THE MILITANT SOUTH
William Henry Harrison and the Whig party came to power in 1841 without
a program. The men who had driven Martin Van Buren from office in 1840
were in as much doubt what to do for the country as the Jackson men had
been in 1829. Clay had said during the campaign that he might restore
the United States Bank, and he had said he might not do so; the Eastern
Whigs had declared for a higher tariff in 1842, when the compromise of
1833 would expire, while the Southern Whigs had denied that such a move
would be made; the Western men who had deserted Van Buren for a
log-cabin leader demanded now as ever internal improvements, though
their Southern allies bitterly opposed all such propositions. With
counsels so divided Harrison turned readily to Henry Clay, who shaped
the inaugural and filled the Cabinet with his political friends.
Congress was called in extra session for the last of May, 1841, when an
improvised plan of action would be offered and perhaps enacted into law.
The main items were to be a new National Bank, a higher tariff, and the
distribution among the States of the proceeds of the public land sales.
This would enable States to construct their own public improvements and
at the same time avoid a rupture between Southern and Western Whigs.
Thus the chief items of the old Clay and Adams "American System" was to
be reënacted by a Congress whose majority was none too large and more
than heterogeneous in character.
But before the national legislature met, the President had died and John
Tyler had become the head of the Administration. Virginia politics were
at that time and long after dominated by a state banking system, and
both Virginia and the lower South opposed all forms of tariff
protection. The new President had been nominated by the Whigs in spite
of his political views, and only in the hope that he might carry his
State, in which they had been disappointed. Clay thought, however, that
he could control the Administration, and undertook with the assistance
of the Cabinet to bring all into a harmonious support of his "system."
The law creating the Independent Treasury, for which Jackson and Van
Buren had labored industriously for six years before its final passage,
was promptly repealed. In place of the Independent Treasury there was to
be a National Bank, but the President was reported to be hostile to such
a bank unless it should be located in the District of Columbia, and the
consent of the States should be made necessary before branches could be
established anywhere. Aware of Tyler's scruples on this and other
measures, Clay marshaled his followers in both houses, held his friends
in the Cabinet in his firm grasp, and was reported to have declared:
"Tyler dares not resist me; I will drive him before me." Tyler was not
the man to be driven, and meanwhile Calhoun, Benton, and their friends
were rallying around him in the hope of breaking down once again the
program of Clay.
A bank law was passed. On the 16th of August it was vetoed, and there
ensued another party break very much like that which Calhoun led in
1831. Many Southern Whigs supported the President; Eastern Whigs burned
Tyler in effigy as "the traitor." A second bank bill was passed only to
meet another veto; and the Clay scheme for the distribution of the
proceeds of the land sales, on which he had set his heart, was so
mutilated by amendments that it could not serve the purpose of its
friends. Anger and denunciation were the order of the day in Washington.
Clay called a conference of the members of Tyler's Cabinet early in
September, and advised all to resign at once in order to isolate their
chief. The advice was followed by all save Webster, who retained his
post and otherwise refused to accept the dictation of the Kentucky
leader. Calhoun, Henry A. Wise, William C. Rives, and other leaders of
Congress applauded the President and Webster. Congress adjourned on
September 13 in the worst possible humor. Excitement now ran high
throughout the country. Whig meetings were held everywhere, some to
denounce, some to defend the Virginian President. The congressional
elections came on and the voters divided sharply. But the Democrats won,
which meant that the next Congress would be deadlocked--the Senate Whig,
and the House Democratic. Under these circumstances Tyler gathered about
him a Cabinet to his own liking and planned a forward step in the
national policy. At the regular session of Congress a protective tariff
law which restored many of the high duties of 1832 was enacted. Tyler
gave his assent, perhaps in the hope of holding his New England friends
like Webster. In view of the fact that the next Congress would be at
least half anti-tariff, this move on the part of the Whigs was resented
in the South, where leaders like Robert Barnwell Rhett still spoke
openly of secession in case the old protectionist policy should be
resumed.
