or accumulating enough money to buy their own farms. Some remained landless tenants all their lives.14 Women who headed families were especially vulnerable to poverty, because so few occupations were open to them. As a Virginia editor put it, in 1834, ‘‘there are but very few avenues of business’’ open to women, and ‘‘the wages paid for female labor is very trifling; and when she has others besides herself to provide for, it seems almost impossible that a woman can succeed.’’ Those fortunate enough to inherit land operated farms or plantations, but the overwhelming majority of working white women were in the needle trades, especially in low-paid seamstress work, or in domestic labor or clothes washing, where white women competed with slaves and free blacks. A majority of the operatives in the South’s growing textile industry were women, but these, too, were lowpaid jobs, certainly not enough to support a family. Educated women could become teachers, but seldom principals or superintendents. In every city, a small number of women owned shops, usually for millinery or clothing, and others opened boardinghouses, maintaining middle-class status. Those without other options might work as field laborers or as prostitutes.15

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From the ranks of the propertyless came that small minority of ‘‘rabble’’ described by Cairnes as the most prevalent—the restless and violent white underclass that thumbed its nose at middle-class standards of respectability. They populated the stories of writers such as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, who helped to create a genre of humor with his satires of finger-biting, eye-gouging brawls, published in Georgia Scenes (1835). As is always true of the poorest, it is difficult for historians to learn much about their lives. The evidence is likely to come more from their encounters with the courts than from their own letters or diaries. One indelible self-portrait was left by Edward Isham, who was hanged for murder in 1860, and whose lawyer left in a notebook a vivid ‘‘autobiography’’ in Isham’s own words. He had supported himself mainly with unskilled work, almost constantly on the move, driving cattle, splitting rails, digging ditches, working in a lumber mill, supplementing his income with hunting and fishing. He also worked at the criminal margins of the economy, gambling or stealing. His brief membership in a church ended when he was expelled for fighting. Isham narrated his life as a passage from one violent conflict to another using just about every kind of weapon, from fists to rocks to knives and guns. He was a bigamist who recounted sexual affairs with a dozen women. The women in his narrative were tough, sexually active, prone to drink, and as ready as he to pick up an ax and attack an enemy. Such women turn up in southern court records. With few legal rights and little formal power, most poor women relied on men for protection in a difficult world, even if this meant abandoning one man for another in defiance of respectable standards.16

Free Black Southerners Free blacks lived throughout the South, making up about 6 percent of the total black population. They were concentrated in cities and in the rural upper South. In 1860, free African Americans made up 6 percent of the population in New Orleans, 7 percent in Richmond, 8 percent in Charleston, and 12 percent in Baltimore (where they outnumbered slaves almost ten to one). In the same year, there were 84,000 free blacks in Maryland (nearly outnumbering slaves) and 58,000 in Virginia, but fewer than a thousand each in Mississippi and Texas.17

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Most free blacks were poor, especially those who lived in rural areas. Most free black men eked out an existence as laborers for white employers. In one sample of 1,000 free black households in the mountain South in 1860, the largest number of family heads were low-wage farm laborers, and most of the others were servants or unskilled workers in the region’s mines, mills, and forests. Fewer than 10 percent earned more than $300 annually, the approximate poverty line in the United States. Free black women were especially likely to be poor, limited to a few underpaid occupations such as manual labor, domestic service, and clothes washing. Since more women than men were manumitted, many raised children without husbands at home. In 1860, more than half of all free black families in Petersburg, Virginia, were headed by women, and over half of these women owned no property at all. Nonetheless, enough free blacks earned incomes as masons, plasterers, carpenters, seamstresses, or in other skilled trades to provoke protests from white artisans. In Richmond, a third of free black men, and in Charleston, three-quarters, were skilled workers in 1860. A minority of free blacks acquired property, occasionally by gift, but usually by purchase. More than 1,200 free blacks in Virginia in 1860 owned farms, averaging about 50 acres each, and another 693 owned town or city real estate. Where the law allowed, many worked hard to earn money to purchase the freedom of family members; a third of the African Americans emancipated in Petersburg, Virginia after 1806 were freed by other blacks.18 Some free blacks became rich. William Ellison, freed in 1816 by the South Carolina master who was his father, had been apprenticed to a cotton gin maker, and used the skills he learned there to build up a fortune. By 1850, he owned a plantation and 36 slaves. His sons married into the mulatto aristocracy of Charleston, which separated itself from darker-skinned black people, free or slave, by joining organizations such as the Brown Fellowship Society, whose membership was limited to 50 free, light-skinned mulatto men. New Orleans, with its legacy of French and Spanish colonialism and a significant in-migration of wealthy mulattoes fleeing the revolution in Haiti, was home to a population of free people of color unparalleled elsewhere in the South. The wealthy elite among them owned slaves, published French verse, and sometimes sent their children to school in France.19

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Such economic success was exceptional because free blacks suffered severe discrimination. They were denied the right to vote, yet heavily taxed; they were hedged about in many states by laws forbidding them to worship freely in their own churches, or to gather together for recreation. Except for the small, and usually light-skinned, elite, their social world was bound up with that of slaves, and intermarriage between slaves and free blacks was not uncommon; in such cases, marriages faced the threat of separation by sale of the slave spouse. The very existence of free blacks was an affront to the South’s system of racial slavery, a living contradiction to the idea that people of African descent were incapable of supporting themselves, much less prospering. Masters worried that their example would ‘‘corrupt’’ slaves, and throughout the South, they came under increasing legal pressure in the last decade of the antebellum era. Many state laws required free blacks to register and pay special taxes; if they fell into debt or were convicted of a crime or simply were unemployed, they or their children could be indentured out to work for whites.

A Patriarchal Institution? The South’s big slaveholders, most of them owners of plantations growing tobacco, cotton, rice, or sugar for national and international markets, were few in number, but important far out of proportion to their numbers. Planters owning 20 or more slaves, about one-sixth of all slaveholders, owned a majority of all slaves and raised most of the South’s valuable crops. Just 2 or 3 percent of white men owned more than 50 slaves, but their slaves produced more than a third of all the South’s cotton.20 At the top of the economic pyramid were planters whose slaves were in the hundreds—no more than 350 masters in 1860 owned as many as 250 slaves. These great planters were concentrated along the rice coast of South Carolina and on the alluvial soil of the Mississippi River, but, in 1860, at least one lived in every slave state except Missouri and Delaware.21 Most of these big owners had inherited all or some of their slaves, and intermarriages among these richest families protected and reproduced their inherited wealth. Some accumulated slave empires during their lifetimes by

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advantageous marriages (for example, the politician and proslavery writer James H. Hammond of South Carolina) or with hard work and entrepreneurship. Near Natchez, Mississippi, a cluster of great fortunes was built up by immigrants from Pennsylvania and New York who arrived early in the nineteenth century. The father of Joseph Davis of Mississippi began life as a nonslaveholder in Georgia before moving to Kentucky, where he came to own 16 slaves. Joseph parlayed this middle-class background, a successful career in law, and shrewd land speculation into a fortune that by 1860 included 355 slaves. He then helped to make his younger brother, Jefferson, a rich planter, too.22 Planters and their apologists created an image of the slave plantation that was an inverse of the abolitionist portrait of slavery as tyranny. Slaves, planters claimed, were genuine, if subordinate, members of the ‘‘family.’’ According to a writer in 1828, ‘‘A patriarchal feeling of affection is due to every slave from his owner’’ and the master ‘‘should consider the slave as a member of his own family.’’ According to a minister in 1861, slavery was divinely sanctioned by God ‘‘as an organizing element in that family order which lies at the very foundation of Church and State.’’ Southern whites insisted that masters protected slaves from the injustices confronted by many free laborers; they were fed and housed even when they were too young or too old to work, treated by doctors when they were ill, and not ‘‘fired’’ in bad economic times. Even cruel masters were restrained by the knowledge that slaves were their most valuable investments—a dead or crippled slave could produce no cotton or rice. A similar image of slavery appears in the private comments of many slaveholders. Thomas Jefferson, in 1776, included his slaves in a list of ‘‘Number of souls in my family.’’ Mary Jones, wife of a big planter in Georgia, in 1856 wrote to her sons of the death of a favorite slave, Sina, ‘‘you know the tenderness of your father’s feelings, and his ceaseless anxiety when the servants are sick.’’23 A more extended example comes from the letters of the same Jones family. Mary’s husband, the Reverend Charles C. Jones, was a Presbyterian minister who traveled the countryside to preach to slave congregations and wrote a catechism for nonliterate slaves. In 1856, an 18-year-old slave, Jane, ran away from his plantation. After she was found and seized in Savannah, Jones decided to sell, as a group, her entire family, including her parents, sisters, and two

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children. Jones instructed his son to make the sale to one buyer, and not to a ‘‘speculator,’’ ‘‘for we cannot consent to separate them,’’ giving these explanations: (1) An indisposition to separate parents and child, no matter how evil their conduct had been in the premises. (2) The unreliable character of the family, the trouble the mother has always given, and the moral certainty that whenever occasions offer, the same rebellious conduct will appear again. (3) And in the case of the sale of the present incorrigible runaway apart from her family, although they have sent her away never to return, the effect upon them in all probability will not be for the better. (4) And lastly, a change of investment would be more desirable than otherwise.24

Eugene D. Genovese, one of the most influential modern historians of southern slavery, has argued that such planters as the Reverend Jones were not unusual. To such men, master–slave relationships formed one part of a larger constellation of household relationships, in which the father was the head of all, women, children, and ‘‘servants’’ below him. The ‘‘paternalist’’ ideology that grew out of this understanding of relationships, according to Genovese, ‘‘rested on the assumption of mutual duties, responsibilities, and privileges appropriate to an organic rather than a market society.’’25 The word ‘‘paternalist’’ suggests a kindliness that Genovese does not intend; his point is not that slave masters were kind men and women—some were, some were not. His argument, rather, is that paternalism encouraged a sort of personal relationship between master and slave that was alien to the mentality of a genuine capitalist, for whom the worker is a source of labor and nothing more. A slave plantation, then, is best understood as a kind of extended household under the management and direction of a patriarch (which is why some others have preferred the term ‘‘patriarchalism’’ to ‘‘paternalism’’). Slaves were, in planters’ eyes, a race of perpetual children, and, as good patriarchs, they had both the right and the duty to discipline slaves firmly, for the same reason that they might put the rod to their own children from time to time; at the same time, they had a duty to give their slaves adequate care and, for planters such as Jones, Christian instruction. Such a mixture of attitudes can be seen in the journals and papers of South Carolinian James H. Hammond. In 1848, he wrote in his

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‘‘secret’’ diary, ‘‘I love my family, and they love me. It is my only earthly tie. It embraces my slaves, and there to me the world ends.’’ He wanted slaves to see him as a stern but honest and well-intentioned father figure, not a tyrant, and, therefore, he instructed overseers that all his slaves should ‘‘be brought into that contact with the master, at least once a week, of receiving the means of subsistence from him.’’ He hoped slave children would grow up to see him, not their own fathers and mothers, as their main provider.26 Paternalist ideology, in Genovese’s interpretation, not only was the prevailing philosophy of the South’s ruling class, but more generally permeated the South’s social and economic relationships, guided its politics and legal system, and shaped its culture. In the words of historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, paternalism invoked ‘‘a specific metaphor of legitimate domination: the protective domination of the father over his family.’’ Paternalism encouraged, by extension and analogy, a patriarchal rule also over the women of the household and a legal system that exalted household relationships above individualism—thus, no women’s rights movement, with its stress on the equal rights of women as individuals, could flourish in the South. Paternalist ideology legitimated slaveholders’ ultimate control—their hegemony—in a unique southern civilization, justifying slavery to both themselves and others. According to some versions of the paternalist interpretation, this ideology even, to some extent, enabled masters to rule their slaves more effectively, because it encouraged slaves to seek to improve their lives within the paternal household itself, rather than to overthrow the entire system. For example, as one of the privileges due the slave from the patriarch, slaves successfully claimed Sunday as a day when planters could not require them to work. For ‘‘countless’’ slaves, according to another historian, ‘‘it was simpler—and safer—by far to accept the dominance of a ruling class as just and appropriate than to develop an alternative strategy for interpreting and, perhaps, changing their world.’’27 It would be easy to multiply examples of apparently ‘‘paternal’’ concern for slaves from slaveowners’ records. Nevertheless, my own reading of the evidence leads to the conclusion that paternalist ideology had far more of an impact on planters’ self-image than on their actual behavior. It seems even less likely that paternalism explains the ability of planters to control their slaves or to dominate

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the South politically. For the majority of white southern nonslaveholders, racial supremacy was a far more salient point of agreement with their wealthier neighbors than paternalism. In plantation records, slaves appear first and foremost as a valuable property used to generate profits, and only secondarily as dependent members of patriarchal households.

The Business of Slavery A plantation was a business. Its owner’s main capital investment consisted of slaves. The same planters whose papers reflect their paternalist self-image demonstrate how clearly they themselves recognized this fact. James H. Hammond’s instructions to his overseers, for example, begin with the point that a ‘‘good crop’’ is not to be measured only in cotton bales, but must be ‘‘good taking into consideration every thing—negroes, land, mules, stock,’’ so ‘‘there should be an increase in number, & improvement in condition and value of negroes.’’28 Similarly, the Reverend Jones was quite conscious that the sale of Jane and her family was a desirable ‘‘change of investment.’’ Planters carefully calibrated slave prices according to market conditions and to the productive and reproductive potential of their slaves, according to such factors as sex, age, size, strength, and special skills. The Reverend Jones, in listing Jane’s family for sale, included details to justify a high price: Cassius, Jane’s father, was a ‘‘good field hand, basket-maker, and handy at jobs,’’ her mother Phoebe a ‘‘good cook, washer and ironer, and fine seamstress,’’ her 14-year-old sister a ‘‘smart, active field hand.’’ The entire family also ‘‘have excellent constitutions and are in good health.’’29 Much ‘‘paternalist’’ behavior was good business practice. Violence might make people work, but too much violence could cripple or kill a slave or provoke the slave to run off. Skimping on food was counterproductive if, as a result, slaves got sick or became too weak to work, and plantation records and slaves’ own accounts show that most received adequate calories, though in a monotonous diet that usually lacked a full range of vitamins and minerals. Kindness and consideration worked as incentives for some slaves, and extra food, time off, or small cash payments worked for others. Time off

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at Christmas and in August (when there was little work to be done anyway) might help to attach slaves to their masters. Slaves with special skills or responsibilities often received special treatment or rewards. Since slaves were a kind of property that could reproduce, it made sense to encourage slave marriages and family life so children might grow into valuable adults. At the same time, because slaves could not be ‘‘fired,’’ nor could their ‘‘pay’’ be docked below subsistence without harming one’s investment, it made economic sense for planters to use violence to force slaves to work. Frederick Law Olmsted wrote that punishment on plantations was necessary ‘‘because the opportunities of hiding away and shirking labor, and of wasting and injuring the owner’s property’’ was so great, and ‘‘above all, because there is no real moral obligation on the part of the negro to do what is demanded of him.’’ Hammond’s instructions state straightforwardly that ‘‘The negroes must be made to obey & work.’’ While he added that ‘‘Much whipping indicates a bad tempered, or inattentive manager, & will not be allowed,’’ he meant that making slaves work ought to take ‘‘very little whipping.’’ Hammond was typical, according to one wide-ranging study of the South’s biggest slaveholders, which concluded that ‘‘Although some paternalistic planters endeavored to encourage their workers through an array of rewards, a far greater number resorted to harsh physical punishment to keep their chattels in line.’’30 The legal right to coercion allowed planters to force black women into hard field labor and to force any slave into unpleasant, regimented gang labor, a system that produced cotton with greater efficiency (in output per hour of work) than was possible on farms without slaves.31 In Mississippi, Olmsted witnessed a brutal flogging of a young female slave who had been caught hiding in some bushes; the overseer did not believe her account about how she had gotten there. When ‘‘thirty or forty blows across the shoulders with his tough, flexible, ‘raw-hide’ whip’’ did not produce a change in her story, he ordered her to ‘‘pull up your clothes—lie down,’’ and whipped her ‘‘across her naked loins and thigh.’’ With a 15-yearold ‘‘young gentlemen’’—perhaps the son of the slave owner— watching impassively, the girl writhed and screamed out ‘‘Oh, don’t sir! Oh, please stop master! please sir! . . . Oh God, master, oh, God, master.’’ She never changed her story, but when Olmsted asked the overseer whether he had needed to be so harsh, he replied

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‘‘ ‘Oh yes, sir,’ (laughing again.) ‘If I had n’t punished her so hard she would have done the same thing again to-morrow, and half the people on the plantation would have followed her example.’’32 The exceptional severity of this incident does not limit its usefulness for understanding how masters used violence. The lash—or worse— was always available if other incentives did not work. The overseer observed by Olmsted perhaps thought he had engaged in ‘‘very little whipping,’’ because this single whipping of a teenage girl might prevent others from shirking work and getting whipped in the future. Even more than the raw violence used against slaves, the slave trade makes it difficult to reconcile the business of slavery with a ‘‘paternalist’’ explanation of planter behavior. A father might punish his own children, but he did not sell them, either to punish them or simply to pocket some extra cash. Slaveowners, though, bought and sold slaves in massive numbers, routinely separating family members. More than any other feature of the slave system, the trade supports the judgment of historian Philip Morgan, writing about the rise of paternalist sentiment in eighteenth-century Virginia, that ‘‘enlightened patriarchalism had limits. Where it collided with self-interest and commercial advantage, the slave invariably lost.’’33 Between 1820 and 1860, nearly 900,000 slaves were taken from southeastern states to those in the southwest. Over half of these moved there not with masters who were themselves migrating, but through the interstate trading system, purchased by dealers for sale in markets from Alabama to Texas. In the main exporting states from Maryland to the Carolinas, the sale of slaves to traders in the three decades before the Civil War generated the cash equivalent of 15 to 20 percent of the value of all the tobacco, cotton, and rice raised in those same states. The business records of traders, examined by historian Michael Tadman, demonstrate that the concern for slave families shown by Reverend Jones was unusual. Much more typical was the attitude of a Virginia master who wanted to sell 31 of his slaves: ‘‘Divide the children and manage matters as you think best . . . fix them as well as you can before sale.’’ The characteristics of slaves sucked into the trade matched those in demand from planters interested in how much work they could do, and, for young women, their childbearing potential. Traders’ records show that about 25 percent of

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slaves they bought (sometimes, literally, by the pound) were children aged 8 to 14, all sold off as individuals. Another 50 percent of the slaves purchased were men and women of marriageable ages, but just 2 percent were sold as husband-wife pairs and another 20 percent in mother-child combinations. Such limited respect for family ties by no means interfered with profits, since children below 8 years of age could do little productive work, and since many buyers preferred young women with young children, since this assured them that the women could bear more children. The great majority of such sales would have broken up marriages, and fathers were almost never sold with children. Tadman estimated that over half of all interstate sales either split husbands from wives or took children under 15 away from their parents. Slaves sold in local markets, rather than in the interregional trade, had a greater chance of staying together as families. The papers of planters contain examples similar to Reverend Jones’s sale of Jane’s family as a family group, or sales made in order to unite a husband and wife. On balance, however, financial considerations ruled even in local sales. One detailed study of slave trading in a Missouri county, where the average slaveholding numbered five or six, showed that 30 percent of the trade involved children under the age of 15 sold apart from parents, and that ‘‘the evidence appears conclusive’’ that most slaveowners ‘‘had little concern for the breakup of slave families.’’34 In the wills left by members of the largest North Carolina planter families, just 10 percent requested that slave families be protected during sale or distribution, and in another study ‘‘only seven of about six hundred’’ wills ‘‘expressly tried to assure that slaves would be kept together.’’35 Slaves had a good chance of staying together as families when sold as part of large lots (for example, after the death of a large slaveowner), but this practice, too, had economic advantages for the sellers, since it would have been difficult to sell aged, ill, or infirm slaves as individuals. Thus Hammond complained to a neighbor that ‘‘in buying gangs one is obliged to take pensioners and invalids and many others that do not suit.’’36 Slaveowners and their apologists rationalized the trade by denying (falsely) that the trade was a normal part of the system, and they usually claimed (falsely) that most slaves were sold as families. They also claimed that slaves did not care because Africans were incapable of true family attachment. The slave’s ‘‘natural affection is not

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strong,’’ one of them wrote, ‘‘and consequently he is cruel to his own offspring, and suffers little by separation from them.’’ As for marriage, wrote another, Africans ‘‘with new partners and another marriage, are quite as happy as if they had never been separated.’’37 As it turned out, despite the efforts of the Reverend Jones, even Jane’s family was swallowed up in the interstate trade. A ‘‘speculator’’ bought them and sold them off, one by one. Jane ended up in New Orleans, where she soon became ill and died. The ‘‘revelation’’ of this ‘‘unpleasant’’ news caused Jones’s son to denounce slave trading as ‘‘the lowest occupation in which mortal man can engage, and the effect is a complete perversion of all that is just, kind, honorable, and of good report among men.’’38 Here is displayed the most important function of paternalist ideology—to convince planters themselves of their good motives and basic decency. The ‘‘Negro trader’’ was an essential element of the system, as he had been since the days of the African trade, because slavery was driven mainly by market factors such as the prices of cotton and slaves and the costs of transportation. The Jones family foisted off on the ‘‘Negro trader’’ the dirty business of making slavery work, shielding themselves from their own complicity as they made ‘‘a change of investment’’ that ‘‘would be more desirable than otherwise.’’ The economic importance of the slave trade meant that slave marriages could not be given legal standing as this would have severely limited the flexibility of owners to sell. In this and in other ways, southern lawmakers and judges who struggled to reconcile the dual nature of slaves as both people and property nearly always chose policies that gave owners the greatest economic advantage. While the deliberate killing of a slave was murder, and a few owners and overseers were actually convicted of this crime, such legal protection was vitiated because the law assumed that owners would not purposely damage their own property, and because the testimony of blacks was not accepted against whites in court; a murder of a slave in front of an entire work gang would have no legal witnesses. Similarly, slaves could be used as collateral for loans and seized in the case of nonpayment, they were passed down to heirs like any other form of property, and, when slaves left in an estate had to be sold to pay off debts, they went, by law, to the highest bidders, regardless of family ties. It is all the more astonishing that so many masters confidently believed that ‘‘the strongest affection the negro nature is capable of

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feeling is love of his master, his guide, protector, friend, and indeed Providence.’’39 Yet, to judge by the reaction of many masters and mistresses during and after the Civil War, when slaves showed what they truly thought, owners had indeed convinced themselves with their own propaganda that slaves loved and respected them. When, after Sherman’s men arrived in the neighborhood of the Jones’s plantation, most of their slaves, including house servants, either ran off or ‘‘placed themselves in perfect antagonism to their owners and to all government and control.’’ Mrs. Jones was shocked and disheartened, writing, ‘‘we cannot but feel such ingratitude.’’ She described her heart as ‘‘pained and sickened with [former slaves’] vileness and falsehood in every way. I long to be delivered from the race.’’40 Her slaves had demonstrated in actions the truths uttered by John Brown, a fugitive from slavery who wrote in 1855 that ‘‘we cannot be made to understand how any man can hold another man as a slave, and do right.’’ Even more eloquent was the unlettered Virginia woman who ran away to the Union army during the war: ‘‘White folk’s got a heap to answer for the way they’ve done to colored folks! So much they wont never pray it away.’’41

Profits and Prosperity in a Slave-Based Economy Investments in slaves paid about as well as investments in the bonds of railroad companies, the closest equivalent to our modern stock market. In this and other ways the slave South resembled the free North more than contemporaries believed. Opponents of slavery commonly argued that the institution was holding back the South’s economic progress. Antislavery writers like Cairnes believed that slavery inevitably made whites, whether masters or ‘‘rabble,’’ lazy, and this image crept into the accounts of more admiring Europeans such as Michael Chevalier of France, who, in 1839, praised Virginia’s planters for their ‘‘pride in country and their ‘‘frank, hearty, open, cordial’’ manners, but also called them ‘‘indisposed to activity . . . even indolent.’’42 A similar portrait appeared in 1832 in a popular novel, Swallow Barn, in which author John Pendleton Kennedy portrayed a slightly decaying Virginia plantation as the home of a cultured and leisurely gentleman planter, a gracious plantation mistress, and slaves who were childlike, happy, and not too hard-working. But planters did not earn good profits by

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accident, or by being lazy. Studies of their operations show that they used slaves as profit-maximizers as they would use any expensive investment, by keeping them busy at a steady pace all year around at a wide variety of tasks. Southern agricultural journals are filled with advice about how to get the most work from slaves, and many planters purchased clocks and watches so they could regulate the slaves’ day more closely and time slave tasks so as to use them most efficiently and eliminate shirking. They experimented with fertilizers, tools, crop rotations, and new varieties of seeds. Even Chevalier distinguished between planters in Virginia and the ‘‘sons of the old Southern States’’ who had moved to the southwest, where they had ‘‘become as industrious as the Yankees.’’ There a cotton plantation was ‘‘a sort of agricultural manufactory, in which [the planter is] obliged to exercise more or less of the activity, and to feel more or less of the hopes and fears of a manufacturer.’’43 When contemporaries called the South backward, they often were thinking of its concentration on agriculture at the expense of manufacturing; implicitly or explicitly, they compared the region to New England. Certainly, the South had no textile cities like Lowell, Massachusetts, and its per capita manufacturing output fell well behind that of New England and the Middle Atlantic states. But, compared to New England, every country in the world other than Great Britain was ‘‘backward,’’ and, if the South were treated as a separate ‘‘nation,’’ it would have ranked in 1860, on a per capita basis, second in the world in railroads, sixth in cotton textile production, and eighth in pig iron production. In 1850, Virginia ranked third among all states in pig iron production, led the nation in tobacco manufacturing, and exported tens of thousands of barrels of flour. The South’s measured manufacturing performance would be even stronger if the U.S. Census had classified sugar mills, cotton gins, and rice polishing machinery on plantations in the same way that it classified flour mills of similar size and output. When these are counted, the per capita output of manufactures in the South was about the same as in the Midwest, though still far behind the Northeast.44 The South also stands out in comparison with other slave-based societies; its manufacturing capacity and railroad mileage soared far above that of Brazil, the second largest slave society of the era. Slaveowners in the South adapted their ‘‘peculiar’’ institution to their economic needs in a wide range of work. Many female slaves

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in towns worked as domestic servants for their owners, but other women, and most slave men, were put to work to earn money for their masters. Many small masters hired their slaves to others to work as laborers, carpenters, blacksmiths, or masons. In Richmond, the nation’s leading tobacco manufacturing center, slaves made up over four-fifths of the workforce in the tobacco factories. Outside cities and towns, slaves worked in enterprises like coal mines and iron forges; the largest slaveholders in both Tennessee and Kentucky in 1860 were iron manufacturers. In Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, the iron works at rural Buffalo Forge depended on slaves for the most highly skilled operations as well as for heavy manual labor—about half of them owned by the Forge’s owner, and the rest hired by the year.45 If southern businessmen turned their entrepreneurial talents toward plantation agriculture, this was in large part because plantations promised high profits. Even in the colonial era, big planters strove to improve their operations through careful study and experimentation, learning to grow indigo when that was profitable and abandoning it when it no longer was; developing an entirely new product in Sea Island cotton; and building up along the Atlantic Coast rice district one of the world’s most complex and sophisticated systems of agricultural production.46 Their entrepreneurship had made South Carolina’s rice planters, as a group, the richest Americans. The entrepreneurs who developed the cotton and sugar fields of the Mississippi Valley became millionaires whose fortunes compared favorably with those anywhere in the country. Indeed, in 1860, two-thirds of all men in the U.S. worth at least $100,000 (approximately $2,000,000 in 2003) lived in the South. Even when slaves are included in the calculation, the South’s per capita income was about three-quarters of the national average in 1860, a figure that would have ranked it, as a separate ‘‘nation,’’ fourth in the world. If the free population alone is considered, the South’s per capita annual income was above the national average.47 The entrepreneurial and capitalist outlook of southern planters is further demonstrated in the planters’ own investments outside agriculture. William Scarborough, the historian who has studied most closely the region’s richest slaveholders (those owning at least 250 slaves), found that about a fifth had invested in banks, factories, railroads, northern real estate, and other nonagricultural enter-

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prises. He concluded, ‘‘the large slaveholders, both in their economic motivation and behavior. . . exhibited values little different from their free-state counterparts.’’48 Southern planters felt no need to apologize for the alleged ‘‘backwardness’’ of their economy; on the contrary, they became overconfident that their control of cotton, the most valuable product in the country’s foreign trade and an essential commodity in the world’s ongoing industrial revolution, would make them economically invulnerable in case of war.

Southern Cultures: Religion Just as the South’s economy is often contrasted, implicitly or explicitly, with the North’s, so primary aspects of antebellum southern white culture are often contrasted with northern counterparts. These differences may be summarized as those between a ‘‘traditional’’ South and a ‘‘modern’’ North, or between a ‘‘paternalist’’ South and a ‘‘capitalist’’ (or ‘‘bourgeois’’) North: the South was rural, kin-centered, heavily influenced by evangelical Christianity, hierarchical, and male-dominated, while the North was urban, individualistic and focused narrowly on the nuclear family of parents and children, more liberal in religion and egalitarian, and marked by a gendered culture of ‘‘separate spheres’’ that led women into a variety of benevolent reform movements, including abolition and, ultimately, women’s rights. As sectional conflict escalated in the decades before the Civil War, contemporaries gave such stereotypes a sharp moral edge, and southerners often traced them back to alleged differences between royalist ‘‘cavaliers’’ and Puritan ‘‘roundheads’’ during the seventeenth-century English Civil War. Thus, a Mississippi planter in 1857 contrasted the South’s ‘‘hightoned gentlemen descended from the ‘cavaliers’ ’’ to the northerners descended from the ‘‘narrow minded, sanctimonious, biggots, who landed at Plymouth Rock.’’49 Others identified southern culture with the old Scottish culture depicted in the wildly popular historical romances of Sir Walter Scott. Yet in their cultures, as in their economies, South and North were more similar than either contemporaries or many later historians have acknowledged. By 1830, the evangelical denominations that had taken root in the late colonial period had deepened their influence and embraced a large majority of white southerners. This influence owed much to

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a revival movement touched off in Kentucky in 1801, started by Presbyterians but later dominated by Methodists and Baptists. At revivals, teams of preachers simultaneously terrified their audiences with condemnations of their sinfulness and vivid descriptions of the punishment that was waiting for them in hell, and comforted them with the message that Christ was ready to accept and forgive all who genuinely repented. This ultimately optimistic message was received with fervor by both blacks and whites, who responded to the message of salvation and found solace as members of intimate and supportive communities. From Kentucky, the revival movement spread south and east, and Baptists and Methodists, whose more spectacular emotionalism attracted thousands to outdoor camp meetings, gathered up most of the converts; ultimately a majority of white southerners adhered to one or the other of these denominations. The old Catholic strongholds of Louisiana remained exceptional, and the Episcopal and, to a lesser extent, the Presbyterian churches, with their attention to an educated clergy, remained the favored denominations of the slaveholding elite. Even the latter two denominations, though, were much affected in tone by the evangelical movement. Over time, the fervor of the revival cooled and the major denominations became more institutionalized. To train their ministers, they established seminaries, as northern denominations had done in the colonial era, and, to educate southern young men and women, colleges such as Emory and Georgia Female College (by Methodists in Georgia), Furman (by Baptists in South Carolina), and Davidson (by Presbyterians in North Carolina). They published and disseminated journals, tracts, and sermons, and hired missionaries to spread the Gospel. In cities and towns, their ministers became well-paid and influential professionals, their churches among the region’s most eminent and elaborate structures. Evangelical theology stressed individual salvation rather than improvement of this world, and evangelical churches policed their members by bringing them to account for drunkenness, gambling, or spousal abuse; although expulsion was their only sanction, the emotional and social benefits of membership in the church community were powerful incentives to conform. While ministers avoided formal and overt intervention in partisan politics, southerners participated eagerly in the movements for benevolent religious reform that are most often associated with northern

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evangelicalism; they supported Bible and tract societies to reach out to the unchurched, missions to Indians and slaves, and temperance societies. This modernization of evangelicalism displeased some members, especially in rural areas, where splinter denominations such as the Primitive Baptists rejected missionary movements and preferred local, unlettered preachers to the more educated clergy in the cities and towns. The evangelical movement embraced blacks as well as whites, and by about 1830, Christianity had reached a majority of slaves for the first time, despite continuing resistance from masters who preferred to keep their slaves away from outside influences. Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians worked hard to convert black southerners; the Baptists, with their openness to lay leaders and their emotional services, were the most successful. Many churches throughout plantation areas had more black than white members. Black members sat in segregated balconies and had no say in how a church was run, but did often hold the power to judge one another’s transgressions in meetings of members, much as whites did for one another. The most pious blacks (in the judgment of whites) were formally recognized as ministers of the Gospel. In some cities, free blacks and slaves founded largely independent congregations. Savannah alone had four independent black Baptist churches. In Richmond, after 20 years of campaigning for independence within the local Baptist association, black Baptists in 1841 established the First African Baptist Church. Virginia law required that whites supervise the church and that the pastor be white, but the white supervisory committee and the pastor, the Reverend Robert Ryland, left most of the church’s management in the hands of black deacons, and Ryland allowed the congregation to evade the law, passed after Nat Turner’s Rebellion, that forbade free blacks to preach.50 First African seated 1500 congregants, and the church soon became a major center of community life for Richmond’s blacks, both slave and free. Most black religious life took place, not in cities, but on farms and plantations. On large plantations, some masters brought in white ministers to preach, but the most important religious leaders were black preachers chosen by the slaves themselves. Sometimes recognized by official denominations, and sometimes not, these preachers often carried great authority in the slave quarters. When religious meetings were forbidden, rural slaves retreated to

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secret ‘‘brush arbors,’’ where they could meet out of the sight and hearing of whites. Gertrude Thomas, a slave mistress and devout Christian, more than once attended black worship services in her home, Augusta, especially to hear sermons by Sam Drayton, ‘‘a negro of extraordinary talent and cultivation.’’ Thomas described one service when Drayton ‘‘was calling mourners’’ to the altar. One of her own slaves, Aunt Pink, fell to the floor and ‘‘rose and commenced shouting,’’ then another, Amanda, went to the altar, prompting Amanda’s mother, Lurany, to raise her hands ‘‘in such a perfect ecstasy of gratitude, that words were not requisite.’’ From the congregation, Thomas wrote, ‘‘a low moaning sound would be heard, gradually growing louder and louder until it became a perfect wail—This would be begun by one and taken up by another until it becomes the most awful harrowing sound I almost ever listened to. I cannot describe its effect upon me.’’51 Thomas’s brief account gives a glimpse of the ethos of black religious performance. White Methodists and Baptists knew about emotionalism in worship, but even they were often both taken aback and drawn in by the shouting, singing, crying call-and-response between preacher and congregation in black services. When Frederick Law Olmsted visited a service in New Orleans, he was ‘‘surprised to find my own muscles all stretched, as if ready for a struggle—my face glowing, and my feet stamping.’’52 African Americans transformed traditional hymns into ‘‘spirituals,’’ sometimes created on the spot in a communal process, as a leader first called out verses, taken from various sources, and put them into a familiar tune, with the congregation taking them up in response. The spirituals recorded in the 1860s, when whites first paid enough attention to write them down, focused above all on Jesus as both friend and savior, and on Moses. The spirituals indicate a powerful identification with the children of Israel whom Moses led out of Egyptian bondage. Alongside, and sometimes fused with, this evangelical Christianity were folk practices rooted in African religions. On the Atlantic Coast especially, an African ring ceremony evolved into the ring ‘‘shout,’’ a ritual during which members of the congregation circled, keeping separate rhythms with feet and hands, accompanied by distinctive songs. Outside of Christian practice altogether, slaves (and sometimes whites) turned to practitioners of voodoo or to ‘‘root doctors’’ to cope with illness, jealousy, or signs of haunting spirits. Frederick

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Douglass, for example, turned to his fellow slave Sandy when he was about to go to a showdown with his master; Sandy gave him a root that, he promised, would protect Douglass from punishment. The world of religion gave slaves some space for autonomous cultural practice, and it provided a source of community, a role for leadership, and a message of hope for the future outside the purview of white masters and white preachers.

Southern Cultures: Family, Kinship, Gender Kinship ties were powerful among southerners, both white and black (as they were among northerners). Emotional and pragmatic ties extended well beyond the narrow bounds of the nuclear family, and these networks in the South tended to be more interwoven than in the North. Southern families were also somewhat larger than northern, especially among the rich; by the Civil War, northern elite women were having fewer children than their southern counterparts. The ideal for white women throughout the United States revolved around family duties and responsibilities: the domestic labor of raising children, managing the household, and serving as loving helpmeets for their husbands. These duties meant constant involvement with their many children—suffering the discomfort and danger of pregnancy and childbirth, nursing infants, educating children in both character and intellect, guiding young people to make good marriage choices. For most women, managing households meant serious and sustained physical labor: washing, cleaning, cooking, sewing, and gardening. In many poor families, women’s domestic labor was supplemented, especially at harvest time, by hard work in the fields, but in wealthy families, household labor was eased or eliminated by the work of slaves–though with a corresponding increase in the tasks of managing slaves and caring for the ill. Evangelical theology and practice identified women with religious piety and reinforced conservative family ideals that emphasized the supremacy of men in public life and private decisionmaking. One of the most important duties of women was to ensure that their children grew up to be equally pious. If the letters and diaries that have survived are an indication, this ideal matched reality for many women, who (as in the North) dominated evangelical churches in numbers, though not in power.