The lines were being drawn for the next presidential race. Clay came
back to Congress in December, 1841, deeply resentful toward the
President and displeased at Webster. Having carried through Congress the
tariff bill already mentioned, he rose on March 31 to offer "the last
motion I shall ever make in this body," and to read his farewell address
after the manner of his great antagonist Jackson, who had sent to
Congress a similar message on his retirement in March, 1837. It was an
affecting scene as the able and dramatic orator prayed "the most
precious blessings upon the Senate," even upon Calhoun, who at the close
extended his hand for the first time in several years. "Sober old
Senators as well as ladies in the galleries shed tears at the scene";
yet it was known that Clay would seek the Presidency two years later.
Calhoun, likewise, retired "forever" from the august legislative
assembly, twelve months later, the better to lay his plans for the
Democratic nomination in 1844. Though the South was not ready to unite
in support of its greatest statesman, its leaders were ready to adopt
his views and carry out his policy. The South, with its cotton, tobacco,
and sugar plantations yielding their increasing annual returns, was
preparing for another effort at getting control of the National
Government. And changes of sentiment as well as economic development
favored her in the struggle.
In Virginia the reforms of 1829 had been inadequate. The slavery problem
was still a burning question, and the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831,
in which a few slaves rose against their masters and killed many men,
women, and children, forced a reconsideration. Again the difficult
problem was declared insoluble. Thomas R. Dew, a professor of political
science in William and Mary College, gave the deciding counsel in
elaborate testimony before a committee of the legislature, which was
enlarged and published in book form in May, 1832. He contended that
slavery was a positive good; that negroes could not live in the South
except in a state of bondage; and that for the State of Virginia, at
least, it was a most profitable institution. The time had passed, he
contended, for men to believe or teach the fallacies of the Declaration
of Independence. Society, certainly Southern society, was taking on a
stratified form in which all men had their definite places; and the
North, too, was fast drifting in the same direction, because of the
influence of their growing industries, in which it was essential that
some should be masters of great plants and direct the labor of thousands
of people. Few books ever influenced Southern life so much as did this
little word of clear reasoning and convincing statistics.
A year later Calhoun was offering the same arguments in the United
States Senate; South Carolina had already come in a practical way to the
same conclusion. North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and
Louisiana accepted the teaching that slavery was a beneficent social
arrangement. In Kentucky and Tennessee, where James G. Birney and John
Rankin had long worked for gradual emancipation, sentiment rapidly
crystallized about the same dogma. Southern anti-slavery leaders
emigrated to Ohio during the next few years, "leaving Ephraim joined to
his idols"; and Southern men in Congress now replied with increasing
earnestness to the petitions which came from Northern abolitionists. In
1837 it was decided not to receive such petitions, and John Quincy Adams
was given his great theme for agitation; the United States mails were
also closed to abolitionist literature intended for Southern
distribution. The representatives of the great region which stretched
from Baltimore to New Orleans and extended from the coast to the
mountains, united almost to a man in defense of "the institutions of the
South," and he who offered argument or example to the contrary was then
unwelcome and later compelled to hold his tongue or emigrate.
Calhoun now became the undisputed leader of the plantation interests of
the South, and few men were better fitted for the great commission. A
keen and able debater and an enthusiastic Southerner, a combination in
himself of the up-country ideals and the low-country purposes, he had
become the idol of South Carolina. Conciliatory in manner and pure in
all his public and private life, he won the respect and friendship of
the best men in the North, like the Lowells and Winthrops of
Massachusetts, and of Senators Allen, Hannegan, Breese, and the Dodges
of the Northwest. Devoted to the ideal of a great American Union which
he had made strong at the close of the second war with England, he was
willing always to yield something to the West if only his "one
institution" be left alone. Badly treated by Jackson and Van Buren, he
had yet forgiven and joined hands with them both in 1840, in the hope
that the power of Clay and his Eastern allies might be broken. In
Congress and out he was the leader of the South as that section began to
gird her loins for the fight over tariff, slavery, and expansion in
1840-44.
While the South was coming to one opinion on the great question of
slavery, the West had been reviving her old ambitions and claims for
more lands. So long as there was plenty of free lands and wide
wildernesses, the Westerner felt that the American Republic was a free
country; but when these began to fail he imagined himself hemmed in and
stifled. In 1812 he had demanded Canada and Florida. He secured only the
latter in 1819, and that after giving up Texas. The ink was hardly dry
on the parchment of the treaty of that year before leading Westerners
began their campaign for the "reannexation" of Texas. Stephen Austin,
who settled in Texas, and Sam Houston, who deserted his wife for a home
on the distant Southwestern frontier, kept the question alive. Thousands
of Southerners and Westerners poured into the new cotton region between
1828 and 1836, and in the latter year they fought with the Mexicans the
battle of San Jacinto, which gave Texas her freedom. A new American
Republic with a pro-slavery constitution was speedily organized. Though
Van Buren evaded the issue, Calhoun and the South urged immediate
annexation.
There was thus a Southern call to the isolated President in 1842 to take
up the Texas problem. Moreover, Virginia under the apportionment of 1841
lost five Representatives in the National House; South Carolina's number
fell from nine to seven. North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and
Georgia barely held their own. The older South was distinctly losing in
the national race, despite the three-fifths rule on slavery. The
Southwest gained some members, but the Northwest was growing faster. It
was time for the South to act if she was to maintain her position in the
country. In making up his Cabinet in the autumn of 1841, and again in
filling the vacancies that occurred from time to time, the President
selected men who favored expansion in the Southwest. The leaders of the
Administration in the House of Representatives were ex-Governor Gilmer
and Henry A. Wise, of Virginia, and the spokesmen of the South generally
joined these in demanding the immediate annexation of Texas as a
Southern measure. Calhoun, though not speaking so often, was the real
leader of this cause in the Senate, and he constantly urged upon his
friends the necessity of this acquisition as a distinct aid to his
section.
Nearly all the West favored this Southern proposition; but an equally
important matter to them was the occupation of Oregon. In Ohio,
Michigan, and northern Illinois there was some indifference as to Texas,
but none on the subject of Oregon. The vast region stretching from the
forty-second parallel of north latitude to Alaska, and embracing an
empire in itself, was held jointly with England, whose fur traders had
actually occupied the country on the northern side of the Columbia
River. England desired to hold the promising region. Under the agreement
of 1818, renewed in 1828, either country was to give one year's notice
of a purpose to abandon joint control, and, should the relation with
England be dissolved, the stronger party would doubtless obtain the
better part of the territory. The people of the Northwest under radical
leadership soon learned to demand all Oregon; English fur interests
understood the situation well, and they pressed their Government to
seize all the territory along the Pacific to the Bay of California. And
English relations with Mexico were such that Lower California was apt to
be added to Oregon in case of a break with the United States.
In the East there had been reason for increasing irritation between the
two Governments. British public opinion had been distinctly unfriendly
since the Canadian insurrection of 1837-38, when so many Americans gave
assistance to the insurgents. And this unfriendliness was fed by the
ill-concealed desire of the people of the West for the annexation of
Canada to the United States. When the American ship Caroline, which had
been assisting the Canadian insurrectionists, was seized and destroyed
by the English on Lake Erie, an American citizen was killed. This was
amicably arranged; but in 1840 a certain Alexander McLeod, then in New
York, avowed that he had killed the American and was promptly seized by
the state authorities and put on trial for his life. McLeod now claimed
that he had done the deed in obedience to orders, and the British
Minister came to his assistance. Officers of the American State
Department took the same view, but they were helpless, and for a time it
seemed that one of the States would put to death as a murderer a man
whom both England and the United States recognized to be innocent. War
seemed imminent, but as so often happens in Anglo-Saxon procedure, a way
out of the legal _impasse_ was found in a fictitious _alibi_, and McLeod
was acquitted.
When Sir Robert Peel became the head of the English Government in 1841
he sent, as Minister to Washington, Lord Ashburton, one of the Baring
Brothers who had had such large business relations with many of the
States and with the old National Bank. Ashburton and Webster were
personal friends, and they were likely to find a solution to other
important and pressing problems engaging the attention of both
countries. One of these disputes had to do with the suppression of the
nefarious African slave trade, which still flourished in spite of the
most stringent of laws, national and international. The difficulty lay
in the enforcement of law. The South did not regard slavery as an
unmixed evil, and hence Southern Presidents had not been overzealous of
invoking the severe law against the slave trade. England stood ready to
enforce her laws, but then the traders would raise the American flag.
This necessitated the exercise of the obsolete right of search of
suspected vessels, if anything was to be done. But the people of the
United States resented the exercise of the right, and Northern statesmen
were also loath to allow this. To obviate all difficulty the two
Governments agreed in 1842 to maintain a joint naval patrol of the
African coast. The South was not quite pleased, and a great many people
of the West were displeased that Webster had yielded the right of search
in disguise, as it was thought.