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Men wielded power in most households with the support of legal authority as well as of religious culture. According to one southern judge, ‘‘The wife must be subject to the husband’’ and ‘‘every man must govern his household.’’53 Southern states inherited the English common law tradition that assigned all property (including women’s inherited property) and all power within the family to the husband. Major family decisions, such as the choice to uproot a family to move west, were often made by men alone. When the highly intelligent and spirited Varina Howell Davis complained to her husband Jefferson about difficulties that arose from her conflicts with Davis’s brother, Joseph, Jefferson blamed her for everything and admonished her to follow ‘‘a line of conduct suited to the character of your husband, and demanded by your duties as a wife.’’ Otherwise it would be ‘‘impossible for us ever to live together.’’ What she thought of this harsh rebuke is unrecorded, though she later told her mother that ‘‘I . . . absolutely look upon Jeff’s pleasure or displeasure as a minor consideration to my own duty.’’54 The impact of women’s socialization is reflected in a journal entry by Gertrude Thomas, who wrote that her husband had ‘‘just such a master will as suits my woman’s nature, for true to my sex, I delight in looking up and love to feel my woman’s weakness protected by man’s superior strength.’’55 Most of this portrait of women’s lives could be applied with equal accuracy to the North. Evangelical religious denominations nationally attracted a majority of Americans, including a large majority of women. In both North and South, men controlled property and monopolized public life, and women’s work was mainly unpaid domestic labor. In both North and South, many women went to work in low-paid jobs as servants or needle workers or in textile factories. In both North and South, many exceptions to these generalizations existed. Wealthy white women in the South, for example, often controlled a good deal of wealth, either because they had been given independent estates by their parents that could not be touched by their husbands without permission, or because they were widows who had not remarried. Family life in practice and ideology for whites evolved in the same broad direction in both sections, toward a softening of male control over property and toward a greater emphasis on the private emotional life of the nuclear family. Records of post offices and booksellers show that, even in small towns, southerners eagerly

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purchased nationally popular novels and subscribed to northern magazines that portrayed and promoted newer ideals of domestic womanhood. Legal changes weakened the untrammeled power of the husband and father that characterized the common law. Mississippi was the first state in the country to give married women property rights independent of their husbands, and all but four other southern states followed suit before the Civil War. All southern states but South Carolina followed the national trend of creating a new right to divorce (common law had allowed for separations only, without the right to remarry). In several southern states, legislatures and courts broadened divorce law so that women could win divorces on grounds of mental cruelty alone. Courts in the South also began to award custody of children in broken marriages to women, when that was considered to be in the children’s best interest.56 Surviving letters between husbands and wives, and parents and children, display in both North and South similar ideals of marriage and family, ideals that historians have sometimes associated exclusively with the northern middle class. Thus marriage was to be based on affection and companionship, and parents ‘‘played only an indirect role in courtship’’; they might intervene to exercise a veto over a marriage choice, but they rarely tried to force any particular match on either a son or a daughter.57 Expectations for children were similar in North and South; sons and daughters alike should be trained, in their respective spheres, in industry, selfdiscipline, and self-reliance. Elite women in the South began to receive educations commensurate with these changing ideas. The 1841 catalog of the Judson Institute in Alabama, a school for young women, included classes in chemistry, algebra, philosophy, and physiology, and at the Female High School in Gaffney, South Carolina, students formed a Sigourney Club (named after a popular woman novelist from Connecticut) that subscribed to northern periodicals and debated such topics as, ‘‘Were the white men justified in driving the Indians from North America?’’58 Southern women also began to participate more consistently and openly in public life, though within limits set by southern law and custom. In cities and towns, women supported the new benevolent associations designed to bring religion and proper social training to the poor and unchurched, raising money for societies that distributed Bibles and religious tracts, teaching in Sabbath schools,

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supporting the cause of temperance, and founding orphanages for poor children. As in the North, such women (as well as men) usually came from urban, professional or business families, and they did so usually under the auspices of their local churches. To be sure, the South lacked the dense network of associational life that characterized the urban northeast; the South remained a mainly rural society. Rural women, whether on farms or plantations, were relatively isolated from regular contact with others, and they were also, usually, very busy. So, too, southern white women did not hold offices in churches or in associations that included men, nor speak in public about public affairs, as a few women began to do in the North in the 1830s. But southern women attended lectures and debates at lyceums and contributed to public debates through the written word, publishing letters to editors and pamphlets on a wide range of subjects, even serving as newspaper editors in a few instances. And it must be remembered that, in the North, when antislavery women demanded the right to speak in public, or, later, campaigned for the right to vote, even most abolitionists were shocked. Quite aside from the fact that the women who first provoked these divisions in abolitionist ranks were Angelina and Sarah Grimke´, daughters of a wealthy South Carolina slaveowner, it is an error to base regional comparisons on these untypical cases. Broadly speaking and in most respects, white southerners and white northerners were very much a part of the same American culture. In family life, as in so many other ways, it was slavery that distinguished southern whites from northern. Individual masters and mistresses could not help but see slaves as people and form emotional attachments (not necessarily happy ones) to some of them. Some masters developed genuine affection and trust for favored slaves, especially domestic servants and highly skilled slaves. Slave mistresses often became attached to their women servants, providing them with extra food and special gifts, and spending long hours nursing sick slaves. Some wives intervened with their husbands to try to prevent a slave from being punished or to purchase the spouse of a favored slave. James C. Johnston, a North Carolina owner of more than 500 slaves, left his slave Peter in charge of one of his three plantations, and the literate Peter wrote to Johnston about the condition of the plantation.59 Some masters fell in love with slaves. Robert Stafford and David Dickson of Georgia, and Robert Hairston of Mississippi, were

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among large planters who took slave mistresses, lived with them openly for years, and left large estates in their wills to the children produced by these relationships. In Louisiana, one historian found that ‘‘almost every major planter family had at least one member whose alliance with a slave woman became a subject of court records,’’ usually because white relatives challenged wills that freed slaves or left them property. Wealthy whites in Augusta, Georgia, were scandalized when George Eve, of a prominent slaveholding family, fell in love with an enslaved woman and took her north so he could free and marry her.60 Far more common, though, was raw sexual exploitation of slaves by masters and overseers. James H. Hammond carried on a longrunning liaison with a slave he had purchased with her young daughter, then later took up with the daughter. He refused to free his children of the first relationship, on the grounds that it would be cruel to send them to the North. Judge Samuel Boyd of Natchez kept a slave mistress, Virginia, long enough to have three children with her, but when he feared that his wife might learn of the relationship, he sent Virginia and her children to Texas to be sold.61 Many white women did know about their husbands’ relationships with slaves, but they could do little about it. One former slave recounted the story of Diana, who told her mistress of being raped by her master, but the mistress ‘‘couldn’t help her, because she was afraid of her own husband. He would beat her if she tried to meddle.’’62 In one notorious case in Missouri, Celia, a slave who had been repeatedly raped by her master, fought back and killed him. Because of their sympathy for her, local whites went to extraordinary lengths to provide her with good legal counsel, but she was convicted and hanged; killing a master was murder, but there was no such crime as rape of a slave. Such sexual relationships prompted private denunciations of slavery by a number of white women in slave-owning families. Gertrude Thomas, who perhaps suspected both her father and her husband of having sex with slaves, wrote in her journal that ‘‘Southern women are I believe all at heart abolisionists,’’ partly because of sympathy for female slaves, but more because she believed that ‘‘the institution of slavery degrades the white man more than the Negro and oh exerts a most deleterious effect upon our children.’’ White men who were discreet about these sexual relationships had little to fear from public opinion. Gertrude Thomas complained of the ‘‘very very great

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injustice’’ of the sexual double standard that winked at men’s sex relationships with slaves while condemning women for any sex outside marriage.63 However great the burdens that slavery placed on white family relationships, they could not compare to the burdens on the families of the slaves themselves. The great majority of slaves were members of genuine families, not the slave master’s pseudo ‘‘family,’’ and most slave children grew up with mothers and fathers who did their best under difficult conditions. Masters and overseers who raped slave women took a terrible toll on family life. Masters also had enormous power to inflict psychological punishment on husbands and wives, or parents and children, who might be forced to watch, helpless to intervene, while the other was whipped. The owners’ power to split apart families by gift or sale was limited only by their consciences and their business practices. Indeed, the threat of punishment by sale was one of the strongest weapons of masters who, like the Reverend Jones, were trying to prevent ‘‘rebellious conduct.’’ Unlike Jones, however, most masters paid little or no attention to family ties in such sales; thus, one South Carolina judge noted in 1833 that ‘‘the owners of slaves frequently send them off from amongst their kindred and associates as a punishment, and it is frequently resorted to, as the means of separating a vicious negro from amongst others.’’ Another South Carolina master, in his 1855 will, suggested that ‘‘young negroes’’ should be sold if they were ‘‘turbulent or otherwise troublesome.’’64 Slave families on small farms and in towns often faced the additional problems that came when husbands and wives had different owners—a situation faced by perhaps one in four slave marriages. Such couples typically saw one another only on weekends, and two masters, not just one, might cause a permanent separation by sale or migration. At a minimum, parents’ authority and control over their children was continually challenged by masters, who provided basic subsistence and housing and had the final right to punish. Nevertheless, within the limits of commercial advantage, masters usually supported slave family life. James H. Hammond wrote that ‘‘marriage is to be encouraged as it adds to the comfort, happiness & health of those who enter upon it, besides insuring a greater increase.’’65 Hammond and most other planters allowed slaves to marry freely, at least within the bounds of their own plantations, reduced the work loads for pregnant slave women, and provided

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separate cabins for each family. Favored slaves might even be given big weddings, complete with a wedding dress. Careful analyses of the accounts in the 1930s of their childhoods by former slaves suggests that 65 percent of slaves grew up in households with both their mothers and fathers present. Another 20 percent grew up with just one parent, nearly always the mother, and the remaining 15 percent had lived as children with others, or alone, or in the master’s house. Of the children living with mothers alone, about one in six had white fathers, while in other cases the parents were owned by separate masters, or the marriage had been broken up, either voluntarily or by the actions of owners. The experience of family life differed a great deal on bigger plantations from that on farms with fewer than 15 slaves or in towns and cities. On large, successful plantations with few sales, many potential spouses were available, and slave communities were able to build up a rich family life, with multiple generations of interlocking family lines.66 A number of historians have argued that the peculiar circumstances of slavery, as well as traditions surviving from Africa, made slave families more ‘‘matrifocal,’’ centered more on the authority of the mother than was true of white families. Many slave fathers, especially on smaller holdings, could not be present most of the time, and, unlike white fathers, they did not have the primary responsibility for the care and feeding of their children. These factors alone probably made relationships between slave husbands and wives more egalitarian than was true for most whites, but fathers were still important figures in the lives of most young slaves, as we can see from the pronounced tendency for boys to be named for their fathers. Even absentee fathers could help their children by providing extra food from hunting, fishing, or garden crops. Most skilled slave artisans were men, and these skilled workers could sometimes earn incomes through self-hiring or extra work. A large number of slave families managed to accumulate property by earning extra money by selling products of the fields or the hunt, by making craft products, or by working on Sundays for extra pay. In extraordinary cases, highly skilled slaves could substantially raise the living standards of their families. Sam Williams, a refiner at Buffalo Forge iron works in Virginia, regularly earned about $50 per year in the 1850s though overwork, depositing it in a savings bank account and using it to buy, among other things, expensive

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silks, ‘‘fine shoes,’’ and a ‘‘looking glass.’’67 After the Civil War, the Claims Commission set up by Congress to reimburse loyal southerners whose property had been taken or damaged by Union troops heard testimony from hundreds of slaves about their ownership, not only of food and small personal items, but also of horses, wagons, and other expensive items.68 On large holdings in South Carolina and Georgia, slave parents and grandparents passed down family traditions, taught songs, and told stories of ghosts and tricksters that had migrated with them from Africa. On Louisiana’s large sugar plantations, a similar process transmitted lore from Caribbean syncretic traditions such as vodun (or voodoo). On smaller slaveholdings, where many more marriages were necessarily between partners having different owners, just one-third of slave children grew up with both parents present. The fathers and husbands in these marriages, through their regular travels on the weekends, helped to keep a larger slave community in contact across plantation lines. Even when cut off from their parents or other relatives, many slaves came to depend on what has been called a ‘‘malleable extended family’’ that provided them with material and psychological support. On one Louisiana plantation just before the Civil War, ‘‘young unmarried mothers were sheltered in the households of their parents; orphans lived permanently with kin or friends; and young or otherwise dependent siblings were cared for in the households of older siblings, whether these were married or unmarried.’’ Still, the damage slavery caused to family life was immense. Records of slaveowners and testimony from former slaves both show that the psychological pressures of slavery resulted at times in domestic violence and conflict in the slave quarters. Former slaves have described harsh treatment from parents or other relatives, and some have told of masters who intervened to protect women or children from physical abuse by other slaves.69

Slaves’ Resistance, Masters’ Fears Slaveowners knew slaves could resist them by violence, even murder. Mary Chesnut of South Carolina wrote, in 1861, of the poisoning of an elderly cousin by slaves. Near Natchez in 1857, slaves conspired successfully to murder an overseer on a big plantation. In

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1827, John Hamlin of Virginia, known as a brutal master, was buried alive by a group of his slaves. In all three cases, the slaves were tried, convicted, and hanged.70 Perhaps the most famous act of individual resistance is young Frederick Douglass’s conflict with a Mr. Covey. Covey was a nonslaveholder with a reputation as a slave-breaker; he had hired Douglass from his master. One day, Douglass, rather than submit to the whip, fought back until Covey gave up the attempt to subdue him. Covey’s fear for his reputation if he should ask for help or seriously injure Douglass seems to have prevented him from taking further action; he never tried to whip Douglass again. Laura Smalley, an elderly former slave interviewed decades later, recalled her Uncle Jesse as a ‘‘great big ol’ man’’ who could not be whipped. ‘‘He’d get him a stick an’ keep them off.’’ In this case, the master feared that Jesse might get killed by the overseer and decided to punish him by putting him on short rations.71 But such cases were unusual. Douglass saw an overseer shoot down and kill one slave who refused an order to come to be whipped. It was not considered a crime if a slave died while resisting ‘‘moderate correction.’’ More frightening to white slaveholders than slave individual resistance, even murder, was the prospect of collective violence. In 1829, David Walker, an African American who had recently moved from North Carolina to Boston, published a pamphlet, David Walker’s Appeal, in which he bitterly denounced slavery and slaveholders and called on slaves to rise up in rebellion. ‘‘Do not trifle,’’ he told them; ‘‘if there is an attempt made by us, kill or be killed.’’72 Southern whites were horrified to discover copies of the Appeal in the hands of slaves in Savannah, where they may have been carried by black mariners, and later in Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Louisiana. Just two years later, the largest slave rebellion of the antebellum era erupted under the leadership of a charismatic Virginia slave, Nat Turner. Turner believed that God had marked him for a special purpose and that the Holy Spirit had visited him more than once. He interpreted a solar eclipse in February 1831 as a sign to begin the work of liberating his people; he began that work the next summer on August 22. He and his followers, about 70 in all, killed his owner’s family, then passed from plantation to plantation, killing more than 50 other men, women, and children with pikes and swords. Soon white men were out in force, tracking down and dispersing Turner’s group;

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as they scoured the countryside, they murdered with impunity dozens of innocent slaves and free blacks. Forty-five slaves and five free blacks were arrested and tried in Southampton; some were acquitted, some transported out of state, and 18, including Turner, were hanged.73 The Turner rebellion deeply frightened whites throughout the South. It was a reminder that a slave was not just property, but, as one Virginian said, ‘‘a man as well as his master,’’ and thus liable ‘‘to be misled by extravagant expectations,’’ especially ‘‘with the voice of a mighty movement for his emancipation sounding always in his ears.’’74 Indeed, Turner’s bloody rebellion prompted a serious debate (to be considered below) in Virginia about the future of slavery. But its end result—the capture and execution of the leaders, the terrorizing of slaves and free blacks throughout southeastern Virginia, and the passage of laws further restricting the rights of all blacks to meet, worship, and attend school, pointed out to slaves the great cost of rebellion. Unlike in Haiti, where slaves had successfully revolted in the 1790s, whites were an absolute majority throughout most parts of the South. Whites controlled all the public means of communication, and widespread conspiratorial plans were subject to betrayal if an individual slave, either for self-protection or out of genuine attachment to an owner, revealed those plans to authorities. Slave resistance was usually not a matter of individual or collective violence; it took many forms, as it had from the first years of colonial slavery: shirking work, damaging tools, and stealing food (which, they thought, belonged to them as much as to their owners). Thousands of slaves ran away. Frederick Douglass was one of the relatively few who made it to the North and freedom. Douglass’s Maryland contemporary, Harriet Tubman, ran away in 1849, then returned in a series of trips in the 1850s to lead to freedom about 70 more slaves, including many of her own kin. But flight to the free states was far easier for slaves in border states such as Maryland than it was for slaves in the lower South. Jane, the runaway slave of the Reverend Jones, is more typical of lowerSouth slaves seeking permanent freedom; she headed to the nearest city and hired herself out as a free woman. In rural areas, slaves ran off to forests and swamps, where they sometimes survived indefinitely on their own, or, more likely, with the connivance of slaves still on the plantation who secretly sent them food. Slaves ran away to

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try to reach spouses or children, or to return to familiar neighborhoods after they had been sold, or to prevent a beating, or to protest against what they considered unjust treatment. Douglass, before his fight with Covey, had run off to his master to complain about Covey’s harsh treatment. Running away was often a sort of labor strike, intended to give slaves leverage to improve daily life or simply to take some time off. Historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger estimate that runaways numbered about 50,000 per year in the decade before the Civil War.75

Southern Honor and Southern Violence Antebellum white southerners were more prone to personal violence than northerners, and to critics of slavery, this was another sign of the South’s backwardness and another consequence of the corruption caused by unchecked power over slaves. Many southerners accepted a higher level of violence as a necessary price to pay for a culture that valued personal honor over personal gain. The ethic of honor centered on individual and family reputation. It embraced traditional ideas of patriarchal rule; women upheld their own and their families’ honor with their chaste behavior, men by their own honorable behavior and by their willingness to resent and challenge insults to themselves or their families. For ‘‘gentlemen,’’ the quintessential ritual of masculine honor was the duel, in which two men of equal status risked their lives in public combat. In some cases, duels followed arcane rules for challenge, counterchallenge, selection of weapons, and roles for seconds and spectators. Dozens of southern politicians, including Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, fought duels, and dozens of others satisfied challengers with elaborately conceived and publicized apologies. Newspaper editors, for whom the hurling of insults was practically part of the job, were at even greater risk of challenges. Dueling was primarily an elite ritual; those of high status did not recognize the right of their inferiors to participate in a duel, and those of lower status, less obsessed with ritual, were more likely to defend their honor in violent brawls like those depicted in Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes. To northerners, dueling was a prime example of southern ‘‘barbarism,’’ but it was neither especially ‘‘backward’’ nor uniquely

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southern. Its popularity in the United States dated mainly from the Revolution, where Americans learned it from French officers. It spread north as well as south—the most celebrated of all American duels was between two New York politicians, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, in 1804, and, in 1838, U.S. Representative Jonathon Cilley of Maine was killed in a duel with a representative from Kentucky over an incident that began with Cilley’s verbal attack on a New York City newspaper editor. Abraham Lincoln himself was challenged to a duel in 1842, and felt he could not turn it down without a loss of face, although the duel was avoided when friends of Lincoln and his challenger negotiated an honorable settlement. Furthermore, dueling came under fierce condemnation within the South itself, especially from the evangelical denominations that had spread their own influence so deeply and widely. In sermons and periodicals, southern ministers denounced dueling as ‘‘a relic of feudal barbarism,’’ ‘‘a detestable practice,’’ ‘‘murder.’’ Antidueling organizations sprang up in Charleston, Savannah, and other towns, with the goals of preventing specific duels and changing public opinion about the acceptability of dueling.76 Violence persisted at a high level partly because the South was rural and, in many places, still a semifrontier society. For example, violence was rampant among both elite and poorer men in frontier middle Florida when it was settled in the 1820s and 1830s. Wealthy planters frequently engaged in violence against both enemies of similar status—either in duels or in simple fights—and those of lower status who refused to offer them proper deference. In a Florida village in 1838, according to a traveler from France, everyone ‘‘seemed to be fighting; here two drunken men were dragging themselves along to attack each other; there farmers were amusing themselves by lashing unfortunate slaves . . . , farther on young men were blaming themselves for the murder of a relative, and murderous weapons gleamed immediately in their hands.’’ The courts there tolerated violence by elite men; between 1825 and 1833, the average punishment meted out to eleven wealthy planters charged with assault in one county was a fine of $6.81. But following an economic downturn, a series of political defeats suffered by the local planter elite, a season of religious revivals, and, finally, a return of prosperity, violence of all kinds in the region declined, and ‘‘duels disappeared.’’77 Joanne Freeman, an historian who has examined the important role of honor in the political conflicts of the new nation in

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the 1790s, has argued that, ‘‘in a sense, Northerners and Southerners spoke different dialects of the language of honor, balancing the conflicting value systems of honor, religion, and the law in regionally distinct ways.’’78 Thus, with honor, as with economic orientation and religion, southern white culture can be seen as one variation of a single, national culture, not a distinct civilization. In only one way did the society and culture in the North and South truly stand apart, but that way was, of course, all important: the North, state by state before 1805, gave up racial slavery, and the South did not.

The Geography and Politics of Slavery It was a matter of decisive political significance that slavery was never uniformly spread through the slave states, but varied widely in importance from place to place. While slaves labored in a wide range of occupations and profited their owners in many ways, they were concentrated in places where soil and climate made it possible to grow the principal commercial crops: tobacco in southern and central Virginia; rice along the southeastern Atlantic coast; sugar in southern Louisiana, and cotton in the broad swath of territory, stretching from southern North Carolina to Texas, where a growing season of at least 200 days allowed it to flourish. Rice, cotton, and sugar, and, therefore, slavery, were much more important in the lower South than in the upper South. In Maryland, the number of slaves actually dropped in the 1850s, and, by 1860, slaves made up just one-eighth of the population. Other upperSouth states had similar proportions: one-fifth in Kentucky and one-tenth in Missouri. (Delaware, with just 1,800 slaves and almost 20,000 free blacks in 1860, was in most respects already a free state). In the lower South, slaves made up almost half the population, and they were a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina. The prosperity of the white elite in these states depended almost entirely on the exploitation of slave labor. The difference between a lower South overwhelmingly dependent on slavery, and an upper South much less so, was a constant concern for the band of southern sectionalists and nationalists who made the defense of slavery the paramount object of their politics after 1820. They always

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suspected, with good reason, that Virginia or Maryland might fall short in defending slavery, or might even follow the example of northern states that ended slavery after the American Revolution. The uneven geographic distribution of slavery was crucial also within each state. The cotton plantation belt of middle Georgia was far more dependent on slavery than the mountainous north. In Virginia, where slaves were about 39 percent of the population in 1830, the tobacco regions resembled the cotton states, while slaves were less than one-sixth of the population west of the Blue Ridge. The implications of such divisions were clear in 1832 in the great debate in the Virginia legislature over proposals to emancipate the state’s slaves. The debate was prompted by Nat Turner’s bloody rebellion, but, although the uprising had taken place in an eastern county with many slaves, the demand to move toward emancipation in Virginia came from the west. In early 1832, legislators engaged in two weeks of searching discussion of a variety of emancipation proposals. Some, but not many, of the antislavery legislators argued that slavery was wrong because it violated the natural rights of blacks. Many more argued that slavery was harmful to whites, not only because it was dangerous, as Nat Turner had shown, but also because it hindered economic progress. All the emancipation proposals followed the Jeffersonian idea of gradual emancipation to be followed by expulsion of the freed slaves. Eastern Virginia delegates defended slavery, claiming that it protected inferior blacks and elevated the morals of masters. Their principal argument, though, was economic: slaves were valuable property, and no state legislature could rightfully take away property without the consent of the owner and full compensation. After two weeks, the House of Delegates voted down, by a vote of 73 to 58, a motion stating that it was ‘‘expedient’’ for Virginia to develop a plan to end slavery in the state. The House did agree to a motion urging the removal of all free Negroes from the state, but that otherwise ‘‘a further action for the removal of slaves should await a more definite development of public opinion.’’ The votes followed sectional lines: east of the Blue Ridge mountains representatives overwhelmingly opposed emancipation; west of the Blue Ridge, the vote favored abolition. The final votes would have been much closer, but probably not reversed, if the legislature had been apportioned strictly according to white population, rather than in a manner that guaranteed a majority to the east.79

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The Planters’ Political Problem: Versions of Antislavery In the 1830s, the rise of a new kind of antislavery movement in the North energized southern leaders to suppress internal opposition to slavery, by censorship, expulsion, or crowd violence. William Lloyd Garrison, a young Bostonian, published the first issue of The Liberator on January 1, 1831, appealing to all Americans to abolish slavery immediately on the grounds that it was a profound national sin. Garrison’s voice became the most prominent in a movement that spread quickly through New England, then westward, although abolitionists were, in the 1830s, extremely unpopular in most of the North. As a frightening example of what could happen after years of antislavery agitation, the southern elite could look across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where Parliament had bowed to antislavery pressure and approved a plan for gradual emancipation in British colonies, starting in 1834. In the face of such uncompromising attacks on slavery from the North, it became almost impossible to criticize slavery openly in many parts of the lower South. Possession of antislavery literature could lead to mob attacks, and even private comments might be dangerous. For example, in Lafayette County, Mississippi, in 1851, after a Methodist minister, William Hale, said in a conversation that the Bible did not support slavery, several local slaveholders denounced him in the local newspaper. Opponents of slavery from the lower South either kept quiet or left the region. Angelina and Sarah Grimke´ of South Carolina moved to Philadelphia, where they became pioneers in both the abolitionist and the women’s rights movements. James G. Birney of Kentucky and Alabama moved to New York and in 1840 became the first presidential candidate of the abolitionist Liberty Party. In the upper South, criticism of slavery continued, even though northern-style abolitionism was suppressed. In Kentucky, a former slaveholder, Cassius Clay, openly agitated for emancipation throughout the antebellum era. Like Virginia’s antislavery legislators in 1832, Clay argued that Kentucky’s economic development was being held back by slavery. He propagated his views in a newspaper, True American, and, when a mob forced him out of Lexington, he moved across the river to Cincinnati and continued

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to publish. In 1851, he ran for governor of Kentucky as an emancipationist. Another Kentuckian, John Fee, son of a slaveholder, campaigned against slavery on moral grounds after he experienced a religious conversion. Cassius Clay thought Fee was too radical, but the two cooperated in founding a school at Berea, dedicated to antislavery. In Virginia, a number of editors continued to criticize slavery and call for emancipation, though always to be followed by expulsion of the freed slaves from the state. In 1857, Hinton Rowan Helper, a son of white North Carolina yeoman parents who had moved north, published The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. Helper shared neither the moral nor the religious sensibilities of Garrison; indeed, some of his publications were viciously racist. In his view, the white nonslaveholders of the South were the primary victims of slavery. With elaborate statistics, Helper tried to show that slavery had made the South poorer by far than the North and that planters followed policies that helped themselves at the expense of their poorer white neighbors. Helper called on the nonslaveholding majority to seize political control of the South from the ‘‘Despotism of the Oligarchy’’ and to tax slavery out of existence, then expel the emancipated slaves to Africa. Realistic white southerners, despite their many claims to the contrary, knew that most slaves never accepted the legitimacy of their bondage and that they had to depend on support from the majority of voters in the nation as a whole, and the majority of nonslaveholders in the South, to hold the slaves down. The nation protected slavery by enforcing the return of fugitive slaves from the North, by protecting slavery at the national borders, by opening new territory for settlement by slaveholders, and by refraining from exercising constitutional powers to limit slavery, for example, by regulating or forbidding the interstate trade in slaves. White southerners were angered that northern states did not go even further by suppressing abolitionism in the North with censorship and arrests, just as southern states did. But slaveowners depended, too, on support from southern white nonslaveholders. White men without slaves made up the backbone of the slave patrols that policed slaves at night and of the militia that was called out to repress collective resistance by slaves. As voters, nonslaveholders potentially had the power to overturn the many laws, both civil and criminal, that helped masters control and profit from their slaves.

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To be sure, slaveowners remained firmly in control of southern politics. Although in a minority in the population, slaveowners filled public offices at every level. In 1860, except in three border states, more than half of all state legislators in the slave states owned slaves. In Kentucky, for example, where just one-third of white families owned slaves, three-fifths of the state legislators and nearly three-quarters of local judges owned slaves. In western North Carolina in 1860, just 10 percent of white families owned slaves, but more than 90 percent of state legislators from the region were slaveowners. In Texas, where just over one-fourth of household heads owned slaves, over two-thirds of leaders at the local, state, and national level did so. Even in Missouri, where slaves made up just 10 percent of the population and slaveowners were a small share of the white population, more than two-fifths of both legislators and justices of the peace owned slaves in 1860. In the lower South in 1860, the proportion of legislators there who owned slaves ranged from 55 percent in Florida to 82 percent in South Carolina. About half of all lower-South legislators were planters who owned at least 20 slaves. Slaveowners’ dominance of local and state politics helped to ensure policies friendly to planter interests. Southern states, unlike northern states, did not tax themselves significantly to support public education, and the state-supported transportation projects they favored usually were aimed at making it cheaper to get commercial crops to market.80 Yet, the slaveholding elite did not rest easy. The Virginia debates of 1832 exposed the fact that large numbers of whites in the slave states wanted to see the end of slavery. By the 1850s, even the poorest white men could vote in every state. Planters fretted, publically and privately, about whether they could count on nonslaveholders in the future. They were aware that poor whites like Edward Isham frequently mingled with people of color in relatively egalitarian contexts, fighting with slaves or free blacks one day, and gambling or sleeping with them the next. Planters constantly complained that poor whites traded liquor to slaves in return for stolen goods. Poor whites did the sort of work done by slaves, and their living standards were not much different from those of slaves. Thus planters reacted with particular alarm at the appearance of Helper’s Impending Crisis, with its appeal to poor whites to take power in the South. They also supported the creation, over several decades, of an elaborate proslavery argument aimed at refuting

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abolitionist claims and shoring up support for slavery wherever it might be weakening.

Proslavery Soon after the conclusion of Virginia’s debate over slavery in 1832, a young professor at William & Mary College, Thomas Roderick Dew, published a Review of the Debate in which he attempted to demonstrate the folly of antislavery proposals. Dew’s was by no means the first defense of slavery, but he brought together a number of different arguments in a highly visible way, and his long essay marks a turning point in the development of proslavery thought. Dew searched the Bible to show that the Hebrews of the Old Testament had held slaves with God’s approval, that Jesus had never condemned slaveholding, and that Paul had apparently accepted slavery as a morally neutral institution. Slavery, he claimed, was doing God’s work by bringing heathen Africans within reach of Christianity. Dew argued that most slaves were well taken care of and contented and that slavery was a fit status for an inferior race. But he focused primarily on what he saw as the necessities rather than the morality of the case. The stark facts, he insisted, were that Virginia’s economy depended on slave labor and that it would be utterly impractical, because far too expensive, to emancipate slaves and deport them. Even so, he believed that Virginia might eventually evolve naturally into a free state as slaves were taken or sold off to more profitable regions. For slavery’s defenders, Dew provided the service of systematizing and publicizing hitherto scattered arguments and suggesting further lines of development. According to one argument, slavery was compatible with ‘‘progress’’ because it made possible the development of civilization in a hot climate like that of the lower South. Some writers turned to the latest ‘‘scientific’’ knowledge to try to demonstrate that Africans were a separately created species of mankind, biologically unfit for freedom, and subject to such defects as ‘‘drapetomania, or the disease causing negroes to run away.’’81 Proslavery writers also addressed the problem of reconciling slavery with the heritage of American liberty to which virtually all white southerners laid claim. This problem had both theoretical and practical implications. To reconcile slavery with the idea of political

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freedom, southern apologists drew on a conservative version of the republican ideology that informed nearly all American political thought in the antebellum era. To reconcile nonslaveholding whites to a slave system, they focused on the psychological benefits all whites enjoyed in a society that degraded and enslaved blacks. The survival of republican liberty, conservatives argued, required restraint among both voters and their elected representatives. The people’s rulers might be restrained by written constitutions, but the ultimate survival of ‘‘ordered’’ liberty (not to be confused with anarchy or ‘‘licentiousness’’) depended on the virtues of the people themselves. A corrupted and selfish people would choose corrupt and selfish rulers. Conservative proslavery writers were often pessimistic about the virtue of the masses, and, to prevent political participation of the poor and dependent, most early state constitutions had limited the vote, or office holding, or both, to property owners. However, democratic reforms in the 1820s and 1830s ended most of the voting restrictions on white men. Pure democracy was on the rise, and pure democracy, conservatives agreed, was a threat to the ordered and balanced liberty of true republicanism. Slavery, though, when based on racial difference, eliminated the most dependent of men from politics. Slaves could not vote, nor agitate for radical changes, nor be bribed by ambitious demagogues. Thus, so far from slavery being ‘‘incompatible with the genius of Republicanism,’’ one Baptist minister wrote, no republican government could long survive without it, as otherwise the poor would soon come to control the government through ‘‘knavish demagogues.’’ In 1835, South Carolina’s governor George McDuffie laid out the argument in detail, concluding, in a phrase that would echo through future defenses of slavery, that slavery was ‘‘the corner-stone of our republican edifice.’’82 Slaveholders also tried to assure nonslaveholders that slavery was in their own interest: while slavery degraded Africans, it made whites more equal to one another because they shared skin color. For example, Thomas Cobb, a Georgia lawyer, wrote that ‘‘every citizen feels that he belongs to an elevated class. It matters not that he is no slaveholder; he is not of the inferior race; he is a freeborn citizen; he engages in no menial occupation.’’83 The claim of northern abolitionists that slavery was sinful and that slave masters were cruel tyrants presented the greatest ideological threat to slavery, at least in the long term. If slavery

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was truly incompatible with Christianity, or if it subjected millions of innocent people to cruelty and exploitation, the practical defenses of slavery as beneficial to white prosperity and liberty would hardly be sufficient. The abolitionist condemnation of slavery as un-Christian was aimed at the consciences of the mass of white southern Christians; to the claims that slavery was inefficient or contrary to American freedoms, it added deep personal insult. Only after slaveowners came under such withering attacks from the abolitionists over the immorality of the system did proslavery writers develop consistently their counterclaim that slavery was not just a necessity, but also a profoundly moral institution; that slavery, rather than contradicting the teachings of Christianity, helped to fulfill them; that slaves were a part of a benevolent patriarchal system that embraced all relationships, including that of God to man and that of man to his wife and children. Christian ministers in the South took up the task of explaining how slavery was compatible with Christianity. Like Dew, they found it easy enough to show that slavery was compatible with the sort of literal reading of the Bible that a majority of both southerners and northerners still accepted. Ministers of all major denominations contributed essays, sermons, and tracts on these themes. When national denominations of Methodists and Baptists, under the growing influence of antislavery northerners, challenged the right of slaveholders to serve as bishops (for the Methodists) or missionaries (for the Baptists), southerners broke off to form their own denominational associations, in 1844 and 1845. By the 1850s, religious leaders were in the forefront of writers arguing that slavery was a positive good for both whites and blacks. Louisa Cheves McCord, the daughter of one of South Carolina’s great slaveowners and the wife of another, wrote confidently in 1853 of slavery as ‘‘the best possible for black and white, for slave and master,’’ that ‘‘we proclaim it . . . a Godlike dispensation, a providential caring for the weak, and a refuge for the portionless.’’ Thus, paternalism, in the words of one historian, ‘‘invoked a specific metaphor of legitimate domination: the protective domination of the father over his family.’’84 All these defenses shared a deep and almost unthinking racism. If slavery was good for the South economically, it was because Africans were specially suited for labor in tropical climates. If slavery was a Christian institution, it was because Africans were

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heathens in need of conversion—and, as many Biblical literalists claimed, because Africans had descended from Noah’s son, Ham, who with his children had been condemned to be ‘‘a servant of servants.’’ If paternalism suited slaves, it was because, as members of an intellectually and morally inferior race, they could not take care of themselves. If slavery was a necessary form of social control, it was because Africans could easily turn into dangerous savages. And if slavery preserved republican liberty, it was because inferior Africans could be permanently excluded from citizenship, thus making whites more equal to one another. Rich planters grumbled at times about the dangers of excessive democracy even among whites, and many, in private, agreed with Virginian Edmund Ruffin that universal white male suffrage was a mistake because it allowed ‘‘the mass of the most ignorant & vicious of the people’’ to put demagogues into office. More extreme still were the proslavery arguments published in the 1850s by Virginian George Fitzhugh, who implied that even the white ‘‘wage slaves’’ of England and New England would be better off as slaves. Slavery was far superior to ‘‘free society,’’ Fitzhugh argued, because under slavery, ‘‘domestic affection and self-interest shield the patriarchal subjects from oppression, and secure to them the kind treatment, protection, and support.’’85 The claim that southern slaves were better off than degraded peasants or factory workers became a staple of southern rhetoric, but it is doubtful that even Fitzhugh took seriously the idea that poor whites should be reduced to slavery. A southern politician who had even suggested such an idea would have had his career, if not his life, quickly cut short.

Conservative Americans ‘‘The institution [of slavery] is based on conservatism,’’ said Alexander H. Stephens, later vice president of the Confederacy. There was much truth in Stephens’s assertion, and it was echoed by other writers and political leaders. Thomas Cobb agreed that ‘‘political slavery is a conservative institution,’’ and James H. Hammond wrote that ‘‘stability and peace are the first desires of every slaveholder, and the true tendency of the system;’’86 That slavery should encourage a conservative resistance to northern radical abolitionism is not surprising, but many southern thinkers also

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believed that slavery helped protect not just the South, but the United States, from the excesses of modern life. Slaveholders have been ‘‘eminently conservative in our influence upon the spirit of the age,’’ in the words of South Carolina Presbyterian minister and college professor James Henley Thornwell, who authored significant works in both theology and philosophy.87 But if southerners were usually conservatives, they were still recognizably Americans in virtually all areas of life except slavery. Like other Americans, they were republicans who looked back to the American Revolution for their founding ideals and who worshiped the founding fathers. Like other Americans, they were North American imperialists who thought it natural and proper that the United States rule the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Like other Americans, they moved restlessly in search of opportunity and believed in a future of prosperity. Like the vast majority of other white Americans, white southerners believed in white supremacy and acted on those beliefs in virtually every facet of public and private life. In these ways, as in religion, family life, standards of masculinity and femininity, or the books they read, southerners belonged fully to American national culture. But it was slavery— ‘‘the great distinguishing characteristic of the Southern states,’’ as Virginian Abel Upshur put it—that encouraged southerners to adopt conservative versions of these common American values.88 Slavery helped make republican ideology in the South a conservative bulwark of the social order rather than a foundation of working-class free labor ideology, as among northern workers; slavery pushed southern Christianity toward biblical literalism and conservative theology; slavery prompted southern capitalists to invest in slaves and western land rather than factories and machines; slavery’s plantation system reinforced patriarchal notions of the family rather than promoting the new feminism that appeared in the townbased middle-class culture in the northeast. Slavery’s apologists said that its conservatism explained why the South had escaped the plagues of feminism, anarchism, Mormonism, and other ‘‘isms’’ spread in the North by freedom run to excess. Slavery, said Stephen Elliott, editor of a compendium of proslavery essays, had been left as a legacy to southerners: ‘‘we have grown up with it; it has grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength, until it is now incorporated with every fibre of our social and political existence.’’ And it was slavery, according Elliot, that had become the ‘‘one great

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question dividing the American people, and that, to the greater danger and stability of our government, the concord and harmony of our citizens, and the perpetuation of our liberties, divides us by a geographical line.’’89 Elliott published these thoughts in January 1860. One year later, his own state of Mississippi became the second state after South Carolina to leave the Union.

5 The Politics of Slavery and the Road to Secession

A wave of political democratization swept the South, as it did the rest of the United States, after 1820, with suffrage restrictions eliminated, more offices becoming elective rather than appointive, and a new national party system mobilizing voters with unprecedented effectiveness. Since the Revolution, political institutions had changed little in the southern states. In most, voting and officeholding were still restricted to property owners or taxpayers, and both governors and local officials were more often appointed rather than elected. In the seaboard states, legislative apportionment was skewed toward the east, heavily populated by slaves. Thus in western North Carolina in 1819, 23 legislators represented a white population of 223,000, while in eastern North Carolina, 36 men represented just 173,000 whites.1 Democratization went farthest in new western states. Alabama entered the union in 1819 with universal white manhood suffrage and democratically elected officials, as did Arkansas in 1836. In Mississippi, a new constitution in 1832 abolished property qualifications for voting and made both county offices and judgeships elective. In Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida (when it entered the union in 1845) the degree of political democracy was broadly similar, although in these states, unlike those to the west, legislative apportionment still favored counties with many slaves. Conservatives strongly resisted change in older states, especially Virginia, where 40 percent of white men were disfranchised by property requirements for voting and the eastern half of the state, with most of the slaves, was grossly overrepresented in

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the legislature. In a constitutional convention in 1829–30, reformers from western Virginia appealed to the legacy of Thomas Jefferson—‘‘the father of our political church’’—insisting that representation be based on people, not wealth, and that the state rid itself of ‘‘aristocratic privilege.’’ Conservatives, such as Abel Upshur, argued that eastern Virginians had a ‘‘peculiar. . . and great, and important leading interest’’ in the institution of slavery and that ‘‘Those who have the greatest stake in the Government . . . [should] have the greatest share of power.’’ Old Republican John Randolph predicted that if representation in Virginia were based on white population only, ‘‘in less than twenty years you would have a Bill brought into the House of Burgesses for the emancipation of every slave in Virginia.’’ The convention approved only modest changes, granting the western half of the state more representation and expanding voting rights, while ensuring that the east could still always outvote the west in the state legislature. Not until 1850–1 did a new convention extend suffrage to all white men and make representation more equitable. (Then, notably, proponents of reform argued that greater democracy would actually strengthen slavery by making certain that all whites, nonslaveholders included, had an equal stake in the political system.)2 South Carolina had been the first southern state to modify its constitution substantially. In 1808, the upcountry and the coast compromised on a new formula for state legislative representation that took property and population equally into account, and, in 1810, property requirements for voting were abolished. But with no other changes until the Civil War, South Carolina became the most politically conservative state in the U.S., with the legislature appointing the governor and most county officials as well as choosing presidential electors. South Carolina was the great exception in southern, as well as in national, politics.

Andrew Jackson, the Rise of the Party Politics, and South Carolina’s Challenge to Majority Rule With democratic institutions spreading, contenders for the presidency in 1824 maneuvered for advantage. One leading candidate was John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, Secretary of State under Monroe, the others all from slave states: Henry Clay of Kentucky,

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John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, William Crawford of Georgia, and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. ‘‘National Republicans’’ Adams, Clay, and Calhoun favored a strong federal government. Clay, who thought of himself as a candidate of the West more than the South, promoted a tariff to protect American manufacturers, a national bank, and national support for canals and other internal improvements, a set of policies he dubbed the ‘‘American System.’’ Calhoun, like Clay, made his reputation as a War Hawk and supporter of nationalist projects like the Bank and internal improvements; in 1824 he saw himself as the alternative to Crawford from the South. When Calhoun failed to get much support outside South Carolina, he opted to run for Vice President instead. Crawford was the favorite of Old Republicans like John Randolph of Virginia who favored narrow states’ rights doctrines. Jackson, the ‘‘Hero of New Orleans,’’ had served in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, but his national reputation was based almost wholly on his military successes against the southern Indians and the British in the War of 1812. In the election, Jackson won the most popular votes (43 percent) but fell short of a majority in the electoral college; in the slave states, Jackson won 55 electoral votes, Crawford 36, Clay 14, and Adams 6. Since Jackson lacked a majority in the electoral college, the House of Representatives had to choose from among the top three vote-getters, Jackson, Adams, and Crawford. Clay, with nationalist convictions and a belief that Jackson was a mere ‘‘military chieftan,’’ threw his support to Adams, who won the presidency with a one-state majority. When Adams then appointed Clay as Secretary of State, Jackson’s supporters raised the cry of a ‘‘corrupt bargain,’’ a charge probably untrue, but widely believed. It became the clarion call of the campaign to defeat Adams and elect Jackson in 1828. The director of Jackson’s campaign, Martin Van Buren of New York, put together a national organization without precedent in scope and efficiency, and Jackson’s followers, calling themselves ‘‘Democratic Republicans,’’ swept him into office by mobilizing hundreds of thousands of new voters. The total vote cast jumped from 357,000 votes in 1824 to 1,155,000, with Jackson winning 56 percent. In the southern states, Jackson overwhelmed Adams by 105 electoral votes to 9. Calhoun, who had switched sides, ran again as a Jackson supporter and was re-elected vice president.

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Jackson claimed to act as a ‘‘direct representative of the American people,’’ defending them from corrupt politicians and special interests. He vetoed bills to build roads and to renew the charter of the second Bank of the United States. In the South, his most popular policy was the Removal Act of 1830 that required all the organized Indian confederacies still remaining in the east to move across the Mississippi River. The Act was in keeping with the racial limits to the age of democratization. Voting privileges were being extended to property-less white men, but at the same time, the two southern states that had allowed free black men to vote disfranchised them: Tennessee in 1834 and North Carolina in 1835. Many Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees had adopted much of American culture. Cherokee leader John Ross, for example, one-eighth Cherokee by descent, had fought alongside Jackson in the Creek War and owned a cotton plantation and slaves. Many Cherokees accepted Christianity and sent their children to schools run by missionaries. None of this meant anything to white Georgians who coveted the Cherokees’ land. Georgia imprisoned two missionaries and claimed all of Cherokee territory. To Jackson, this was a matter of states’ rights; Indians had no claims to sovereignty, so they could either leave or ‘‘voluntarily’’ come, as individuals, under Georgia law. When Ross and most other Cherokees fought their removal in federal courts, President Jackson sponsored a fraudulent treaty in which a minority faction of Cherokees agreed to move. The majority of Cherokees refused to accept this treaty and were rounded up into camps. About 500 fled into western North Carolina, but the rest were forced westward on the notorious ‘‘Trail of Tears.’’ Thousands of Indians died during the removal to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). In Florida, it took a seven-year war costing about 1,500 casualties on both sides before most of the Seminoles left for the west.3 By the end of Jackson’s first term, the organization created to elect him had taken firm root as the Democratic party, organized first and foremost, not around a philosophy, but around the person of Jackson. Westerners liked him because he was one of them and because of his Indian policy. Southern slaveholders, suspicious of northern politicians after the Missouri controversy, liked him as a slaveowner and cotton planter. Old Republicans liked him because he promised to curb the excesses of federal power. Americans in all regions admired him as a self-made man and the ‘‘Hero of New

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Orleans.’’ Van Buren and other Democratic Party leaders built a formidable political machine, organizing local leaders who, in turn, recruited voters in their towns and neighborhoods. They rewarded key party members with government patronage jobs, subsidized newspapers, disseminated pamphlets and broadsides, and appealed to the voters’ emotions with propaganda, parades, and barbecue oratory. Jackson was re-elected easily in 1832, when he was challenged by Henry Clay. Although the popular president won 55 percent of the popular vote in 1832, he actually did worse in the South, winning just 87 (out of 121) electoral votes from slave states, down from 109 in 1828. One reason for the decline in the southern electoral vote was his dispute with South Carolina and its leading politician, his vice president, John Calhoun. Calhoun had moved easily from the camp of John Quincy Adams to Jackson in 1828, no doubt expecting support for a future presidential bid of his own, but both personal and political events dashed the alliance. Jackson was infuriated when Calhoun’s wife, Floride, snubbed the wife of a favorite cabinet minister, a social break that prepared the way for a serious political split prompted by developments in Calhoun’s home state. South Carolinians, still trying to recover from the economic downturn in 1819, were angered by a new tariff, passed in 1828, that placed high, protective duties on many manufactures. They considered the tariff unfair to agricultural states and unconstitutional because it was a tax for protection, rather than simply for revenue. The tariff was unpopular in most of the South, but only in South Carolina did it prompt leading figures to begin ‘‘to calculate the value of our union.’’4 They demanded that Calhoun, campaigning for the vice presidency on Jackson’s ticket, take their side, and he responded by secretly drafting an Exposition that, after being printed in somewhat altered form by the South Carolina legislature, became the best-known treatise in favor of the theory of state sovereignty. Relying in part on language from the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798–9, Calhoun argued that the states had always remained sovereign and could, therefore, ‘‘nullify,’’ or exercise a veto against, unconstitutional acts of Congress. Other states could then decide whether to amend the Constitution or to concede the individual state’s right to nullify the offending law within its boundaries. If a three-quarters majority of states did

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agree to amend the Constitution, then the nullifying state could decide whether or not to remain in the Union. The idea that states retained basic sovereignty, even to the extent of being able to withdraw peacefully from the Union, was widespread at the time. During Jefferson’s and Madison’s administrations, New England states had acted essentially to nullify commercial restrictions. Calhoun considered nullification as a means of avoiding secession, and he hoped that his theory would damp down the rising determination among some South Carolinians to secede if the tariff was not modified. The state’s political elite did carry out the procedures Calhoun had outlined. In 1832, nullifiers elected a majority of the South Carolina legislature, which then called a convention that issued an ‘‘Ordinance of Nullification’’ forbidding anyone to collect the tariff in the state after February 1, 1833. It further stated that South Carolina would leave the Union if the national government tried to coerce the state. In response, Andrew Jackson issued a Proclamation denouncing the Ordinance and disputing every aspect of the theory of state sovereignty on which it rested. Jackson announced that ‘‘disunion, by armed force, is TREASON;’’ he would suppress it by force, if necessary, and to back up this threat, he introduced in Congress a ‘‘Force Bill.’’ At the same time, he supported a compromise tariff, pushed through Congress by Henry Clay, which provided for a gradual reduction in duties over ten years. The combination of compromise and threat worked. South Carolina’s convention met to accept the new tariff, and, somewhat feebly, ‘‘nullified’’ the Force Bill. The Nullification Controversy has been called, with good reason, a ‘‘prelude to Civil War.’’ It was the first of a series of confrontations that ended in secession, with South Carolina leading southern resistance to national policies. The principles involved, however, were more far-reaching than the tariff. Calhoun himself noted, ‘‘I consider the Tariff, but as the occasion, rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things’’; the great danger was that a national majority might attack ‘‘the peculiar domestick institutions of the Southern States.’’ A South Carolina legislator wrote that the ‘‘gist of the controversy’’ was that the tariff ‘‘is only preparatory to ulterior movements, destined by fanatics and abolitionists to subvert the institutions’’ of the South. A decade earlier, Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina had warned ‘‘If Congress can make

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canals, they can with more propriety emancipate [slaves],’’ and during the Missouri debates, Macon argued that southerners must ‘‘Meet these [northern] gentlemen on the threshold . . . . they may tax us to raise up their hot-bed manufactures;—or abolish the slave representation feature in our Constitution.’’5 Since then, white South Carolinians had witnessed several alarms over slavery: in 1822, the discovery of an alleged plot to revolt in Charleston led by a free black named Denmark Vesey; in 1829, the appearance of the incendiary pamphlet, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, by black Bostonian David Walker, urging slaves to revolt; in 1831, the appearance of the first issue of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and the rebellion in Virginia led by Nat Turner. To nullifiers in South Carolina, the theory of state sovereignty was a means to protect slavery, and nullification of the tariff a way to meet potential threats ‘‘on the threshold.’’ No state again tried to implement Calhoun’s theory of nullification, and his identification with the movement branded him as a sectionalist and destroyed his chances to win the presidency. The Alabama state legislature called nullification ‘‘unsound in theory and dangerous in practice,’’ and Mississippi lawmakers resolved to stand by Jackson, ‘‘at whatever sacrifice,’’ to put it down.6 Still, the theory of state sovereignty, including the right to secession, was bolstered by Calhoun’s systematic explication, and states’ rights was confirmed as the strongest weapon in the arsenal of slavery’s defenders. Though Virginia’s legislature resolved that it could not ‘‘sanction’’ nullification, it denounced the Force Bill as in conflict with correct ‘‘doctrines of state sovereignty and states’ rights.’’7 In South Carolina itself, most political leaders for the next 30 years continued to see themselves as standing on the threshold in defense of the rights of southerners to own and rule slaves against the designs of religious fanatics and unprincipled politicians from the North.