At the same time a matter of larger importance to the North, the
settlement of the long-disputed boundary between Maine and Nova Scotia,
was pending. Since 1838 there had been quarrels and actual encounters
along the northeastern boundary, which had won the name of "the
Aroostook War." Both Maine and the National Congress had appropriated
money to maintain American rights on the border, and here again there
was reason to fear war. Webster and Ashburton took up the problem and by
mutual concessions came to a fair but very unpopular agreement. They
also settled outstanding disputes concerning the long boundary between
the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains.
But the question of dividing Oregon was left untouched even by these
friendly diplomats. Nor could they do more than discuss the critical
Creole trouble, which just now came to complicate the relations of both
peoples, evidently desirous of avoiding war. The Creole was a vessel
engaged in the domestic slave trade. In 1841 this ship, bound for New
Orleans, was seized by the slaves on board, who killed its crew and
carried it into the port of Nassau. The local courts punished some of
the negroes as murderers and set the others free. Speaking for the
American Government, Webster demanded of England an apology and
compensation for the slaves. Ashburton defended his country stoutly and
refused satisfaction. Again public opinion, at least Southern opinion,
was greatly excited, but nothing was done about the Creole case until
1853, when it was submitted to arbitration, and compensation was allowed
the owners of the slaves.
Thus the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 was a settlement of some
threatening difficulties and a tacit compromise or ignoring of others.
It served the useful purpose of keeping the peace between kindred
peoples. The Oregon and Texas questions were left open, and these were
assuming more dangerous forms with the passage of time.
This served to direct attention to the Pacific Coast and even the Far
East, where New England merchants and shipowners had long driven a
profitable trade. President Tyler sent Commodore Jones to the Pacific to
protect American interests; he proposed to send a commissioner to China
in the hope of aiding American commerce there, and he began to consult
members of Congress about the possibility of obtaining Texas,
California, and Oregon all in treaties with Mexico and England. He
offered to send Webster to London to conduct the negotiations, and at
his instance John Quincy Adams wrote Edward Everett, the American
Minister to England, that he might resign and go to China to do pioneer
work for New England interests. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty was to be
followed by a greater one, securing to the United States the coveted
expansion southwest, west, and northwest. Thus Calhoun and his extreme
Southerners, Benton and his ardent imperialist followers, and the
radical Northwest were all to be satisfied at a single stroke of state,
and Webster, the New Englander, was to be the happy instrument and
perhaps become President in consequence.
Everett refused to resign, and Webster had promised his Whig friends to
leave the State Department. Tyler did not despair; when the great New
Englander retired in 1842, like Clay, to private life, he invited Hugh
S. Legaré, of Charleston, to the vacant place. A year later Abel P.
Upshur succeeded to the office. All the while the President was seeking
to guide the Administration into other channels than the old ones of
tariff, bank, and internal improvements.
The Texan envoys to Washington repeatedly urged unofficially the
annexation of their country, which had fallen into a state of
semi-bankruptcy, and whose governor, Sam Houston, was making overtures
for English protection as an alternative to failure to get a favorable
hearing in Washington. Southern States petitioned for annexation, while
Middle Westerners met in a convention at Cincinnati in August, 1843, and
demanded the immediate seizure of Texas and prompt occupation of Oregon.
Thousands of emigrants left Missouri during the summer of 1843 for the
Columbia Valley, under the encouragement of Senator Benton and for the
purpose of holding the country against English fur traders or more
permanent settlers. Under all this pressure the Administration let it be
known in Congress that at least Texas would be annexed. Upshur reopened
negotiations with the Texan envoy in Washington. Immediately John Quincy
Adams protested, declaring the "Confederacy" to be dissolved in case
Tyler's "nefarious" scheme should be consummated; but the President
continued to press the Texan negotiations.
When the treaty with the new republic was about concluded, Upshur was
accidentally killed by the explosion of a gun on the ship Princeton.