Southern States Embrace the Second Party System Jackson’s response to nullification added new potential members to an anti-Jacksonian movement: not just Calhoun, but states’ rights Democrats such as John Tyler of Virginia, who broke with Jackson

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over his threat to coerce South Carolina. Another anti-Jackson group was a reformist party called the Antimasons, which had originated in upstate New York after a member of a Masonic Lodge was apparently murdered for threatening to reveal the order’s secrets. The Antimasons aimed to restore traditional American virtues and to combat threats to republican liberty, including, in addition to the Masons, the Catholic Church and corrupt politicians. Though not widely popular in the South, the Antimasons nominated a Marylander, William Wirt, for president in 1832. The core of the opposition to Jackson, though, came from Henry Clay and other National Republicans who objected both to Jackson’s vetoes of key elements of the American System and to what they considered Jackson’s tyrannical style of executive leadership. It took a decade for Jackson’s opponents to coalesce into an organization powerful enough to win the presidency. States’ rights partisans were highly suspicious of the National Republican policies on tariffs and internal improvements, and Antimasons distrusted Clay because he was a Mason. The Antimasons attracted opponents of slavery to their reform program, making them difficult partners for any southern politician. To compound the problem of molding these disparate groups into a unified party, many anti-Jacksonians were suspicious of all party organizations. At least, all could agree that American liberty was threatened by Andrew Jackson. A cartoon of the day showed the President wearing a king’s robe and crown, wielding as a scepter his Bank veto and trampling underfoot a copy of the Constitution. The anti-Jacksonians adopted the name of ‘‘Whig’’ after the name taken by patriots of the American Revolution. In 1836, when the Democrats nominated Martin Van Buren for president, the Whigs could not agree on a candidate and split their votes among Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, William Henry Harrison of Ohio, who carried the border slave states of Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky, and Hugh White of Tennessee, a favorite of the states’ rights faction, who carried Georgia and Tennessee. South Carolina went its own way, casting its electoral votes for W.P. Mangum of North Carolina. Van Buren won the election with 51 percent of the total popular vote, but in the South the combined Whig electoral vote was 63 to Van Buren’s 58. In 1840, the Whigs, for the first time, held a national convention to choose a single candidate: Harrison of Ohio, best known as

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leader of U.S. troops against Indians at Tippecanoe in 1811. To balance the ticket, Whigs nominated John Tyler of Virginia as their vice-presidential candidate. Democrats nominated Van Buren for a second term, but a severe economic downturn in 1839 hurt the incumbent, and the Whigs’ effective campaign brought new voters to the polls, with turnout soaring to over 80 percent in most states. Harrison won with 53 percent of the total vote and carried eight slave states, losing only Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, and Missouri. For the next decade, the parties competed on roughly even terms in the South in what political historians term the Second Party System. Democrats usually dominated in the southwestern states of Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas, while Whigs usually won in the upper-South states of Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. In Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana, and Florida, elections were typically close. Both national parties were alliances of state parties that came together every four years to try to win the presidency. Since issues varied from state to state, consistency in philosophy or policy was secondary, compromise on key issues essential. Both parties attracted voters and leaders from all economic ranks and geographical areas, but a core set of beliefs and a distinct constituency for each emerged throughout the South as in the rest of the United States. As explained by historian Michael Holt, ‘‘the central line or cleavage in the electorate separated men with different degrees of experience in and different attitudes toward the market economy and the cultural values it spawned.’’8 Henry Clay positioned the Whigs as the party that would use federal and state government to promote the welfare and economic opportunities of the majority, for example by chartering banks and limited liability corporations and by financing canals and railroads. The Whigs attracted most of their voters in places where the market and commerce flourished, such as the cotton-plantation belt, the sugar parishes of Louisiana, and the bluegrass regions of Kentucky, where Clay himself raised livestock and hemp and invested in banks. (Sugar planters and hemp growers also depended on protective tariffs to keep out low-cost imports.) Whigs also did well in cities and towns. Democratic voters tended to distrust government policies that, as they saw it, favored a financial and commercial aristocracy.

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Democrats usually did best where slaves were fewer and markets more distant, especially in the hill country stretching from northern Georgia to eastern Texas. By vetoing bills to build roads and recharter the second National Bank, Jackson made himself the tribune of those who feared that their liberty was most endangered by the illegitimate use of government power. Party divisions encompassed cultural as well as economic values. Whigs were more likely to present themselves as the party of order, sobriety, and respectability, and they were more willing to support state action to regulate liquor consumption. They were also more likely to seek and attract the support of women, who could not vote, but who could serve an important role by symbolizing and demonstrating the solid virtues of respectability. In Virginia in 1840, women formed political organizations, raised money, and attended rallies for Harrison; in Louisiana in 1844, a ‘‘Whig Ladies’’ club held a rally in New Orleans that attracted more than 1,500 women.9 The political fault lines were not rigid. In western Virginia and western North Carolina, where there were relatively few slaves, Whigs attracted many voters who wanted state aid for transportation connections to Atlantic ports. Catholic Creole sugar planters were mostly Whigs, cotton planters in central Louisiana mainly Democrats. In Virginia, the Whig coalition attracted not only states’ rights Democrats like Tyler, but also rival Conservative Democrats, led by Senator William C. Rives, who disagreed with Van Buren’s hostility to state banks.10 As the Second Party System became firmly organized, men who voted first for one party or the other seldom changed their minds. If they disliked their party’s candidate, they might simply stay home on election day. The parties’ main goal was to identify their loyal supporters and get them to the polls, relying on local activists often related through blood and marriage to their neighbors. Public debates during contested campaigns served to sharpen party differences as candidates appealed both to reason and to the emotions of the voters. In the 1850s, one North Carolina Whig wrote that ‘‘Party ties are among the strongest associations which bind men together. . . . The very name of party has a talismanic power on the passions and prejudices of the people.’’11 The claim was more true in his own state than in lower South states like Mississippi, especially in races for local offices, but, in races for statewide or national offices, politics throughout the South was thoroughly

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enmeshed in the national party system. South Carolina, where no parties ever crystallized, remained the great exception, in part because South Carolina was small and economically unified, in part because it was the only state with no statewide elections around which to organize. South Carolina’s politics also reflected the influence of John C. Calhoun, who, more than any other nationally important politician, retained the old fear of party politics as fatal to republican virtue. Calhoun cooperated with the national parties (first the Democrats, then the Whigs, then the Democrats again), but spent much of his political energy attempting to unite white southerners on a sectional rather than party basis.

Slavery’s Intrusion into National Politics Martin Van Buren, who shaped the party system more than any other person, believed that party conflict would prevent sectional discord by forcing compromise and thus repressing the ‘‘prejudices between the free and slave holding states.’’12 By 1836, when Van Buren himself was running for president, his prediction had already been thrown into doubt. In the 1830s, abolitionist societies, calling for immediate action to end slavery, had spread through New England, upstate New York, and northern Ohio. At first, northern politicians could ignore the abolitionists, since they were unpopular and since many abolitionists were women, who could not vote, or followers of William Lloyd Garrison, who urged them to avoid all collusion with a corrupt political process. In 1835, frustrated with their lack of success, abolitionists embraced new tactics that changed the nature of national debates over slavery and made it a political problem that politicians could no longer safely ignore. One abolitionist project was to mail into the South thousands of antislavery pamphlets and newspapers in the belief that these would convince slaveholders to emancipate their slaves. To outraged white southerners, this literature seemed likely to incite future Nat Turners. In Charleston, citizens seized the initial mailing and burned it. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a grand jury indicted the New York editor of one abolition newspaper for inciting ‘‘insurrection and murder.’’ President Jackson asked Congress for a permanent ban on mail of this sort.13 A second tactic was to

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flood Congress with petitions asking it to ban slavery wherever the federal government had jurisdiction, including the District of Columbia. Many petitions denounced slavery in harsh terms as a ‘‘foul stain of legalized plunder’’ and slaveholders as ‘‘villainous enslavers of souls.’’ When Congress met in December 1835, South Carolina Representative James H. Hammond rose to say that ‘‘He could not sit there and see the rights of the southern people assaulted day after day, by the ignorant fanatics from whom these memorials proceed.’’ After much debate, the House resolved that ‘‘all petitions . . . relating in any way. . . to the subject of slavery’’ be automatically tabled without discussion. Both suppression of the mails and the so-called ‘‘Gag Rule’’ in the House were seen by many northerners as affronts to their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and petition. The southern responses to abolitionism immensely broadened the appeal of antislavery by switching the focus of debate to infringements on the liberties not of slaves, but of northern white citizens. It thus created a new kind of antislavery target, the ‘‘Slave Power’’—a term used to refer to the undemocratic political power that southern slaveowners allegedly wielded in national affairs. This was an issue with political legs in both the North and the South.14 Lower South Whigs, in particular, saw the defense of slavery as a strong campaign issue in 1836. Louisiana’s Senator Alexander Porter, for example, insisted that ‘‘our interests imperatively require a Slave holding President’’ like Tennessee’s Hugh White, because a northern man like Van Buren could not be trusted to protect slaveholders.15 Southern Democrats, for their part, attacked William H. Harrison, the leading Whig candidate, as a dangerous abolitionist. Van Buren, by publicly backing the Gag Rule, opened himself up to attacks in the north as a man beholden to southern slaveowners. Thus was introduced what historian William J. Cooper, Jr., has called the ‘‘politics of slavery,’’ in which southern politicians vied to paint their opponents as weak on slavery.16 Most southern voters, nonetheless, refused to base their votes on slavery alone. Many upper-South Whigs, in particular, refused to accept the arguments of proslavery politicians such as Calhoun, who said, in 1837, that ‘‘the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two [races] is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.’’17 Henry Clay always shared Jefferson’s views that slavery was ‘‘a curse to the master, a wrong, a grievous wrong to the

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slave,’’ and also that blacks could never be integrated into American society. Clay served as president of the American Colonization Society, an organization dedicated to sending freed blacks to Africa, and, in his will, provided that children born to his 35 slaves be emancipated on reaching adulthood and colonized in Liberia. In North Carolina, Whig Congressman David Outlaw, though no abolitionist, wrote that it was ‘‘absurd’’ to pretend that southerners believed ‘‘that slavery is a blessing, social, moral and political, when many of those who have all their lives been accustomed to it, do not believe it and so far from believing it, believe exactly the reverse.’’ To be sure, Clay and other southern Whigs considered abolitionists as dangerous fanatics. Outlaw simply accepted slavery as ‘‘an existing fact, one for which we are not responsible, and which we must treat as practical men.’’18 To abolitionists, Whig and Democratic ideas represented a distinction without a difference, but the distinction did make a difference in political debates over slavery throughout the 1840s, especially the debates over slavery in new territories and states. Such debates first arose over the annexation of Texas. The Mexican province of Texas, populated mainly by American migrants from the South, had risen in revolt in 1836, established its independence, and applied for admission as a new state. With many northerners objecting to the addition of a new slave state to the Union, both President Jackson and presidential candidate Van Buren had opposed annexation, and Texas remained an independent republic. After William H. Harrison took office as the first Whig president in 1841, Whigs looked forward to getting their traditional program into law, but their hopes were dashed when Harrison died of pneumonia just a month after his inauguration. The new president, John Tyler, had joined the Whigs only because he objected to Jackson’s threat to invade South Carolina during the nullification crisis, and, on states’ rights grounds, he cast veto after veto against bills passed by the Whig-controlled Congress. In the 1844 presidential race, dismayed Whigs turned to their old leader Clay, who was confident that he could defeat the expected Democratic nominee, former president Van Buren. President Tyler, having alienated the Whigs, seized upon the issue of Texas as a strategy to restore his political fortunes and make him the nominee in 1844 either of the Democrats or a new third party. Tyler and Secretary of State Abel

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Upshur began secret negotiations with Texas for a treaty of annexation. Upshur apparently took seriously rumors that the British, who had abolished slavery in their colonies the previous decade, were promising financial and diplomatic support for Texas in return for the abolition of slavery there. After Upshur was killed in an accident, Tyler replaced him with Calhoun, who, with the treaty of annexation completed, determined to push it through the Senate. Whether Texas was a slave state was not especially important to President Tyler; expansion would excite national pride and open millions of acres for settlement by small farmers from both South and North. But for Calhoun, annexation was a golden opportunity to promote his own vision of a politics aligned along sectional, rather than party, lines. He sent a note to the British government, accusing it of an attempt to bring abolition to Texas; he included an elaborate defense of slavery as a system that had elevated Africans to unprecedented heights in ‘‘civilization.’’19 He appended this letter to the text of the treaty when he sent it to the Senate for confirmation. If northern Democrats and Whigs rejected the annexation of Texas because it would be a slave state, southerners might be prompted to reorganize politics along sectional lines (behind a leader such as himself). The end result, however, was not a realignment of politics, but the election of James K. Polk of Tennessee as president in 1844. Clay and Van Buren, leading candidates for nomination and recognizing the dangers to their separate parties whenever slavery became a national issue, each published a letter saying that it would be inexpedient to annex Texas in the near future. Van Buren’s stance led southern Democrats to block his nomination, and ultimately the ‘‘dark horse’’ Polk was nominated on a proexpansion platform. To ease potential opposition to expansion from northern Democrats, the party platform also called for annexation of all of Oregon, a territory then including present-day British Columbia. It was a popular platform plank on which Whig candidate Clay had to balance. Opposition to annexation of Texas would be unpopular in the South, but endorsement of annexation would alienate antislavery northern Whigs, who might stay home on election day or vote for the tiny, but growing, abolitionist Liberty Party. Clay published more letters suggesting that he was open to annexing Texas at a future date, disappointing northern Whigs, but without sufficiently reassuring southerners. Polk defeated Clay in one of the closest elections in

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American history. Had Clay carried New York he would have won; he lost there by just over 5,000 votes, while the Liberty Party candidate won almost 16,000. Tyler interpreted Polk’s narrow victory as proof that most Americans favored annexation, and, with no hope of getting a two-thirds vote for his treaty in the Senate, instead pushed through a concurrent resolution of both houses of Congress to annex Texas even before Polk’s inauguration. The politics of slavery was important in the election of 1844, but most southern voters remained loyal to their parties, demonstrating the validity of the claim that ‘‘party ties are among the strongest associations which bind men together.’’ Polk won 67 of the 114 electoral votes of the slave states, but his margin in the South’s popular vote was less than 2 percent, and Texas was the decisive issue only in Georgia and, perhaps, in Louisiana. Clay carried Kentucky, North Carolina, Maryland, and Polk’s own state of Tennessee, and lost narrowly in Virginia. In Congress, too, southern Whigs usually chose party over section. On one proslavery amendment to the annexation resolution, four of five southern Whig Senators and two of three southern Whig Representatives voted against, and, on the final vote, only one southern Whig Representative voted in favor of annexation. The regional split within the South on the politics of slavery continued. Nearly all upper-South Whigs voted against proslavery amendments to the annexation bill; most lower-South Whigs voted in favor.20 President Polk was also ambitious to add to the United States all the Mexican territory between Texas and the Pacific Ocean. Mexico not only refused to sell, but disputed the boundary between Texas and Mexico. Polk sent troops into disputed territory and, when some of them were killed, convinced Congress to declare war in 1846. The Mexican War was at first quite popular in the South, and southerners were disproportionately represented in America’s armies. In northern Mexico, a Mississippi Democratic Congressman and West Point graduate named Jefferson Davis made a name for himself as commander of a regiment, and, in central Mexico, a bold strike under Gen. Winfield Scott captured Mexico City with the help of a rising star in the engineering corps, Virginian Robert E. Lee. Whigs, north and south, blamed Polk for mismanagement and for prolonging the war to achieve his territorial ambitions, but they usually voted for appropriations for the army.

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The basically partisan differences over the war were transformed into sectional divisions when a Democratic representative from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, proposed an amendment to an appropriations bill to bar slavery in any territories taken from Mexico. Northerners of both parties voted almost unanimously for the so-called Wilmot Proviso, southerners almost unanimously against. Few southerners expected slavery to be established in areas west of Texas, but few were willing to accept an amendment that would brand slaveholders as unworthy to share territories won by the common blood of all Americans. As the war dragged on, meanwhile, northern abolitionists attacked it as little more than a plot of the ‘‘Slave Power’’ to extend slavery. The conflict over the Proviso severely divided both parties, the Whigs most of all because their northern voters were more likely to be opposed to slavery and might desert to the Liberty Party. Northern and southern Whig congressmen alike, preferring to avoid the slavery issue altogether, simply followed the party of line of support for victory and of opposition to the addition of new territory. Unfortunately for the Whigs, the peace treaty with Mexico in early 1848 added both New Mexico and California to the United States, so the fight over the Wilmot Proviso could not be avoided. With a presidential campaign looming, Whigs nominated as their candidate a military hero and career soldier, Zachary Taylor, who had won fame leading a smaller American force to victory over a larger Mexican army at Buena Vista. Taylor had no political record, and Whigs could offer conflicting claims about his views. Northern Whigs seized on his pledge to veto no laws except those plainly unconstitutional to tell their voters that Taylor would sign the Wilmot Proviso, barring slavery in California and New Mexico, if it passed Congress. Southern Whigs argued that, since Taylor was a Louisianan and owned more than 100 slaves, he was surely safe on slavery and would veto the Proviso. To make sure this strategy was not confounded by the party platform, the Whigs did not adopt a platform at all. For their part, some southern Democrats tried to force into their own party’s platform a guarantee that slaveowners could take their slaves into the new territories. Leading the way was William L. Yancey, an Alabama editor and former congressman, who convinced Democrats in his state to adopt the ‘‘Alabama Platform,’’ declaring that the state’s delegates to the national convention must insist on a

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candidate who supported such a guarantee. Instead, the national Democratic convention in 1848 rejected, by a vote of 216 to 36, a plank incorporating the goals of the Alabama Platform and nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan on a platform of ‘‘popular sovereignty.’’ This policy was ambiguous enough to satisfy both northerners and southerners; northern Democrats understood it to mean that a territorial legislature could exclude slavery, while southern Democrats understood it to mean that only when a territory became a state could its voters exclude slavery. Although Yancey and one other Alabama delegate walked out of the convention in protest, most southern Democrats endorsed Cass and the platform as an acceptable compromise.21 The nominations of Zachary Taylor and Lewis Cass enraged northern dissidents in both parties. In Buffalo, a national meeting of those opposed to extension of slavery gathered these dissidents together with members of the Liberty Party to form a new Free Soil Party that nominated Van Buren for President on a platform that endorsed the Wilmot Proviso. In the November election, Taylor prevailed. As southern Whigs had predicted, his southern roots and military reputation enabled him to cut into the Democratic vote throughout the slave states, although Cass carried, by narrow margins, Virginia and the Democratic strongholds in the southwest. Taylor swept the areas of traditional Whig strength in the upper South, plus Georgia, Louisiana, and the new state of Florida. Van Buren got 10 percent of the vote, almost entirely in the free states, but did not carry a single state. Southern Whigs were triumphant, and the conflict over the Wilmot Proviso moved back to Congress, this time for a real decision on slavery in the new territories.

The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 As Congress gathered in December 1848, tensions mounted over the question of slavery in the Mexican cession. Four broad positions on slavery in the new territories were apparent. Nearly all northern Whigs, many northern Democrats, and the small number of Free-Soilers wanted the Wilmot Proviso: slavery forbidden in all the newly conquered territories. A majority of southern Democrats insisted that slaves were property protected by the Constitution,

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and, as such, must be allowed in the new territories. Calhoun had told the Senate in 1847 that the Wilmot Proviso would brand southerners as inferior in their rights and liberties, and ‘‘I would rather meet any extremity upon earth than to give up an inch of our equality.’’22 But moderates in both parties favored compromise. Many southern Whigs endorsed an extension of the Missouri Compromise line to divide the territories (including California) between free and slave; most northern Democrats preferred the ‘‘popular sovereignty’’ option of Cass since they believed that northern migrants would outnumber southerners in the new territories and popular sovereignty would produce a free-soil result. Political calculations mixed with genuine convictions. Calhoun, an enemy of the party system, could ignore the partisan implications of his arguments, but Whigs and Democrats in each section had to persuade party members in the other section to compromise, while preventing themselves from being outflanked on the slavery issue back home. The debate was propelled forward after the discovery of gold in California, as thousands of gold hunters clamored for a new territorial government. Indeed, some thought that California should skip the territorial stage altogether and enter the Union as a state, which would avoid a vote on the Wilmot Proviso. When Calhoun struck first by calling a caucus of southern representatives and senators, about half showed up to hear him present a draft of an ‘‘Address of the Southern Delegates in Congress.’’ In it, he argued that abolitionism was a mortal threat that could lead not only to the end of slavery, but also to ‘‘political and social equality’’ for blacks, who would ally with their northern white friends to keep ‘‘the white race at the South in complete subjection.’’23 Only 48 (2 Whigs and 46 Democrats) out of a total of 124 congressmen from the South signed the address, but Calhoun had succeeded in laying down the most absolute southern demands, backed up by an implied threat of disunion. His proslavery position rejected the immediate admission of California as a state as a mere ruse to enact the essence of the Wilmot Proviso. The congressional session came to a close in March 1849 without a decision, with California and New Mexico receiving temporary governments only. President Taylor’s inaugural address that month was so vague that no one was sure about his own stand. In the months between the March inauguration and the convening of the next Congress in December 1849, the atmosphere of crisis

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intensified. In October 1849, a meeting in Mississippi called on all slave states to send delegates to a convention in Nashville the following June to consider ‘‘some mode of resistance’’ to northern ‘‘aggression.’’ Georgia’s lawmakers passed resolutions requiring the governor to call a convention if Congress passed the Wilmot Proviso banning slavery in the territories or admitted California as a state ‘‘in its pretended organization,’’ and also if northern states continued their ‘‘refusal . . . to deliver up fugitive slaves as provided for in the Constitution.’’24 When he arrived in Washington, Georgia’s Representative Alexander H. Stephens, a Whig, wrote that ‘‘the excitement in the South upon the Slave question is much greater. . . than those who are at the head of affairs here have any idea of.’’ His Whig colleague, Robert Toombs, declared in the House that ‘‘if, by your legislation, you seek to drive us from the territories . . . purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people, . . . thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half the states of this Confederacy, I am for disunion.’’25 Meanwhile northern representatives proposed bills to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and Senator James Mason of Virginia introduced a bill to make it easier for slaveowners to recover slaves who had escaped to free states. Zachary Taylor communicated his own proposal: Congress should admit both California and New Mexico as states immediately, bypassing the territorial stage. This was an attractive solution to many Whigs, since northern Whigs would be happy that new states had been admitted without slavery, and southern Whigs could point out that the hated Wilmot Proviso had never been passed. But Taylor’s proposal failed to satisfy those who equated admission of California with the Proviso, and his plan also ignored a festering border dispute between Texas and the territory of New Mexico. Texas’s claim to everything as far as the Rio Grande River included half of the territory of present-day New Mexico, and, at one point, Texas’s governor threatened to seize the region by force. Into this breach stepped Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser, to propose a series of measures designed to balance concessions to the North and South and produce ‘‘an amicable arrangement’’ on all questions relating to slavery. Like Taylor, he would admit California immediately as a state, but he would organize New Mexico into territories ‘‘without the adoption of any restriction or condition on the subject of slavery,’’ in effect a popular sovereignty solution that

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left the question to each territorial legislature. The border between Texas and New Mexico would be settled largely in favor of New Mexico, but the U.S. government would compensate Texas by paying off old state debts—a proposal that created an influential lobby of Texas bond-holders in favor of Clay’s solution. As concessions to the South, Congress would pass a ‘‘more effectual’’ fugitive slave law, and it would also declare that it had no power to interfere with the interstate slave trade and that it was ‘‘inexpedient’’ to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of Maryland. Clay would, however, abolish the slave markets that operated in the District. The Senate combined the most important of Clay’s proposals into a single ‘‘Omnibus Bill,’’ but, as of June 1850, it lacked enough votes to pass. Calhoun, so ill that another Senator had to read his speech, made his final appearance in the Senate to denounce the compromise, and Zachary Taylor, annoyed that his own plan was ignored, used his patronage power to undercut Clay. But the prospects for the compromise were revived by the unexpected death of Taylor in July. The new president, Millard Fillmore of New York, favored the compromise and lobbied northern Whigs in its favor. A new Democratic senator from Illinois, Stephen Douglas, took over management of the compromise and pushed it through. Douglas broke the Omnibus Bill into its constituent parts so he could combine votes of the minority of moderates who favored the compromise as a whole, first, with the votes of proslavery congressmen on bills that favored the South, then, with the votes of antislavery congressmen on bills that favored the North. Thus, in the House, on the key issue of California, every northern representative voted to admit California as a state, two-thirds of southern representatives against. On the Fugitive Slave Act, all 78 southern representatives voted yes; northern representatives voted 76 no, 31 yes. Within the South, the moderate, procompromise votes came mainly from the upper-South slaves states.26 Serious discussion in Washington of the compromise measures had deflated the Nashville Convention when it met in June 1850 to consider ‘‘resistance’’ to northern ‘‘aggression’’; it was poorly attended and simply passed vague resolutions on the territories before adjourning until the next fall. When it met again after passage of the compromise, just 59 delegates, representing the radical fringe of southern opinion, showed up. Georgia’s governor

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called a convention, as he had been directed to do the year before if California was admitted as a state, and procompromise candidates from both parties, calling themselves ‘‘Constitutional Unionists,’’ smashed the opposing ‘‘Southern Rights Democrats’’ by a two-toone margin in the popular vote for delegates. When the Georgia convention met in December, its resolutions called on the state to abide by the Compromise ‘‘as a permanent adjustment’’ of the controversy. Only in South Carolina and Mississippi was there widespread sentiment in favor of secession, and, even there, secessionist sentiment quickly withered as it became clear that the other slave states would not go along. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that Ohio Senator Salmon Chase was correct when he said of the Compromise of 1850 that ‘‘The question of slavery in the territories has been avoided. It has not been settled.’’ Only about one out of eight Senators and one out of three Representatives had voted consistently for all the compromise measures, and the crisis had deeply strained the ties within the national parties, especially the Whigs. Only 4 out of 64 northern Whig representatives, compared with 27 of 43 northern Democrats, had supported the southern position on the Fugitive Slave Act. It was becoming more difficult for southern Whigs to make the claim that their party could continue to defend slavery and the rights of the South. For their part, Democrats in the South were damaged by their identification with the extreme southern rights position. In Georgia, the Democratic party fractured as important leaders, among them Howell Cobb, joined prominent Whigs in a Union Party that easily elected Cobb governor in 1851. In the Mississippi governor’s race that year, the Democrats nominated a secessionist, John A. Quitman, but Quitman was so unpopular that he withdrew from the race in mid-campaign, replaced by his party with popular Jefferson Davis. Davis backed away from secession but still lost the race to the candidate of the newly formed Union party. Disunion, never a powerful force in the upper South, had clearly been repudiated not only there, but throughout the lower South. Still, even though secessionists had been routed at the polls, the crisis of 1850 had made their position more popular than ever. In the late 1840s, the core group of southern disunionists—those prepared to leave the union immediately and form a new nation of slaveholding states—had been a small minority. These early

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‘‘fire-eaters,’’ as they were later dubbed, included John A. Quitman, who had been born in the North, and Nathaniel Beverly Tucker and Edmund Ruffin, both Virginians; otherwise, the influence of South Carolina stands out. Robert Barnwell Rhett, born in 1800 and a South Carolina state legislator during nullification, had written even after Congress had passed the compromise tariff in 1833 that ‘‘a Confederacy of the Southern States’’ would be ‘‘a happy termination—happy beyond expectation, of our long struggle for our rights.’’27 William L. Yancey of Alabama, another fire-eater, had married into a wealthy South Carolina slaveowning family (and, later, killed his wife’s uncle in a street fight). Fire-eaters Louis Wigfall of Texas and James D.B. DeBow, a New Orleans editor, had both grown up in South Carolina. Outside of South Carolina before 1850, secessionists were isolated and frustrated, with little political influence. The fire-eaters could not, like their nationalist contemporaries in Germany, Italy, or central Europe, stir white southerners to action based on a separate language, religion, or national tradition, since whites shared all these with their fellow Americans to the north. Secessionist influence depended, rather, on convincing white southerners that they were under attack from without. The crisis of 1850 had sharply increased southerners’ receptiveness to that argument and had shifted opinion away from simple loyalty to the Union toward a conditional Unionism. For older politicians like Henry Clay, attachment to the Union was unshakeable; Clay told the Senate in 1850 that ‘‘Here I am within [the Union], and here I mean to stand and die.’’28 But the entire careers of the younger generation of southern political leaders had been marked by sectional conflicts related to slavery, and their loyalty to the Union was no longer absolute. Thus, when Georgia’s convention affirmed that state’s support for the Compromise of 1850, it also declared that Georgia ‘‘will and ought to resist even (as a last resort) to the disruption of every tie that binds her to the Union,’’ any further encroachments on slavery by Congress, and ‘‘that upon a faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law. . . depends the preservation of our much beloved Union.’’29 Conditional Unionists might differ on what ‘‘condition’’ would be severe enough to justify secession, but they had been convinced by the Calhoun doctrine that the states retained sovereignty, and that, therefore, they could legally withdraw from the United States if they chose to. To bring about secession,

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fire-eating nationalists would have to wait for events, or else manufacture them, to convince the mass of southern voters that conditions called for independence.

The Breakdown of Compromise and the Rise of an Anti-Slave Power Party For about two years, the Compromise of 1850 held, but then, at first slowly, and beginning in 1854 more rapidly, it unraveled. The Whig party broke down along with the Compromise, and Whigs in both sections searched for a new organization capable of winning political power. The organization that succeeded the Whigs was not a national party but a sectional one: the Republican party, its central issue halting the expansion of slavery. It competed seriously for votes only in the free states. The popularity of the Compromise had seemed secure after the election of 1852, when Democrat Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire defeated Whig Winfield Scott on a platform that called the Compromise a final settlement of all sectional disputes related to slavery. Votes for the Free Soil Party in the North declined by half. In the slave states, Scott’s vote fell sharply from Taylor’s, and Scott won only two slave states, Tennessee and Kentucky. The young Union party coalitions in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi disintegrated as Democrats returned to the national party. For the first few years after the Fugitive Slave Act passed, most captured fugitives were returned without incident to their owners, and few captives were rescued by force. Though a small number of strongly antislavery men, including Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, were sent to the U.S. Senate, Sumner could garner only four votes for a bill to repeal the Act. This apparent acceptance of the Compromise as ‘‘final’’ was deceptive, however, since slaves continued to escape to the North, and northern public opinion began to turn against the Fugitive Slave Act. A measure of northern hostility to the Act was the phenomenal popularity of an antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1852. The novel follows the story of Uncle Tom, a deeply religious, humble, and intelligent slave, as he is carried by the slave trade from Kentucky to New Orleans, and then to the plantation of the infamous Simon

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Legree, where he is literally whipped to death. Stowe’s main point was to demonstrate that it was impossible to reconcile slavery with Christianity, but her secondary target was the Fugitive Slave Act, which required northern officials to cooperate in returning runaway slaves who had reached the free states. Uncle Tom’s Cabin opens with the escape of the slave Eliza with her young son, who has been sold along with Uncle Tom to satisfy a debt; Eliza makes it to free territory by a thrilling dash across ice floes in the Ohio River. There, an Ohio state legislator chooses to follow his heart and assist her rather than to fulfill his legal duty to turn in her and her son. The novel infuriated white southerners because its sentimental plot and characters were far more effective than abolitionist pamphlets in convincing readers that slavery was a fundamental evil. In its first year, it sold the unheard-of number of 300,000 copies: one for every four votes won in the North by Franklin Pierce. The hostility to slavery suggested by the sales of Uncle Tom’s Cabin burst forth politically in 1854, when the territorial issue, supposedly settled by the Compromise, was re-opened by an act of Congress to organize those parts of the Louisiana Purchase to the west of Missouri. The sponsor of this Kansas–Nebraska Act, Stephen Douglas of Illinois, needed southern votes, and, to secure them, he agreed that the act would repeal the ban on slavery north of 368 30’, part of the Missouri Compromise; instead the new territories would be organized under the principal of ‘‘popular sovereignty.’’ Northern voters, especially Whigs, recoiled against this new concession to the ‘‘Slave Power,’’ and passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act proved fatal to any hopes of reviving the Whigs as a national organization following Scott’s crushing defeat in 1852. Two options for Whigs were apparent in 1854. One, which arose seemingly out of nowhere, was an outgrowth of a secret fraternal organization called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. Because its members were supposed to reply to questions about the Order with ‘‘I know nothing,’’ they quickly became known as ‘‘KnowNothings.’’ Know-Nothings wanted to limit what they saw as the growing danger of immigrants, especially Catholics, to the American way of life and to republican liberty. In 1853 and 1854, local councils of the Order suddenly sprouted up all over the country, including every southern state, and its members were instructed to vote for candidates pledged to support nativist goals, such as extending the

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period of residence required for citizenship. Know-Nothing candidates won offices in several southern cities, but, even in places with negligible immigrant populations, the Know-Nothings appeared to be a viable reform movement. A Tennessee Baptist elder wrote in 1854, for example, that ‘‘nothing is more evident than that our political parties have become sadly, deplorably corrupt,’’ and he blamed this in large part on the ‘‘foreign Catholics’’ who were working toward the ‘‘subversion of our free institutions.’’30 By 1855, the Know-Nothings had shed their secrecy to emerge as the new American Party. For a time, the Americans became the principal opposition party to the Democrats throughout the South. They captured a majority of Maryland’s legislature and the governorship of Kentucky, and they attracted former Whigs in several other states. In Mississippi, a stunned editor wrote that ‘‘men who were not even candidates were elected to office against popular candidates whose race was expected to be a walkover.’’31 In 1856, the American presidential nominee, former Whig, and president, Millard Fillmore, won a respectable 44 percent of the vote in the slave states. And yet, by the time that election took place, the day of the American party was already past. Almost simultaneously with the American party appeared a second new alternative to the Democrats, the Republican party. The centerpiece of its appeal was ‘‘free soil’’: a determination to prevent the spread of slavery to any new territories. To Republicans, the Kansas–Nebraska Act represented a blatant rejection of a hallowed compromise and the latest in a long series of aggressions by the Slave Power. The Republicans had little appeal in the slave states, but they could win a majority in the electoral college simply by carrying most of the North. It was at first by no means clear whether the nativist Americans or the free-soil Republicans would survive. Events in the new territory of Kansas, and their reverberations in Washington, determined that it would be the Republicans, and not the Americans, who would replace the Whigs as the main competitor to the Democrats. After passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act opened Kansas to settlers, both proslavery and antislavery activists saw the territory as a test of their ability to advance their goals. Proslavery leaders in neighboring Missouri spurred residents of Missouri to cross over the border to vote for Kansas’s first territorial legislature, so the total vote was almost double the number of eligible voters.

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The legislature thus elected expelled antislavery representatives and enacted draconian proslavery legislation, for example, making it a capital crime to aid a fugitive slave. Angry antislavery voters then boycotted the regular political process and set up a parallel government of their own, complete with a ‘‘governor’’ and ‘‘legislature.’’ The consequence was anarchy and a low-level partisan war. A proslavery force invaded and ‘‘sacked’’ the town of Lawrence, the home of two antislavery newspapers; in retaliation, a small group of abolitionist zealots led by John Brown murdered five proslavery settlers in cold blood. Members of the new Republican party attacked Kansas’s official legislature as an illegitimate offspring of fraud and violence. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, in a two-day speech in the Senate, denounced ‘‘The Crime Against Kansas,’’ in one vivid passage calling Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina a ‘‘Don Quixote’’ who had pledged himself to ‘‘the harlot, slavery’’ and mocking Butler’s slight speech impediment.32 Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a relative of the elderly Butler, took umbrage at this attack on a family member, approached Sumner at his desk three days later after the Senate had adjourned for the day, and proceeded to beat the Massachusetts senator unconscious with a cane. The caning of Sumner confirmed to many northerners the constellation of negative images associated with the term ‘‘Slave Power’’—the control of the political system by a small group of aristocratic slaveowners whose unbridled power nurtured a lust for violence and domination more suitable for a barbarian than a Christian country. Although most southern whites may well have regretted Brooks’s attack as intemperate and unfortunate, many southern editors and politicians argued that Sumner had provoked it and that Brooks was merely upholding the honor of his family and state. Before the House of Representatives could formally investigate, Brooks resigned and returned home to a triumphant reception. His constituents returned him to Congress with a unanimous vote, and he received dozens of replacements for his shattered cane from admirers throughout the South. In this heated atmosphere, the parties met to nominate their candidates for the presidency: Fillmore by the Americans, John Fremont, a famous western explorer, by the Republicans, and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a favorite of southerners, by the Democrats. In the American party national convention, southerners

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won a crucial battle on the platform by voting down a resolution to restore the Missouri Compromise (and thus repeal the relevant section of the Kansas–Nebraska Act), but lost the war when 50 northern delegates walked out to form a separate ‘‘Northern American’’ grouping. This split was fatal to Fillmore’s chances, as northern anti-Democratic voters overwhelmingly chose Fremont, who carried eleven of the free states to five for Buchanan. The election made the Democrats even more of a southern-based party; Buchanan became the first winning presidential candidate since 1828 who did not carry a majority of both the free and the slave states. And the election added another of the conditions that, southern sectionalists claimed, would lead to secession: the election of a ‘‘Black Republican’’ to the presidency. After the failure of the American party, some southern Whigs moved over to the Democrats, others retired from politics altogether. In old Whig strongholds like North Carolina, a surprisingly large number of Whigs continued to contest elections, either as Whigs or as the ‘‘Opposition,’’ but, without northern allies, these state parties had little hope of long-term success. With Democrats dominant in the South, especially in the lower South states, the question became whether the party’s southerners could continue to dominate its policies and determine its national candidates. The political managers who had controlled the party for so long now found themselves outflanked on the slavery issue by extreme proslavery partisans, some determined to rule or ruin the national party, others actively working for ruin. Fire-eater Edmund Ruffin prayed for a Democratic split that would open the way for a Republican victory in 1860 that would force ‘‘the dishonest & timid southern men’’ finally to ‘‘stand up for the South.’’33 South Carolina secessionists tried to promote a division by campaigning to reopen the African slave trade, which would, these advocates claimed, make it possible for ‘‘every white man’’ to become a slaveowner and eliminate ‘‘a stigma on [southern] institutions.’’34 Promoting the African slave trade, however, was a poor way to unite white southerners, because many slaveholders shrank from the trade as an evil, and because slaveowners in the upper South who profited by selling their surplus slaves opposed a policy that would lower slave prices. The fire-eaters, though, were aided by events in the next two years: a renewal of conflict over Kansas, a controversial decision of

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the Supreme Court, and a bold raid into Virginia by abolitionist John Brown. In Kansas, the proslavery minority tried to bring the territory into the Union as a slave state. In an election in June 1857, boycotted by antislavery voters, delegates were chosen for a constitutional convention that proceeded to write a constitution guaranteeing that slaves currently in Kansas (about 200 in all) would remain slaves, and with a clause opening Kansas to future settlement by slaveowners. Rather than submit the entire constitution to a popular vote, the delegates gave the voters only two choices—the constitution ‘‘with slavery,’’ meaning with the clause allowing future importations, or ‘‘without slavery,’’ which would still protect ownership of slaves already in Kansas. With antislavery men again boycotting the ratification vote, the constitution passed ‘‘with slavery.’’ Southerners in Congress insisted that Kansas be admitted as a state under its new proslavery constitution, and Buchanan agreed. But Stephen Douglas and other northern Democrats considered the proposed new constitution a fraud against the theory of popular sovereignty, since no one believed that it represented the will of a genuine popular majority in Kansas. Douglas rallied enough votes in Congress to defeat admission, but only at the expense of creating a huge breach between northern and southern Democrats. The breach was widened further in the aftermath of an 1857 decision by the Supreme Court on a Missouri slave named Dred Scott, who had sued for his freedom on the grounds that his master had taken him to live in the region of the Louisiana Purchase where slavery had been banned by the Missouri Compromise. The Court, with a majority of southern-born judges, not only threw out Scott’s case on the grounds that people of African descent had no rights to sue in Federal courts, but also went on to declare the Missouri Compromise Line unconstitutional. It endorsed Calhoun’s old argument that southerners must be guaranteed all property rights— including the right to own slaves—in the territories. It had, basically, ruled that the founding principle of the Republican party, ‘‘free soil’’ in all territories, was unconstitutional. But, by implication, even a territorial legislature could not keep out slavery in Kansas, so the Court also undercut the ‘‘popular sovereignty’’ doctrine of northern Democrats. When Stephen Douglas was pressed during his famous debates with Abraham Lincoln in 1858 to explain how local settlers could keep out slavery in the face of the Dred Scott decision, he replied that, Supreme Court or no Supreme Court,

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territorial settlers could exclude slavery simply by refusing to protect it. No slaveowner, he pointed out, would take his slaves to a place where the laws did not stringently protect his right to this troublesome property. Southern Democratic leaders became determined to prevent Douglas from winning their party’s nomination for the presidency and to put the Democrats on record as defending the rights of slaveowners to take their slaves into all U.S. territories. Fire-eaters now had a new rallying cry, a demand that Congress itself write laws to protect slaveowning in the territories. Southern whites’ fears over slavery were heightened dramatically in October 1859 when John Brown, of Kansas notoriety, backed financially by several prominent abolitionists, led a raid on the national armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia with an ‘‘army’’ of 21, including three of his own sons and five black men. Brown’s Christianity was guided more by the stern rule of the Old Testament’s Jehovah than by the compassionate religion of Harriet Beecher Stowe. He failed to touch off a slave insurrection, if that is what he planned; no slaves rallied to his side, and his band was soon bottled up and captured by a contingent of troops under Colonel Robert E. Lee. The state of Virginia put Brown on trial for treason and hanged him on December 2, 1859. But, if Brown’s daring raid failed in its immediate goals, it helped to accomplish his larger purposes. Southerners jumped to the conclusion that Brown’s plans were bigger and his supporters far more numerous than they were, and panic seized areas heavily populated with slaves. Whites imagined a Nat Turner in every neighborhood, perhaps already poised to strike under the guidance of Brown’s ‘‘emissaries.’’ The white reaction is yet another example of the way in which the tradition of slave resistance fueled fears that lay always smoldering just below the surface of white consciousness, ready to burst into flame at any time. White southerners were further angered by the northern response to Brown’s raid. While scarcely any white northerners approved of inciting slaves to violence, Brown’s behavior at his trial and execution raised him in many eyes to the status of martyr, if to some a deluded one. Brown claimed he wanted to arm slaves only in selfdefense and eloquently claimed willingness to ‘‘mingle my blood . . . with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments.’’ Even Edmund Ruffin, Virginia’s leading fire-eater, was impressed

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with Brown’s calm courage as the noose was put around his neck. Ruffin wrote that ‘‘it is impossible for me not to respect his thorough devotion to his bad cause, & the undaunted courage with which he has sustained it.’’35 But northerners’ refusal to see Brown as simply a monster outraged white southerners. Some became convinced that there could be no safety for them in the Union, while others agreed that their safety required that the national government remain in the hands of men like Buchanan, who bowed to southern white demands.