Calhoun, whose ardent candidacy for the Democratic nomination had
failed, was called to the State Department to take up the unfinished
work. Meanwhile the campaigns of the two great parties were already far
advanced. Clay was the acknowledged candidate of the Whigs, and Van
Buren had obtained the pledged support of two thirds of the delegations
to the next Democratic Convention, which was to meet in Baltimore in
May, 1844. Instinctively dreading new issues, Van Buren arranged a visit
to Jackson in the early spring, and on his return he called on Clay at
Lexington, Kentucky, where it seems to have been agreed that the two
candidates should eventually eliminate the Texas proposition from the
platforms of the two great parties. On April 20, when Clay was in
Raleigh, North Carolina, and Van Buren was at his home at Lindenwald,
New York, public letters were given out by both leaders. Both advised
against discussing the one thing everybody was discussing. The
simultaneous appearance of these formal statements, each advising the
same thing, caused a national sensation. Men thought that the two
candidates had agreed beforehand what the people should not do. In
Virginia, South Carolina, and Mississippi, where Texas feeling ran high,
Democratic opinion could not be restrained, and meetings were called to
reconsider the instructions of their delegations to the Baltimore
Convention; nor were the Southern Whigs less anxious about the outcome,
though the party as a whole acquiesced in Clay's wish that Texas should
be eliminated from their forthcoming platform.
At this point Robert J. Walker, Senator from Mississippi, a shrewd
little man who had gone to the Southwest eighteen years before to make
his fortune, assumed the management of the Democratic party. A bold land
speculator and an able lawyer, connected with the powerful Dallas and
Bache families in Pennsylvania, he quickly rose to a commanding position
in his State and was sent to the United States Senate, where he soon
made himself felt as the most radical representative of Southern and
Western interests, urging the rapid removal of the Indians beyond the
western frontiers, free homesteads for all who would go West, and the
immediate annexation of Texas. An intimate friend of Van Buren, a
persistent opponent of Calhoun, and a rival of Benton for national
honors, Walker published on Jackson Day, January 8, 1844, a letter to
the public which was immediately reprinted in the newspapers of the
South and West, and which in pamphlet form had a very wide circulation.
In this letter he came out boldly for the "reannexation of Texas and the
reoccupation of Oregon,"--all Oregon. His rhetorical language and his
defiance of England gained the public ear on both Texas and Oregon,
while his shrewd suggestions of commercial expansion in the Pacific won
powerful support in New York and Boston. But the greatest stroke of this
publication was the apparent Southern demand for all Oregon, and before
the Van Buren-Clay "self-denying ordinances" appeared, Walker was
forging the union of South and West on the proposition, reannexation of
Texas and reoccupation of Oregon, and maneuvering in Washington for what
was later called the "bargain of the Baltimore Convention." Walker's
relations with the Pennsylvania leaders gave him a strong position in
that great Democratic community, and he soon secured the support of
Thomas Ritchie, the master politician in Virginia. When the Democrats
met, late in May, the "little Senator" was in perfect control. He
renewed and vitalized the rule of the Democratic party whereby the
candidate must secure two thirds of all votes cast in order to receive
the nomination. He procured the passage of this resolution by a mere
majority vote, and thus Van Buren, who had a majority of the delegates
instructed to vote for him, was deprived of the leadership of the party.
The Walker slogan, "All of Texas, all of Oregon," was adopted by the
convention, and James K. Polk, formerly Speaker of the House of
Representatives, was nominated for the Presidency. Walker's
brother-in-law, George M. Dallas, a Pennsylvania protectionist, was
nominated for the Vice-Presidency. It was but a few days before the
Northwestern men indicated the trend of events by giving every assurance
of their support and adding to the campaign cry of Walker the
"fifty-four-forty-or-fight" slogan which was heard on every stump from
June till November.
Van Buren was humiliated and eliminated from the counsels of the party;
Clay laughed at his "dark-horse" competitor, of whom he affected never
to have heard; Calhoun, the legitimate beneficiary of the Texas
propaganda, joined Walker with heart and soul and aided greatly in the
management of the campaign. A new Democratic régime--the South and West
coöperating--had been founded. This second coalition aimed at Clay and
the East resembled very strikingly that of 1828. And new issues had been
injected into the national discussion. A rapid extension of the national
domain to the Rio Grande, to the Pacific, and to 54° 40' of north
latitude in the Far Northwest was opposed to Clay's well-worn program of
a protective tariff, national bank, and internal improvements.
Meanwhile Calhoun and Tyler completed their treaty with Texas and
submitted it to the Senate, where it was held in suspense until after
the meeting of the conventions. Tyler, after some hesitation, gave his
support to Polk and Dallas. Calhoun suppressed uprisings against the new
leadership in South Carolina, where strong doubt prevailed as to the
purposes of Walker and Dallas with reference to the tariff. The old
statesman, isolated though he was, thought that if the South and West
could be held together the future would be secure. He took pleasure in
the belief that "this is the end of Clay," who had so long troubled the
national waters, while the politicians of the new coalition assured him
that he would succeed Polk in 1848. Webster said little during the
campaign; New England was divided by the promises of a great commercial
expansion and the annexation of Oregon. The election of Polk and Dallas
justified the bold moves of the Baltimore Convention. The scheme of
Tyler, looking to the annexation of Texas, California, and Oregon, was
now to be put into effect, even at the risk of war with England, whence
serious warnings had been coming since the new national purpose became
clear.
After years of uncertainty and deadlock, the country was now prepared
for a forward movement, and though Polk was not her ideal statesman, the
people rallied with fair unanimity to his standard. The new
Administration would represent the new Democratic party--a resolute
South and an ardent West. And the President-elect, simple and direct in
all his ways, was determined to carry out the purposes of his
supporters, namely, set the country upon a career of expansion hitherto
unparalleled in its history.
In Illinois, Missouri, and throughout the South the demand was
well-nigh unanimous that the disputed region along the Rio Grande should
be held as against Mexico, and that California and Oregon should be
seized and colonized. Cass, the older, and Douglas, the younger leader
of the Northwest, were agreed in these extreme demands; even Benton, the
disappointed friend of Van Buren, found compensation in the proposed
Pacific frontier, while a powerful group of Southerners led by Governor
Gilmer, of Virginia, Robert Barnwell Rhett, of South Carolina, William
L. Yancey, of Alabama, and Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, took up the
program of Calhoun and pressed it almost daily upon Congress and the
country. The South was about to resume control of the national fortunes.
In that region, where cotton was king, and tobacco, sugar, and rice were
powerful allies, a unique civilization had grown up. The plantation was
the model, and the patriarchal master of slaves the ideal character
which the ambitious poor imitated everywhere. The elegant life of the
colonial plantation houses, which adorned the banks of the winding
rivers of the old South in the days of the Revolution, had gradually
moved westward and southwestward until the larger tobacco area of the
Piedmont region extended from Petersburg, Virginia, to Greensboro, North
Carolina, and from the falls of the rivers to the slopes of the Blue
Ridge. Instead of running away from their slaves, as John Randolph had
feared Southern gentlemen would be compelled to do, the tobacco planters
found their business increasingly prosperous as the great cotton area
south of them opened larger markets for their crops and higher prices
for their surplus negroes. Even the wheat-growers of Virginia and
Maryland became again prosperous when the great canals and the improved
turnpikes reached the valley of Virginia and opened still wider areas of
rich lands to the Richmond and Baltimore markets. The plantation form of
life penetrated the high lands of Virginia almost to the Tennessee
border, and slavery was fastening its hold upon the up-country people
who had formerly been hostile.
[Illustration: Tobacco Areas in 1840]
[Illustration: Cotton Areas in 1840]
But the vast cotton region, embracing the better part of middle and
eastern North Carolina and the accessible lands of the lower South to
Eastern Texas, and extending over most of the Mississippi Valley to St.
Louis, was the heart of the South, which supported the Polk
Administration and waged the war upon Mexico soon to begin. In this fine
country, men of ability made fortunes in a few years and learned to
imitate the life of the old southern manor houses. Forests were cleared
away in winter by the sturdy hands of slaves, and new fields were opened
to cotton culture each spring to supply the places of those that had
been rapidly worn down by unscientific methods of agriculture. The
cabins which made the homes of well-to-do men in the Jeffersonian epoch
gave way to substantial frame houses with massive columns and wide
verandas, with great hallways and broad banquet-rooms, which so much
delighted the heart of the planter of Calhoun's day. In a warm climate
like that of the cotton region the object of the builder was always to
attain cool recesses and retired gardens, where the social life of the
time displayed itself.