The Election of 1860 Provokes the First Secession In this emotionally charged atmosphere, southerners approached the 1860 election. Remnants of the Whigs and Americans, meeting in Baltimore as the Constitutional Union Party, nominated former Whig John Bell of Tennessee for president and adopted a simple platform calling for national unity, support for the Constitution, and enforcement of the law. Playing on fears of secession, the Constitutional Unionists mounted a vigorous campaign throughout the South. The Republican party surprised many by nominating Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, whose only national office had been a single term as a Congressman. Lincoln firmly supported free soil in the territories, though he had always said he would not attack slavery where it already existed. Southern Democrats were themselves divided. A minority supported Stephen Douglas as the only candidate strong enough in both North and South to win, but Douglas was unacceptable to a majority of southern Democrats, who feared that, with Douglas at the head of the ticket, they might lose to the Constitutional Unionists. These ‘‘Southern Rights Democrats’’ insisted that the party repudiate Douglas and include in its platform a promise that, if the settlers of a territory refused to protect the rights of slaveowners, Congress would step in. A third group of southern Democrats, true secessionists, saw a split in the party as an opportunity. Yancey again convinced his state party to endorse the Alabama Platform’s call for full protection of slaveholders’ rights and went to the convention determined to get his way or walk out. South Carolina fire-eaters hoped Yancey’s strategy would split the party. Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr., for example, predicted that if

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the Alabama and Mississippi delegations did walk out of the convention, ‘‘the game will be ours,’’ since it would lead to the breakdown of ‘‘the spoils Democracy,’’ the election of ‘‘a Black Republican,’’ and the dissolution of the Union.36 The scenario played out as Rhett hoped. The 1860 Democratic convention met in Charleston, South Carolina, the cradle of secessionist thought and a place hardly conducive to compromise. The platform committee, where southerners had the advantage, adopted a prosouthern report, embodying language suggested by Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, that ‘‘it is the duty of the Federal Government . . . to protect, when necessary, the rights of persons and property in the Territories.’’ But the majority of actual delegates rejected this majority report in favor of a platform that stated simply that the party would ‘‘abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court’’ upon the question of slavery in the territories.37 This precipitated a walkout from the convention by Alabama’s delegates, as contemplated in Yancey’s platform, and the Alabamans were followed in turn by most other delegates from the lower South. Most of the bolters probably expected the Douglas majority to recognize defeat and compromise, but, if so, they were mistaken. Douglas’s managers were no more willing to compromise than southerners, and the convention adjourned after two days of balloting with no nominee. In June, after six weeks of maneuvering, the northern and southern wings of the party nominated separate candidates: by the northerners, Douglas, and the southerners, Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. Southern Democrats had lost control of their party’s national election machinery. They could no longer dominate the party’s northern wing and could also not afford, or so they felt, to be dominated by the northerners. Indeed, despite the decline of the Whigs, Breckinridge Democrats could not even be certain of controlling the slave states. Herschel Johnson, a Georgia senator, accepted nomination for Vice President on the ticket with Douglas and told voters that southern rights would best be protected with Douglas as President. Breaking with precedent, Douglas personally barnstormed the country, to tell voters he was the only real alternative to Lincoln. He campaigned hard for southern votes, but he also said forthrightly that, if southern states tried to leave the union, he would respond as Andrew Jackson had responded to nullification. Breckinridge and his supporters insisted for their

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part that they were not disunionists, but that the best way to keep the union together was for southerners to unite behind a strong platform that insisted on protection for their slave property; only then would northerners be forced to go along. The election of 1860 revealed that the South was united only in rejecting Lincoln and the Republicans. Breckinridge carried the lower South and three upper South states to finish second in the electoral college with 72 votes, but Bell won in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, and his vote total of 516,000 in the slave states was not far below Breckinridge’s 571,000. Douglas won 163,000 southern votes and carried Missouri, so Breckinridge overall took only 46% of the popular vote in the slave states. The real victors among southern politicians were the fire-eating secessionists, who watched with anticipation as Lincoln won a clear majority in the electoral college by carrying almost every free state. Even as southern Democrats campaigned for Breckinridge in 1860, many of them agreed with Thomas Cobb of Georgia that Lincoln’s election would mean ‘‘inevitable disunion.’’ South Carolina’s political elite was ready to force the issue as soon as the result became known. The legislature called for a convention in December, and a correspondent from the London Times reported that ‘‘There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees.’’38 On December 20, amid wild cheering, the convention voted unanimously to withdraw from the Union. The address it published to justify its action had a long introduction defending the constitutionality of secession and made crystal clear that the state had acted because of ‘‘the action of the nonslaveholding states’’ against ‘‘the rights of property established in fifteen of the states’’: they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace . . . of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.’’

Most important, the election of Lincoln meant that ‘‘this agitation . . . has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government.’’

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This basic message, that white southerners faced a mortal threat because the power of the central government had passed into the hands of an antislavery party, was echoed in speeches, editorials, and pamphlets throughout the slave states, most of which also called for conventions to consider secession. Unlike in South Carolina, however, both the public and elites elsewhere were far more divided. In Georgia, for example, Alexander Stephens pointed out that Lincoln had been elected in strict constitutional form, that he had not threatened slavery in the South, and that his power would be hedged about by Congress and the Supreme Court. ‘‘If we yield to passion,’’ he added, ‘‘instead of becoming more peaceful, prosperous, and happy. . . we shall . . . at no distant day commence cutting one another’s throats.’’ In Texas, Governor Sam Houston predicted that secession would bring ‘‘anarchy and ruin.’’39 Secessionists replied that Lincoln was too great a threat to ignore. Henry Benning of Georgia insisted that ‘‘the election of Mr. Lincoln . . . means the abolition of slavery’’ as soon as his party ‘‘shall have gathered the strength to abolish it,’’ which it would soon do. Thomas Cobb called Lincoln ‘‘one of the most objectionable and fanatical’’ of northern leaders, one who would set the nation on the road to total emancipation. Lincoln, using the power of patronage, would be able to build up the Republican Party in the South itself. Given that the Republicans had won 10 percent of the vote in Missouri and 24 percent in Delaware, both slave states, this prediction did not seem implausible. Georgia’s Governor Joseph Brown appealed to the masculine honor and the racial fears of his state’s nonslaveholding white men. Emancipated slaves would ‘‘live by stealing, robbing and plundering,’’ or else they would ‘‘come in competition with the poor white laborers’’ and drive down wages. Worse, ‘‘the negro and the white man, and their families. . . . must go to church as equals; enter the Courts of justice as equals . . . enter each others’ houses in social intercourse as equals; and very soon their children must marry together as equals.’’ Most secessionists mocked fears of war; Benning claimed that separation would bring about a commercial crisis so severe that ‘‘nobody would be able to pay the necessary taxes for the war,’’ and the North would not be able to raise an army: ‘‘A few persons might volunteer for the sake of bread, none would for any other reason.’’40 Similar debates played out throughout the South as voters chose delegates to conventions that would meet in early 1861 to decide

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whether their states would follow South Carolina’s lead. Candidates campaigned as out-and-out secessionists, as opponents to secession, or as ‘‘cooperationists’’ who maintained that southern states should meet together to decide on a joint response to Lincoln’s election. Some cooperationists were committed to secession but believed a joint move the safest way to accomplish it. Some believed that a united southern convention could force concessions from the north and force the Republican party to back down from its platform. Others, though running as cooperationists, flatly opposed secession. In the elections in January and February 1861 in the lower South, immediate secessionists prevailed, although in some states by narrow margins. In Georgia, probably only a bare majority of voters favored immediate secession, but, in the key vote on January 19, its convention voted by 166 to 130 for immediate secession. Conventions in Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas also voted to leave the Union. Their declarations, like South Carolina’s, made it clear that protecting slavery was the impulse behind secession. Texas’s Declaration of Causes explained that ‘‘the servitude of the African to the white race within [the state’s] limits’’ created ‘‘the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy,’’ that the United States was ‘‘established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity,’’ and that the destruction of slavery ‘‘would bring inevitable calamities upon both [races] and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.’’ The connection between secession and slavery also is reflected in the election returns. Voters in the heavily slave regions of the cotton belt from middle Georgia to east Texas sent secessionist delegates to the conventions, while the hill country and pine lands with few slaves sent cooperationists or outright unionists. It is likely that, in these first seven states to leave the Union, a majority of nonslaveholders were, in fact, opposed to immediate secession, a pattern that helps to explain why only one state, Texas, allowed a popular vote on its ordinance of secession. It was the political class dominated by slaveholding planters, and not the mass of people themselves, that carried the lower South out of the Union. These seven seceding states sent delegates to Montgomery, Alabama in late February 1861 to declare the establishment of a new Confederate States of America and write a constitution for the new country. They modeled their founding document on the U.S.

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Constitution. It specified that the new government was being formed by the people of ‘‘each State acting in its sovereign and independent character.’’ It prohibited protective tariffs and most spending for internal improvements. Yet, its preamble stated that the purpose was to ‘‘form a permanent federal government,’’ and there was no mention of nullification or a right of secession. Also included were changes designed to prevent the kind of corruption that many southerners associated with political parties. The president would be limited to a single, six-year, term and could remove lower officials only for cause. The new constitution forbade Congress to pass laws ‘‘denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves’’ but included few explicit endorsements of fire-eater dogmas. The African slave trade was outlawed. Over the objection of South Carolinians, the constitution did not prohibit the admission of nonslaveholding states to the new Confederacy. Pending elections, the delegates chose, as the first president of the Confederacy, Mississippi’s Senator Jefferson Davis, the West Point graduate who had won glory in the Mexican War and then served as an effective Secretary of War under Pierce. Davis was known as a strong southern rights Democrat, though he had not strongly supported secession in 1860. The delegates gave little consideration to Robert Barnwell Rhett or other fire-eaters, who were more fit for agitating than governing. To demonstrate the South’s unity, they selected as Vice President Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who, after opposing secession in his own state, had pledged his full support.

The South Divided The Montgomery delegates rejected the fire-eaters’ extreme proslavery goals in part because the South itself was divided by secession. Powerful voices in the upper South did campaign for secession, but the movement there stalled in early 1861 as more moderate leaders resisted. Some, such as Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, were firm Unionists who denounced secession as folly and treason. Many more moderates were conditional Unionists who believed that Lincoln’s election was not sufficient cause for secession and that, to the contrary, disunion and war were the greatest threats to slavery. These antisecessionists had a strong

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political base in the surviving ‘‘Opposition’’ parties. Two-thirds of the delegates elected to Virginia’s convention opposed immediate secession. In North Carolina and Tennessee, a large majority of elected delegates opposed immediate secession, but they had nothing to decide, since a majority of voters in both states also rejected the call for a convention. In Arkansas, a convention did meet and a slim 39 to 35 majority opposed immediate secession. The other slave states (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) did not even call for conventions.41 The patterns of voting in these upper South states again reflects the close connection between slaveholding and support for secession. In Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina, many nonslaveholding Democrats abandoned their leaders and joined the coalition of Unionists who opposed immediate secession, while about a quarter of the men who had stayed home in the November election voted overwhelmingly against immediate secession. Altogether, about three-quarters of nonslave-owning voters in the upper South voted against secession, while about two-thirds of slaveowners voted for it.42 Secessionists in the upper South had utterly failed to convince a large majority of nonslaveowners that Lincoln and the Republican Party were a mortal threat to their way of life. To sway them, the new Confederacy dispatched commissioners to those slave states that had not left the Union. John Preston of South Carolina told Virginia’s convention that Lincoln’s election signaled future ‘‘annihilation’’ for the white people of the South. Commissioners to North Carolina predicted that, under the Republicans, the South would be ‘‘doomed to a servile war.’’ Stephen Hale of Alabama wrote to the governor of Kentucky that no southern man, ‘‘be he slave-holder or no-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not distant future associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped . . . of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed.’’43 The longer-term success of the Unionist movement in the upper South would depend on Lincoln. Most upper-South voters wanted to stay in the Union, but their unionism remained conditional. The most important of the conditions was that Lincoln reject coercion of the seven states of the new Confederacy. Lincoln must either

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cooperate with southern Unionists to devise a compromise that would tempt the lower South states back into the Union, or he must let them go in peace. Southern Unionists, especially those in Virginia, worked with a sense of desperation to design such a compromise. In December 1860, a special committee in Congress proposed amendments to the Constitution that might satisfy the slave states, but the effort foundered when Lincoln refused to bend on the most important of the proposed amendments, an extension of the Missouri Compromise Line to cover all present and future territories. Lincoln was willing to accept guarantees for slavery where it already existed, but, having been elected on a free-soil platform, he was unwilling to give way on slavery in the territories. Virginians also called for a ‘‘Peace Conference’’ of delegates from every state to meet in Washington in February 1861, but the lower South states, busy setting up the Confederacy, refused to send delegates, and the compromise on the territories supported by the Peace Conference satisfied neither secessionists nor Republicans. Upper-South Unionists now waited to see what Lincoln would do. They were alarmed when, in his inaugural on March 4, 1861, the new president declared that the Union was perpetual and pledged to ‘‘hold, occupy, and possess the property’’ still held by the national government. By this time, federal property within the Confederacy consisted of forts in the harbors of Pensacola and Charleston. Because of its location in the Confederate heartland, and because its small garrison was running short of supplies, Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbor seemed the most likely place for a conflict to begin. The Confederacy sent commissioners to Washington to demand that both forts be turned over to their new government, but Lincoln refused to meet them. He decided to send supplies, but not reinforcements, to Sumter and informed South Carolina’s governor that he would do so. The impatient Confederates decided to wait no longer to claim what they considered to be their own property, and, on April 12, 1861, Confederate commander General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Sumter and forced its surrender. On April 15, Lincoln called for troops to put down the rebellion. Lincoln’s call for troops undercut the Unionist cause in Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, as most conditional Unionists became ‘‘reluctant Confederates.’’ Tennessean William Henry King explained that ‘‘I am opposed to secession and

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disunion. But . . . we have to take sides, and we cannot go against our State and Country.’’44 Arkansas’s convention now voted 65 to 5 to secede, and Virginia’s convention passed an ordinance of secession by 88 to 55. After North Carolina’s legislature called for a new convention vote, its convention adopted secession unanimously on May 20. In Tennessee, the legislature skipped a convention to hold a popular referendum on the question, and, on June 8, voters in west and middle Tennessee overwhelmingly supported secession and carried the state into the Confederacy. The ordinances of secession eliminated the moderate middle ground of conditional Unionism, leaving only a choice of loyalty to the Confederacy or to the Union. Most white southerners chose the Confederacy because they were unwilling to oppose their own state’s people. Robert E. Lee, when offered command of the Union army, resigned from the U.S. Army, telling a relative that ‘‘I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.’’45 Others stuck with the Union. In Richmond, angry convention delegates from the northwest of the state hurriedly departed after the secession vote and prepared to spark their own version of secession by taking their section out of Virginia. In other parts of the upland South, especially East Tennessee, unionists simply withdrew from public participation and hoped for the best. But, in the border slave states from Delaware to Missouri, even Lincoln’s call for troops was not enough to provoke secession. In Maryland, the governor was a strong unionist, while the legislature resolved that Maryland would ‘‘have no part’’ in the prosecution of the war. A special election for U.S. Representatives on June 13, 1861 showed that most Marylanders were Unionists; all six Unionist candidates won.46 Delaware, with fewer than 2,000 slaves, hardly counted any longer as a slave state, and, unless Maryland seceded, lacked a common border with the Confederacy. In Missouri, a convention decisively rejected secession, and Governor Claiborne Jackson’s attempt to lead the state into the Confederacy after Fort Sumter was thwarted when U.S. Army Captain Nathaniel Lyon mobilized loyal German citizens in St. Louis. Kentucky’s governor issued a proclamation of neutrality insisting that both sides keep their troops out of Kentucky, but elections for Congress in June and for the state legislature in August both produced large Unionist majorities. When a Confederate force under General

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Leonidas Polk violated the formal ‘‘neutrality’’ of the state in September, Kentucky’s adherence to the Union was sealed. At the moment when the dream of a southern nation was finally fulfilled, the nightmare of southern division was confirmed.

Why Secession? The Greek historian Thucydides once wrote that people risk war because of ‘‘honor, fear, and interest.’’47 Virtually identical wording can be found in the arguments of secessionists. Stephen Hale of Alabama urged Kentuckians to secede ‘‘to protect the interest, honor, and safety’’ of their citizens, and Georgia’s Henry Benning told Virginians that ‘‘above all we have a cause—the cause of honor, and liberty, and property, and self-preservation.’’48 The common source of the threats to honor, safety, and interest was slavery. Slaves, worth $2 billion in themselves, were obviously the leading interest of the South and the source of prosperity for virtually all its leading men. Secessionist Henry Foote of Mississippi had stated the point clearly: ‘‘Would you be willing to shoulder your musket in vindication of slaveholding rights . . . if your slaves were only worth five dollars apiece? Why, every man sees that that is an absurdity.’’49 But slaves were property like none other. No other property rose up to burn barns, poison masters, or even kill owners’ families, hence the palpable fear that spread from time to time throughout the South and the emphasis in secessionist rhetoric on the danger of ‘‘insurrection,’’ on the ‘‘horrors’’ of Haiti, on the coming of ‘‘a servile war.’’ And honor, too, was at stake. The drumbeat of denunciation of slave masters by abolitionists as merciless exploiters of innocent women, sellers of children, and hypocritical Christians was hard enough to take in any case, but now these views had apparently been endorsed by a majority of northern voters, who had taken control of the national government. The appeals to honor and fear were especially important for nonslaveholders, whose economic stake in slavery was highly questionable. Every southern man, secessionists insisted, had a vital stake in preventing racial equality that would threaten every home, and the only manly response was resistance in a cause in which ‘‘cowards will become men, men heroes, and heroes gods.’’50 The centrality of racial

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slavery to the purpose of the new Confederacy was summed up memorably by Vice President Stephens in June 1861, when he told a cheering crowd in Savannah that the new government was the best on earth because ‘‘its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery. . . is his natural and normal condition.’’51 Honor, fear, interest: all were threatened by the transfer of power to a northern majority hostile to slavery. Of course, the secessionists, for the most part, preferred not to take seriously the possibility that their property would be taken from them and that the ‘‘horrors’’ of racial equality could be thrust upon them because of secession. Many believed that the North, faced by 8,000,000 southern whites supported on the home front by 4,000,000 contented slaves, would never go to war. The first Confederate Secretary of War, Leroy Pope Walker, had said he would ‘‘wipe up with his pocket handkerchief all the blood shed as a result of the South’s withdrawal from the Union.’’ More realistic was a South Carolina businessman writing just after his state had seceded. Though a ‘‘Union loving’’ man, he could no longer accept the North’s ‘‘fierce and unrelenting war upon us. . . . They have held us up to the world in the most disgusting and humiliating light.’’ But he had no illusions about peace or easy victory. ‘‘Talk of a peaceful Revolution is out of the question. . . . It is useless for men of either section to boast of bravery or attempt to depreciate or disparage the other. . . . We know they are all brave. Our blood and theirs are the same.’’ And so he had ‘‘no doubt’’ that the result would be ‘‘the bloodiest war that ever deluged any Country.’’52

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Slavery, one Alabama editor wrote early in the war, would be ‘‘a tower of strength to the Confederacy;’’ with the slaves remaining peacefully at home to raise food, the new nation would be able ‘‘to place in the field a force so much larger in proportion to her white population than the North.’’1 Private communications reflected similar confidence. Mississippian Louisa Lovell wrote, in July 1861, to her husband at the Virginia front that their ‘‘servants’’ ‘‘often speak to me about the war and there was great rejoicing in the kitchen at the news of our recent glorious victory’’ at Manassas: ‘‘those miserable abolitionists . . . know nothing of the bond that unites the master and servant of its tenderness and care on the one side, and its pride fidelity and attachment on the other.’’2 The Confederacy did benefit from the labor of slaves, not only on plantations and farms, but also on fortifications and in many industrial enterprises. Thousands became hospital workers caring for wounded soldiers. White men filled the armies, and, for more than a year, Confederate successes on the battlefield gave promise of final victory. But final victory did not come, and as the war dragged on, it exposed more fault lines in southern society between slaves and masters, between slaveowners and nonslaveowners, and between Unionist and Confederate patriots. Slavery divided not only North and South, but southerners themselves, and the divisions proved fatal to the Confederate cause. Slavery proved to be a fundamental weakness for the Confederacy, as the war gradually dispelled widely shared illusions of racial harmony and exposed the divisions between the slave-owning minority of whites and the nonslave-owning majority.

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At first, most whites in the Confederacy were confident that a single mighty battle would quickly end the war and bring independence. Jefferson Davis appointed U.S. Army veterans to most of the top ranks, but, as in the Union, some generals owed their appointments more to political clout than to military ability. Recruiting was a largely private activity. Men who dreamed of leading companies and regiments signed up relatives, friends, and neighbors in new units, then offered themselves for service. The core of early recruits, however, came from hundreds of pre-existing volunteer militia companies who were already uniformed and armed. Governors also provided arms from state arsenals or U.S. arsenals they had seized. Women, too, mobilized, to design and sew banners, flags, and uniforms and to send men off with elaborate ceremonies that stressed their masculine duty to defend home and hearth. But portents of future conflicts between the state and central governments soon appeared; Georgia’s Governor Joseph E. Brown insisted that one local company either surrender its arms or pledge not to take them out of the state. Volunteers were eager to get to Virginia and the fighting, afraid that the war might be over before they had a chance to share in the glory. In May and June of 1861, hastily assembled armies drilled. P.G.T. Beauregard of Fort Sumter fame commanded about 22,000 Confederates southwest of Washington and Joseph Johnston about half that many in the Shenandoah Valley, ready to repel a Union invasion along that route. Urged on by President Lincoln, Union General Irwin McDowell sent his own 35,000 troops south. In the three days it took these green men to move 30 miles, Beauregard concentrated at Manassas Junction. McDowell attacked early on July 21, and, despite poor management, almost prevailed in a back-and-forth battle, until Confederate forces under Johnston arrived from the Valley by railroad in the late afternoon to turn the tide. McDowell conceded defeat, an orderly Union retreat turned into a panic, and thousands of soldiers fled toward Washington, throwing down arms and packs (and running into hundreds of spectators who had come down from the capital in their carriages to watch an expected Union victory). The 900 killed and 2,700 wounded on both sides combined would pale beside the huge numbers of casualties in later battles, but Manassas (or Bull Run, as the Union called it) showed both sides that the war would be long and expensive in blood and treasure. Jefferson Davis and his advisors adopted a strategy that

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has been called the ‘‘offensive–defensive’’: ‘‘fielding large national armies, placing them in an overarching defensive posture to protect as much territory as possible, and launching offensive movements against northern armies when circumstances promised success.’’3 The Confederacy’s goal was to win enough victories to destroy Union morale and prompt recognition or intervention by Britain and France. Its large territory—bigger than all of western Europe— would be difficult to defend but even more difficult to invade and subdue; the Union would need its advantages in men and material to hold territory and protect its lines of supply. The Union’s Commanding General, Winfield Scott, proposed to strangle the Confederacy with his ‘‘Anaconda Plan,’’ blockading the coast, moving down the Mississippi River, and avoiding large bloody battles. The blockade gradually tightened, as the Union seized Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina, Port Royal, South Carolina, and Roanoke Island, North Carolina. In April 1862, it took New Orleans, the Confederacy’s largest port and its most important commercial and financial center. In Virginia, Joseph Johnston organized defenses around Richmond while George McClellan, the new Union commander in the east, built up and trained his army, now named the Army of the Potomac. It was in the west that the Confederacy would face the more serious military threat. An indecisive battle at Wilson’s Creek in southwest Missouri in August 1861, and a Federal victory at Pea Ridge the next spring, ensured that the Union would remain firmly in control of Missouri’s government. A small Confederate force from Texas, with the ambitious goal of detaching the entire southwest (including California) from the Union, was defeated and scattered by a Union army in New Mexico in February 1862. But the Union’s greatest successes were in Tennessee that same month, when Union Gen. U.S. Grant led a combined army and naval operation down the Tennessee River. Grant took the lightly defended Fort Henry, then moved against a bigger prize, Fort Donelson, 12 miles away on the Cumberland River. Albert Sidney Johnston (no relation to Joseph), in overall command of Confederate forces in the west, reinforced Donelson, but it was ineptly defended by two political generals, John B. Floyd and Gideon Pillow, and Grant captured it and its 15,000 defenders. The loss of the two forts made the defense of Nashville untenable, and a Union army occupied that important supply and manufacturing center.

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Johnston fell back to Corinth, Mississippi, to gather an army large enough to counter Grant’s invasion, and Grant moved up the Tennessee River (‘‘up’’ in this stretch of the river meaning south) to Pittsburg Landing, 20 miles from Corinth. Johnston decided to strike first; he planned a one-day advance from Corinth to catch Grant by surprise, but it took almost three full days to get his men into place, near a little church named Shiloh. Despite the delay, the Confederates caught Grant’s men by surprise on April 6 and, in a day of bitter fighting, nearly drove them into the river. Johnston was shot in the leg and bled to death, and the Confederates fell short of a complete victory. Overnight, Grant was reinforced, and he then counter-attacked, driving the Confederates back across the fields they had conquered the day before. The scale of the Battle of Shiloh overshadowed Manassas. Each side had about 1,700 killed, 8,000 wounded, and thousands more captured or missing in action. As Grant was moving in western Tennessee, McClellan had begun his own advance in Virginia, transferring most of his army to the Chesapeake in order to move on Richmond from the southeast. His move was almost thwarted on March 8 when the fledgling Confederate navy’s new ironclad ship, the Virginia, steamed into Hampton Roads and in five hours sank two Union blockaders and ran three others aground. The next day, the Union sent out its own ironclad, the oddly shaped Monitor, against the Virginia. Their duel was a standoff, but the Virginia was prevented from doing further damage. As Grant was encamped at Pittsburg Landing in early April, McClellan completed the transfer of his army. Fortunately for the Confederacy, McClellan was a cautious man with an exaggerated idea of the size of the Confederate forces before him (he thought he was outnumbered, while in fact his 130,000 men outnumbered the Confederates by almost two to one). Joseph Johnston, a master of tactical defense, delayed McClellan until he could withdraw into the strong defenses around Richmond. Still, by the end of May, with McClellan nearing Richmond and another 30,000 Federals under Irwin McDowell ready to reinforce him, the fall of the Confederate capital appeared so imminent that Jefferson Davis sent his family away for safety. Bold Confederate action stopped McClellan, then drove him back. Robert E. Lee, Davis’s military advisor, sent Thomas ‘‘Stonewall’’ Jackson against Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley. Taking advantage of the speed of his ‘‘foot cavalry,’’ intimate knowledge of

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the valley’s terrain, and his uncanny ability to ‘‘mystify, mislead, and surprise’’ his enemy, Jackson repeatedly fell on isolated union forces, defeating them in five battles from May 8 to June 9. Lincoln, alarmed, insisted that McDowell stay near Washington to guard against a surprise attack on the capital. On May 31, Johnston attacked McClellan’s army, divided by the rain-swollen Chickahominy River. This assault, while only a moderate success, led McClellan to retreat and try to take Richmond by siege. Johnston himself was severely wounded, and Davis replaced him in the field with Lee. Lee, 55 years old, had been the most respected officer in the U.S. Army. He graduated from West Point in 1829 without a single demerit and served with distinction under Winfield Scott in Mexico. In the first year of the Civil War, however, he gave little indication of his later fame, failing to expel Union forces from western Virginia, then spending four months strengthening fortifications along the south Atlantic coast. Lee got along well with Davis, which many people did not, and Davis brought him to Richmond in March 1862. Finally in command of a major fighting force, Lee was in his element. Calling Jackson in from the Valley, he planned to attack McClellan’s still-divided army and destroy it. In a week of assaults at the end of June, known as the Seven Days battles, Lee drove McClellan back to the protection of his gunboats, at the cost of more than 20,000 casualties to 16,000 for the Army of the Potomac. In August, Lee followed this victory by moving into northern Virginia and smashing into a Federal army under John Pope on the old Manassas battlefield, inflicting twice as many casualties on Pope as his own men suffered and driving Pope back toward Washington. Morale in the Confederacy soared. Had McClellan captured Richmond, the war might have ended with slavery still intact. Ironically, Lee’s victories prolonged the war long enough to ensure that the Confederacy’s final defeat would mean the end of slavery as well.

Black Anti-Confederates By the summer of 1862, slavery had begun to unravel, largely because of the actions of the slaves themselves. Louisa Lovell, who had written confidently to her husband of slaves’ ‘‘pride

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fidelity and attachment’’ to their owners, had heard rumors at the very outset of the war that slaves near her Mississippi plantation ‘‘had been talking a great deal about Lincoln freeing the servants.’’ Several carriage drivers—among the most intimately known and highly prized personal slaves—were suspected of ‘‘forming plans about an insurrection,’’ and at least four were hanged. Political and military news spread to slaves throughout the South by means of what Booker T. Washington, born a slave in Virginia, later called the ‘‘ ‘grape-vine’ telegraph’’: ‘‘even the most ignorant members of my race on the remote plantations felt in their hearts, with a certainty that admitted of no doubt, that the freedom of the slaves would be the one great result of the war, if the Northern armies conquered.’’ Slaves may have been, as one planter admitted, part of the Confederate ‘‘Body politic,’’ but they considered both the Confederacy and its ‘‘cornerstone,’’ slavery, illegitimate.4 At first, slavery presented a dilemma for the Union, since few white northerners wanted to attack it outright. After all, the Union itself included four slave states: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Both Lincoln and the Congress, consistent with the Republican party platform of 1860, explicitly denied an intent to attack slavery. But, by the time of McClellan’s retreat from Richmond, this reluctance had been altered by the events of war. As early as May 1861, runaway slaves began arriving behind Union lines. One slave, Henry Jarvis, escaped to Fort Monroe, Virginia, occupied by a Union force under General Benjamin Butler, and offered to enlist. Butler told him that ‘‘it wasn’t a black man’s war,’’ but, Jarvis claimed, ‘‘I told him it would be a black man’s war before they got through.’’5 Rather than send fugitives back to their owners, Butler put them to work, calling them ‘‘contraband of war’’ on the grounds that slave property could be used to aid the Confederate rebellion. Congress ratified Butler’s policy in the Confiscation Act of August 1861, making slaves ‘‘subject of prize and capture.’’ This Act caused problems in the slave states still in the Union, since runways there presumably belonged to loyal owners, and, in Kentucky, General William T. Sherman told his subordinates to refuse to let runaways into his camps. In Missouri, on the contrary, General John C. Fremont proclaimed all slaves free—an act that an embarrassed Lincoln quickly countermanded. Within the Confederacy itself, slaves flocked to Union troops wherever they gained a foothold. After several Sea Islands off

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South Carolina were seized in November 1861, thousands of slaves came into Union lines or refused to leave their plantations when their owners tried to evacuate them. In April 1862, General David Hunter, Union commander in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, began to enlist these escaped slaves into his army. When border state representatives in the U.S. Congress protested the recruitment of ‘‘fugitive slaves,’’ Hunter retorted that he had enrolled no such fugitives, though he did have ‘‘a fine regiment of persons whose late masters are ‘Fugitive Rebels.’ ’’ Hunter then declared all slaves in his department free, but, like Fremont, he had gotten too far out in front of Lincoln, who required him to disband his black regiment and rescind his declaration of emancipation.6 No declarations, however, could prevent slaves from pouring into federal camps. In August 1862, planters along the Georgia coast said they had lost 20,000 slave runaways and called for summary execution of such ‘‘Traitors’’ captured while escaping.7 Meanwhile, opinion in the North moved steadily against slavery. In March 1862, Congress prohibited the Union army from helping Confederate masters recover fugitive slaves; in April it abolished slavery in the District of Columbia; in June it extended abolition to all U.S. territories. After McClellan’s retreat from Richmond, Congress passed a second Confiscation Act calling for the seizure of all rebel property, making all slaves thus seized ‘‘forever free.’’ A Militia Act authorized the use of ‘‘persons of African descent’’ in ‘‘any military or naval service for which they may be found competent.’’ The War Department authorized recruitment of slaves into new regiments in the Sea Islands, and General Butler, now commander in New Orleans, accepted into his forces several companies of ‘‘Native Guards,’’ made up of free people of color. Lincoln himself resolved on a more far-reaching step, and, on July 22, 1862, informed his cabinet that he intended to issue an emancipation proclamation freeing all Confederate slaves. The cabinet approved, but Secretary of State William Seward urged Lincoln to delay until military prospects improved. Lincoln agreed and put his proclamation aside until a victory allowed him to act. The victory Lincoln needed came in September, when the tide of war seemed to be running in favor of the Confederacy. Separate Confederate armies under the command of Braxton Bragg and Kirby Smith had moved into Kentucky. Lee, seeking to tip the balance of the war decisively, had invaded Maryland, where he

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hoped to recruit new troops, threaten Philadelphia and Washington, and, perhaps, tempt Britain into intervention on behalf of Confederate independence. Lee’s invasion was stopped first by the Army of the Potomac under McClellan, one of whose men had luckily found a set of Lee’s orders for his divided army wrapped around three lost cigars. Lee was able to concentrate most of his forces along Antietam Creek, at Sharpsburg, before McClellan attacked him on September 17. In the single bloodiest day of the war, Lee fended off McClellan’s much larger army, but only at the cost of 1,546 dead and 7,752 wounded. Lee was forced to retreat across the Potomac. Three weeks later, a Union army engaged Bragg at Perryville, Kentucky, and sent him back into Tennessee. For Lincoln, Lee’s retreat after the Battle of Antietam provided the long-awaited opportunity to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation, published September 22, stated that, on January 1, 1863, any slaves held in states ‘‘in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.’’ When the date of freedom arrived, he signed the final Emancipation Proclamation, which, in addition to freeing the slaves, declared that they ‘‘would be received into the armed forces of the United States.’’ The Proclamation did not apply to the slave states in the Union, nor to Tennessee and other areas under the control of Union armies, so its immediate impact was limited, but it would decisively reshape both the purposes and strategy of the war.

The Problem of Confederate Strategy Confederate partisans had expected to win the war quickly, convinced that their people would make far better soldiers and officers than the North’s, marked as they were by ‘‘luxurious effeminacy.’’8 Only with difficulty had Jefferson Davis persuaded the Confederate Congress to require volunteers to sign up for a full year, not the six months they expected the war to take. The hope persisted that a single great battle or campaign could overwhelm the Union army so completely that the Union would simply give up, and many critics looked for someone to blame when such a decisive battle never came. Immediately after First Manassas, observers blamed Beauregard or Davis for the Confederate army’s failure to follow up the victory with the capture of Washington, D.C., perhaps ending

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the war before it had fairly started. This sort of criticism occurred on other occasions, in both North and South, when a field commander failed to follow up a victory and, by vigorous pursuit, destroy a wounded enemy. But military historians have observed that it was almost as damaging for an army to win a major Civil War battle as it was to lose one. Winners as well as losers suffered thousands of casualties, and long days of fighting left both sides exhausted and disorganized. In four years of fighting, on only one occasion, at Nashville in late 1864, was the losing army so crushed in battle that it fell apart. The two sides were fairly evenly matched on the battlefield, and neither could mount the sort of climactic and decisive battle that both sides at first expected. Thus, the war would be won not by an overwhelming victory on a Napoleonic scale, but by an accumulation of victories or defeats that finally compelled one side or the other to give up. In such a war of attrition, the greater material and manpower resources of the Union loomed very large. The Union had advantages in population of 5 to 2, in bank capital of 4 to 1, and in value of manufactures more than 10 to 1. In 1860, the states that would remain in the Union built 470 locomotives, those about to secede, 19.9 The failure of the secession movement to unite all the slave states was also a huge factor, since the border slave states had more than a third of the South’s white population and more than half of its industry. Kentucky furnished twice as many white men to the Union as to the Confederacy. A Baltimore manufacturer made iron plate for the Union’s Monitor, not for the Confederacy’s Virginia.10 Against these material disadvantages, Confederate leaders counted on a more highly motivated citizenry and a slave system that would allow most white men to enter the army. They also counted on the South’s great expanse of territory, which would tie down Union troops needed to protect supply lines and occupy the conquered areas. The disparity in numbers on most battlefields, while favorable to the Union, was usually much less than the 5 to 2 advantage held by the Union in total numbers under arms. Even though the contest was becoming a battle of attrition, the sort of war that the Confederacy was ill-prepared to survive, the Union was held to a stalemate. In October 1862, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Gladstone, had publicly proclaimed, ‘‘there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders

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of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either—they have made a nation.’’11 In the winter of 1862–3, the Confederate army continued to protect the new nation. After Antietam, Lincoln turned command of the Army of the Potomac over to Ambrose Burnside, who protested that he was not up to command of an army, then demonstrated that fact with a foolish frontal attack on Lee’s entrenched forces at Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862. Lee suffered 5,300 casualties against Burnside’s 12,700; as he watched his men mow down the closed Union ranks, he made his famous remark that ‘‘It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it!’’12 Two weeks after Fredericksburg, a Union advance against the Confederate Army of Tennessee was halted in a bloody battle at Murfreesboro in middle Tennessee. In the twoweek period between these bloody battles, attempts by Grant to take Vicksburg, on the Mississippi River, were stopped when Confederate raids destroyed his supply lines, and when William T. Sherman’s advance down the Yazoo River was easily rebuffed at Chickasaw Bluffs. In the spring, fighting was renewed in two campaigns that exemplified both the strengths and weaknesses of the Confederate military effort. In the East, a new Union commander, Joseph Hooker, reinvigorated the Army of the Potomac and rebuilt its confidence; by May 1863, he had 130,000 men. Across the Rappahannock River, Lee, who had sent his largest corps south to forage, had just 60,000 men present and ready for combat. At the end of April, Hooker left a large force under John Sedgwick across from Lee’s position at Fredericksburg and slipped most of his army undetected across the river to the north. The ensuing three-day battle showed the Confederate army at its strongest. Lee, selfconfident in a way that encouraged similar self-confidence in his men, understood the strengths of his subordinates and used them to best advantage. He was willing to take great risks—in part because he knew the Confederacy needed to take risks, in part, because he was something of a riverboat gambler. With his remarkable ability to anticipate the moves and to exploit the weaknesses of his opponents, Lee recognized that the principal threat came from Hooker, not the 40,000 troops under Sedgewick still across the river. Leaving just 10,000 men at Fredericksburg, he turned the bulk of his army against Hooker, where they first clashed near

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the little crossroads of Chancellorsville on May 1. Learning of a back road through the woods, Lee once again divided his outnumbered army, sending 30,000 men under Stonewall Jackson around the front of Hooker on May 2. That afternoon, Jackson fell on Hooker’s exposed right flank, rolling it up as Union forces fell back in surprise and confusion. The next day, as the main battle continued at Chancellorsville, Sedgewick crossed the river to capture Fredericksburg and place himself in Lee’s rear. Before he could get to Chancellorsville, Lee reversed his direction and forced Sedgewick to retreat back across the river. The next night, Hooker followed Sedgewick with the bulk of his army, leaving Lee in possession of the field. Lee’s bold generalship had produced an outstanding victory against great odds, but the cost was heavy: nearly 13,000 casualties (including 1,667 dead), or more than one-fifth of his army, including among them the mortally wounded Stonewall Jackson, shot by his own men as he scouted Union defenses. One of Lee’s aides described the scene as he rode past his lines during the battle: ‘‘One long, unbroken cheer, in which the feeble cry of those who lay helpless on the earth blended with the strong voices of those who still fought, rose high above the roar of battle and hailed the presence of the victorious chief. He sat in the full realization of all that soldiers dream of—triumph. As I looked upon him in the complete fruition of the success which his genius, courage, and confidence in his army had won, I thought that it must have been from such a scene that men in ancient times rose to the dignity of gods.’’13 Chancellorsville showed how superior leadership and morale, combined with intimate local knowledge of terrain, could go far to neutralize superiority in men and supplies. Yet, even as Chancellorsville unfolded, the Confederacy suffered a defeat in the West that illustrated its military limitations. Having been thwarted by the swampy terrain and high bluffs that protected Vicksburg, Grant had Rear Admiral David Porter run a flotilla of transport and supply ships down the Mississippi past the city, then marched his army down the west bank of the river and ferried across. On May 1, John C. Pemberton, commander of 35,000 men protecting Vicksburg, found Grant’s army of 41,000 on dry ground in his rear. Grant faced a Confederate command in disarray. Jefferson Davis had placed Joseph Johnston in charge of the entire western theater,

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but Johnston was reluctant to give orders to other generals. Recognizing the threat to Vicksburg, Davis had encouraged Kirby Smith, commander of Confederate troops in Arkansas, to reinforce Pemberton, but Smith refused on the grounds that he faced bigger problems than did Pemberton. Davis told Pemberton to ‘‘hold both Vicksburg and Port Hudson’’ on the river, while at the same time Johnston was advising him to consolidate his army at Jackson in the interior of the state.14 Grant was quick to take advantage of this combination of dithering and confusion, in a campaign that ranks with Chancellorsville as an example of brilliant generalship. He cut himself off from his lines of communication and fed himself off the countryside, brushing off small Confederate forces and placing himself between Pemberton and Johnston, who was in Jackson with a force of 6,000. Grant drove Johnston away, then turned and defeated Pemberton in a sharply fought battle at Champion’s Hill on May 16. Pemberton fell back in disorder into Vicksburg, and, unable to take the city by storm, Grant settled down to a siege. Davis and his advisors now debated whether to send large reinforcements from the east to attack Grant from the rear, but Lee, brimming with confidence after Chancellorsville, prevailed upon Davis to approve his idea of a new raid north into Pennsylvania, with, perhaps, a moralebreaking defeat of the Union army on its own soil. Lee, however, was stopped at the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, climaxed when he over-confidently sent more than 10,000 men, mostly from George Pickett’s division, into a disastrous assault on the Union center three-quarters of a mile away. All told, the Army of Northern Virginia lost more than a third of its 75,000 effectives at Gettysburg. The very next day, July 4, 1863, Pemberton surrendered his entire army of 30,000 men to Grant at Vicksburg. Given the Confederacy’s task of staving off defeat, rather than conquering the enemy, critics have questioned whether the ‘‘offensive-defensive’’ strategy was too offensive and if Lee’s aggressive attacks ultimately bled his army of so many men that, by 1865, there were not enough left to fight. The power given to the defense by rifled guns (with barrels grooved to impart a spin to the bullet or shell) added to the burdens of an army on the attack. The smoothbore muskets used earlier in the century were effective only to about 100 yards, and a defending army could be overwhelmed by massed attacks of soldiers armed with bayonets. Rifled guns were

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accurate to 500 yards or more, and a well-entrenched force could cripple an attack by a larger number before they ever got close. The Confederacy might have adopted a wholly defensive strategy, trading territory for time, preserving men and supplies, standing to fight only when a strong defensive position raised the odds of its victory. Joseph Johnston, who even hinted that he was prepared to abandon Richmond rather than fight McClellan on unfavorable terms in 1862, tended to think precisely along these lines. Confederate public opinion, however, overwhelmingly opposed a purely defensive strategy. One historian has pointed out that ‘‘the style and substance of Confederate military strategy sprang directly from the expectations of the southern people. . . . a strategy that would affirm nationalistic strivings and thus nourish popular will.’’15 Confederate citizens insisted that their armies take the war to the enemy and invade Union territory whenever the opportunity arose. After each of Lee’s stirring victories, Confederate morale soared, and, by the end of the war, the confidence in Lee’s generalship may have been the most important glue holding the Confederacy together. P.G.T. Beauregard and other Confederate generals, part of what historians have called a ‘‘western bloc,’’ believed that Davis and Lee failed to realize the West’s importance. The Confederacy, according to their strategy, should concentrate its forces in the West and place them under a unified leadership, rather than relying on Davis’s practice of dividing the region into fixed geographical territories, each with its own commanding general. To some extent, their ideas prevailed when Johnston was given overall command in the West, but the Confederacy’s problems there were rooted in geographical realities. Neither Davis, Johnston, nor anyone else could make well-informed decisions about allocating troops across such a large area. The region was cut by north-south rivers that gave the Union, with its naval superiority, good routes for invasion and supply, while making it difficult to concentrate Confederate forces. So, too, concentration of armies was severely hampered by a rail system that used three different gauges and mainly connected the coast to the interior. Aside from these geographical considerations, the western theater, unlike Virginia, included large populations hostile to the Confederacy. And, of course, the Confederate Army of Tennessee faced, not the inept opponents of Lee, but the gifted generals Grant and Sherman.