The houses were built on hilltops covered with primeval oaks, which cast
a dense shade over all. Sometimes stone or brick walls protected the
premises against the outer world, and wide entrances, guarded on either
side by sculptured lions or tigers, gave a dignity and a splendor which
reminded one of the estates of English noblemen. In the rear of these
pretentious and sometimes beautiful houses were the rows of negro
cabins, with their little gardens for the raising of vegetables and the
ranges for chickens, as dear to the palates of negro slaves as to those
of visiting clergymen. The barns and carriage houses completed the
outfit. Where hundreds of bales of cotton and thousands of barrels of
corn were grown annually, there would be driving or saddle horses for
the master's family and many Kentucky mules for the work of the fields;
and a plantation took on the appearance of a busy colony in a new
country. Sixty to a hundred negroes were regarded as the best labor unit
for profitable agriculture. Of these there would be a few house servants
trained in all the intricacies of patriarchal hospitality and courtesy.
The carriage driver and keeper of the stables, sometimes clad in the
extra dignity of a special livery and a tall silk hat, a tyrant to all
the little negroes, but an obsequious flatterer to those who were
welcome at the master's house, was perhaps the most envied man of the
estate. To see this matchless son of Africa mounted on the high seat of
an old-fashioned English carriage, as he drove his prancing horses to
the front door of the "great house" and asked if all were ready for
church, was to get a glimpse of the old South itself. The boasted
freedom of "poor white trash" or of "impudent free issue negroes" had no
attractions to him who enjoyed these high prerogatives.
The master who was responsible for the multitudinous life of the
plantation, arbiter of the fortunes, sometimes, of a thousand men, was
usually conscious of his power and, when "times were good," kind to his
dependents. He liked to see his negroes fat and happy, for a "likely
slave" was as good as money in the bank. Accustomed to the exercise of
authority, he was apt to be a member of the county court, the actual
governing agency of the old South, and as such he was always "squire."
From the county court he went to the state legislature, where he and his
fellow planters made the laws of these sovereign States of the old
régime. From local magistrate to chief executive the Southern community
was governed by the owners of slaves, and the great men whom they chose
to speak for the South in Congress or to advise the President and his
Cabinet or to sit upon the benches of the federal courts were invariably
masters of plantations, trained from early youth to the exercise of
authority and accustomed to receive the homage of their neighbors. It
was a mighty social and economic organization which had grown up in and
spread over the richer lands of South and West, as far as the borders of
Mexico and the valleys of the Ohio and Missouri. The wheat and tobacco
growers, the rice and sugar planters were allied to the more powerful
cotton lords, and, though there were party differences, all spoke the
same voice in the national life. Of the five or six millions of southern
white people in 1845 only seven or eight thousand were great plantation
masters, though some three hundred thousand were either owners of slaves
or members of the privileged families--a larger proportion than usual
for a favored class, but still a small number when compared to the total
population of the country which was, from 1845 to 1860, controlled by
them.
As was natural, the professional classes of the South, the lawyers,
clergymen, physicians, and teachers, were in close alliance with the
planters, their callings and their incomes being directly dependent on
them. A successful professional man soon became a master and usually
retired to a country seat. If a poor but capable young man gave promise
of power and leadership he was soon accepted by his dominant neighbors
and became a son-in-law of a privileged family; if a preacher rose to
fame doubting or even condemning the institutions of the South, he was
apt to find a way to change his views and to become a part of the system
before he reached his mature years. The articulate South was, therefore,
in economic and social life a unit in 1845, and this unit was the
strongest group in the country as a whole. Its demand for expansion
towards the southwest was based upon the common desire, the common law
of growth, and this growth was the only means of winning new votes in
Congress and in the electoral college. It was the same motive which
actuated the farmers of the Northwest and the commercial leaders of
New England when they demanded of the Federal Government the seizure of
Oregon or the protection of ships upon the ocean.
[Illustration: Wheat Areas in 1840]
If the planter and dominant element of the South urged Polk and Walker
onward in their course and gave power to Calhoun, the greater masses of
non-slaveholding Southerners were hardly less enthusiastic. The earlier
jealousy and fear of the planters had everywhere weakened as the new
lands of the South and West gave opportunity to the more ambitious to
rise in the social and economic scale. The sons of small farmers and
landless men in the old South had built the cotton kingdom of the lower
South, and were now drawing aristocratic Virginia and the Carolinas into
a close union with the new region. The widening of the area of slavery
was equivalent to the opening of a social safety valve to the older and
stratifying life of the South. Young men who had been hostile to slavery
at home became friendly allies in a new environment. Thus the small
farmers became enthusiastic supporters of the great machine of which
slavery was the base.