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The Question of Political Leadership Much blame for the Confederacy’s defeat has fallen on its politicians, especially Jefferson Davis, whom one contemporary editor called, at various times, ‘‘silly,’’ ‘‘puerile,’’ and ‘‘childish.’’16 No one could doubt Davis’s depth of experience, dedication to the cause, or commitment of energy, despite painful illnesses. But Davis seemed unable to separate the important from the trivial. Each day he sent to the War Department dozens or even hundreds of documents, some involving details such as whether a certain soldier should be allowed a leave, while, in truly important decisions, he often hesitated or left decisions to bickering subordinates. He tended to confuse commitment to the Confederate cause with military ability and favored men that he knew personally and liked. These weaknesses contributed to problems that plagued the western armies, especially the Army of Tennessee, headed by the ill-tempered Braxton Bragg. Bragg quarreled constantly with his corps and division commanders, blaming them for his defeats and publicly humiliating them; these subordinates in turn undermined Bragg by criticizing him directly to Richmond. Davis did little to end this discord at the top of the most important army in the West. Davis also allowed himself to become distracted by public disputes, interpreting disagreement in personal terms and attributing to his opponents a lack of commitment to the cause. He was a very thinskinned man in a job that required a very thick one; as one historian has put it, ‘‘his determination in all disagreements, past or present, trivial or significant, to prove himself right and others wrong made him many enemies.’’17 He engaged in long-running feuds with both Joseph Johnston and Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia. Davis’s personal failures led historian David Potter to suggest that ‘‘if the Union and the Confederacy had exchanged presidents with one another, the Confederacy might have won its independence.’’18 But Lincoln was not available to head the Confederacy, and, when we consider the alternatives, Davis’s faults appear in a softer light. At the founding Confederate convention in February 1861, prominent fire-eaters such as William L. Yancey of Alabama and Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina were not seriously considered because the delegates did not consider them effective executives, and nothing either man did during the war would have

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changed their opinion. Another alternative, Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia, had ability but also drank too much, as the delegates at Montgomery could observe first hand. During the war, Toombs served briefly as Secretary of State, then as a brigadier general, but he caused great trouble in the army, continuing to drink too much, chafing at military discipline, being easily insulted by criticism, and, in 1863, resigning to return to Georgia. There, he sulked and became a bitter critic of Davis. Nor did outstanding national political leaders appear in the Confederate Congress, the Cabinet, or the states during the war. The best known members of the Congress gained their notoriety as carping critics, and some of them, such as R.M.T. Hunter of Virginia and fire-eater Louis Wigfall of Texas, secretly schemed with Johnston and other unhappy generals to undermine Davis’s role as Commander-in-Chief. Davis’s Cabinet was filled with mostly undistinguished or ineffective members. An exception was Judah Benjamin, who served Davis loyally as Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State, but, as a man of Jewish heritage, Benjamin would never have been considered for the presidency, even though he had assimilated and converted to Christianity. The most visible state leaders were governors Joseph E. Brown of Georgia and Zebulon Vance of North Carolina, both good executives, but also men who made their reputations as defenders of states rights against the encroachments of the central government. Any president of the Confederacy would have faced enormous difficulties, most obviously in the arena of finance. In 1861, the new nation had on hand just $27 million in specie. Compared to the Union, banks were few and banking talent and experience were lacking. The biggest economic assets were land, slaves, and crops, and of these, only the crops, and especially cotton, could be readily turned into cash or supplies. In the first months of the war, when the Union’s blockade was largely on paper, the Confederacy negated the value of its best asset with a self-imposed, voluntary embargo on cotton exports, in the vain expectation, as South Carolinians expressed to a British reporter, that ‘‘we have only to shut off your supply of cotton for a few weeks, and. . . . we know that England must recognise us.’’19 The blockade eventually greatly reduced cotton exports, driving up prices dramatically, but, although the Confederacy might have capitalized on the shortage either by heavily taxing exports or by assuming control of the crop and using it to

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extract loans from European importers, it did neither. The first Secretary of the Treasury, Christopher Memminger, considered it unconstitutional for the government itself to sell cotton.20 A small export tax was almost uniformly evaded, and most profits from the sale of cotton went into private hands. Indeed, the Confederacy never meaningfully taxed its citizens. Memminger, for example, imagined that a tariff on imports would support the new government, and neither he nor the Confederate Congress favored a serious program of internal taxation. Although a tax on land and slaves was passed in 1861, the states themselves, to avoid inconvenience to their citizens, simply borrowed money to cover it; even this tax was eliminated when a clause in the new permanent Constitution forbade direct taxation. Finally, in April 1863 the Confederacy established a tax-in-kind, requiring farmers to turn over 10 percent of their harvests, after subsistence, to the government, but collection was poorly administered and the unpopular tax was easily evaded. The Davis administration planned to rely on loans rather than taxes, and loans eventually covered about a quarter of the war’s cost, but, as the fortunes of the Confederacy waned, the government found it difficult to sell bonds without control of cotton to back up their value. By 1864, Memminger and the Congress resorted to a forced loan that raised cash at the cost of further alienating the public. Lacking revenue from taxation or loans, the Confederacy turned to printing money, covering about 60 percent of the budget. The inevitable result was a ruinous inflation that was exacerbated as the Union blockade created shortages and as the area where Confederate money circulated shrank. By 1865, financial inflation had reached 6,000 percent and real wages had fallen by 65 percent. Many saw the dramatic rise in prices as a sign of poisonous greed and materialism, and hundreds of sermons and grand jury pronouncements denounced the sin, or crime, of ‘‘extortion.’’ By 1863, many farmers would no longer accept Confederate money as payment for their crops, whereupon the Congress authorized impressment of supplies by the army: agents could take food or other supplies by force, paying in depreciated currency or in IOU’s at prices well below market value—a policy that further angered farmers and planters. The blame for disastrous financial policies must be shared among virtually the entire Confederate political leadership, who expected

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a short war and exaggerated the power of ‘‘King Cotton.’’ Distrusting strong centralized government and fearing its power to tax, they believed that popular enthusiasm for the cause would make governmental coercion unnecessary. When these expectations proved mistaken, they lacked the creativity, and, in the world of finance, the talent to respond.

Class and Confederate Loyalty: Nonslaveholder Discontent After Fort Sumter, hundreds of thousands of ordinary farmers, artisans, and other nonslaveholders had joined the army, in addition to members of the slaveholding elite who largely filled the ranks of officers. In their letters and diaries, officers and men alike expressed their determination to defend home and family against invasion and forced emancipation. ‘‘We are fighting for matters real and tangible . . . our property and homes,’’ wrote one Texas private.21 To defend home was a mark not only of patriotism, but of honor and masculinity. A Louisiana captain told his wife that if he was killed, ‘‘my children would be prouder of their father than if he had staid at home while his countrymen were struggling for liberty.’’22 And yet, the commitment of many white southerners to the Confederacy was always suspect. Probably a majority of nonslaveholders, even in the lower South, had opposed immediate secession, and voters in the upper-South Confederate states had rejected secession by large majorities before Lincoln’s call for troops. Confederate leaders propagated a vision of national greatness to build a broad loyalty, while new schoolbooks promoted a usable past that proclaimed the South a superior civilization. Newspapers constantly reminded their readers that liberty, home, slavery, and white supremacy were at stake, and ‘‘Confederate songs served almost as catechisms in civics for the far-flung Confederate republic.’’23 Clergymen, in sermons, essays, and tracts, assured Confederate soldiers and families that they fought on God’s side, and God on theirs. But the weight of the evidence suggests that attachment to the Confederate nation was concentrated in the core of officers who came from the ranks of slave-owning planters. One systematic study of Confederate soldiers’ letters and diaries showed that about three-quarters of all

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slaveholders expressed ‘‘patriotic’’ motives, but just 42 percent of nonslaveholders did so.24 After a year of war, the Davis administration realized that thousands of troops might go home as their one-year enlistment terms came to an end, so it turned to a draft, the first in U.S. history. The first of three Confederate Conscription Acts extended the terms of one-year volunteers to three years and required all white men between the ages of 18 and 35 to serve. Conscription itself brought in relatively few men, but it prodded many others to volunteer. Some of these new volunteers had remained at home because of family obligations, others had remained skeptical of secessionist motives or resentful of being dragged into a war they did not want, and still others had remained loyal to the Union. Well over half of yeoman farmers who volunteered early in the war expressed ‘‘patriotic’’ sentiments in their letters; just 14 percent of yeomen who came in after the spring of 1862 did so.25 Loyalty to the old Union remained a potent force in the South during the war. Many Northern natives in the South’s cities and towns were hostile to the Confederacy, as were many German immigrants in Texas. In Jones County, in southern Mississippi, with few slaves and many poor and yeoman farmers, latent Unionist sentiments came to the surface after the fall of Vicksburg, when many volunteers from the county deserted and returned home. More than a hundred, nearly all of them nonslaveholders, formed a quasi-military company, giving rise to the legend of the ‘‘Free State of Jones.’’ They hid out in the woods and swamps, assassinated conscription officers, and resisted incursions by Confederate cavalry. Washington County, in northeastern North Carolina, with an economic profile similar to that of Jones County, had voted against secession; there, too, after the Union navy seized parts of the North Carolina coast, conflicts between Confederates and Unionists escalated into a small local civil war.26 Most southern Unionists lived in the southern highlands, where (as in Jones and Washington counties) slaves were few and plantations rare. Western Virginians were so hostile to secession that they engineered the new state of West Virginia, accepted into the Union in 1863. Mountainous East Tennessee had voted overwhelmingly against secession, and, while at first, most eastern Tennesseans passively accepted Confederate rule, after conscription began, thousands fled across the state line into Kentucky to sign

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up with the Union army. By the end of the war, an estimated 30,000 white Tennesseans had fought with the Union. In Appalachian North Carolina and Georgia, most antisecessionist voters reconciled themselves to the Confederacy and supported the war effort, but there, too, disaffected Unionists—sometimes individuals, sometimes entire families—refused to support the Confederacy. Many men hid in the woods and remote valleys to evade the draft, and both state and Confederate governments sent troops to force them into service. Differences between neighbors escalated into a vicious guerilla war, reminiscent of the American Revolution in the same regions. In Shelton Laurel, a remote valley in North Carolina, thirteen Unionist men and boys were captured and shot in cold blood; similar summary executions on a smaller scale took place in Georgia.27 As the war continued, more white men and their families began to question whether fighting for the Confederacy was, indeed, the way to protect home, family, and community. The ravages of inflation threatened families of laborers and artisans, as the difficulties of operating farms without an adult man present threatened the families of small farmers. Resentment was increased by what many considered to be the inequities of the draft laws. The first allowed exemptions for office holders and men in essential occupations and permitted draftees who could afford it to hire substitutes. The Second Conscription Act added a ‘‘TwentyNegro’’ exemption for planters who owned twenty or more slaves, prompting complaints about class privilege. One Mississippi woman wrote to Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, in bitter words that echoed in many poor families, that ‘‘It does look hard to exempt a man because he has 20 Negroes they say it is a Rich mans war and a poor mans fight.’’28 As the prices of basic foods soared, women in several cities and towns reacted with violence. In the most spectacular case, more than 1,000 women looted shops of food and other supplies in the national capital of Richmond in April 1863. The crowd dispersed only when Jefferson Davis himself appeared, promising to help them, but also threatening to order the militia to open fire. Women raided stores in Atlanta, Columbus, and Milledgeville, Georgia, and, in Monroe County, a band of nearly 30 women armed with knives and guns robbed a freight wagon.29

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Slave Resistance and Planter Discontent Planters themselves did not have to worry about going hungry, but over the course of the war, many of them also became critical of Confederate policies that restricted their liberties and undermined their control of their slaves. The Confederacy’s early cotton policy was symptomatic of its failure either to entice or coerce planters to give full financial support to the war. While some states, Georgia, for example, passed laws to limit the production of cotton in favor of food, the central government refused to take this step, and many planters kept their slaves hard at work in the first two years of the war growing cotton crops that would never be sold. In January 1863, about three million bales were being held in private hands, and, by one estimate, growing that cotton had taken the ‘‘manpower equivalent of the entire Confederate Army.’’30 Southern planters proved remarkably resistant to the use of their slaves by the Confederacy itself. Throughout the war, the government took slaves temporarily to dig trenches, repair railroads, and perform other essential tasks; in Georgia alone, some 10,000 slaves were impressed to work on the fortifications at Savannah and other key points.31 Slaveowners disliked impressment on principle; one Texas planter in 1861 denounced the practice as ‘‘the beginning of a despotism worse than any European Monarchy.’’32 Others feared that their slaves would be mistreated, injured, or come down with illness, or that they would acquire ‘‘dangerous habits’’ and ‘‘foolish ideas’’ they would then spread to those who remained at home.33 The Richmond Examiner commented that ‘‘The South has concentrated all its proprietary feeling’’ on slaves, ‘‘and the man who would submit without a murmur to the impressment of his horses or his crops may very likely shrink back with a species of superstition from the attempt by his own government to deprive him of these very slaves for whom he had already fought a long and desperate war.’’34 The greater pressure on masters came from their own slaves, whose restlessness and resistance gathered strength as the war continued. On plantations left in the charge of mistresses whose husbands were away, thousands of women handled complex operations, and nothing was more complex than dealing with slaves expecting the day of freedom. In North Carolina, slaveowner

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Catherine Edmondston reported early in the war that all the slaves were ‘‘diligent and respectful.’’ Later, she noted that other people’s slaves in her neighborhood were causing trouble, and she blamed it on ‘‘the indulged negroes, servants of widows and single ladies who have not been kept in proper subordination.’’ Soon her own slaves were ‘‘getting so awkward, inefficient and even lazy,’’ a state of affairs she blamed on her husband’s absence. By the end of the war, as her slaves began deserting to Union lines, Edmondston wrote bitterly, ‘‘As to the idea of a faithful servant, it is all a fiction.’’ The first to leave, indeed, had been ‘‘the favorite and most petted negroes.’’35 Similar laments sprinkle the correspondence and diaries of other women trying to manage their slaves. Laura Comer of Columbus, Georgia, complained about ‘‘lazy,’’ ‘‘obstinate,’’ ‘‘willful,’’ and ‘‘indolent’’ slaves: ‘‘In the field, where a man is with them, whom they fear all the time they will get along but I cannot, nor will not spend all these precious days of my life following after and watching negroes. It is a terrible life!’’ Another Georgia woman wrote to her older son that their slaves ‘‘seem to feel very independent as no white man comes to direct or look after them;’’ the insolence of a slave named Willes ‘‘so excited me I left the door went in the room and lay down with the back ache.’’36 Such experiences prompted women to petition for draft exemptions for white men. One petition, from 23 ‘‘ladies, some of us widows,’’ asked Georgia’s Governor Brown to release from militia duty a man who could help control local slaves, who ‘‘are becoming ungovernable by the women & children & old men, insubordinate & insolent, that many are now runaways.’’37 Such pleas, and the growing difficulties of controlling slaves, led the Confederate government in October 1862 to pass the ‘‘Twenty-Negro’’ exemption, but, in practice, it exempted few men at the cost of disaffecting many more.

From ‘‘Contrabands’’ to Soldiers: African-American Troops Union officers and soldiers had employed ‘‘contrabands,’’ as runaway slaves became known, to cook, clean, and chop wood, while commanders had put them to work digging trenches and throwing up fortifications. The Emancipation Proclamation and the Second

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Confiscation Act opened the way to make emancipated slaves into soldiers, not just laborers. Even before the final Proclamation was issued, a regiment of former slaves in South Carolina was drilling under Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson of Massachusetts, an outspoken abolitionist. Higginson’s diary recounts their transformation into soldiers. Though he shared certain racialist assumptions about his men, sometimes describing them as childlike, he learned to admire them for their discipline and bravery under fire. After their first skirmish, he wrote that the ‘‘unlimited employment of black troops’’ was now ‘‘the key to the successful prosecution of this war.’’ ‘‘Fighting for their homes and families,’’ the ex-slave soldiers demonstrated ‘‘the resolution and the sagacity which a personal purpose gives.’’38 In New Orleans, Federals found southern African Americans already prepared to fight. The city’s free gens de couleur had a long tradition of military organization, and in the decades before the Civil War, two companies of Native Guard militia continued to meet, drill, and arm themselves. At the outbreak of war, they had volunteered to fight for the Confederacy, but the idea of Africans fighting to defend white liberty was too difficult for Confederate authorities to swallow, though Governor Thomas Moore did recognize the Native Guards as part of the state’s Home Guard. In April 1862, when the Union seized New Orleans, the Native Guards did not flee; instead, their officers went to General Benjamin Butler to volunteer for the Union.39 At first, Butler put the Guards to work cutting trees and building up the city’s defenses, but within a few months he put them into the regular army and began to recruit slave runaways. His successor, Nathaniel Banks, sometimes allowed his own recruiters to impress unwilling slaves into service. Although Banks tried to force white officers on all African-American troops, the 1st Louisiana Native Guards remained under the command of Captain Andre´ Cailloux, a Pariseducated member of a well known free-black New Orleans family. In May 1863, these Native Guards played a central role in an attack on Port Hudson, one of the last two Confederate strongholds on the Mississippi River. The attack was thrown back with heavy losses and Captain Cailloux himself was killed, but, so the ranking white officer in the attack reported, the Native Guards ‘‘move[d] forward . . . under a most murderous fire from the enemies guns. . . . these men did not swerve, or show cowardice. I have

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been in several engagements, and I never before beheld such coolness and daring.’’40 The next month black troops helped repel a Confederate attack at Milliken’s Bend on the Mississippi, in ‘‘a most terrible hand to hand combat, of several minutes duration, our men using the bayonet freely and clubbing their guns with fierce obstinacy.’’ These two engagements, together with a wellpublicized attack in July 1863 on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, by the 54th Massachusetts, made up mainly of free blacks recruited in the North, quieted most opposition among Union soldiers to the enrollment of blacks. By the end of the war about 134,000 men who had been slaves in 1860 had served in the Union army or navy, and another 50,000 free blacks, from both North and South, had also served. Of the total 184,000 who had served, 36,000 died from combat or disease.41 Black soldiers were organized in the separate ‘‘United States Colored Infantry’’ under white officers. (Nathaniel Banks eventually succeeded in forcing all remaining African-American officers to resign.) For most of the war, blacks were paid less than white soldiers, punished more frequently, given harder, more unpleasant tasks, and suffered a high incidence of disease. Some white officers, like Colonel Higginson, were honorable and competent, but others volunteered for commands only because it seemed the fastest way to rise in rank and pay. Banks received complaints from observers sympathetic to the soldiers of vicious whippings for trivial offenses and shootings in response to charges of disobedience.42 Black soldiers faced special dangers, too, because the Confederacy refused to recognize them as legitimate combatants. Jefferson Davis, in December 1863, promised to punish captured black soldiers as runaway slaves and their officers as instigators of insurrection. Davis had to suspend this policy when Lincoln threatened to retaliate by executing captured Confederate officers or putting them to work at hard labor, but Confederate soldiers sometimes killed black captives on their own. The most notorious instance occurred in April 1864, when a Confederate force overran Fort Pillow, Tennessee. The garrison, including about 300 black soldiers, panicked, and most tried to surrender, but, as a Confederate lieutenant who tried to stop the massacre described the scene, ‘‘the poor deluded negroes would run up to our men fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down.’’ At the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg in the summer of 1864,

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blacks who tried to surrender ‘‘were not allowed to do so,’’ a Confederate officer said. ‘‘It seems cruel to murder them in cold blood, but I think the men who did it had very good cause for doing so.’’43 By risking their lives to free themselves and defend the Union despite the risks of discrimination, disease, and summary execution, black soldiers made themselves vital to the whole process of emancipation and staked a strong claim to citizenship, not just to freedom from slavery.

White Southerners against White Southerners Those in favor of secession had always justified the move as a defense of liberty—the liberty to own slaves, of course, but also of republican liberty more generally. From the beginnings of sectional conflict, southern slaveholders argued that antislavery politics, while no doubt fueled by religious ‘‘fanatics,’’ was rooted in the determination of northerners to take control of the national government for their own selfish purposes. To prevent their new government from becoming a tyranny, it was necessary to reserve most powers to the states, to protect the rights of individual citizens, and to keep taxes low. The war, however, led the Confederate government to exert unprecedented new powers. It had instituted its draft, and President Davis had selectively suspended the right of habeas corpus so that judges would not free those taken up by conscription officers. In the spring of 1863, Davis signed into law the Impressment Act and the Tax-in-Kind. To many Confederate citizens, these centralizing policies were subverting the very purposes for which the Confederacy had been created. Critics—in Congress and in the states—were concentrated in the Confederate heartland, which was relatively protected from Union invasions but powerfully affected by the draft and the new tax and impressment laws. Governors Brown of Georgia and Vance of North Carolina, especially, even while energetically raising troops, distributing welfare to soldiers’ families, and in other ways supporting the war effort, constantly criticized the Davis administration for violating states’ rights and individual rights. The defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, in mid-1863, strengthened the critics’ arguments, even though the Army of Tennessee temporarily boosted Confederate morale by inflicting a major

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defeat on a Federal army at Chickamauga Creek, in north Georgia, on September 19 and 20. The victory came at a heavy cost in casualties, about a quarter of the 68,000 Confederate troops involved, but it bottled up the Federals in Chattanooga. Two months later, Bragg’s depleted army, demoralized by continuing conflicts within the top command, frittered away the fruits of its victory, as the Union forces, reinvigorated by Ulysses Grant, broke out of Chattanooga and chased Bragg 20 miles into Georgia. In Confederate congressional elections in the fall of 1863, voters, repudiating many of the original secessionists, replaced more than half of all the congressmen. The opposition to Davis never coalesced into an organized party with conventions, nominations, or an alternative platform; party politics had been discredited by the antebellum collapse of the Whigs and Democrats. Instead, politicians and voters divided along a myriad of lines, sometimes based on former adherence to the Whig or Democratic parties, sometimes on support or opposition to Davis, sometimes on purely personal factional grounds. Low voter turnout signaled that many had turned away from politics altogether. Davis found it harder to get support for his policies, and, in February 1864, when he again asked the legislature to allow him to suspend habeas corpus, the measure passed only after vitriolic debate. The new law spelled out, among the cases for which the right could be suspended, ‘‘advising or inciting others to abandon the Confederate cause.’’ Vice President Alexander Stephens went home to Georgia to denounce the measure before the state legislature, telling one correspondent that it would be ‘‘far better that our country should be overrun by the enemy, our cities sacked and burned, and our land laid desolate, than that the people should thus suffer the citadel of their liberties to be entered and taken by professed friends.’’44 And yet, even in the gloomy winter of 1863–4, only a small proportion of voters seemed ready to give up the war completely, though local movements for peace did sprout in some places. In north Alabama, secret peace societies formed, and, in North Carolina, meetings in 30 counties during 1863 endorsed calls by editor William Holden for the state to negotiate separate terms of peace (including the preservation of slavery). But only a few outright peace candidates won election that fall, and the following May, Holden won just 20 percent of the vote when he challenged Zebulon Vance in the governor’s race.

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Hope continued in part because Confederates could see that the Union, too, was divided on the war. Just days after Gettysburg, for example, New York City erupted in a three-day antidraft riot resulting in more than 100 deaths. At about the same time, Ohio Democrats nominated for the governorship Clement Vallandigham, whose denunciations of the war and of the Lincoln administration had become so intemperate that he had been arrested and expelled across Confederate lines, and was now living in Canada. The greatest source of conflict within the Union itself came from southerners in the Union’s slaveholding states. Many Marylanders fought for the Confederacy, though estimates of their number range widely, from 5,000 to 25,000 (more than 46,000 fought for the Union). Internal conflict in Maryland was dampened by the large Union army presence around Washington; some 300 civilian Marylanders were arrested by military authorities, most notably in the first weeks of the war with the arrest of more than a dozen secessionist legislators. Kentucky was sharply divided, though most Kentuckians never supported the Confederacy. About 80,000 whites and 20,000 former slaves from Kentucky fought for the Union, but perhaps 40,000 whites fought with the Confederates, and the state even had a star in the Confederate flag and representatives in the Confederate Congress. Its large number of Confederate sympathizers and its strategic geographical location made Kentucky a perpetual battleground, with guerillas operating in much of the state. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus there in July 1864 to allow free rein to the military to arrest anyone who gave aid to the Confederacy.45 Even though Missouri had relatively few slaves and a large majority of its population supported the Union, it became the most bitterly divided of all the border states. Slavery in Missouri was concentrated in ‘‘Little Dixie,’’ in the fertile Missouri River valley, where perhaps a third of white families owned slaves and many of the men fought for the Confederacy, some in regular units and others in freelance cavalry units operating from Texas. From Texas, they raided western Missouri, attacking pro-Union civilians and recruiting new members, including Frank and Jesse James of later bank-robbing fame. In turn, Missouri’s Unionists organized for protection and retaliation, and the region fell into a state of brutal partisan warfare. William Quantrill, who emerged as the leader of the Confederate guerillas, raided the old antislavery stronghold of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863, and his band killed

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about 200 unarmed men and boys in cold blood; later, they executed 89 Union soldiers they had captured from a train. To crush such partisan activity, Union commanders in Missouri arrested thousands and ordered the evacuation of most civilians from four Missouri counties.46 A civilian in Little Dixie wrote of ‘‘people of every political opinion and all ages, fleeing from their homes. The guerillas prowling into the country and the Federals ravaging towns. . . . Fights rendered horrible by their ferocity. No quarter being given, no mercy shown. It is horrible.’’47 The disintegration of slavery in the border states and the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation provoked more confusion, conflict, and dissent in the Union’s slave states. In 1862, Lincoln tried to persuade these states to accept gradual and compensated emancipation, telling their congressional representatives that, otherwise, slavery there ‘‘will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion— by the mere incidents of the war.’’ The representatives stubbornly rejected the idea, denouncing it as a violation of state sovereignty.48 State sovereignty or no, Lincoln was correct in his prediction, as slaves throughout the border states left their masters. The Emancipation Proclamation excluded the border states, but many Union soldiers stationed in these states were, by 1863, quite out of sympathy with southern slaveholders and frequently gave aid and comfort to the many slave runaways who came into their lines. At the same time, the strongest dissent within Union ranks against the Proclamation came from slave-state soldiers. Volunteer units from Kentucky came close to open battle on more than one occasion with volunteers from the free states who were harboring runaways and allowing them to escape across the Ohio River.49 Confederates, aware of dissent in the Union, hoped that their armies would hold on and that northern voters would turn Lincoln out of office in November 1864. To succeed, the Confederacy had to resist coordinated moves across its entire territory, beginning in spring 1864 under the overall direction of Ulysses Grant. In Virginia, Grant himself would lead an advance of about 120,000 men, and, in Georgia, more than 100,000 under Sherman would try to take Atlanta. Benjamin Butler was to lead a flanking movement on Richmond from the Chesapeake and Nathaniel Banks to take a Federal army up the Red River in Louisiana. Federal raids into Mississippi and the Shenandoah Valley were to distract Confederate forces and prevent reinforcements of the main armies. Against

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these formidable forces, Lee in Virginia and Joseph Johnston, who had replaced Bragg in Georgia, each had about 60,000 men to try to prevent an outright Union victory. The Confederacy was aided by the inept performance of the two political generals, Banks and Butler. An outnumbered Confederate force defeated Banks at Mansfield, Louisiana and sent him retreating back to the Mississippi River; Butler was effectively bottled up well short of Richmond. Lee sent General Jubal Early into the Shenandoah Valley to stop Union raids, and Early’s mere appearance was enough to send the Federals under David Hunter scurrying back into West Virginia. Early then undertook a quick raid into Maryland, and, in July, threatened Washington, causing Grant to divert some of his own troops to protect the capital. When Grant first advanced in May 1864 into the heavily wooded ‘‘Wilderness’’ around the old Chancellorsville battlefields, Lee moved to meet him amid the second-growth forest and tangled underbrush in the first of a series of terrible engagements that produced the heaviest casualties of the entire war. After the Wilderness (May 4–6) came Spotsylvania (May 8–19) and Cold Harbor (June 3). Each time, Grant tried to flank Lee to the east, and each time, Lee got into position to resist. After Cold Harbor, another flanking movement reached the outskirts of Petersburg, a vital rail junction 30 miles south of Richmond, on June 15. A determined effort would almost certainly have taken the city, but the Federals hesitated, and the tiny Confederate force of about 5,400 was quickly reinforced to more than 40,000. After a failed assault, Grant’s exhausted men settled in for a siege. In six weeks of fighting, Lee had lost close to 30,000 men, nearly half his army, and he had inflicted nearly 64,000 casualties on Grant. The arithmetic of attrition was running against Lee, but Richmond, and his army, were both safe for the moment. Sherman had marched out of Chattanooga on May 7, and, like Grant, executed a series of flanking movements against Johnston. Johnston, like Lee, parried these, but, unlike Lee, did not suffer major losses. On only one occasion, at Kennesaw Mountain, did Sherman try a frontal assault, and it was beaten back with heavy casualties. Still, Johnston was retreating all the while, and, in early July, Sherman crossed the Chattahoochee River, at Atlanta’s doorstep. With both Grant and Sherman still short of their goals, and Jubal Early threatening Washington, the Democratic party was preparing

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to nominate former general George McClellan to run against Lincoln in November on a platform calling for a convention to negotiate a peace settlement. In late August, Lincoln was so pessimistic about his chances for re-election that he instructed every cabinet member to sign, sight unseen, a statement pledging that, if McClellan won in November, they would work to ‘‘save the Union between the election and the inauguration,’’ since McClellan would have been elected ‘‘on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.’’50 But the Confederacy was closer to the breaking point than it appeared. Pressure was mounting on President Davis because it seemed possible that Johnston would give up Atlanta without a major battle, and, on July 18, Davis replaced Johnston with John Bell Hood. Hood’s bravery and devotion were unquestionable; in 1864 he was fighting with one leg and a disabled arm, but he thought only of aggressive offense, and, in the circumstances, he was a poor choice. Attacking Sherman’s superior force at Peachtree Creek and Atlanta, he was beaten badly both times. Hood fell back into his entrenchments while Sherman worked his army to the west and south to cut off Atlanta’s remaining supply lines. Hood was forced to abandon the city to Sherman on September 1, and, two days later, Sherman telegraphed to Washington that ‘‘Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.’’ Atlanta’s capture sent Union morale soaring once again, and less than two weeks after Lincoln’s pessimistic secret pact with his cabinet, his re-election had been assured.

Reluctant Confederates In the face of retreat and defeat, Confederate soldiers and their families exchanged letters, encouraging one another to keep heart and resist in hopes of independence. A Georgia sergeant wrote that he wanted ‘‘to be at home as bad as anybody can,’’ but that he could not imagine ‘‘skulking my duty’’ while others continued to fight. One soldier’s mother rebuked him for taking pleasure in a medical furlough, reminding him that ‘‘your time belongs to your Country & not to your pleasures. . . . I hope you will not need the whole 60 days.’’51 For many other women and men, conviction and patriotism had long been fading, and even elite slaveowners were suffering from

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profound war weariness. Gertrude Thomas of Augusta, Georgia, daughter and wife of wealthy planters, had written in her journal when her husband Jefferson went off to war in 1861 that she did not have ‘‘one wish to have him remain with me. When Duty and Honour call him it would be strange if I would influence him to remain. . . . Our country is invaded—our homes are in danger— . . . . shall we tamely submit to this? Never!’’ A year later, she longed for peace, even though she still insisted that fighting on was better than ‘‘dishonourable submission to Lincoln rule.’’ A few weeks later, Jefferson resigned his commission and came home, and Gertrude admitted that ‘‘I would most heartily oppose his joining again unless the enemy were at our doors. . . . when I think of the thousands and thousands of desolate homes and hearts, of the many bright intellects and manly forms hushed in death I turn to my Husband and thank God that he is home again.’’52 Ordinary soldiers defended the Confederacy in part because they considered it their masculine duty to defend their families, but, when duties to nation and family came into conflict, both women and men often ranked family as a ‘‘higher duty.’’ One Georgia woman wrote to Governor Brown, begging him to get her son released from the army, since she had already lost her husband and two other sons. ‘‘I possess no slave at all,’’ she told him, and ‘‘I live in a state of some perplexity and vexation which is enough to drive me into insanity.’’ Another asked for an exemption for her brother, ‘‘a poor man with a wife and a hand full of little children [and] a widowed mother.’’ A petition from a group of Georgia women to Jefferson Davis, in September 1863, told him that ‘‘Our crops is limited and so short. . . . We can seldom find [bacon] for non has got But those that are exzempt from service . . . and they have no humane feeling.’’ One man asked Brown, ‘‘What is the Confederacy worth to a man when it has taken all he has, brought himself and family to poverty and want, his posterity together with himself burdened with a debt that will enslave them for generations to come?’’53 To help soldiers’ families, local and state officials responded by raising taxes and intervening in the economy in unprecedented ways. Georgia’s Governor Brown rallied his legislature to allow the state government to produce and distribute salt, to shut down liquor production to conserve grain, and to limit cotton production. State property tax rates in 1864 were 10 times prewar levels;

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the state also levied taxes on cotton and a progressive tax on business profits, while exempting poor soldiers from both property and poll taxes. These taxes paid for corn to distribute in hard-hit areas of north Georgia. In North Carolina and Virginia, as well, state, town, and county governments raised taxes to provide food and subsidize rents for the families of soldiers.54 But these efforts fell far short of the need. A study of desertion among Georgia troops concludes that ‘‘Georgia’s common soldiers, including those from the Upcountry and upper Piedmont, had lost their will to continue long before 1865, not as the result of any great military defeat but from the long, steady grind required of both soldier and civilian.’’55 Even as Johnston’s Army of Tennessee retreated through the valleys and mountains of northeast Georgia toward Atlanta in 1864, thousands of his soldiers from this region of small farms crossed over to Union lines and formally surrendered, while thousands of others simply returned home. Some men did not desert or hide out, but joined military organizations that served more to protect them from the fighting than to contribute to it. By 1864, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi were all ‘‘plagued,’’ in the word of one military historian, by state-organized cavalry units romantically known as ‘‘partisan rangers,’’ intended mainly to provide a way to avoid regular service. When they were not roaming the countryside ‘‘impressing’’ horses and provisions, these rangers were competing for recruits with undermanned regular units of cavalry. One local commander in Georgia wrote Governor Brown that ‘‘most of the militia officers in the counties around here are young & robust men, and without exception obtained these offices from the most sordid motives. As far as I know them I heartly believe they would take the oath of alligence to Lincoln tomorrow.’’56 After the fall of Atlanta, Jefferson Davis toured his diminishing territory and exhorted the women of the Confederacy to ‘‘use your influence’’ to ‘‘form a public opinion that shall make the skulker a marked man, and leave him no house wherein he can shelter,’’ but he also admitted that two-thirds of the nation’s soldiers were absent from the ranks, most without leave.57 Davis went to Macon and promised Georgians that Sherman would soon have to retreat just as Napoleon had done from Moscow. (Grant commented that ‘‘Davis has not made it quite plain who is to furnish the snow for this Moscow retreat through

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Georgia and Tennessee.’’) In fact, Sherman had no intention either of staying or retreating. With the Army of the Potomac methodically extending its siege lines around Petersburg, Sherman decided to demonstrate Federal military superiority to southerners at home; rather than pursue Hood’s diminished army, he would follow Grant’s example at Vicksburg, cut himself off from his base, and set off toward Savannah. In early September, he ordered the evacuation of all civilians from Atlanta. When local leaders complained at this injustice, Sherman replied that ‘‘War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.’’ The Union was fighting not just ‘‘hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.’’58 After studying the 1860 Census of Agriculture, Sherman had determined that his army could easily live off the countryside, and he intended to ‘‘make Georgia howl,’’ to show the Confederacy’s civilians that their government was utterly unable to protect them. He gave orders to ‘‘forage liberally on the country’’ but to avoid destruction of property unless they were actively opposed; still, he was not greatly concerned when his soldiers ‘‘did some things they ought not to have done.’’59 His men burned factories, warehouses, and train depots, but spared private dwellings as long as the residents did not resist or give aid to the enemy. There were exceptions, especially when the house belonged to a politician; one house owned by a state legislator was burned after a slave told an officer that it ‘‘ought to be burned’’ because there had ‘‘been so much devilment here, whipping nigger ’most to death.’’60 Slaves by the thousands fell in with Sherman’s columns, until they became something of an impediment. Brigadier General Jefferson Davis (no relation to the Confederate President) pulled up his pontoon bridge across a swollen stream and left many slaves behind to be recaptured. Slave property was stolen by soldiers who refused to believe that slaves could own anything. It was slave women and not their mistresses who suffered sexual assaults from Sherman’s troops While Sherman marched, a similar Federal campaign under General Phillip Sheridan devastated much of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Sheridan drove Jubal Early out of the Valley, then followed Grant’s orders to destroy railroads, carry off slaves, and see that ‘‘nothing should be left to invite the enemy to return. . . . ; such as cannot be consumed, destroy.’’ As Sherman was leaving Atlanta, Sheridan reported that he had destroyed or taken 1,200 barns,

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more than 20,000 head of cattle and sheep, 24 mills, furnaces, and tanneries, and a half million bushels of grain.61 Against these swaths of destruction, Confederate forces could do little. John Bell Hood took his army into Tennessee in the hopes that Sherman would follow him, but Sherman trusted George H. Thomas to take care of Hood. Hood moved to meet Thomas’s advance force under John M. Schofield. Hood maneuvered alertly enough but missed his best opportunity to surprise the Federals, and Schofield withdrew into strong defenses at the little town of Franklin. On November 30, 1864, Hood, who had decided that his weary army was suffering from a deficiency of discipline, chose to remedy this by ordering frontal assaults on Schofield’s entrenched veterans. The predictable result was an overwhelming defeat; Hood lost more than 6,000 men, including 12 generals, to Schofield’s 2,500. Schofield then withdrew to join Thomas at Nashville, with Hood following. On December 15 and 16, Thomas hammered Hood’s badly outnumbered force, inflicting a further 6,000 casualties while losing about 3,000. The defeat at Nashville was so complete that Hood’s command fell apart as an independent fighting force.

‘‘If Slaves Will Make Good Soldiers Our Whole Theory of Slavery Is Wrong.’’ By December 1864, the Confederacy’s currency had become almost worthless and its heartland defenseless against Sherman; its armies were disintegrating. Yet, Jefferson Davis refused to concede defeat. In the army and at home, the resistance of many had been heightened, not diminished, by the suffering of the war. Their shared sacrifices had transformed into devoted patriots many who had not been ardent secessionists in 1860 and 1861. Their devotion is reflected in the letters of men who fought to the end—especially those of the officer core, most of them young slaveholders. From the Valley of Virginia in October 1864, Dodson Ramseur wrote to his wife that, despite Sheridan’s and Sherman’s triumphs and Lincoln’s impending re-election, ‘‘I feel sure that Justice & Right will finally triumph.’’ She must be willing to prefer ‘‘anything to submission.’’ Also from the Valley, in December, 28 women petitioned the Confederacy to allow them to ‘‘raise a full regiment of ladies . . . armed and equipped to perform regular service.’’62

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Though several hundred women may, in fact, have fought disguised as men in the ranks of both armies, the Confederacy was not prepared to jettison its assumptions about gender and enroll female soldiers. Yet, many Confederates were prepared to jettison slavery itself in order to win independence. In January 1864, Patrick Cleburne, a division commander in the Army of Tennessee, circulated a petition calling for the enrollment of slave soldiers. Other officers called the idea a ‘‘monstrous proposition,’’ and, when Jefferson Davis learned of it, he ordered Joseph Johnston, Cleburne’s commander, to suppress all such discussion as ‘‘injurious to the public service.’’ Just 10 months later, Davis changed his mind and suggested that the Confederate Congress authorize the purchase of some slaves outright, adding that he supported freedom for those who gave ‘‘faithful service.’’ In December, he sent a mission to Europe to propose diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy in return for gradual emancipation. A few weeks later, Davis openly called for enrolling slaves as soldiers.63 His Congress at first balked, even with defeat—and forced emancipation—staring the Confederacy in the face. South Carolina’s fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett raged against the ‘‘insulting’’ idea of emancipation. ‘‘It was on account of the encroachments upon the institution of slavery,’’ he wrote, that South Carolina had seceded, and if the choice had to be made between an independent Confederacy and slavery, ‘‘We want no Confederate Government without our institutions.’’ A Richmond editor argued that emancipation ‘‘would be a confession, not only of weakness, but of the absolute inability to secure the object for which we undertook the war.’’ Georgia’s Howell Cobb, a long-time Davis supporter, cut to the heart of the issue: ‘‘If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.’’64 In the end, the opinion of Robert E. Lee was decisive. Lee maintained that using slaves as soldiers was ‘‘not only expedient but necessary’’; otherwise ‘‘the enemy will certainly use them against us.’’ He believed they would make good soldiers and added: ‘‘I think those who are employed should be freed. It would be neither just nor wise, in my opinion, to require them to serve as slaves.’’ Even with Lee’s backing, the Confederate Congress authorized the recruitment of slave soldiers by the narrowest of margins, and the law forbade emancipation without the consent of the owners and also of the states in which they lived. Confederate officers on

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March 21 appealed for ‘‘colored troops,’’ and within days some were drilling in Richmond. On April 2, Lee wrote to Davis that many such officers were willing to train black troops, but, on the same day, also told Davis that he had to abandon Petersburg and Richmond that very night. Davis and his cabinet packed up papers and gold; fires set to destroy cotton and other supplies burned much of Richmond. The next morning, advance troops of the Army of the Potomac, former slaves among them, marched into the Confederate capital.65

A Divided South Grant had tightened the noose around Lee until he could no longer count on supplies from the south, and Sherman, after pausing in Savannah, had resumed his march into South Carolina. The destruction of property was even greater in South Carolina than in Georgia, as Federal troops punished the state they blamed for starting the war. At Columbia, South Carolina’s state capital, fires set by retreating Confederates to burn cotton spread through the city, and Sherman’s men did not try to stop the destruction. Even as Lee was lobbying to add emancipated slaves to his ranks, his own soldiers were slipping away in the face of certain defeat. Between February 15 and March 18, 1865, about 8 percent deserted; one private noted that the ‘‘most influential cause of desertion was the news that reached the men of the great suffering of their wives and children at home, caused by the devastations of Sherman’s army.’’66 Others loathed the idea of fighting alongside former slaves. Private Grant Taylor of Alabama wrote to his wife that ‘‘if we are reduced to that extremity. . . stop the war at once and let us come home for if we are to depend on the slaves for our freedom it is gone anyway.’’67 Lee tried to slip away into western Virginia to reach supplies and a rail connection to North Carolina, but Grant cut him off, and Lee, recognizing the inevitable, surrendered at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Three days later, 28,231 of Lee’s soldiers, the remains of the once fearsome Army of Northern Virginia, stacked their arms and left for home. Jefferson Davis fled south hoping to make it to Texas to continue the resistance, but the professional soldiers were convinced that the war was over. On April 18, Joseph Johnston signed

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an armistice with Sherman in North Carolina, effectively ending the life of the Army of Tennessee. The remaining Confederate forces surrendered in turn: on May 4, Lt. General Richard Taylor, in Alabama; on May 26, Lt. General Simon Buckner in New Orleans; on June 2, General Kirby Smith at Galveston. The Federal army caught up with Jefferson Davis on May 10 in Irwinville, Georgia. William Gladstone had said in 1862 that Davis and other leaders had ‘‘made and army. . . and . . . made a nation.’’68 That order is important, because, in a sense, the Confederate nation—as distinct from the new Confederate government of 1861—was more a product of its armed forces than the reverse. The war itself, not only battlefield successes, but also defeats and shared suffering, became the most important source of national pride binding Confederate citizens in common purpose. In four years, they had sacrificed much. The Confederacy had mobilized perhaps three-quarters of its white men of military age in one way or another. About onethird of these died of disease or on the battlefield. Of those who actually went into combat, 38 percent died of wounds, a percentage higher than the Union’s and far higher than in any other U.S. war.69 Even so, with Lee’s surrender, the Confederacy collapsed with a suddenness that betrayed the actual limits of national commitment. There was no serious effort, for example, to resort to guerilla warfare. When Edward Porter Alexander, one of Lee’s young subordinates, suggested to him that the Army of Northern Virginia not surrender, but dissolve so that its soldiers could return home to carry on partisan warfare, Lee rejected the proposal. Guerillas, he replied, ‘‘would become mere bands of marauders [and]. . . . bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from.’’70 During the American Revolution, patriots in the southern colonies had resorted to partisan warfare in the ultimately successful bid for independence. Yet, to southerners in the 1860s, independence was not worth that kind of struggle. A basic assumption behind the secessionist impulse was that a united slave South would face a northern population unwilling to sacrifice for the Union. Even after southerners learned that Yankees would fight, a Confederate Secretary of War confidently asserted that ‘‘There is no instance in history of a people as numerous as we are inhabiting a country so extensive as ours being subjected if true to themselves.’’71 Midway through the war, a Memphis newspaper editor (at the time a refugee in Atlanta) wrote that ‘‘a people

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determined to be free will submit to any sacrifice and cannot be conquered.’’72 ‘‘If true to themselves.’’ ‘‘Determined to be free.’’ Such claims assumed a kind of unity and commitment that no outside force could conquer. The most obvious exception to that unity was the 40 percent of southerners who were black. Not in their wildest nightmares had secessionists imagined that their own slaves would be fighting against them in Union uniforms—or, indeed, for them in Confederate uniforms. But equally important were divisions among white southerners. One historian of the secession crisis remarked that, as early as December 1860, four months before Fort Sumter, it was obvious that ‘‘the fifteen states of the South were not a united whole; and if the secession leaders had possessed sufficient wisdom to see the real significance of this division, secession would have been abandoned as hopeless.’’73 Late in the war, the Charleston Mercury, denouncing the move to put slaves into the Confederate army, pointed to the differences in geography that underlay southern divisions. In the upper states of the Confederacy, ‘‘the institution of African slavery is one merely of choice’’; without slavery, Virginia, for example, would survive to become another Pennsylvania or Ohio. But in the lower South, without slavery (‘‘the systematized labor of the negro’’) ‘‘every vestige of our present form of civilization, society, and government. . . . must go by the board, and sink like a house built of cards.’’74 However, the geography of slavery divided the lower South as well, with serious resistance to Confederate policies in parts of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Divisions over slavery were matters, not just of geography or race, but also of class and conscience. Slavery divided white southerners by class, even as Confederate leaders struggled to convince white nonslaveholders that their own liberty depended on black slavery. The war, in fact, curbed white liberties and hurt poor families by prompting conscription and impressment. The draft raised cries of despotism and drove thousands of men into the Union army, but, without conscription, the Confederate armies would have dissolved long before 1865. So, too, the laws exempting overseers or large slaveowners from the draft and permitting men to hire substitutes raised the cry of ‘‘rich man’s war and poor man’s fight’’; not to exempt them, on the other hand, meant heightened slave resistance, fears of insurrection, and feelings of abandonment by plantation women left to manage unruly slaves.

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Growing numbers of people who had been reluctant Confederates to begin with decided that the survival of a Confederate nation and of slavery were less important than the survival of their families. There were doubts, too, even in the hearts of persistent Confederate patriots, as defeats and deaths mounted and religious convictions began to cut against nationalist conviction. Surely, if God were on the side of the Confederacy, He would not allow a Yankee victory? Or was it possible that God was using the war to punish southerners for their sins? Did those sins include slaveowners’ treatment, or mistreatment, of their slaves? Some important religious leaders raised just such questions. While not condemning slavery itself as immoral, they did insist that southern whites must reform slavery by, for example, protecting slave marriages and allowing slaves to learn to read the Bible. Methodist bishop George Foster Pierce told the Georgia General Assembly that ‘‘If the institution of slavery cannot be maintained, except at the expense of the black man’s immortal interests, in the name of Heaven I say—let it perish.’’75 It was but a short step from questioning the treatment of slaves to questioning the morality of slavery itself. Gertrude Thomas, the wealthy slave mistress from Augusta, Georgia, wrote in her diary in September 1864, that ‘‘the idea has gradually become more and more fixed in my mind that the institution of slavery is not right.’’ She was honest enough to admit that, as someone who benefited from owning slaves it was ‘‘a subject upon which I do not like to think,’’ but concluded that ‘‘I can but think that to hold men and women in perpetual bondage is wrong.’’ Another white diarist, a Georgia minister, writing in September 1864, foresaw a ‘‘crisis’’ coming with respect to slavery and raised the possibility that, ‘‘Having found us unfaithful to our weighty trust, God may be changing his plan. . . . These poor sons of Africa. . . . may have cried against us, until His slumbering wrath may have awakened, and He may be about to place them in another political relation.’’76 The extent of such feelings of doubt or guilt over slavery are impossible to measure and hotly disputed by historians, but if doubts about the institution at the center of the Confederacy’s purpose were indeed reaching into the heart of the master class, it could not bode well for the survival of the new nation. In the end, the Confederacy failed to attract from enough southerners the emotional depth of ties—the feeling of belonging that comes to seem unthinking, primordial—that undergirds modern

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nationalism. Neither religion, language, ethnic origins, nor historical memories—what Lincoln called the ‘‘mystic chords of memory’’—set white southerners apart from northerners. It was slavery—and all the political conflicts that slavery had produced— that divided the North and South, but the white South itself was never wholly united around its commitment to slavery, and too few were willing to follow Davis when, at the very end, he exhorted them to fight on, saying that ‘‘nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain, but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve.’’77 By then most white men had already yielded. The Confederacy’s belated last resort to enlist slaves in its failing army was a fitting ironic flourish to this failure of nationalism. The social and political elites that had dominated the lower South in 1860 and carried off secession had premised their strike for independence on an illusion of unity. Thus, Georgia’s Governor Brown told his constituents, at the outset, that ‘‘our whole social system is one of perfect homogeneity of interest, where every class of society is interested in sustaining the interest of every other class,’’ and the Confederate Congress proclaimed, late in the war, that ‘‘the unanimity and zeal with which the separation [from the Union] was undertaken and perfected, finds no parallel in history.’’78 In acting on that illusion, the slave-owning elite divided their own society and sparked an unprecedented slave rebellion that, in concert with a powerful Federal government, destroyed their political power and ended slavery. They had reaped their own destruction, and their movement for secession deserves a place among the great political follies in the annals of history.

7 The Reconstruction of the South and the Construction of Southern History

The military theorist Karl von Clausewitz wrote famously that wars are not mindless exercises in violence, but ‘‘the continuation of political activity by other means.’’ Union military victory meant a political triumph over the ‘‘Slave Power,’’ and the preservation of the United States as a unified country. But, reversing Clausewitz’s insight, the end of the war was not the end of the political conflicts that caused it, and these conflicts—over the place of African Americans and the balance of power between the national and state governments—would now be fought with other means. The conflict during the reconstruction of the former Confederate states involved these great issues and reshaped southern identity and consciousness decisively as an Old South gave way to a New South.

Reconstruction in Wartime Even before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, the new Confederate states feared, and Abraham Lincoln hoped, that seceding states could be ‘‘reconstructed,’’ brought back into what Lincoln called their ‘‘proper practical relation’’ to the Union. Lincoln himself never abandoned that hope; he accepted the establishment of West Virginia in 1863 and tried to organize new loyal governments in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana during the war, though not until December 1863 did he announce his ‘‘Ten Percent Plan’’ for reconstruction. Under this plan, when 10 percent of the

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eligible voters in a Confederate state took an oath to future loyalty to the Union, they could establish new governments that would be recognized by Washington. Recognizing that emancipation had created an utterly new situation in the South, Lincoln’s plan required voters, and the constitutional conventions they elected, to accept the abolition of slavery. After the Union seized New Orleans in 1862, Lincoln encouraged unionists to form such a new government, but progress was slow, in part because there were not many unionists available—by one estimate, about 56,000 white Louisianans fought for the Confederacy, about 5,000 for the Union.1 When a state constitutional convention met in April 1864, free gens de couleur submitted a petition asking for civil rights for themselves, and Lincoln urged the delegates to give the vote to ‘‘colored people’’ who were ‘‘very intelligent’’ or ‘‘who have fought gallantly in our ranks.’’ Few of the delegates spoke in favor of granting voting rights to African Americans. The large majority of centrist Unionists, though opposed to slavery, nonetheless wanted Louisiana to remain a white man’s country, and a significant minority of these Unionists opposed even emancipation. The more radical members of Lincoln’s own Republican Party rejected his ‘‘Ten Percent Plan’’ as too lenient and as a usurpation of powers that properly belonged to Congress. Their ideas were embodied in a stringent bill passed in July 1864 that would require 50 percent of voters to take an ‘‘iron-clad’’ oath swearing that they had never taken up arms against the Union before a new government in a Confederate state would be recognized. Lincoln refused to sign the bill into law, but Congress in turn refused to seat the congressmen and senators elected in 1864 from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. This is where things stood in April 1865, as the Confederacy collapsed, but the task of guiding reconstruction would fall to the new President, Andrew Johnson, who had taken office after the assassination of Lincoln on April 14. Emancipation meant that getting the Confederate states back into their ‘‘proper practical relation’’ with the federal government would be immensely complex. Emancipation, like political reconstruction, evolved during the war in haphazard fashion, largely as an adjunct to military conflict. What that freedom would mean in practice, and even whether it would remain permanent, remained to be decided. In the border slave states of the Union itself, the

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situation was at its most confusing, because the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply there and border-state slaveholders stubbornly held out against emancipation. Antislavery Republicans during the war took political control of Maryland and Missouri with the aid of heavy-handed intervention by the Union army, which jailed proslavery editors, sent off prominent pro-Confederates, and kept out soldiers who joined the Confederate army. Republican leaders in these states saw slavery as the foundation of rebellion and were eager to destroy it for that reason. Maryland did so under a new constitution in November 1864, and Missouri by constitutional amendment in January 1865.2 Neither Kentucky nor Delaware abolished slavery Since Lincoln was unsure whether the Supreme Court would uphold his Emancipation Proclamation after the war, he lobbied hard for a new constitutional amendment to free all slaves in the United States. He finally succeeded in early 1865, though with only a two-votes margin in the House of Representatives. Maryland, Missouri, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas quickly ratified the amendment, but Delaware and Kentucky rejected it. It would require ratification by some of the other Confederate states in order to reach the required three-quarters majority of states. Meanwhile, as runaway slaves gathered behind Union lines, the Federal government searched for ways to deal with the unplanned transformation of the South’s social and economic system. One model was the ‘‘Port Royal experiment’’ on the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast. When the region near Port Royal was seized by the Union navy in November 1861, plantation owners fled, leaving the army to deal with 10,000 ‘‘contrabands.’’ To South Carolina went hundreds of idealistic northern men and women who planned to set up schools and bring ‘‘true’’ Christianity to the former slaves, and other northerners who saw the problem of emancipation as primarily a labor issue. The New York Times editorialized that, after the slaves were freed, ‘‘there will come the further duty of making them work.’’3 By work the editor meant raising cotton and other valuable commodities. The former slaves themselves wanted to control their own small plots of land and ‘‘insist upon cultivating their own corn patch only.’’4 Businessmen and speculators, convinced that their know-how would quickly demonstrate the superiority of free labor over slavery, bought much of the plantation land from the U.S. Treasury, which seized

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it for nonpayment of taxes. These investors made a considerable profit, but some, faced with continuing resistance from black workers with different priorities, later sold off most of their land in small plots to the former slaves. The Port Royal experiment was especially influential with northern abolitionists, who founded dozens of freedmen’s aid societies that sent hundreds of teachers, mainly young women, to teach throughout the South in new schools for the former slaves. More influential in shaping public policy, however, were the experiments in the Mississippi River Valley, where Union army commanders Benjamin Butler and Nathaniel Banks tried to keep blacks at work on the sugar and cotton plantations in order to buy the loyalty of wealthy planters as well as produce valuable crops, provide a source of tax revenue, and keep thousands of African Americans from becoming dependent on the army. The rights and freedoms of black workers did not rank high on these two generals’ lists of priorities, and both issued regulations designed to compel black men and women to labor faithfully on plantations, albeit for wages, and without any threats of sale. Black workers resisted, one telling a Union officer that ‘‘All I want for my people is to be rid for ever of Masterism.’’ In October 1863, during the sugar harvest, season, a ‘‘Revolt & Insurrection among the negroes’’ broke out on one plantation; workers took off for a neighboring property and ‘‘Returned with flags & drums shouting Abe Lincoln and Freedom.’’ The next year Banks modified his contract system to raise wages and give workers more rights, but they could be punished for violating their contracts, and half their pay was withheld until the end of the year.5 A third model for freedom came from William T. Sherman. Shortly after his army arrived in Savannah in December 1865, Sherman met with a group of local black leaders who told him ‘‘the way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor. . . . We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.’’ Four days later, Sherman set aside a broad swath of land along the coast, to be divided among the freedmen in 40-acre plots. A permanent decision on this land would be up to Congress and the President, but thousands of former slaves moved on and began to till these acres as their own.6 As the war drew toward its end, a vocal minority of Radical Republicans wanted to confiscate plantation land and distribute it

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to the former slaves, but few northerners were willing to go this far. Nor did Congress respond to numerous petitions for civil and political rights that were coming from southern blacks. One petition from Tennessee blacks, for example, said that ‘‘We know the burdens of citizenship, and are ready to bear them. We know the duties of citizenship, and are ready to perform them cheerfully.’’ They appealed, powerfully, to the fact that thousands of black soldiers ‘‘have already died in battle, or perished by a cruel martyrdom for the sake of the Union. . . . If we are called on to do military duty against the rebel armies in the field, why should we be denied the privilege of voting against rebel citizens at the ballot-box?’’7 But how could representatives and senators force Tennessee or Louisiana to allow blacks to vote, when Ohio and Wisconsin kept blacks from the polls? In March 1865, Congress did establish a Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) to smooth the transition from slavery to freedom. The Bureau’s agents provided emergency food aid to thousands of southerners (the majority of them white); they oversaw abandoned properties, helped to coordinate the educational work of private freedmen’s aid societies, and, in the first year after the war, acted as judges in civil and criminal disputes involving freedmen. Its agents focused especially on the labor problem, convinced as they were that a fair system of wage labor was the best school to teach the former slaves that hard work and ambition would lead to upward mobility. They insisted that planters give written contracts to freedmen and sat as judges in case of contract disputes. When many former masters tried to use old laws on apprenticeship to force the children of former slaves into unpaid labor, Freedmen’s Bureau agents quashed many of these blatant attempts to reassert planter power. Still, at its peak, the Bureau employed fewer than 1,000 men, and neither its power nor its resources were up to the task of supervising the working conditions of three and a half million African Americans.

Contests for Power For black southerners, the end of the war was a time of hope, one that many identified with the Biblical day of Jubilee. According to a study by the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, ‘‘the chief

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object of ambition’’ among them ‘‘is to own property, especially to possess land, if it be only a few acres.’’8 The small number of southern white Unionists expected to win powerful influence and perhaps even dominate the postwar South. But most white southerners felt sadness and trepidation. The war had killed perhaps 250,000 Confederate soldiers and grievously wounded many thousands more. Farms and plantations had been run down with neglect or turned into battlefields. Richmond, Atlanta, and other cities had been partly destroyed. Most stunning of all, the social world built on slavery had been turned upside down. John Jones, who had grown up on a large plantation in Georgia, wrote to his mother, Mary, in August 1865 that ‘‘The dark, dissolving, disquieting wave of emancipation has broken over this sequestered region . . . It has been like the iceberg, withering and deadening the best sensibilities of master and servant, and fast sundering the domestic ties of years.’’ Gertrude Thomas, of Augusta, Georgia, wrote in October 1865, that only at the end of the war had she realized ‘‘how intimately my faith in revelations and my faith in the institution of slavery had been woven together. . . . Slavery was done away with and my faith in God’s Holy Book was terribly shaken. For a time I doubted God.’’ More practically, mistresses like Thomas found out for the first time how unpleasant and tiring it was to cook, clean, and care for children every day; after making her very first cakes, her back ached, and she admitted that ‘‘I have seen things I like to do better.’’9 Long after Lee’s surrender, many slaveowners still could not believe that slavery would really be abolished. South Carolinian David Golightly Harris, master of 10 slaves, who wrote in his diary on June 5, 1865, ‘‘a yankey has issued a proclimation freeing all the negroes,’’ added, ‘‘I do not much think it will have much effect.’’ When soldiers arrived in his neighborhood in August to enforce emancipation, Harris was shocked: ‘‘Alas! a decree has gone forth from the yankeys, that we must say to our negroes that they are free. If they stay with us, we are to pay them, & not drive them off nor correct them. The negroes seem to receive a higher place in the yankey opinion than the white people.’’10 As for rejoining the Union, Gertrude Thomas probably expressed a common view when she wrote, in May 1865, that ‘‘the war is over and again we become a part of the United States—how united will depend alone upon treatment we receive at the hands of the North. It will prove

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to their interest to be very discreet for the South will prove a smouldering volcano requiring but little to again burst forth.’’11 When Andrew Johnson took office in April 1865, Congress was in adjournment until December, so, for several months, the new president could guide Reconstruction largely as he saw fit. Johnson’s words about Confederates were harsh: ‘‘treason must be made infamous and traitors must be impoverished.’’ Believing that the South’s ‘‘aristocrats’’ had conspired to drag the South into secession, he proclaimed that high Confederate political and military leaders and all men in the Confederate South worth more than $20,000 would lose their civil and political rights. But Johnson was no friend of the freedmen. When Lincoln had issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, Johnson, then Military Governor of Tennessee, had said, ‘‘Damn the negroes. I am fighting these traitorous aristocrats, their masters!’’12 As President, Johnson appointed provisional governors for the former Confederate states and instructed each of them to call a state convention. Each state must then abolish slavery and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, repudiate debts run up to fight the war, and repudiate secession.13 Most of the provisional governors and convention delegates had opposed secession in 1861, but few of them had been genuine unionists. The conventions met and did Johnson’s bidding, though not without grumbling and dissent. An Alabama convention delegate objected to abolishing slavery since the Emancipation Proclamation, he said, had been an unconstitutional violation of ‘‘the sovereignty of the States.’’14 Although Johnson, like Lincoln before him, suggested that extending the vote to literate and property-holding blacks would disarm the Radicals in Congress, none of the conventions seriously considered this possibility. South Carolina’s Governor James Orr told his own state’s convention that black suffrage would be ‘‘folly and madness,’’ and that ‘‘this is a white man’s government, and intended for white men only.’’15 By the time the states elected new governments, Johnson was granting pardons to almost any former Confederates who expressed remorse, and many of these men were elected to offices in the new state governments. Mississippi’s legislature, stubborn to the last, refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, but with legislatures in South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia ratifying, it became law on December 6. The newly elected

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legislatures also passed new laws, known as Black Codes, to govern the status of African Americans. The laws conceded to former slaves a few basic rights—to marry, own property, sign contracts, and sue in court, for example—but blacks could not vote, hold office, serve on juries, or testify against whites in court in many cases. Mississippi’s code prohibited blacks from buying or renting farm land, and South Carolina’s freedmen had to get a special license for any employment except agricultural labor. One Louisiana parish made its own Black Code, requiring all African Americans to ‘‘be in the regular service of some white person,’’ remain with the employer every night, and obtain permits to move about the parish. Draconian criminal laws were put in place, for example giving long prison terms for the theft of a pig. Obviously, white leaders intended to preserve, as much as possible, planters’ control of African Americans’ labor.16 Johnson, from Tennessee, agreed that the United States should remain a white man’s country, and he did not object to such laws. He also returned to their original owners the tentative grants of land that Sherman had given to freedmen along the Atlantic coast. As congressmen returned to Washington in December 1865, Johnson declared that Reconstruction was essentially over. White southerners would, he expected, continue to control their own states and to rule over inferior blacks; Congress, he thought, should seat the South’s new senators and representatives, even though some of those men had filled high places in the Confederacy— most notoriously, former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, now sent by Georgia to the U.S. Senate. Democratic representatives and senators were happy, for they anticipated that most of the new southern representatives and senators would vote with them, but Republican party members found them unacceptable. Reports of violence against the freedmen were pouring in from the South, and old abolitionists like Charles Sumner of Massachusetts believed the Black Codes would effectively put the freedmen back into slavery. It was bad enough that former Confederate officials had been sent to Washington to make laws for the United States; it was worse that the fruit of Johnson’s Reconstruction policy might actually include an increase in the power of the southern-dominated Democratic party. As free people, all blacks in the southern states, not just three-fifths of them as under slavery, would count toward apportioning representation and presidential

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electors, but, without black suffrage, these additional representatives and electors would be chosen by the same white electorate that had just fought a bloody war against the Union. While some Radical Republicans were prepared to rule over the former Confederate states as territories or ‘‘conquered provinces,’’ to confiscate plantation land, and to make former slaves full citizens, most Republicans had more modest aims. They wanted to provide some protection for the former slaves and keep the old Confederate leaders out of power, but they still hoped for a compromise with Johnson that would speed the reentry of the southern states and revive the southern economy without threatening their party’s power. They had no intention of altering, fundamentally, the federal structure of the government that left control of local affairs to the states, nor did they wish to force full racial equality on the South. Most white northerners still opposed giving votes to black men—as they demonstrated by defeating proposals to do so in referendums in Connecticut, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The Republican majority in early 1866 did pass an extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau and, to protect black rights, a Civil Rights Act. The latter was a significant departure from American tradition, exerting national power to grant citizenship to every person born in the U.S. ‘‘of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude,’’ and guaranteeing all citizens ‘‘the same’’ basic rights: to own property, make contracts, sue in court, and receive ‘‘full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens.’’17 The Civil Rights Act was intended to override both the recently passed Black Codes and the now-infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857. It ignored the question of land and it did not give the freedmen any political rights. Johnson shocked the Republicans by vetoing both these bills, calling the Bureau an expensive and unwarranted extension of national power and denouncing the Civil Rights Bill as a form of discrimination against white people. His vetoes delighted southern white leaders, who felt confirmed in their limited concessions thus far, but they touched off a political war that would end in a far more radical reconstruction policy than most congressmen of 1866 had intended. A two-thirds majority overrode Johnson’s vetoes of the Civil Rights Act and also his veto of a new Freedmen’s Bureau bill. More importantly, Congress passed and sent to the states for

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ratification a new constitutional amendment. The first clause of this proposed Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the basic ideas of the Civil Rights Act, giving citizenship to all persons born in the United States and forbidding states to deny to any citizens ‘‘equal protection of the law’’ or ‘‘due process of law.’’ Other clauses repudiated Confederate debts and denied office-holding to most of the antebellum political leadership of the Confederate states. To limit the political power of southern white voters but without forcing northern states to give the vote to blacks, one clause allowed states to limit the franchise but provided that, it they did, they would, thereby, lose, in proportion, representation in Congress and in the electoral college. Tennessee ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, but the other southern states rejected it, Florida’s legislature resolving to ‘‘quietly endure the government of the bayonet’’ rather than suffer such ‘‘dishonor’’ and ‘‘degradation.’’18 Southern white leaders, refusing to believe that northern whites would force dramatic changes in their treatment of blacks, waited for Johnson to rally opinion to their side. Widespread violence erupted against African Americans in the South, including riots in Memphis in May 1866, and in New Orleans in July, during which local white police participated in massacres of dozens of blacks. But Johnson and his southern supporters had miscalculated. In the fall of 1866, northern voters returned a huge Republican Party majority to Congress, and, the next spring, emboldened Republicans passed a series of Reconstruction Acts that returned the former Confederate states (except for Tennessee) to military rule and required army generals to call elections for new constitutional conventions. In these elections, former Confederate leaders were disfranchised, but all other adult males, blacks included, were to be registered as voters. Not until the legislatures elected under these new constitutions met and ratified the new Fourteenth Amendment would the former Confederate states’ representatives and senators be admitted to Congress. The revolutionary step of giving the vote to African Americans was confirmed by the ratification in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment, forbidding discrimination in voting anywhere in the United States on the grounds of ‘‘race, color, or previous condition of servitude.’’ The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments reversed more than two centuries of systematic legal discrimination based on race and enslavement. This was unique in the history of eman-

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cipation in the western hemisphere, where freed slaves in the Caribbean and Latin America were confined to a distinctly second-class citizenship.

The Politics of Reconstruction in the States In each southern state, Republican party organizers rallied voters to choose delegates for constitutional conventions, as called for by the Reconstruction Acts. The main organizing force was the Union League, originating in the North during the war to support the Lincoln administration, then spreading to the South afterwards as a way to educate and mobilize both whites and blacks. In rural areas, the League became a remarkable grassroots movement, nearly all of its members black, led by preachers and other respected leaders from the days of slavery. Spurred by the League, the mass of freedmen responded with enthusiasm to exercise, for the first time, their right to vote. In the conventions elected across the South under the terms of the Reconstruction Acts in 1867–9, 267 of the delegates, about a quarter of the whole, were African Americans. The constitutions drawn up in these conventions gave African Americans full rights as citizens, including, for men, the right to vote. They established the first statewide public school systems in most of the states. Three of the states for the first time gave property rights to married women. The sharpest debates in the conventions involved questions of race and white disfranchisement. Black delegates, often with support from new migrants from the North, pushed for the fullest endorsement of racial equality, while white southerners, both Unionists and recent Confederates, resisted demands for ‘‘social equality.’’ Only in Louisiana did the new constitution ban segregation in public schools and places of public accommodation. White southern Unionists were usually the most determined supporters of disfranchising large numbers of former Confederates; other white southerners and many former slaves leaned toward leniency. Except for one relatively small program in South Carolina, none of the conventions authorized serious efforts to make it possible for the freedmen to become landowners. On this issue, the landless freedmen were probably not well represented by most of the black delegates, most of whom were ministers, artisans, or already landowners.

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In each state, the Republican party, growing from its southern base in the Union Leagues, dominated the elections for the new state governments. These parties were coalitions of black southerners, new migrants from the North, both black and white, and white southerners. In every state, blacks—most of them former slaves, but some of whom had long been free—formed the voting base of the party. About 800 African Americans served in state legislatures during Reconstruction, and 16 were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate. Several hundred more served in local offices.19 The small number of postwar migrants from the North were disproportionately important compared to their numbers in the Republican party coalition because many of them were elected or appointed to high office and controlled patronage. In Louisiana, for example, two governors, three U.S. Senators, and ten of the thirteen U.S. Representatives elected during Reconstruction had come south during or after the war; recent arrivals also garnered more than two-thirds of appointments to federal jobs in the state.20 Some had come to teach or preach to the freedmen; many were young and ambitious veterans of the Union army who saw the South as a place both to make their fortunes and, in the words of Marshall Harvey Twitchell of Vermont, to ‘‘substitute the civilization of freedom for that of slavery.’’21 Twitchell prospered and became the leader of the Republicans in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. Albert T. Morgan of Wisconsin, another former Union officer, took up politics only after he lost $50,000 trying to plant cotton in Mississippi. To men like Morgan, politics was a way both ‘‘to secure to the freed people the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’’ and a ‘‘means for a restoration’’ of his personal finances.22 A few northerners were African Americans, including Martin Delany, who had been born free in Virginia but lived most of his life in the North. Delany campaigned against slavery but, in the 1850s, became so disgusted with American racism that he urged blacks to emigrate to Africa. During the war he recruited northern blacks into the Union army, and afterward he went to South Carolina, where he served in the Freedmen’s Bureau and entered state politics. With a natural constituency of black voters, Republicans in each state did quickly build new parties, but only in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana could the party keep power with black votes alone. In every state southern whites were among the party’s

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leaders. Some, such as William ‘‘Parson’’ Brownlow, governor of Tennessee from 1865–9, had been committed unionists throughout the war; others, like the wealthy Mississippi planter James Alcorn, were former Whigs who liked the party’s economic platform and saw it as the route back to political power; still others, among them Joseph E. Brown, former governor of Georgia and ardent secessionist, joined out of sheer expediency. Southern Republicans tried to attract whites with proposals to restore prosperity, especially by supporting the building of railroads, and to build strong systems of public schools. Georgia’s Republicans urged ‘‘the Poor White Men of Georgia’’ to vote for their new constitution because it would place ordinary whites on the same level as the ‘‘slaveholding aristocracy’’ that ‘‘used to boast that for every slave they were entitled to three-fifths of a vote in congressional representation.’’23 Many white Georgians did vote for that state’s new constitution. As in other southern states, the white Republican vote was concentrated in the Appalachian highlands, where slaves had been few before the war and many whites had opposed the Confederacy. Western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee became centers of white Republican strength. On the whole, however, the ratification votes for these constitutions revealed that relatively few southern whites accepted the reconstruction process. In Louisiana, for example, where the constitution was ratified by a vote of 66,152 to 48,739, more than 40,000 potential white voters did not participate, and, outside of New Orleans, white voters rejected the constitution by a margin of 20 to 1. In Alabama and Mississippi, very few whites participated, and in no state did anything close to a majority of the white electorate approve the new constitutions.24 In other ways, too, whites refused to accept their new state governments as legitimate. They dismissed the northern migrants contemptuously as ‘‘carpetbaggers’’ because they had supposedly arrived in the South carrying everything they owned in a cheap travel bag made of carpet material, hoping to feed at the public trough. They denounced southern white Republicans as traitors and ‘‘scalawags,’’ and they presumed that black voters were little more than tools in the hands of unscrupulous whites. The unprecedented role of African Americans in politics gave rise to the white southern postwar legend of a ‘‘Black Reconstruction’’ dominated by ignorant former slaves. While most of the African American leaders obviously lacked experience with electoral politics, more

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than half of black officeholders whose prewar status is known were free in 1860 or earlier; relatively affluent and educated free blacks were especially influential politically in South Carolina and Louisiana. More than 80 percent of black officeholders were literate; more than half the officeholders were ministers, teachers, or skilled artisans; about 10 percent had served in the Union army or navy. In most states, blacks never held anything close to a majority of state elective offices. In only three constitutional conventions did blacks make up more than one-quarter of the delegates, and South Carolina, with a population about 60 percent black, was the only state ever to have a black majority in its legislature. No state had a black governor (except when P.B.S. Pinchback, lt. governor. of Louisiana, temporarily served as governor after the elected governor had been impeached.) By 1870, all the new southern legislatures had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, chosen U.S. Senators, been accepted back into Congress, and begun to work on the Republican agenda, guaranteeing the civil rights of the freedmen and forbidding racial discrimination, establishing the first comprehensive public school systems in most southern states, and encouraging the building of railroads by guaranteeing or subscribing to bonds raised by private entrepreneurs. The states had to invent new fiscal systems, since, before the war, taxes on slaves had provided much of state income. The Republican regimes, building on policies put into place by Democrats during the first year of Reconstruction, turned to poll taxes (levied on adult males) and to taxes on real estate, in effect shifting the tax burden toward small landowners. To save money on prisons, states leased out prisoners (most of them black) to labor for private businessmen such as Georgia’s former governor Brown, who put them to work in his mines.25 To pull off this difficult transition to a new economy and fiscal system would have been difficult in the best of circumstances, but circumstances after 1867 worked against the Republicans. Planters, having lost their slaves, would have suffered in any case, but floods, droughts, and, for rice planters, competition from Asia and from new fields in Louisiana and Arkansas made things worse. Especially damaging, the price of cotton began a long-term decline that would last, with few interruptions, for more than three decades. Southerners lacked the capital to build new factories quickly in order to transform their economic base, nor could they pay wages high

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enough to attract skilled workers from the North or abroad. Dozens of the new railroad projects went bankrupt, leaving their bonds to be paid off by the taxes of small farmers. With the southern economy weighed down by this constellation of blows, the new Republican governments quickly dissipated much of their potential support among poorer white southerners, who found the new public schools less important than losing their farms. The new parties also damaged themselves with factionalism and corruption. ‘‘Carpetbaggers’’ and ‘‘scalawags’’ quarreled with each other over control of the spoils, and both balked at dividing offices with blacks. For example, when Georgia’s legislature met in 1868, with three African Americans in the Senate and twenty-nine in the House, Democratic legislators challenged the right of blacks to sit in the legislature on the grounds that the new constitution had not specifically mentioned black office-holding. One of the leaders of the expulsion effort was none other than Joseph Brown, the Democrat-turned-Republican. In the state’s House of Representatives, the Republican speaker ruled that black members could not vote on their own eligibility, and 15 white Republicans voted along with the Democrats to expel the blacks, while 15 other white Republicans did not vote at all.26 In Tennessee and Virginia, Democrats returned to power quickly by exploiting such divisions and allying with conservative white Republicans who had refused to go along with radical policies. Both states were firmly in Democratic hands by 1871. Corruption, too, cost the Republican regimes support among both southern whites and otherwise sympathetic northerners. Governmental corruption in this era was a national, not a southern, problem; businessmen in many states found it easy to get favors by the judicious use of bribery or by exploiting inside knowledge. When P.B.S. Pinchback of Louisiana admitted that he profited from investments because, as a member of the legislature, he ‘‘knew about what it would do,’’ this was no more than what Tammany Hall Democrats of New York City were doing.27 But, in the South, corruption reinforced perceptions of southern whites who had already dismissed the new regimes as compounds of ignorance and venality, and made it harder for northern Republicans to respond to pleas for assistance. All these factors made the new governments vulnerable to the strategic use of political violence by determined white Democrats. From 1867 to 1871, the most important source of political violence in the South was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), begun in

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1866 as a social organization of Confederate veterans in Tennessee, but quickly evolving into a violent auxiliary of the Democratic Party. The KKK was not a centralized organization; the name was taken up by groups at the local level (sometimes taking variant names, like the Knights of the White Camellia in Louisiana). The Klan enrolled whites from all social strata, and in many places it was led by prominent ‘‘respectable’’ men. Klansmen targeted ‘‘uppity’’ black men, freedmen who refused to bow to planters’ demands, and northern teachers in black schools. Above all, they threatened and attacked Republican office holders and activists. In Louisiana in 1868, during a reign of terror between the state elections in April and the national elections in November, several hundred black Republicans were murdered, including one who was beheaded. The total Republican vote in the state fell from 65,000 in April to just 33,000 in November.28 In Piedmont Georgia, state senator Joseph Adkins (unlike most Klan victims, a white man) was ambushed and killed. A black leader in Georgia testified, ‘‘They broke my door open, took me out of bed, took me to the woodshed, whipped me 3 hrs or more, and left me for dead. They said to me, ‘do you think you will vote for another damned radical?’ ’’ In one Georgia county where the Klan was active, violence and intimidation reduced the Republican vote from 1,144 to 116 between the elections for governor and President in 1868.29 Such violence helped to give the Democrats control of Georgia’s government in 1871. Vigorous action by some state governments and the passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act by the U.S. Congress in 1871 helped to suppress the Klan and similar groups. Arkansas’s Republican governor placed some counties under martial law and called out the militia, and, in North Carolina, Republican Governor William Holden suspended habeas corpus and sent the militia into two counties. The policy in Arkansas helped to keep the state under Republican rule until 1874, but Holden’s actions provoked a white backlash that led to a Democratic majority in North Carolina’s legislature in 1870, which then impeached him and removed him from office. In upcountry South Carolina, federal prosecutions in 1871 under the Ku Klux Klan Act helped to bring violence under control. After 1871, the KKK itself largely disappeared and political violence declined for a time, but whites throughout the South had learned that, if they were not willing to fight a guerrilla war to

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achieve independence, they were willing to do so in defense of white supremacy. They did not forget the lesson.

‘‘I Wish You Could Be Here a Little While and See What an Alteration Freedom Makes.’’ At the end of the war, rural freedmen, based partly on their sense of justice and partly on the statements of Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, who favored a policy of confiscation and redistribution of plantations, were convinced that Lincoln’s government would give them land. Rumors of such a land distribution at Christmas in 1865 circulated widely among African Americans and frightened many southern whites, who interpreted their beliefs as a threat of violent insurrection. But, although northern and southern Republicans alike proved willing to exert state power to try to guarantee civil and political rights for the freed slaves, the freedmen themselves were sorely disappointed in their hopes for land. Southern planters, for their part, had hoped that their Black Codes would enable them to keep tight control over their emancipated laborers, but the Civil Rights Act and Fourteenth Amendment had sharply limited this option. Planters in several states dreamed of getting rid of black labor altogether by replacing it with cheap immigrants from Italy or Asia. Several thousand Chinese laborers were imported into Louisiana and Mississippi, but these experiments came to little as immigrants soon learned that they could command higher wages in other parts of the country or left the fields to buy their own small farms or establish small businesses. The balance of economic power and opportunity in the transformed southern economy would have to be worked out, not mainly in legislative halls, but, instead, one plantation and one freedman family at a time. Most planters at first hoped to continue old practices, hiring workers to perform tasks in the rice and Sea Island cotton fields or to work in gangs on sugar and short-staple cotton plantations. In the immediate aftermath of war, planters resorted to violence when they could. In November 1865, a South Carolina farmer wrote in his journal that ‘‘In this district several negroes have been badly whipped & several have been hung by some unknown persons. This has a tendency to keep them in their proper bounds

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& make them more humble.’’30 Reports poured into the Freedmen’s Bureau of planters who drove off their workers without paying wages or without dividing crops properly. Bureau agents prevented some of this abuse, but the most effective check against gross exploitation was the mobility of black workers, because, even if laborers had ‘‘nothing but freedom,’’ they were now free to leave one employer for another. Planters who, in comparison with their neighbors, underpaid or mistreated workers might find that they had no labor to weed or harvest their crops. In many places planters colluded to set wage rates and keep one planter from hiring away another’s workers, but such efforts usually broke down quickly as planters competed for workers in the new labor market. Some of the most contentious conflicts arose over the control of the freedmen’s family labor. As former slaveholders’ exploitation of ‘‘apprenticeship’’ laws demonstrated, they still imagined that they, not the freedmen themselves, had the right to control the labor of black women and children. But African Americans insisted instead on controlling their own families and family time. Black women now spent far more of their working hours in their own households, cultivating gardens and caring for children, than they had under slavery. In one South Carolina rice county the proportion of black women signing contracts to work as full-time hands fell from more than two-thirds to less than one-third between 1866 and 1868.31 One rice planter complained that black children on his plantation had been taught ‘‘never to call me ‘Master’ again.’’ Yet, if black women resisted attempts of white landowners to control them, they also did not always go along with the efforts of many Freedmen’s Bureau agents to impose northern middle-class family ideals. Northerners were dismayed to see that African Americans failed to appreciate assumed northern standards for sexual behavior, for example. Black men and women distinguished between temporary liaisons such as ‘‘taking up’’ or ‘‘sweethearting’’ and the permanent sort of marriage that most eventually settled into.32 Thousands of African Americans went to the Bureau to legalize long-standing marriages, but others ignored the Bureau when it tried to enforce such legalities, instead marrying with traditional ceremonies or being satisfied with public acknowledgment of their relationships. Women, in part because they worked for wages more often than white women, in part because slavery had encouraged a greater

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authority for women in black families than in white families, resisted the idea that their husbands ought to control all family decisions and family property. Bureau agents, in fact, spent much of their time adjudicating disputes within and between black families over such issues.33 On the Sea Islands, it proved too difficult, or too expensive, to keep workers in the long-staple cotton fields, which had to be fertilized each winter with mud from nearby swamps. Freedmen in South Carolina who had managed to buy small farms continued to raise some cotton on their own, but large-scale cotton planting soon disappeared on the Sea Islands. Rice plantations did recover, though never reaching the prewar level of production. Rice planters and workers compromised on a ‘‘two-day’’ system, with planters providing small plots of land to black families, who then raised their own provisions and worked in the planters’ rice fields for two days a week for cash wages.34 Gang labor was especially important during the sugar harvest, when the cane had to be brought to the mills before its sugar content fell. Sugar planters came to rely on a small core of stable families working year-round as tenants; their labor was then supplemented at harvest time by seasonal day laborers. To get enough labor for the harvest, sugar planters had to pay wages considerably higher than those in other parts of the South.35 Most cotton planters, too, tried to keep the gang system. On two Georgia plantations owned by David C. Barrow, where many of the former slaves stayed to work for their old master, freedmen were first ‘‘divided into two squads, the arrangement and method of working of each being about the same as they had always been use to.’’ Contracts required the freedmen to be ‘‘obedient & respectful’’ and to ask permission to leave the plantation. This system quickly broke down because it smacked too much of slavery for most of the workers. The overseer on one of Barrow’s plantations, accustomed to slavery, now found it impossible to keep his men and women working as hard as he expected. Workers left the plantation to attend political meetings and they demanded higher pay. ‘‘I wish you could Be here a Little while,’’ the overseer wrote to Barrow in December 1865, ‘‘and see what an alteration freedom makes.’’ One of Barrow’s relatives advised him that ‘‘the hireling system will fail. Emancipated negroes will not work next year, nor the next after, under overseers or drivers . . . but the tenant system

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gratifies their pride & excites their hopes and lust of money.’’36 Barrow for a time contracted with ‘‘companies’’ of tenants, with groups of workers, usually bound to one another by kinship, farming a section of the plantation under the direction of a black leader. Over time, most of the plantation was divided up into smaller tracts and rented out to individual black families. In its evolution toward a tenant system, the Barrow plantation was typical, although Barrow, unlike most cotton planters, charged his tenants a fixed rent, payable in cotton. The more common practice was sharecropping, under which landlord and worker shared the crop at the end of the harvest. Terms could vary, but might, for example, give one-third of the crop to the landlord, one-third to the laborer, and one-third to the party who provided the seed, fertilizer, mules, and other means of production. A sharecropping system gave workers the incentive to stay through the year to avoid losing their share of the crop, which was important to landlords since cotton required steady labor throughout the summer and fall. Sharecropping also allowed cash-short planters to avoid paying regular wages during the year. With most of their annual income arriving at the end of the crop year, planters had long depended on credit to get them from one harvest to the next, but, after the war, the old credit system broke down. Slaves, the most valuable collateral for loans, were no more, and few lenders would risk mortgages on land. Local merchants stepped into the breach, providing credit for planters and sharecroppers, with the future crop itself as collateral. Since the incomes of the planter, the tenant, and the merchant all depended on a future crop, the legal details were crucial. Did the entire harvest go to the landowner, who then paid out the workers’ share? Or did the worker automatically get his or her share at harvest time, then repay the merchant? Or could the merchant get the first lien, giving him the right to recover his advances first, before the crop was divided? Battles over who had first rights to the crop were waged in state legislatures throughout Reconstruction. Most often, merchants were the victors, given the right to demand the first lien on any crops that had been put up as collateral for credit. When South Carolina abolished the merchant’s lien merchants simply refused to extend credit to farmers or planters, and their rights were soon restored.37

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White Supremacy The Republican Party candidate for president in 1868, U.S. Grant, won the presidency with 53 percent of the national popular vote. His Democratic opponent, Horatio Seymour of New York, carried Georgia, Louisiana, and the upper South states of Delaware, Kentucky, and Maryland, winning a majority of both the popular and electoral votes in the South (Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia, still unreconstructed, did not participate). Grant supported congressional attempts to enforce black rights, including, somewhat reluctantly, the Ku Klux Klan Act. His administration was notoriously corrupt, alienating Radical Republicans like Charles Sumner so much that they refused to support Grant’s renomination in 1872. Now calling themselves Liberal Republicans, the reformers nominated another old abolitionist, Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, for president. Southern Democrats, seeing an opportunity to defeat Grant, joined other Democrats in what they called the ‘‘New Departure’’ to endorse Greeley rather than make a separate nomination, thus creating an odd alliance of ex-Confederates and ex-abolitionists. Grant trounced Greeley with 56 percent of the popular vote and all but 66 of 352 electoral votes, but Greeley captured 49 percent of the South’s popular vote and won six southern states (Georgia, Texas, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Tennessee). A depression beginning in 1873 further deflected northern attention from southern affairs and allowed the Democrats to capture control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1874. In the former Confederacy, Democrats won control in Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas in 1873 and 1874, leaving just four states of the old Confederacy controlled by Republicans: Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In all four states, Republicans were bitterly divided. Three factions contested for offices in Louisiana, one made up mainly of southern whites, another of ‘‘carpetbaggers,’’ and the third of African Americans, angered over the unwillingness of Governor Henry Clay Warmoth to enforce the state constitutional provisions requiring integrated schools and ‘‘social equality’’ in public accommodations. In 1872, Warmoth joined the Liberal Republicans and formed a ‘‘Fusion’’ alliance with Democrats; the regular Republicans united with the black

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faction headed by P.B.S. Pinchback. Both sides claimed victory in the state elections that year, and rival candidates for governor and legislative seats showed up in the capital. President Grant intervened to settle the conflict in favor of the regular Republicans, but not before a battle in 1873 between ‘‘fusionist’’ whites and black Republicans in the town of Colfax resulted in a massacre of more than 100 African Americans, at least 37 of whom were prisoners executed in cold blood.38 Two years later, Grant again ordered federal troops into Louisiana’s legislative halls to prevent Democrats from forcibly seating their candidates in five disputed elections. In December 1874, elections in Vicksburg and surrounding Warren County served as a dress rehearsal for what became known as the ‘‘Mississippi Plan’’ to restore that black-majority state to white Democratic control. Democrats in the city organized as a ‘‘Taxpayers’ League,’’ then as the ‘‘White Man’s Party,’’ with its own informal militia. Victorious in city elections, the White Man’s Party forced Republican sheriff Peter Crosby to ‘‘resign,’’ then routed a crowd of black men who gathered to reinstall Crosby and pursued them into the countryside, killing at least 25. Aided by similar vigilante violence in other areas, the Democrats took over the legislature in 1875 and immediately threatened to impeach Governor Adelbert Ames, a former Union general from Maine. Ames appealed to Grant to send troops to protect black voters, but northerners were losing patience with southern Republicans who seemed unable to protect themselves, and the president, fearing that intervention would hurt his party, refused. Ames, seeing defeat as inevitable, resigned and left the state. During the campaign violence, some 800 armed whites took over Yazoo County and chased out the Republican organization headed by white ‘‘carpetbagger’’ Albert Morgan. In 1872, black Republican voters in Yazoo County had given Grant 2,433 votes; in the 1876 election, Republican candidate Rutherford Hayes received two votes. Mississippi had shown the way to restore home rule and white supremacy.39 The presidential election in 1876 touched off the final sectional political conflict of the Civil War era and confirmed the victory of states’ rights in the South in the realm of racial policy. The Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, won the popular vote, but, because of 19 disputed electoral votes in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana (plus one from Oregon on a technical issue),

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Tilden remained one shy of a majority in the electoral college. Democrats claimed a majority of the votes in all three states, but Republican election officials in each, charging that the results had been produced only by fraud and intimidation, awarded their electoral votes to Hayes. Congress appointed a special commission to resolve the dispute, and this commission decided, on a series of 8 to 7 partisan votes, to give all the electoral votes to Hayes, thus making him President. Southern Democrats, in return for supporting the commission’s decision, exacted concessions from Hayes, the most important of which was a pledge not to interfere in southern elections. Once in office, Hayes ordered federal troops in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana to their barracks, and the Democrats in all three claimed victory in the state elections. In both South Carolina and Louisiana, Democrats had won with home-grown versions of the Mississippi Plan, selectively using economic coercion, intimidation, and violence to depress the Republican vote.40 White southerners had, in the words of historian Kenneth Stampp, demonstrated ‘‘what a people can do against overwhelming odds when their morale is high, when they believe in their cause, and when they are convinced that defeat means catastrophe.’’41 They had achieved a degree of consensus on race that they had never achieved on secession or independence. But they had prevailed not only because of southern white consensus, but also because of northern white acquiescence. Northerners had been willing to spend billions of dollars and to die by the hundreds of thousands to prevent the destruction of the Union and, as part of that effort, to destroy slavery; they were unwilling to spend millions, or to die by the hundreds, to protect the civil and political rights of the freed slaves. To do so would probably have required the federal government to occupy the South militarily and to prevent majority rule in all the southern states with a white majority for a generation. White northerners, too, believed that each state must govern itself in most respects without national interference, and most white northerners also thought that white men must rule. The Supreme Court endorsed both views in decisions of 1876 and 1883. The first, U.S. vs. Cruikshank, resulted from an appeal by three men who had been convicted for violating black civil rights in the infamous massacre in Colfax, Louisiana. The court threw out their convictions on the grounds that the Fourteenth Amendment

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prevented only states, not private individuals, from ‘‘depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law’’; if a private army killed people because they were black and politically active, the federal government could do nothing about it. In 1883, the Court ruled unconstitutional the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875, the final attempt of Congress to enforce equal treatment of African Americans in hotels, railroads, and other places of public accommodations. The grounds were similar: the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to states; it did nothing to prevent individuals from discriminating against blacks. White southerners had not been able to win national independence, nor to save slavery, but they had preserved white supremacy, and, for that purpose, the remaining rights of the states to govern their own affairs had been sufficient.

The Construction of Southern History The Democratic ‘‘Redeemers’’ of the South, as they called themselves, soon acted to insure that white supremacy would be permanent. In several states, black leaders were driven from office or jailed on trumped-up charges, and the new regimes ignored massive fraud that ensured Democratic victory in black-majority districts. Redeemers repudiated many of the debts run up by the Republicans to support railroad construction and they slashed taxes, thus damaging the fledgling public school systems. They changed lien laws to benefit landlords over renters, and their judges defined sharecroppers as mere laborers who had no independent rights to the crop at all. But the Redeemers could not, or would not, eliminate all of the gains that emancipation and Reconstruction had brought to southern African Americans. Blacks continued to vote in large numbers and to serve in state and local offices in small numbers. Although financing for public schools was cut, the schools themselves remained. Black colleges survived to educate a rising generation of black men and women. Black churches remained under the full control of black congregations and became the emotional and institutional centers of many black communities. Black families were threatened by poverty, but not by sale of husbands, wives, or children. And, while later historians have sometimes described

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sharecropping as little more than an updated version of slavery, it was not. Southern blacks were poor and discriminated against in the courts, but they had gained control of important aspects of their lives and they had opportunities that, if they were not equal to whites’, were far better than those of slaves. In 1879, black incomes in the rural South had risen by about 40 percent over those of slaves (measured in the value of food and other material goods) in 1859.42 A way had been opened, if a hard and narrow way, for blacks to climb into the middle class, and a generation after the end of Reconstruction, a quarter of all black farmers owned their land. Southern whites, meanwhile, suffered a drastic decline in their national power and in their material well being; the average incomes of whites in the cotton regions in 1879 had fallen by more than a third since 1859. Most planters held on to their land, but some fell into genuine poverty, and many older men and women never reconciled themselves to the challenges of the new society. It was whites, not blacks, who looked back with nostalgia on the days of slavery. That nostalgia helped to shape their understanding—or misunderstanding—of their own history. If, in 1815, a historian of ‘‘the South’’ would have wondered what the subject of such a history might be, a historian writing in 1865 would have no doubts. The rise of a southern slave society, its strike for independence, and its defeat in war must be the heart of the story. By 1875, the historian would have added chapters on the conflicts over race and home rule that followed the war. A black southern historian would have written this as a story of the emergence of freedom from slavery and a battle for the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, first won, then partly lost. A few whites did accept such views, but the history of the South that came to prevail in white southern textbooks, public rituals, and political discourse took a very different direction; it was a story of white liberty, not black liberty. Slavery itself could not be denied, but the South, they claimed, had fought not for slavery, but for self-government. In 1861, Alexander H. Stephens, the new vice president of the Confederacy, had proclaimed that the ‘‘foundations’’ of the new nation had been laid on the ‘‘great truth’’ that slavery was the ‘‘natural and normal condition’’ of Africans, but after the war, in his Constitutional View of the Late War between the States, Stephens claimed that slavery was a mere ‘‘incident’’ leading to secession, and that the real

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cause had been the conflict between the rights of the states and the rights of the central government; the ‘‘Federative system of government’’ was ‘‘of infinitely more importance to the southern states than slavery, so-called.’’ By 1900, Stephens’s interpretation had become the orthodox southern white view; textbooks that presented other views were purged from southern schools, and southern college professors who claimed otherwise lost their jobs. Southern towns erected monuments to Confederate soldiers, and, in Colfax, a monument was erected in the local graveyard ‘‘in loving memory’’ of the three white ‘‘heroes’’ who had fallen ‘‘in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy.’’43 And this story could be projected backwards, not just to the antebellum years of political conflict, but to the very origins of English settlement in Jamestown. Thus white southerners came to believe that Virginia had been settled by honorable gentlemen ‘‘cavaliers’’ untainted with Yankee greed, and that the Old South—as it was soon dubbed—had developed in an unbroken line as a distinct civilization, superior in many ways to what had come after, even if it was now, as author Margaret Mitchell would so famously write, ‘‘gone with the wind.’’ Slavery had not meant in any real sense a deprivation of liberty, since racially inferior Africans had been incapable of enjoying true freedom, and since the slave plantation had been, at least at its best, according to a later southern historian, a ‘‘school’’ for ‘‘the civilizing of the Negroes,’’ preparing a benighted race for a future liberty that it might become worthy of.44 This story of the Old South was accepted after a time even by most white northerners. Seeing the Old South as a ‘‘civilization’’ distinct from true ‘‘American’’ civilization helped to obscure, for them, the many ways in which the history of the ‘‘Old South,’’ with its legacy of slavery and white supremacy, belonged to all Americans.

Notes

Notes to Prologue 1. J. William Harris, Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 113.

Notes to Chapter 1 1 James Axtell, The Indians’ New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 23. 2 Alden T. Vaughn, American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 25. 3 Ibid., 33, 29. 4 Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), 80. 5 Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 64. 6 Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 71. 7 Vaughn, American Genesis, 37; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 74. 8 Vaughn, American Genesis, 100, 99. 9 David W. Galenson, ‘‘The Settlement and Growth of the Colonies: Population, Labor, and Economic Development,’’ in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States. Vol. 1: The Colonial Era (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 138.

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10 Ibid., 170–2. 11 Russel R. Menard, ‘‘Economic and Social Development of the South,’’ in Engerman and Gallman, eds., The Colonial Era, 249–96; numbers from 262–4. 12 Lois Green Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh, Robert Cole’s World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 13 Menard, ‘‘Economic and Social Development,’’ 264. 14 Ibid., 269. 15 Ibid., 264. 16 Carr, Menard, and Walsh, Robert Cole’s World, 233. 17 Galenson, ‘‘Settlement and Growth,’’ 155–60. 18 Joel W. Martin, ‘‘Southeastern Indians and the English Trade in Skins and Slaves,’’ in Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds., The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521–1704 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 304–26. 19 Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 20 Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 166. 21 Barbara Carson and Cary Carson, quoted in James Horn, ‘‘Adapting to a New World: A Comparative Study of Local Society in England and Maryland, 1650–1700,’’ in Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, eds., Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 154. 22 Kevin M. Sweeney, ‘‘High-Style Vernacular,’’ in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994) . 23 Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 45–6; 53–4. 24 Carr, Menard, and Walsh, Robert Cole’s World, 11. 25 Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 259. 26 T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes, ‘‘Myne Owne Ground’’: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 10. 27 Willie Lee Rose, ed., A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 20–1. 28 Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 7. 29 David Eltis, ‘‘Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation,’’ American Historical Review, 98 (1993), 1399–1423.

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30 Patrick Wolfe, ‘‘Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,’’ American Historical Review, 106 (2001), 877. 31 Phillip D. Morgan: Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 59. 32 Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 69. 33 Lorena Seebach Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 33. 34 Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 239. 35 Brown, Good Wives, 197, 198; Rose, ed., Documentary History, 21. 36 Rose, ed., Documentary History, 26. 37 Jerald T. Milanich, ‘‘Franciscan Missions and Native Peoples in Spanish Florida,’’ in Hudson and Tesser, eds., Forgotten Centuries, 293. 38 Peter H. Wood, ‘‘The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 185–1790,’’ in Peter H. Wood, Gregory A Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley, eds., Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 38, 52–5; Robert M. Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1983), 80–1. 39 Gwendolyn Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 3. 40 Ibid., 10. 41 M. Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina: A Political History, 1663–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 128. 42 Wood, ‘‘Changing Population.’’ 43 Jack P. Greene, The Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 81. 44 Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 35. 45 Ibid., 39–40. 46 Menard, ‘‘Economic and Social Development,’’ 275. 47 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 38. 48 Wood, ‘‘Changing Population,’’ 38.

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Notes to Chapter 2 1 Peter Wood, ‘‘The Changing Population of the Colonial South,’’ in Peter Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley, eds., Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 38–9. In 1707 Scotland was joined formally to England and ‘‘Englishmen’’ became also ‘‘Britons.’’ 2 Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 74. 3 Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina: A Political History, 1663– 1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 238; Jack P. Greene, ‘‘Foundations of Political Power in the Virginia House of Burgesses, 1720–76,’’ in Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994). 4 Cynthia Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700–1835 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 27, 29. 5 Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 64. 6 Kenneth Coleman, Gen. Ed., The History of Georgia (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2nd edn., 1991), 36. 7 Richard R. Beeman, Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg Country, Virginia, 1746–1832 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 23, 100–1. 8 Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 59. 9 Michael Tadman, ‘‘The Demographic Cost of Sugar,’’ American Historical Review, 105 (December 2000), 1534–75. 10 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 61. 11 Ibid., 250. 12 Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 96. 13 Anthony S. Parent, Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 159–60. 14 Willie Lee Rose, ed., A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 102. 15 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 398.

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16 Lorena Seebach Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 83. 17 Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, ‘‘Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake,’’ in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 68, 110; T.H. Breen, ‘‘ ‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,’’ in ibid., 459; Kierner, Beyond the Household, 46. 18 Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, 14; Carr and Walsh, ‘‘Changing Lifestyles,’’ 456; T.H. Breen, ‘‘An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776,’’ Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 467–99. 19 Jack P. Greene, ‘‘The Growth of Stability: An Interpretation of Political Development in the Anglo-American Colonies, 1660–1760,’’ in Greene, Negotiated Authorities, 140; Ronald Hoffman, Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500–1782 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 162. 20 Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 178, 169–71, 164. 21 Ibid., 184. 22 Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina 339, 342. 23 John Richard Alden, The South in the Revolution, 1763–1789 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 70. 24 Beeman, Evolution of the Southern Backcountry, 100; 106. 25 Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 54, 62. 26 Hugh T. Lefler and William S. Powell, Colonial North Carolina: A History (New York: Scribner, 1973), 231, 233. 27 Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 208, 217. 28 Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 51. 29 Ibid., 156; Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 228, 238–41; Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 73. 30 Alden, South in the Revolution, 183–98, quote 197.

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31 Ibid., 259. 32 Edward J. Cashin, ‘‘ ‘But Brothers, It Is Our Land We Are Talking About’: Winners and Losers in the Georgia Backcountry,’’ in Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert, eds., An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), 245. 33 Ibid., 248. 34 Gary B. Nash quoted in Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 189. 35 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 56, 68–9, 60–4, passim; Philip D. Morgan, ‘‘Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760– 1810,’’ in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 111, 139. 36 Clyde R. Ferguson, ‘‘Carolina and Georgia Patriot and Loyalist Militia in Action 1778–1783,’’ in Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E. Tise, The Southern Experience in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 180; Roger Ekirch, ‘‘Whig Authority and Public Order in Backcountry North Carolina, 1776– 1783,’’ in Hoffman, Tate, and Albert, eds., Uncivil War, 107-108; Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and the American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 326; Robert M. Weir, ‘‘ ‘The Violent Spirit,’ The Reestablishment of Order, and the Continuity of Leadership in Post-Revolutionary South Carolina,’’ in Hoffman, Tate, and Albert, eds., Uncivil War, 77. 37 Kierner, Beyond the Household 78–9, 81, 95. 38 Kierner, Beyond the Household 117; Joyce Appleby, ‘‘Introduction: Jefferson and His Complex Legacy,’’ in Peter S. Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 10. 39 Norton, Liberty’s Daughters 229; 28. 40 Alan Gallay, The Formation of a Planter Elite: Jonathon Bryan and the Southern Colonial Frontier (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 38; Margaret Washington Creel, ‘‘A Peculiar People’’: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 87; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 203–4. 41 Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 148–51; Andrew Levy, ‘‘The AntiJefferson: Why Robert Carter III Freed His Slaves (And Why We Couldn’t Care Less), The American Scholar, 70 (2001), 15–35. 42 McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia, 150.

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43 44 45 46

Rose, ed., Documentary History, 67. Beeman, Evolution of the Southern Backcountry, 166–67. Alden, South in the Revolution, 219. Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 24. 47 Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 387–8. 48 Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), vii; Esmond Wright, Fabric of Freedom 1763–1800 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 140.

Notes to Chapter 3 1 Donald E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 30. 2 Leonard L. Richards The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 3. 3 Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 36 (quote slightly altered). 4 Ibid., 34; Peter Wallenstein, ‘‘Flawed Keepers of the Flame: The Interpreters of George Mason,’’ The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 102 (1994), 244. 5 Allan Kullikoff, ‘‘Uprooted Peoples: Black Migrants in the Age of the American Revolution, 1790–1820,’’ in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 150 (note). 6 Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality 1780–1845 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 300. 7 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 207, 209; Margaret Washington Creel, ‘‘A Peculiar People’’: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 170–1. 8 Willie Lee Rose, A Documentary History of Slavery in North America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 113–14; Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, 1736–1801 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), chap 5. 9 Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 172, 184–8;

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Notes to pp. 74–88 Phillip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 67–8. Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670–1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 102. James H. Broussard, The Southern Federalists, 1800–1816 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978). Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 108. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 18, 94–5. Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Statehood (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 29, 48, 51; Joyce Appleby, ‘‘Introduction: Jefferson and His Complex Legacy,’’ in Peter S. Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 10. Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 153. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 10, 279. Gilbert C. Din, Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in Louisiana, 1763–1803 (College Station, Tex.: Texas A & M University Press, 1999), 154–76; Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 212-35, 343–74. The story of Coincoin is summarized from Gary B. Mills, The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977). Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 15–16, 141–2. Ibid., 406–7. ‘‘War of 1812,’’ Encyclopedia of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 1305. Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Viking, 2001), 105. Don E. Fehrenbacher, Constitutions and Constitutionalism in the Slaveholding South (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 43. Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 136.

Notes to pp. 88–98

257

25 George Dangerfield, The Awakening of American Nationalism, 1815– 1828 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 18. 26 Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 27 Dangerfield, Awakening of American Nationalism, 36–72. 28 Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 196. 29 Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 12, 44. 30 David Ramsay, History of South Carolina: from Its First Settlement in 1670 to the Year 1808 (Charleston, S.C., 1809; reprint from an 1858 edition: Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Co., 1959–60), 12. 31 Remini, Henry Clay, 178; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 144–61. 32 Charles S. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 1819– 1848 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948), 123, 122; Freehling, Road to Disunion, 151. 33 Norman K. Risjord, The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the Age of Jefferson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 215, 216; Freehling, Road to Disunion, 150. 34 Jefferson to John Holmes, 22 April, 1820, in Merrill Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 568. 35 Risjord, Old Republicans, 198. 36 Richmond Enquirer, 23 December, 1819.

Notes to Chapter 4 1 J. E. Cairnes, in The Slave Power (1861), quoted in Frank L. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949), 4. 2 David R. Goldfield, Urban Growth in the Age of Sectionalism: Virginia, 1847–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 61–2. 3 Michele Gillespie, Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 1789–1860 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Ira Berlin and Herbert G. Gutman, ‘‘Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves: Urban Workingmen in the Antebellum South,’’ American Historical Review, 88 (1982), 1175–200. 4 Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 82.

258

Notes to pp. 98–102

5 Robert C. Kenzer, Kinship and Neighborhood in a Southern Community: Orange County, North Carolina, 1849–1881 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 2. 6 Victoria E. Bynum, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 7 Morton Rothstein, ‘‘The Antebellum South as a Dual Economy: A Tentative Hypothesis,’’ Agricultural History 41 (1967), 373–82; Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 55–74; J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta’s Hinterlands (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 23–7; Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Wilma A. Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 50; Bradley G. Bond, ‘‘Herders, Farmers, and Markets on the Inner Frontier: The Mississippi Piney Woods, 1850–1860,’’ in Samuel C. Hyde, Jr., Plain Folk of the South Revisited (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 90. 8 Paul D. Escott, ed., North Carolina Yeoman: The Diary of Basil Armstrong Thomasson, 1853–1862 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Bond, ‘‘Herders, Farmers,’’ 90. 9 Carl R. Osthaus, ‘‘The Work Ethic of the Plain Folk: Labor and Religion in the Old South,’’ Journal of Southern History, 70 (2004), 755, 764; Sally G. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990). 10 James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 248. 11 J. William Harris, ‘‘The Organization of Work on a Yeoman Slaveholder’s Farm,’’ Agricultural History 64 (1990), 39–52; Philip N. Racine, ed., Piedmont Farmer: The Journals of David Golightly Harris, 1855–1870 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 5. 12 Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 82. 13 Berlin and Gutman, ‘‘Natives and Immigrants’’; William G. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824–1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 35; Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry; Bolton, Poor Whites; Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860–1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), chap. 1; Bynum, The Free State of Jones.

Notes to pp. 102–106

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14 Frederick A. Bode and Donald E. Ginter, Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1986). 15 Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), 164; Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Neither Lady Nor Slave: Working Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 16 Charles C. Bolton and Scott Culclasure, eds., The Confessions of Edward Isham: A Poor White Life of the Old South (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1998); Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 17 Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 220, 221, 237; Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 62. 18 Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South, 21–2; Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg, 100, 102; Luther Porter Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 1830–1860 (Washington: American Historical Association,1942; rep. New York: Atheneum, 1969), 109–10, 138; Berlin and Gutman, ‘‘Natives and Immigrants.’’ 19 Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), 147, 212–15; David Rankin, ‘‘The Impact of the Civil War on the Free Colored Population of New Orleans,’’ Perspectives in American History 11, (1977–8), 379–416. 20 Wright, Political Economy of the Cotton South, 31. 21 William Kauffman Scarborough, Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). 22 William J. Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 10–14, 72; Scarborough, Masters of the Big House, 470. 23 Shearer Davis Bowman, Masters & Lords: Mid-19th Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 172–3; Eugene D. Genovese, ‘‘ ‘Our Family, White and Black’: Family and Household in the Southern Slaveholders’ World View,’’ in Carol Bleser, ed., In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 70; Lucia C. Stanton, ‘‘ ‘Those Who Labor for My Happiness’: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,’’ in Peter Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 148; Robert

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36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

Notes to pp. 106–115 Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 265. Myers, ed., Children of Pride, 255. Genovese, ‘‘ ‘Our Family, White and Black’,’’ 77. Carol Bleser, ed., Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 188; Willie Lee Rose, ed., Documentary History of Slavery in North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 348. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 64; Lawrence McDonnell, ‘‘Work, Culture, and Society in the Slave South, 1790–1861,’’ in Ted Ownby, ed., Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 142. Rose, ed., Documentary History, 345. Myers, ed., The Children of Pride, 246. Rose, ed., Documentary History, 297, 347; Scarborough, Masters of the Big House, 206. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 74–80. Rose, ed., Documentary History, 297–9. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 294. Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 137, 138 (quoting James W. McGettigan). Jane Turner Censer, North Carolina Planters and Their Children, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 140–1; Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 101. Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 137. Ibid., 214, 215. Myers, ed., Children of Pride, 309. Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 216. Myers, ed., Children of Pride, 1247, 1287, 1313. Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry, 61; Brenda Stevenson, ‘‘Distress and Discord in Virginia Slave Families, 1830–1860,’’ in Bleser, ed., In Joy and in Sorrow, 123. Michael Chevalier, Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States (1839, rep. New York: A.M. Kelley, 1966), 114–15. Ibid., 400; Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

Notes to pp. 115–124

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44 Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 103; Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion, chap. 1; Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Richard Graham, ‘‘Slavery and Economic Development: Brazil and the United States South in the Nineteenth Century,’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23 (1981), 620–55. 45 Berlin and Gutman, ‘‘Natives and Immigrants;’’ Midori Tagaki, ‘‘Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction’’: Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782–1865 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 75,76; Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South, Table 3.1 (website); Charles B. Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994). 46 Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), chaps. 6–7. 47 Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 85–9. 48 Scarborough, Masters of the Big House, 219, 409. 49 Ibid., 412. 50 Tagaki, ‘‘Rearing Wolves,’’ 104–5; Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, 1759–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), chap. 8. 51 Virginia Ingraham Burr, ed., The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848–1889 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 129, 131. 52 Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: AfroAmerican Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 27. 53 Wilma A. Dunaway, The African American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 114. 54 Cooper, Jefferson Davis 162–3. 55 Burr, ed., Secret Eye, 122. 56 Jane Turner Censer, ‘‘ ‘Smiling Through Her Tears’: Ante Bellum Southern Women and Divorce,’’ American Journal of Legal History, 25 (1981), 24–47; Suzanne Lebsock, ‘‘Radical Reconstruction and the Property Rights of Married Women,’’ Journal of Southern History, 43 (1977), 195–216. 57 Censer, North Carolina Planters, 68. 58 Jonathon Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class 1800–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 104, 105–6. 59 Scarborough, Masters of the Big House, 166.

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Notes to pp. 125–132

60 Ibid., 27; Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 223; Burr, ed., Secret Eye, 168. 61 Scarborough, Masters of the Big House, 215. 62 Marli F. Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830–1880 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 75. 63 Burr, ed., Secret Eye, 168–9; Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, A Slave (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1991). 64 Noreece T. Jones, Jr., Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 38. 65 Rose, ed., Documentary History, 352. 66 Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 178, summarizing analysis in Steven C. Crawford, ‘‘Quantified Memory: A Study of the WPA and Fisk University Slave Narrative Collections,’’ (Ph. D. Diss., University of Chicago, 1980). 67 Dew, Bond of Iron, 179–80. 68 Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 45–78. 69 Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 160; Malone, Sweet Chariot, 267–8; Stevenson, ‘‘Distress and Discord.’’ 70 C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 189–227; Michael Wayne, Death of an Overseer: Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 284. 71 Ira Berlin, ed., Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom (New York: New Press, 1998), 19. 72 Charles S. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 1819– 1848 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948), 223. 73 Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents (New York, 1996), 57–8. 74 Bowman, Masters & Lords, 180–1. 75 John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 279–89. 76 Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethic and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Douglas

Notes to pp. 132–143

77

78

79

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81 82 83 84 85 86

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88 89

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Wilson, Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 265–83; Wells, Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 82–3. Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 125, 127, 238. Joanne Freeman, ‘‘Aristocratic Murder and Democratic Fury: Honor and Violence in Early National New England,’’ unpublished paper quoted in J. William Harris, ‘‘Honor, Grace, and War (But Not Slavery?) in Southern Culture,’’ Reviews in American History, 30 (2002), 5. Alison Goodyear Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831–1832 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). Ralph A. Wooster, The People in Power: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Lower South, 1850–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), 41, 103; Wooster, Politicians, Planters, and Plain Folk: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Upper South, 1850–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975), 40, 41, 115, 116; John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 84, 125; Randolph B. Campbell and Richard G. Lowe, Wealth and Power in Antebellum Texas (College Station, Tex.: Texas A & M University Press, 1977), 114. Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 274. Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry, 37. Ibid., 65. Scarborough, Masters of the Big House, 61; Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 64. Bowman, Masters & Lords, 172–3 James L. Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 5; John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 67; James David Miller, South by Southwest: Planter Emigration and Identity in the Slave South (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002), 138. Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 1151. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion, 193. E.N. Elliott, ed., Cotton is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments (1860; reprint New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), ix, iii.

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Notes to pp. 144–155

Notes to Chapter 5 1 Charles S. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism 1819– 1848 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948), 277–8. 2 William G. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824–1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 65–70, 276–80, quotes 65, 66, 69; Alison Goodyear Freehling, Drift toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831–1832 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 76. 3 Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay, Stateman for the Union (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 464; Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 86. 4 William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 130. 5 Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 173–4, 257; Norman K. Risjord, The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the Age of Jefferson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 198, 217, 218. 6 Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 265. 7 Freehling, Drift toward Dissolution, 217. 8 Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 115. 9 Elizabeth R. Varon We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 77; John M. Sacher, A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 123. 10 Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion. 11 Marc W. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina 1836–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 54. 12 Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815– 1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 294. 13 Clement Eaton, The Freedom of Thought Struggle in the Old South (1940; rev. and enlarged ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 199. 14 Sydnor, Development of Southern Sectionalism, 233, 234. 15 Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, 43. 16 William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery 1828– 1856 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978). 17 Margaret L Coit, ed., John C. Calhoun (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 47.

Notes to pp. 156–179

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18 Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 105; Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 285. 19 William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Volume I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 409. 20 Holt, Rise and Fall, 220–1. 21 Erik H. Walther, The Fire-Eaters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 57–8. 22 Holt, Rise and Fall, 268. 23 Coit, ed., John C. Calhoun, 52–3. 24 Holt, Rise and Fall, 463. 25 Ibid., 459, 467. 26 David Potter, The Impending Crisis 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 112–14. 27 Walther, The Fire-Eaters, 125. 28 Remini, Henry Clay, 737. 29 Potter, Impending Crisis, 128. 30 W. Darrell Overdyke, The Know-Nothing Party in the South (1950; rep. Gloucester, Mass. : Peter Smith, 1968), 67. 31 Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 153. 32 Potter, Impending Crisis, 210. 33 Walther, The Fire-Eaters, 257. 34 John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 134, 136, 137. 35 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 209; Walther, The FireEaters, 259. 36 Ibid., 151. 37 Roy Franklin Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York: MacMillan, 1948), 299. 38 Ibid., 363. 39 William W. Freehling and Craig M. Simpson, eds., Secession Debated: Georgia’s Showdown in 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 68; James Marten, Texas Divided: Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State 1856–1874 (Lexington, Ky. University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 41. 40 Freehling and Simpson, eds., Secession Debated, 117–18, 152, 154, 132. 41 Kruman, Parties and Politics, 210; Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989),140, 149–52.

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Notes to pp. 179–190

42 Ibid., 193 43 Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 70, 35, 98. 44 James L. Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 7. 45 Emory Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 188. 46 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 286–7. 47 Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 8. 48 Dew, Apostles of Disunion, 90, 67. 49 Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 152. 50 Dew, Apostles of Disunion, 67. 51 J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta’s Hinterlands (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 123. 52 Richard E. Beringer, et. al., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 87–8; Nichols, Disruption of American Democracy, 413–14.

Notes to Chapter 6 1 James M. McPherson, Ordeal of the Union: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 266–7. 2 Winthrop D. Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 18. 3 Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 116. 4 Jordan, Tumult and Silence, 11–16 (quote 11); Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (New York, 1901; reprint New York: Bantam Books, 1975), 5, 6; Ira Berlin et. al., eds, Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York: New Press, 1992), 64. 5 Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 70. 6 Berlin, et. al., Free At Last, 57. 7 Ibid., 61–6.

Notes to pp. 191–202

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8 J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta’s Hinterlands (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 141. 9 Richard M. McMurry, Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 21. 10 William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 61, 63. 11 William J. Cooper, Jr., Jefferson Davis: American (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 404. 12 Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 271. 13 Ibid., 286. 14 Steven E. Woodworth, Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 206. 15 Gallagher, The Confederate War, 115. 16 David Donald, ed., Why the North Won the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,1960), 18. 17 Woodworth, Jefferson Davis and His Generals, 315. 18 Donald, ed., Why the North Won, 109. 19 William Howard Russell, My Diary, North and South, ed. by Eugene H. Berwanger (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 92. 20 ‘‘Memminger, Christopher Gustavus,’’ in David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 1315. 21 James M. McPherson, What They Fought For, 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 18. 22 James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 136. 23 Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 19. 24 McPherson, What They Fought For, 15. 25 McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 102. 26 Victoria E. Bynum, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Wayne K. Durrill. War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 27 Philip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981); Jonathan D. Sarris, ‘‘An execution in Lumpkin County: localized loyalties in north Georgia’s

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49

50 51

Notes to pp. 202–213 Civil War,’’ in Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson, eds., The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977). Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry, 150. David Williams, Teresa Crisp Williams, and David Carlson, Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War: Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 2002), 82–8. Stanley Lebergott, ‘‘Through the Blockade: The Profitability and Extent of Cotton Smuggling, 1861-1865,’’ Journal of Economic History, 41 (1981), 883. Clarence Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Confederate Georgia (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 128. James L. Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 79. Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry, 160. Roark, Masters Without Slaves, 79. Ibid., 82. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom, 224, 231. Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry, 176. Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Free Press, 1990), 122. C. Peter Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 102–5. Berlin et. al., eds., Free At Last, 440. Ibid., 477. Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen, 112ff. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 152–3. George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 251. Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 91. Ibid., chap. 2 Daniel E. Sutherland, ‘‘Guerrilla Warfare, Democracy, and the Fate of the Confederacy,’’ Journal of Southern History, 68, (2002), 289. Russell F. Weigley, A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861–1865 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 171. Victor B. Howard, Black Liberation in Kentucky: Emancipation and Freedom, 1862–1884 (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 12–28. Weigley, A Great Civil War, 357. Gallagher, The Confederate War, 75,76.

Notes to pp. 213–220

269

52 Virginia Ingraham Burr, ed., The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848–1889 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 184, 185, 206, 209. 53 Mark A. Weitz, A Higher Duty: Desertion among Georgia Troops during the Civil War (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 93; Williams, Williams, and Carlson, Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War 76, 77–8, 160–61. 54 Peter Wallenstein, From Slave South to New South: Public Policy in Nineteenth-Century Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 111–114; William Blair, Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 55 Weitz, A Higher Duty, 118. 56 Thomas Lawrence Connelly, Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 382, 384–5; Williams, Williams, and Carlson, Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War, 160. 57 Cooper, Jr., Jefferson Davis, 494. 58 Anne J. Bailey, War and Ruin: William T. Sherman and the Savannah Campaign (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2003), 25. 59 Ibid., 41–2; 32–3. 60 Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 344. 61 Weigley, A Great Civil War, 371, 384. 62 David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 469; Gallagher, Confederate War, 106, 77. 63 Cooper, Jefferson Davis, 501, 516. 64 Robert F. Durden, The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972) 98, 232; Cooper, Jefferson Davis, 517. 65 Durden, The Gray and the Black, 206. 66 Royster, The Destructive War, 347. 67 Chandra Manning, ‘‘Revolution Rejected: The Confederate Debate over Black Enlistment,’’ unpublished paper delivered to the Organization of American Historians, March 2004. 68 Cooper, Jr., Jefferson Davis, 404. 69 Gallagher, Confederate War, 29. 70 Weigley, A Great Civil War, 455. 71 Richard E. Beringer, et. al., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 52. 72 Noel C. Fisher, ‘‘Definitions of victory: east Tennessee Unionists in the Civil War and reconstruction,’’ in Daniel E. Sutherland, Guerrillas,

270

73 74 75 76 77 78

Notes to pp. 220–229 Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate home front (Fayetteville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), 123. Roy Franklin Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York: MacMillan, 1948), 399. Durden, The Gray and the Black, 233–5. Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism, 81. Burr, ed., The Secret Eye, 269. Cooper, Jefferson Davis, 524. Rable, The Confederate Republic, 54, 241; Roark, Masters Without Slaves 27.

Notes to Chapter 7 1 Ted Tunnel, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 9–10. 2 Dates in Ira Berlin, et. al. eds., Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1992); Clayton E. Jewett and John O. Allen, eds., Slavery in the South: A State-by-State History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004). 3 Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 23. 4 Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 77. 5 John C. Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes 1862–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 35–6, 40–1. 6 Berlin, et. al., eds, Free at Last, 312, 314. 7 Ibid., 497–99. 8 Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 79. 9 Virginia Burr, ed., The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas 1848–1889 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 276–7, 259. 10 Philip N. Racine, ed., Piedmont Farmer: The Journals of David Golightly Harris, 1855–1870 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 378, 389. 11 Burr, ed., Secret Eye, 260. 12 Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Transformed, 1860–1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 107. 13 Eric McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1960), 137.

Notes to pp. 229–240

271

14 Walter L. Fleming, ed., Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational and Industrial, 1865 to 1906 (Cleveland, 1906–07; rep. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), Vol. I, 178. 15 McKitrick, Andrew Johnson, 167. 16 Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction 1865–1877 (New York: Vintage,1965), 80; Walter L. Fleming, ed., Documentary History, I, 279. 17 Fleming, Documentary History, I, 197–8. 18 Ibid., I, 236. 19 Data on black officeholders, unless otherwise noted, is from Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). 20 Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 144. 21 Ibid., 140. 22 Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 152. 23 C. Mildred Thompson, Reconstruction in Georgia: Economic, Social, Political 1865–1872 (New York, 1915; rep. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith), 204. 24 Tunnel, Crucible of Reconstruction, 134; Foner, Short History, 148. 25 Peter Wallenstein, From Slave South to New South: Public Policy in Nineteenth-Century Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 183–95; J. Mills Thornton, ‘‘Fiscal Policy and the Failure of Radical Reconstruction in the Lower South,’’ in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 26 Thompson, Reconstruction in Georgia, 211–16. 27 Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 171. 28 Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 154–7. 29 J. William Harris, Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 71. 30 Racine, ed., Piedmont Farmer, 397. 31 Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 251, 207. 32 Nancy Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of the Household in the Delta, 1861–1875 (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 2003), 106–8.

272

Notes to pp. 241–248

33 Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 121–4. 34 Harris, Deep Souths, 11–26. 35 Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields, 58–78. 36 J. William Harris, ‘‘Plantations and Power: Emancipation on the David Barrow Plantation,’’ in Robert McMath and O. Vernon Burton, eds., Towards a New South? Studies in Post-Civil War Communities (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 246–64. 37 Lacy K. Ford, ‘‘Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1865–1900,’’ Journal of American History, 71 (1984), 294–318. 38 Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 170–2, 189–94. 39 Harris, Deep Souths, 71; William C. Harris, Day of the Carpetbagger: Republican Reconstruction in Mississippi (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 634–49. 40 Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 173. 41 Stampp quoted in ibid., 217. 42 Roger L Ransom, Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the American Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 228. 43 Richard Rubin, ‘‘The Colfax Riot,’’ Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2003, 155, 158. 44 Ulrich B. Phillips, Life & Labor in the Old South (Boston, 1929; rep. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 198, 199.

Bibliographical Note

To list all the books and articles I have drawn on for this study would require more space than is available here. Much of the most important scholarship is cited in the endnotes, but, since the notes have been used mainly to indicate the sources of quotations and other specific information, they omit many items. The purpose of this brief note is to indicate some of the books, not mentioned in the notes, that have shaped my interpretations of the history of the Old South and to point readers to historiographical and general works that will lead them to more specialized studies. John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, eds., Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), is comprehensive for older scholarship; John Boles, ed., A Companion to the American South (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), has essays based on more recent work. Peter J. Parish, Slavery: History and Historians (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), is an outstanding analysis of the subject to its date of publication. The Encyclopedia of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), is an essential resource. John Boles, The South Through Time: A History of an American Region (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1995), and William J. Cooper, Jr. and Thomas E. Terrill, The American South: A History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), are expert surveys. Interpretive surveys of particular subjects include John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Donald Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Sally G. McMillen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South

274

Bibliographical Note

(Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1992); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Laura F. Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation: 1861– 1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); William C. Davis, Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America (New York: Free Press, 2002); John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Michael Perman, Emancipation and Reconstruction, 1862–1879 (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1987). For the colonial, revolutionary, and early national eras, I have learned much from James R. Perry, The Formation of Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1615–1655 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1990); Darrett Rutman and Anita Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650–1750 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989); Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in EighteenthCentury Virginia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); T.H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); Silvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); Drew Randall McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Jan Lewis, Pursuits of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Rachel N. Klein Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979). Essential works on antebellum slavery include Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: Alfred A.

Bibliographical Note

275

Knopf, 1956); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Willie Lee Rose, Slavery and Freedom, ed. by William W. Freehling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976); Deborah Grey White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985); Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The ‘‘Invisible Institution’’ in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). On antebellum southern white culture and politics, see Ann Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (2nd edn., Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Joan E. Cashin, A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); John Majewski, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lawrence Shore, Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832–1885 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); J. Mills Thornton, III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); and Manisha Sinha, The Counter-Revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

276

Bibliographical Note

Local studies have vastly increased our knowledge of the nineteenthcentury South; among the best are Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Lacy K. Ford, The Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Joseph Reidy, Slavery and Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Daniel S. Dupre, Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama, 1800–1840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997); Michael Wayne, The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); and Don Harrison Doyle, Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Works on the Civil War and Reconstruction years include Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979); Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianopolis,1964; rep. New York: Oxford University Press); Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Noralee Frankel, Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Lee Ann Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of Southern White Womanhood, 1865–1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of SelfReconstruction in the South, 1865–1867 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Thomas C. Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1977); Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870 (New

Bibliographical Note

277

York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Sharon Ann Holt, Making Freedom Pay: North Carolina Freedpeople Working for Themselves, 1865– 1900 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986); and Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976). Finally, for explorations of the shaping of memories of the war, see Foster M. Gaines, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press,1980); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Index

abolition of slavery 62, 139–40; Grimke´ sisters 124, 135; legislation 70; propaganda 154–5; Quakers 73; as threat 161; see also antislavery movement Adams, Hannah 91 Adams, John 76, 77, 92 Adams, John Quincy 90, 145 Adkins, Joseph 238 African Americans x; anti-Confederates 188–91; citizenship 227; culture 128; education 236, 246–7; family 246–7; free 73, 103–5; gender roles 240–1; income 247; land 247; marriages 232, 240; massacres 244; officeholding 237; political representation 230–1, 233; politics 235–6; religion 119–20, 246; Revolutionary War 58; sexual behavior 240; as soldiers 205, 206–7, 217–18; status 230; violence against 232; voting rights 224, 232; as workers 226,

240; working conditions 227; see also slaves Alabama 79, 84, 90, 144, 235 Alabama Platform 159–60 Alamance, Battle of 54 Albemarle Sound 15, 16, 33 Alcorn, James 235 Alexander, Edward Porter 219 American Colonization Society 156 American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission 227–8 American Party; see Know-Nothings American Revolution 62, 63, 68, 69, 142, 219 American Revolutionary War 39, 56–9, 69, 78 Ames, Adelbert 244 Anaconda Plan 186 Anglicans 21, 54, 60 Annapolis 40 anti-Confederates 188–91 anti-Federalists 71 Antietam, Battle of 191, 193 Antimasons 151 antisecessionists 178–9, 202

Index antislavery movement 124–6, 134–8, 171, 207, 225; see also abolition of slavery antislavery writings 97, 114 Appalachians 55, 78 Arkansas 90, 144, 181, 238 Atlanta 215–16, 228 Atlanta battle 212 Augusta 41, 50, 58 Avile´s, Pedro Mene´ndez de 5 Ayllo´n, Luis Va´zquez 4 Bacon, Nathaniel 22–3 Bacon’s Rebellion 22–3, 25–6 Baltimore 40, 91, 103 Baltimore, Lord 12; see also Calvert family Bank of the United States 88 Banks, Nathaniel 205, 206, 210, 211, 226 Baptists 54, 63, 118; slavery 72, 119, 140 Barbados settlers 16 Barrow, David C. 241–2 Beauregard, P.G.T. 180, 185, 191, 196 Bell, John 173, 175 benevolent associations 123 Benjamin, Judah 198 Benning, Henry 176, 182 Berea school 136 Berkeley, William 21, 22–3 Bermuda 7–8 Beverley, Robert 30, 47 Bienville, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de 31 Biloxi Bay 31 Birney, James G. 135 Black Codes 230, 239 Black Reconstruction 235–6 blackness 26, 30 blacks: see African Americans Blount, William 86

279

Boston Tea Party 53 Bowlegs Town 89 Boyd, Samuel 125 Braddock, Edward 51 Bragg, Braxton 190–1, 197, 208 Breckinridge, John C. 174–5 Britain 51, 52, 58, 84 British Empire 49, 55–6 Brooks, Preston 169 Brown, John 114, 169, 171, 172–3 Brown, Joseph E.: class/ society 222; Davis 197; expulsion 237; honor/fear 176; letters to 213; political expediency 235; states’ rights 185, 198, 207 Brown, Thomas 58, 59 Brown Fellowship Society 104 Brownlow, William ‘‘Parson’’ 235 Buchanan, James 169, 170, 173 Buckner, Simon 219 Buena Vista battle 159 Bull Run battle; see Manassas Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands: see Freedmen’s Bureau Burnside, Ambrose 193 Burr, Aaron 83–4, 132 Butler, Andrew 169 Butler, Benjamin 189, 190, 205, 210, 211, 226 Byrd, Lucy Parke 36 Byrd, William I 36 Byrd, William II 36–7 Byrd, William III 55 Cailloux, Andre´ 205 Cairnes, J. E. 97, 103, 114 Cajuns 81, 91 Calhoun, Floride 148 Calhoun, John C.: compromise 163; early career 85–6; Exposition 148;

280

Index

Calhoun, John C.: (cont.) Martineau on 85–6; national greatness 88; nullification 149; proslavery 161; South Carolina politics 154; state sovereignty 148–9; Texas treaty 157; Vice President 146; Wilmot Proviso 161 California 161–2 Calvert family 12–13, 21, 22 Camden, battle of 57 Canada 86 Canary Islanders 91 Caribbean 16–18, 32, 38, 43, 128 Carolina 15–16, 17, 27; see also North Carolina; South Carolina Caroline, Fort 4–5 carpetbaggers x, 235, 237, 243 Carroll, Charles 48–9 Carter, Landon 55 Carter, Matthew 100 Carter, Robert 47, 63–4 Carter, William 100 Cass, Lewis 160, 161 Catawba Indians 34 Catholics 22, 118 cattle raising 14, 16 cavalry units, freelance 209 Champion’s Hill battle 195 Chancellorsville Battle 194 Charles I 12, 15 Charles II 15–16, 21, 50 Charles Town; see Charleston Charleston: 19, 33; abolitionist pamphlet 154; alleged revolt plot 150; British fleet 57; Confederates 180; freetime earnings 44; Methodists 64; mulattoes 104; runaways 29; slaves 44, 55–6 Charleston Mercury 220 Chase, Salmon 164

Chattanooga 208, 211 Cherokees: adopting American culture 147; British troops 51–2; confederation 5; and Europeans 33; Jackson’s treaty 147; power 89; South Carolina 58; trade 34, 49; Trail of Tears 147 Chesapeake Bay 3, 19, 24, 35, 36 Chesapeake system of husbandry 13–15 Chesnut, Mary 128 Chevalier, Michael 114–15 Chickamauga Creek battle 208 Chickasaw Bluffs battle 193 Chickasaws 34, 49, 52, 89, 147 Chinese laborers 239 Choctaws 58; adopting American culture 147; alliance 51; confederacy 31, 33; and French 49; power 52, 89; trade 34–5 Christianity: revival movements 118; slavery 73, 93, 135, 139–40, 142, 167; slaves 119; Virginia 119; see also specific sects Church of England 18, 20; see also Anglicans citizenship 207, 227, 232 civil rights 224 Civil Rights Act 231, 232, 239, 246 Civil War xi, 114, 184–222; see also specific battles; specific military leaders Claims Commission 128 Clausewitz, Karl von 223 Clay, Cassius 135–6 Clay, Henry: American Colonization Society 156; American System 146, 151; Canada 86; candidate for

Index presidency 145–6, 148, 157–8; Compromise of 1850 152–3; duels 85, 131; early career 85; Jackson 149, 151; national greatness 88; Polk 157–8; slave/ nonslave states 92–3; slavery 155–6; Union 165; Whigs 152 Cleburne, Patrick 217 Clinton, Sir Henry 57, 58 Cobb, Howell 164, 217 Cobb, Thomas 92, 139, 141, 175, 176 Cofitachequi 5 Coincoin 82 Coke, Thomas 64 Cold Harbor battle 211 Colfax massacre 244, 245, 248 colonies xii, 5, 91; British xii, 3, 39, 56–7; church 20–1; English xi, 6, 10–11, 30; French xii, 4–5, 31, 32–5, 38, 49, 51–2; Spanish xii, 4, 26, 30–1, 34–5, 38, 45, 81–2; voting 37–8; wealth 43 Columbus, Christopher 3 Comer, Laura 204 commonwealthmen 50, 53 Company of the Indies 32 Compromise of 1850 160–6; see also Missouri Compromise line Conditional Unionists 165 Confederate States of America 177–8, 181, 232 Confederates x, xi; casualties 219; class 200–2; congressional elections 208; Conscription Acts 201, 202; cotton policy 203; currency 216; Democrats/Republicans 243; Federal raids 210–11; finance 198–200; Johnson 229;

281

Kentucky 209; Lee 196; loyalty 221–2; Maryland 209; as nation 192–3; Native Guards 205; nonslaveholders 200–2; politicians 197–200; religious backing 200, 221; reluctant 180, 212–13, 221; slaveowners 212–13; slavery 184; surrender 219; taxation 199, 213–14; Texas 186; volunteers for army 191–2; women as soldiers 216–17 Confederation, Articles of 69, 70 Confiscation Acts 190, 205 Congress 70–1, 154–5, 178 Conscription Acts 201, 202, 204 conservatism 141–3 Constitution 67, 68, 71–2, 92, 178 Constitutional Unionists 164 Consumers, new importance of 47–9 Continental Army 57 contrabands 204–5, 225; see also runaway slaves Coode, John 22 Coode’s Rebellion 21, 26 Cooper, William J., Jr. 155 cooperationists 177 Cornwallis, Lord 57 cotton: Confederates 203; plantations 114–15, 226; planters 153, 236–7, 239–40; prices 92, 236–7; revenue 198–200; Sea Islands 116, 225, 239, 240–1; slavery 72, 90; small farmers 99; South 84, 133 cotton gin 72, 79 Cowpens, battle of 57 Crater, Battle of the 206–7 Crawford, William 146

282

Index

Creek War 87 Creeks: American culture 147; colonists 5, 51, 52, 58; mestizos 80; power 89; trade 5, 34, 49; war against 84, 87; women 79; and Yamassees 33 creole population 39, 44, 45, 91 Crockett, David 87 crops, commodity/subsistence 37, 98–9, 100 Crosby, Peter 244 Crozat, Antoine 31–2 Culpeper’s Rebellion 22 Currency Act 51, 52 Dale, Thomas 8, 9 David Walker’s Appeal pamphlet 129, 150 Davidson College 118 Davis, Jefferson (Brigadier General) 215, 216, 217 Davis, Jefferson (Confederate President) 187; army volunteers 191–2; career 158, 178; conscription 206–7; family background 106, 122; fleeing south 218; Gladstone 219; Hood 212; leadership 197; looters 202; prosouthern view 174; release pleas 213, 214; secession 164; war strategy 185–6; Western forces 196 Davis, Joseph 106, 122 Davis, Varina Howell 122 De La Warr, Lord 7–8, 9 De Soto, Hernando 4, 5 DeBow, James D.B. 165–6 Delany, Martin 234 Delaware 181, 225 Democratic Party 146–8, 153–4, 164, 170; Buchanan 169; election of 1860 174–5;

Jackson 147–8; Ku Klux Klan 238; McClellan 212; Ohio 209; opponents 168; Redeemers 246; Second Party System 152; slavery 160–1; Southern supporters 155, 170–1, 173, 179, 243, 245; supporters 152–3; Taxpayers’ League 244; Van Buren 152 Democratic Republicans 76 Democratic Societies 75 deserters xi, 201 Dew, Thomas Roderick 138, 140 Dickson, David 124 diseases: army 206; colonists 5, 15; fatalities 43; Indians 35; rice planting 27; slaves 59 disenfranchisement 144–5 divorce laws 123 Donelson, Fort 186 Douglas, Stephen 163, 167, 171–2, 173, 175 Douglass, Frederick 120–1, 129, 131 draft evaders 202 Drayton, Sam 120 Drayton, William Henry 58, 67 dueling 131–2; Henry Clay 85; Andrew Jackson 86 Dunmore, Governor 55–6 Early, Jubal 211, 215 East Florida Rangers 58, 59 Edmonston, Catherine 204 education 43–4, 123, 136, 236, 246–7; see also public schools elections, presidential: 1796 76, 77; 1800 77; 1824 145–6; 1828 146; 1832 148; 1836 151, 155; 1840 151–2; 1844 156–8; 1848 159–60; 1852 166; 1856 169–70;

Index 1860 173–5; 1864 212; 1868 243; 1872 243; 1876 244–5, 173–7 Elliott, Stephen 142–3 Ellison, William 104 emancipation: Confederates 224–5; expulsion of freed slaves 134; gradual 72, 217; Kentucky 78; Pennsylvania 91; racial equality 232–3; Spanish colonies 81–2; see also abolition of slavery Emancipation Proclamation 191, 204–5, 210, 225 Embargo Act (1807) 84–5 Empire of Liberty 79–80, 84 English colonists 7–9, 11–12, 18, 34 evangelicals 54, 72–3, 117–18, 119, 122, 132 Eve, George 125 family: African Americans 246–7; marriage 123; size of 100; slaves 128; Southern culture 121–8; whites 121, 122–3 farmers: slaveless 98–100; small 99; tenant 102, 241–2; yeoman 100–1, 201; see also sharecropping Federalists 75–6, 77, 79, 87–8 Fee, John 136 Fehrenbacher, Donald 71 Fifteenth Amendment 232 Fillmore, Millard 163, 168, 169, 170 fire-eaters 164–5, 170–1, 172, 173, 178 First African Baptist Chursh 119 Fitzhugh, George 141 Florida: British rule 52; democratization 144;

283

invasion 84, 87; Mose 45–6; Negro Fort 89; Seminoles 147; Spanish 4, 82, 89; U.S. control 89 Floyd, John B. 186 Foote, Henry 182 Force Bill 149 Fosset, Joseph 62–3 Fourteenth Amendment 232, 236, 239, 245–6 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth 108 France 51, 84; see also French colonies; French Revolution Franciscans 30–1 Franklin, John Hope 131 Fredericksburg Battle 193 Free Soil Party 160, 166 Free State of Jones see Jones County (Miss.) Freedmen’s Bureau 227, 231, 234, 240 Freeman, Joanne 132–3 Fremont, John 169, 170, 189 French colonies xii, 4–5, 31, 32–5, 38, 49, 51–2, 73, 83; see also Haiti French Revolution 73, 75 Fugitive Slave Act 163, 164, 165, 167 Fundamental Constitutions (Carolina) 16 Furman, Richard 76 Furman College 118 Gabriel’s Insurrection 73–4 Gadsden, Christopher 68 Gaffney Female High School 123 Gag Rule 155 gang labor 241 Garrison, William Lloyd 135, 150, 154 Gates, Thomas 7

284

Index

gender: African Americans 240–1; colonists 18–19, 40–1; education 123; equality 60; patriarchy 122; religion 121; Southern culture 121–8 Genovese, Eugene D. 107, 108 gens de couleur (Louisiana) 205, 224 George II 41 Georgia 40, 41–2; Compromise of 1850 165; cotton 72, 203; democratization 144; enlistment of slaves 58; laborers 102; land speculators 78–9; non-Indian population 50; Republicans 235; summary executions 202; see also Piedmont Georgia convention 164 German immigrants 98, 201 Gettysburg Battle 195, 207 Gladstone, William 192–3, 219 Glen, James 51 Glorious Revolution 50 gold 4, 7, 161 Gone With the Wind (Mitchell) x, 97, 248 Grant, U.S. 196; Chattanooga 208; Fort Henry 186; Lee 218; Mississippi River 194; Republican Party 243, 244; troop losses 211; Virginia 210; Wilderness 211 Greeley, Horace 243 Greene, Jack 35 Greene, Nathaniel 57–8 Grimke´, Angelina and Sarah 124, 135 guerillas 219, 238–9 Guilford Court House, battle of 57 Gullah dialect 44

Hairston, Robert 124–5 Haiti 73, 76, 82, 83, 104, 130 Hakluyt, Richard 5–6 Hale, Stephen 179, 182 Hale, William 135 Hamilton, Alexander 75, 76, 83, 132 Hamlin, John 129 Hammond, James H. 106, 107–8, 112, 125, 126–7, 141, 154–5 Harper’s Ferry armory 172 Harris, David Golightly 101, 228 Harrison, William Henry 151, 152, 155, 156 Hartford Convention 87–8, 88 Hawkins, Benjamin 79 Hayes, Rutherford 244–5 headright system 15 Helper, Hinton Rowan 136, 137–8 Hemings, Sally 62 hemp growers 152 Henry, Fort 186 Henry, Patrick 52–3 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth 205, 206 Hobbes, Thomas 28 hog raising 14 Holden, William 208, 238 Holt, Michael 152 honor 131–3, 176, 182, 200–2 Hood, John Bell 212, 216 Hood, Zachariah 53 Hooker, Joseph 193–4 House of Burgesses 145 Houston, Sam 176 Huguenots 21 Hunter, David 190, 211 Hunter, R.M.T. 198 D’Iberville, Pierre La Moyne 31 Igbo 28 immigrants 15, 32, 76 Impressment Act 207

Index impressment of slaves 203, 207 indentured servants 11, 14–15, 25, 26–7, 105 Independence, Declaration of 60 Independence, War of 39, 69 Indians: Africans 17; alliances 33, 49; American culture 147; British troops 51, 52; ceremonial tobacco 9–10; chiefdoms 3–4; commissioner 89; disease epidemics 35; fatal diseases 5; gender roles 3–4; intermarriage 34; Jefferson 79–80, 87; land claims 79; missionaries 147; Powhatan 3; Revolutionary War 58; runaway slaves 46; slavery 17; trading with colonists 8, 17, 35; see also specific tribes indigo 32, 41, 45, 116 inflation 202 influenza 5 Ingle, Richard 21 interracial sexual relations 29, 34 Irish 26, 42–3, 91, 98 iron manufacturers 116 Isham, Edward 103, 137 Izard, Alice DeLancey 61 Jackson, Andrew: abolitionist mail 154; career 86; Cherokee treaty 147; Clay 149, 151; Democratic Republicans 146–7; dueling 131; election success 146–7; expansion of U.S. control 89; Florida 89–90; Force Bill 149; Nullification Ordinance 149; popular support 147–8; War of 1812 86–7; Jackson, Claiborne 181

285

Jackson, Fort, Treaty of 87 Jackson, Thomas Stonewall 187–8, 194 Jacksonville 5 James, Frank and Jesse 209 James I 6, 9, 12 Jamestown 3, 5, 7, 11, 23, 248 Jarvis, Henry 189 Jefferson, Martha 61 Jefferson, Thomas: Anglican Church 60; anti-taxation 53–4; election success 77; Empire of Liberty 79–80, 84; ideal government 77–8; Indians 79–80, 87; Kentucky Resolution 77; land patents 55; Louisiana 80–1, 83; Missouri debates 93; North/South 67; Notes on the State of Virginia 62, 65, 75; political representation 145; as slaveowner 39, 62, 106 Jeffersonian Republicans 74–78 see also Old Republicans Johnson, Andrew 178, 224, 229, 231 Johnson, Anthony 23–4 Johnson, Herschel 174 Johnson, Mary 23–4 Johnston, Albert Sidney 186–7 Johnston, James C. 124 Johnston, Joseph: armistice 218; Davis 197; Georgia 211; McClellan 187, 188, 196; Richmond 186; Shenandoah Valley 185; slave soldiers 217; Western theater 194–5 Jones, John 228 Jones, Mary 106, 114, 228 Jones, Rev. Charles C., 106–7, 109, 112, 126 Jones County (Miss.) 99, 201 Jordan, Winthrop 26

286

Index

Joseph, William 21–2 Judson Institute 123 Kansas–Nebraska Act 167, 168, 170 Kennedy, John Pendleton 114 Kennesaw Mountain battle 211 Kentucky 78, 116, 209, 225 Kentucky Resolution 77, 148 King, William Henry 180–1 King George’s War 51 King’s Mountain, battle of 57 kinship networks 98–9, 121–8 Knights of the White Camellia 238 Know-Nothings 167–9 Ku Klux Klan 237–8 Ku Klux Klan Act 238, 243 La Salle, Robert 31 Lafayette County (Miss.) 135 land speculators 78–9 Laurens, John 59 Law, John 32 Lee, Henry 77, 87 Lee, Robert E. 188; Brown 172; Chancellorsville 193–4; Confederate morale 196; Gettysburg 195; Grant 218; Jackson 187; Maryland 190–1; resigning 181; Scott 158; slave soldiers 217–18; surrender 218; troop losses 211 Liberal Republicans 243 The Liberator 135 Liberia 156 Liberty Party 158, 159 Lincoln, Abraham: Cobb on 175; constitutional amendment 225; Douglas 171; duel 132; election 175–6; Emancipation Proclamation 191, 210, 229; freeing of slaves 189–90, 191; McClellan 212;

nomination 173; reelection 212; secession 223; slavery 180, 222; Ten Percent Plan 223–4; Unionists 179–80 liquor consumption 153 Little Dixie (Mo.) 209–10 living conditions 19–20, 29, 137 Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin: Georgia Scenes 103, 131 Louis XIV 31 Louisiana: Catholics 118; civil rights 224; constitution 235; crops 32; democratization 144; freed slaves 82; French 31; gens de couleur 224; Jefferson 80–1, 83; population statistics 45; Reconstruction 234; Republicans 238; royal rule 33; slavery 32, 45, 84; Spanish 81–2; sugar 81, 128; tobacco 32, 45 Louisiana Purchase 83–4, 89, 167 Lovell, Louisa 184, 188–9 Lucas, Eliza 41 Lyon, Nathaniel 181 McClellan, George 186, 187, 212 McCord, Louisa Cheves 140 McDowell, Irwin 185, 187, 188 McDuffie, George 139 McGillivray, Alexander 80, 87 Macon, Nathaniel 93, 94, 149–50, 214 Madison, James: Congress 69, 70; Florida 89; House of Representatives 75; National Bank 89; Non-Intercourse Act 85; slaves enlisting 58; Virginia Resolution 77 Maine 92 Manassas, first battle of 184, 185, 191

Index Manassas, second battle of 188 Mansfield battle 211 manufacturing industries 75, 115 manumissions 91; see also emancipation Marie The´re`ze (Coincoin) 82 maroons 46, 81 marriage 61–2, 123, 233, 240 Marshall, John 77 Martin, Josiah 56–7 Martin, Luther 71 Martineau, Harriet 85–6 Maryland: Baltimore’s charter 12; Charles I 12; clergymen 20; Confederates 209; free African Americans 103; Lee 190–1; manumissions 91; Protestants 22; public life 29–30; revolts 21; St Mary’s 21; slaves 25–6, 38, 40, 58; Stamp Tax 53; tobacco 13; Toleration Act 13; Unionists 181, 209 Mason, George 71 Mason, James 162 master–slave relationship 107, 124–5, 184 Memminger, Christopher 199 Memphis riots 232 men: duty 213; honor 131–3, 176, 182, 200–2; Indian 3–4; paternalism 107–8, 109, 113, 140–1; patriarchy 106, 107, 108, 122, 142; public sphere 122; see also gender mestizos 80, 87 Methodists 54, 63, 64, 118; slavery 72, 119, 140 Mexican territory 158 Mexican War 158–9 Mexico, Gulf of 31, 90 migration West 99 Milliken’s Bend battle 206

287

Militia Act 190 Miller, Benton 101 Mims, Fort 87 missionaries 31, 35, 147 Mississippi 3, 84, 90; constitution 144, 235; free African Americans 103; Jones County 99; laborers 102; reconstruction politics 235, 244; secession 143, 164; as state 90 Mississippi River valley 31, 38, 51–2, 78, 226 Missouri xii, 92–3, 137, 186, 209 Missouri Compromise line 93, 161–6, 170, 180 mixed-race people 82; see also mestizos Mobile 99, 100 Mobile Bay 31 Monitor 187, 192 Monroe, Fort 189 Monroe, James 73–4, 77, 89, 90 Moore, Thomas 205 Moore’s Creek incident 56 Moravians 91 Morgan, Albert T. 234, 244–5 Morgan, Edmund 25 Morgan, Philip 111 Morris, Gouverneur 70 mulattoes 73, 82, 104 Murfreesboro Battle 193 Napoleon Bonaparte 83 Nashville (Nashborough) 78, 186 Nashville, battle of 192, 216 Nashville Convention 162, 163 Natchez 79, 106 Natchez Indians 32–4 National Bank 88, 89, 147 National Republicans 146, 151 Native Guards 205–6 Naturalization Act 76 navigation acts 70–1

288

Index

Negro Fort 89 neighbourhood networks 98–9 New England 88, 91 New Mexico 161, 162–3, 186 New Orleans: Burr 84; free African Americans 103; French 32; gens de couleur 205; mulattoes 104; riots 232; Spanish 82; Unionists 224 New Orleans, Battle of 88 New York City 209 New York state 71–2, 91 New York Times 225 Ninety-Six, battle of 57 Non-Intercourse Act 85 nonslaveholders 136, 176, 184, 200–2 Norfolk 40 North Carolina: laborers 102; Moravians 91; Orange County 98; origins 16; population statistics 37, 78; Regulators 54; revolts 21, 22; as royal colony 34; slaveowners 137; Tennessee 78; Tories 56; Whigs 170 North–South division 67, 69, 70, 124, 133, 222 Northern Virginia, Army of 218, 219 novel-reading 123 Nullification Controversy 148–50 office-holding 144, 237 Oglethorpe, James 41 Ohio Democrats 209 Ohio Valley 51 Old Republicans 89, 147–8 Olmsted, Frederick Law 98, 110, 120 Omnibus Bill 163 Opechancanough 12 Orange County (N.C.) 98

Order of the Star Spangled Banner see Know Nothings Oregon 157 orphanages 124 Orr, James 229 Outlaw, David 156 Pamlico Sound 16 partisan rangers 214, 219 paternalism 107–8, 109, 113, 140–1 patriarchy 106, 107, 108, 122, 142 Pea Ridge battle 186 Peace Conference 180 Peachtree Creek battle 212 Pemberton, John C. 194, 195 Pennsylvania 62, 72, 91 Pensacola 180 Perryville battle 191 Petersburg 211 Petersburg battle 206–7 Pickett, George 195 Piedmont 64, 99, 101, 238 Pierce, Franklin 166, 167 Pierce, George Foster 221 Pillow, Fort 206 Pillow, Gideon 186 Pinchback, P.B.S. 236, 237, 244 Pinckney, Charles 41, 73, 77 Pittsburg Landing 187 plantations: as businesses 109–10; colonial culture 47–50; Maryland 38, 40; punishments 110–11; Radical Republicans 226–7; run down 228; slavery x, xi, xii, 23, 27, 35–8, 133; South Carolina 38; speculators 225–6; sugar 81, 128, 133, 226, 241; women in charge 203–4; work patterns 44; see also cotton; tobacco

Index planters: antislavery movement 135–8; control of African American workers 230; cotton 153, 236–7, 239–40; Freedmen’s Bureau 240; intermarriage 105–6; representation in literature 114–15; rice 239–40, 241; slaves 107; violence 132 Pocahontas 8–9 Point Coupe´e (La.) 81 politics: abolition of slavery 154; African Americans 235–6; colonies 37–8; corruption 237, 243; honor 132–3; representation 145, 230–1; secession movement xii; slaveowners 137; slavery 138–9, 155, 158; South Carolina 154; women 60–1, 153; see also elections; names of parties Polk, James K. 157–8 Polk, Leonidas 182 Ponce de Le´on, Juan 4 Pope, John 188 popular sovereignty 160, 161, 162–3 population statistics: blacks/ whites 84; British colonies 39; Chesapeake Bay 24; Indians/ Europeans 35; Louisiana 45; Mississippi Territory 90; Missouri state 92; North Carolina 37, 40; slaves 43–4; South Carolina 37, 40 Port Hudson 195 Port Royal experiment 225, 226 Porter, Alexander 155 Porter, David 194 Portuguese 26 Potomac, Army of the 186, 188, 191, 193, 215, 218

289

Potter, David 197 poverty 102, 104, 246–7 Powhatans 3, 5, 8–9, 12 Presbyterians 118, 119 Preston, John 179 Principles of ’98 77, 89 proslavery 64–5, 137–41, 169, 178 Prosser, Gabriel 73 prostitution 102 Protestant Association 21–2 public schools 233, 246 public sphere 29–30, 122, 124 punishments 47, 74, 110–11, 129, 206–7 Quakers 73 Quantrill, William 209–10 Quincy, Josiah 67 Quitman, John A. 164, 165 race and racism: and colonial slavery 25–6. 29–30, early national period 64–5; 73; free blacks 60, 104–5; and Indians 79–80; proslavery 140–1; reconstruction 232–3, 244–6; republicanism 138–9; secession 176, 179, 182–3 Radical Republicans 226–7, 231, 239 railroad building 235, 237 Raleigh, Sir Walter 6 Ramsay, David 91 Ramseur, Dodson 216 Randolph, John 85, 88–9, 146 rape 125 Reconstruction: during Civil War 223–7; under Johnson 227–33; end in South 243–6; in southern states 233–9 Reconstruction Acts 232, 233–9

290 Red Shoes 51 Red Stick warriors 87 Redeemers 246 Regulators 54 religion: blacks 119–20; Confederates 200, 221; dissenters 21–2; reformers 53–4, 118–19; Revolution 63; Southern culture 117–21 Religious Liberty Statute 60 Removal Act (1830) 147 Republican Party 173, 176; American Revolution 142; Fremont 169; Georgia 235; Grant 243, 244; Kansas– Nebraska Act 168; Louisiana 238; North 232; Reconstruction Acts 233; slavery 166; South 234–5; taxation 236; see also Jeffersonian Republicans Rhett, Robert Barnwell 165, 173–4, 178, 197–8, 217 Ribault, Jean 4–5 rice: plantations 27, 133; planters 239–40, 241; South Carolina 17–18, 37, 44, 116; two-day system 241; working conditions 27–8, 45 Richmond: census figures 98; destroyed 218, 228; First African Baptist Chursh 119; flour-milling 40; free African Americans 103; looting 202; slaveholding statistics 98; tobacco 116 Richmond Enquirer 88, 93, 94 Richmond Examiner 203 ring shout ritual 44, 120 Ritchie, Thomas 93 Rives, William C. 153 Roanoke Island 6

Index Robinson, John 55 Rolfe, John 9, 10 root doctors 120–1 Ross, John 147 Ruffin, Edmund 141, 165, 170–1, 172–3 runaway slaves: Bowlegs Town 89; ‘‘drapetomania’’ 138; enlisting 55–6, 58–9, 189–90, 225; killing of 24; punishment 46–7; resistance 29, 130–1 Ryland, Robert 119 Sabbath schools 123–4 St. Augustine 4, 5, 29, 30–1, 51 St. Domingue see French colonies St. Mary’s (Md.) 21 San Malo 81 Savannah 41, 59, 98, 119 Savannah Indians 17 scalawags 235, 237 Scarborough, William 116–17 Schofield, John M. 216 Schweninger, Loren 131 Scots immigrants 34, 42 Scott, Dred 171–2, 231 Scott, Sir Walter 117 Scott, Winfield 158, 166, 186 Sea Island cotton 116, 225, 239, 240–1 seamstresses 102, 122 secession xi, xii, 177–82, 207; Davis 164; Lincoln 223; New England 88; nonslaveholders 200; Nullification Controversy 149; slaveowners 222; South Carolina 164, 170, 174, 175; Tennessee 201–2 secessionists 165, 219–20 Second Party System 150-4 Sedgwick, John 193

Index Sedition Act 76 Seminoles 80, 89, 147 Seven Days battles 188 Seward, William 190 sex: blacks and whites 29, 81–2, 124–5, 126, 215, 240 Seymour, Horatio 243 sharecropping 242, 247 Shelton Laurel massacre 202 Shenandoah Valley 35, 42, 185, 211, 215 Sheridan, Phillip 215–16 Sherman, William T. 196, 211; armistice 219; Atlanta campaign 210, 211–12; Chickasaw Bluffs 193; Civil War 114; Jefferson Davis on 214–5; land for former slaves 226, 230; march through Georgia 215–16; runaway slaves 189; South Carolina 218 Shiloh, Battle of 187 Sigourney Club 123 Slave Power 155, 159, 167, 169, 223 slave trade 70, 71, 111–12, 178 slaveowners 46–7; children by slaves 125; Confederates 212–13; Constitution 71–2; immunity from law 46; politics 137; Richmond 98; secession 222; stereotypes 97; wealth 116–17; yeomen 100–1; see also planters slavery 11, 74, 134; American Revolution 62; Christianity 63–4, 73, 93, 119, 135, 139–40, 142, 167; class divisions 220; Confederacy 184; Democrats 160–1; English colonies 10–11, 23–7; Indians 17; Lincoln 180, 222;

291

new territories 160–1, 168; paternalism 140–1; politics 138–9; racism 139, 140–1; Republican Party 166; stereotypes 97; supporters 93–4; Thomas 228–9; Virginia 24; see also plantations; specific states slaves: accumulation of property 82; African Americans 23, 28, 32, 44, 45; assemblies banned 74; biological determinism 138; children 110, 127, 227; Christianity 119; Civil War 189; conspiracies 81; culture 27–8; disease epidemics 59; domestic service 115–16, 121, 122; education 43–4; enlisting with British troops 58; family 112–14, 126–8; fathers 127; fear of 182; freetime earnings 44, 127–8; indentured servants 26–7; and Indians 17; as investment 106, 109, 114–15, 182; land grants 226, 230; living conditions 28–9; marriages 28, 126–7; murder by 128-9; murder of 125; patriarchy 106, 142; planters 107; population statistics 24, 43–4; prices 109; property-owning 44, 82; resistance 45–6, 128–31; self-purchase 82, 91; sexual exploitation 125, 215; as soldiers 205, 206–7, 217–18; Spanish colonies 45; stereotypes 97; women 111, 115–16, 121, 215; working conditions 27–8, 44, 109–10; see also runaway slaves Smalley, Laura 129

292

Index

Smith, Captain John 7, 8–9 Smith, Kirby 190–1, 195, 219 Smith, William 93 South 97; Democrats 155, 170–1, 173, 179, 243, 245; Federalists 75–6, 77, 79, 87–8; historical representations x–xii, 67–8, 91, 246–8; income per capita 116; manfacturing industry 115; Republican Party 77, 234–5; rural population 124; secession 177–8, 179; slaveless farmers 98–100; social classes 97; Unionists 178–9; urban population 98; women’s status 108; yeoman farmers 100–1; see also African Americans; North–South division South Carolina 16; Charles Town 19; Cherokees 58; Choctaw alliance 51; colonies 35; constitution 145; cotton 72; elite 36, 37; enlistment of slaves 58–9; ethnic mix 91; independence declared 56; leaving Union 143; militia 56; plantation slavery 38; politics 154; population statistics 37; Regulators 54; revolts 21, 22; rice 17–18, 37, 44, 116; as royal colony 34; secession 164, 170, 174, 175; senators 66; Sherman 218; slave assemblies banned 74; slaveowners 46–7; slaves 27–8, 44; Spanish travelers 5; tariffs 148; Tories/ Whigs 57; troops 33 Southern culture 117–28, 131–3, 141–3, 200–2 Southern Rights Democrats 164, 173

Southerners: black 227–8; Confederate States of America 181; consciousness 93–4; Democratic Party 170–1, 243, 245; disunionists 164; hostility 201; identity 223; nonslaveholders 184; Unionists 181; white 97–8, 176 Spanish colonies xii, 26; Florida 4, 30–1; Gulf Coast 38; Louisiana 81; manumission of slaves 62–3, 81–2; New Orleans 82; slaves 45; trade 34–5 Spotsylvania battle 211 Stafford, Robert 124 Stamp Tax 52–3, 68 Stampp, Kenneth 245 states’ rights 151, 185, 198, 207 Stephens, Alexander H. 230; Constitutional View 247–8; habeas corpus suspended 208; slavery 141, 162, 176; TwentyNegro rule 202; Vice President of Confederacy 178, 183 Stevens, Thaddeus 239 Stono River rebellion 45–6 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin 166–7 sugar plantations 81, 128, 133, 226, 241 sugar planters 152, 153 Sumner, Charles 166, 169, 230, 243 Sumter, Fort 180, 181 Susquehannocks 22–3 Swiss immigrants 42 Tadman, Michael 111 Tallmadge, James, Jr. 92–3 tariffs 148, 150 Tax-in-Kind Act 207 taxation 66–7, 198–9, 236

Index Taxpayers’ League (Miss.) 244 Taylor, Grant 218 Taylor, Richard 219 Taylor, Zachary 159, 160, 161–2, 163 tea drinking 60–1 tea tax 53 Tecumseh 80 temperance movement 124 Ten Percent Plan 223–4 tenant farmers 102, 241–2 Tennessee 78; iron manufacturers 116; laborers 102; secession 201–2; slaves/whites 84; Unionists 186, 201–2 Tennessee, Army of 193, 196, 197, 207–8, 214, 217, 219 Texas: annexation debate 156–8; border 90; Confederates 186; free African Americans 103; German immigrants 201; laborers 102; slaveowners 137 Thirteenth Amendment 229 Thomas, George H. 216 Thomas, Gertrude 120, 122, 125–6, 213, 221, 228–9 Thomas, Jefferson 213 Thomasson, Basil Armstrong 100 Thornwell, James Henley 142 Thorpe, George 12 three-fifths clause 67, 69–70, 92, 230–1 Thucydides 182 Tidewater planters 64 Tilden, Samuel 244–5 tobacco: Chesapeake System 13–15; cultivation 10–13; English workers 11; expansion 40; exports 45; Indians 9–10; Louisiana 32, 45; Maryland 13; plantations 27; prices 36;

293

Richmond 116; slavery 24–5, 133; small farmers 99; work patterns 44 Toleration Act (Md.) 13 Tombigbee River 79 Toombs, Robert 162, 198 Tories (loyalists) 56, 57 True American 135 Tryon, Governor 54 Tubman, Harriet 130 Tucker, Nathaniel Beverly 165 Turner, Nat 119, 129–30, 134 Turner’s Rebellion 119, 129–30, 150 Tuscaloosa 154 Tuscaroras 33 Twain, Mark xi Twenty-Negro exemption 202, 204 Twitchell, Marshall Harvey 234 two-day system, rice planters 241 Tyler, John 93, 150–1, 152, 156, 158 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 166–7 Union: advantages 192; Anaconda Plan 186; blockade 198; runaway slaves 189–90, 204–5, 225; slave states 210 Union League 233, 234 Unionists: Jones County (Miss.) 201; Kentucky 209; Lincoln 179–80; Maryland 181, 209; Missouri 186; Native Guards 205–6; New Orleans 224; reconstruction 233, 235; South 178–9, 181; Tennessee 201–2 United States Colored Infantry 206 United States of America ix (map) Upshur, Abel 142, 145, 156–7 U.S. vs. Cruikshank 245

294

Index

Vallandigham, Clement 209 Van Buren, Martin 146, 148, 151, 152, 154, 160 Vance, Zebulon 198, 207, 208 Vesey, Denmark 150 Vicksburg Battle 193, 194, 195, 201, 207 Vicksburg elections 244 Virginia xii, 3; Byrd family 36–7; Christianity 119; clergymen 20; constitution 60; disenfranchisement 144–5; House of Burgesses 10, 52–3; interracial sexual relations 29; land patents 55; nullification 150; Peace Conference 180; planters 55; proslavery petitions 64–5; Religious Liberty Statute 60; revolts 21, 22–3; slaves 24, 29, 63, 103; tobacco exports 10; unskilled laborers 102; women 19 Virginia 187, 192 Virginia Company 6–7, 10, 11–12, 21 Virginia Gazette 60 Virginia Resolution 77, 148 voodoo 120, 128 voting rights 144, 224, 232 Wagner, Fort 206 Walker, David 129, 150 Walker, Leroy Pope 183 War Hawks 85–6 Warmoth, Henry Clay 243–4 Wars of 1812 84–8 Washington, Booker T. 189 Washington, George x, 47, 74; anti-taxation 53–4; Continental Army 57; Federalist 77, 79; French and Indian War 51; land patents 55

Washington County (N.C.) 201 weaponry in Civil War 195–6 Webster, Daniel 151 Wesley, John 63 Westoes 17 wheat growing 40 Whigs (patriots) slave enlistment 58–9; South Carolina 56–7 Whig Party 153, 155; breaking down 166; candidates 151; formation 151-2; Mexican peace treaty 159; North Carolina 170; Second Party System 152; Tyler 152 White, Hugh 151, 155 White, John 6 White Man’s Party 244 white supremacy x, xii, 142, 239, 243–6, 248 Whitefield, George 63 whites: disenfranchisement 144–5; family 121, 122–3; poor 97, 102–3, 137, 247; privileged 139; servants 30; traders 33; women 121, 125; see also colonists; planters; slaveowners Whitney, Eli 72 Wigfall, Louis 165–6, 198 Wilderness battle 211 Wilkinson, James 83 William and Mary of Orange 21–2, 50 Williams, Sam 127–8 Williamsburg 40 Wilmot Proviso 159, 160, 161, 162 Wilson’s Creek battle 186 Wirt, William 151 Wollstonecraft, Mary: Vindication of the Rights of Women 61 women: abolition of slavery 124; benevolent associations 123; in charge of plantations 203–4;

Index chastity 131; colonists 19, 40–1; Confederacy 185; consumers 47–8; disguised in army 217; domestic labor 122; evangelical movement 122; family 121; Indian 3; looting 202; occupations 102; paid/unpaid work 122; patriarchy 108; politics 60–1, 153; public sphere 124; slaves 110–11, 115–16, 121,

295

215; status 108; Virginia 19; see also gender women’s rights 117, 135 Woodmason, Charles 42–3, 48 Yamassee 33, 34 Yancey, William L. 159–60, 165, 173, 197–8 Yazoo County (Miss.) 78–9, 244 yeoman farmers 100–1, 201