Not only so, the growers of corn and wheat in the remote hills and
mountains of the South, the men who distilled their grain into strong
drink, those who raised pigs or cotton a hundred or two hundred miles
west of the tobacco and cotton belts, could always find a market in the
plantation towns where calicos, "store-clothes," and trinkets could be
had for themselves and families. The long trains of quaint, covered
tobacco wagons which wound their way over rough roads from the
mountains to the black belt carried whiskey or other up-country products
to the plantations; the droves of mules, cattle, or hogs which poured
into the Carolinas and the Gulf region from East Tennessee and Kentucky
were bonds of attraction between the planters and the non-slaveholding
elements too powerful to be ignored. And as time passed the legislatures
under planter control built better highways and projected railways into
the richer sections of the interior, which invariably made allies of
these new economic communities, and gradually slavery followed in the
wake of the new channels of communication.
The most helpless of the Southern groups were the poorer farmers, who
lived on the semi-sterile lands which the planters refused to occupy or
in the pine barrens of the eastern Carolinas, and the landless class
which hung on to the skirts of slavery. Unambitious, ignorant, and
improvident, frequently the "ne'er-do-wells" of the old families,
ignored by the wealthy and spurned by the slaves, who gave them the name
of "poor white trash," their lot was hard, indeed. They earned a few
dollars a year at odd jobs, raised a few hogs or at most a bale or two
of cotton, and lived in cabins little better than those occupied by the
negroes. Their children were numerous, without educational advantages,
and accustomed to the poor and meager cultural life of an outcast class.
Their outlook was no better than that of their parents. Barefoot,
half-clad, yet alert and agile, hating negroes and fearing the masters,
these "Anglo-Saxons" offered the problem of the South. Unaccustomed to
independent voting, they did not endanger the existing order, and even
when they were aroused to a sense of their position, their ignorance and
dependence and prejudices prevented them from organizing in
self-defense. They usually followed their economic superiors, and
learned to denounce the tariff, internal improvements, and "scheming
Yankees" as roundly as did their wealthy neighbors.
Still, life in the South was in the open; the joys and the sports of the
people were those of healthy rural communities. The well-to-do and even
the poorer classes lived on horseback, bet on the races, and
participated in the rough-and-tumble games of the court days. The
wealthy did not refuse all relations with "the people" on such
occasions. The planter knew and called familiarly by name every man in
his part of the county, and the magistrates who made up the courts of
the people exercised a kindly patriarchal authority over their
"inferiors," the dependent whites. There were few occupants of jails or
penitentiaries; poorhouses were often tenantless, and asylums for the
insane were not numerous or crowded. Beggars and tramps were unknown.
Judged by the facts of life the system of slavery and large proprietors
was not so bad as it appeared; and as the South came into full
self-consciousness, say with the inauguration of Polk and Dallas, the
problems of adjustment of the different economic groups, of providing
better educational facilities for the poorer classes, and of meeting
certain religious and social requirements of the slaves themselves, were
fully recognized by the masters, and beginnings of improvement in all
these matters were already making.
In nothing was this more evident than in Southern religious life. The
South which followed Jefferson was largely indifferent to religious
dogmas of all kinds. Most of the greater leaders had been deists rather
than Christians; nor had they suffered for these opinions at the hands
of the people. Calhoun's Unitarianism had in no way retarded his
political career. But before 1830 a change was taking place. The stout
Presbyterianism of the up-country forced the retirement of one of the
professors of the University of Virginia, in its earlier years, and it
compelled the resignation of President Cooper of the University of South
Carolina, in 1836, because of his denial of the inspiration of the
Pentateuch. The Presbyterians had grown powerful and wealthy; they
asserted their influence in Virginia and South Carolina, and they were
already recognized as leaders in North Carolina, Tennessee, and
Kentucky. What this denomination did was applauded by the more numerous
Baptists and Methodists, whose membership was as yet too poor to command
the influence of their rivals.
Before 1844, however, these great religious organizations in the South,
with a combined membership of nearly a million, received full
recognition. With a small-farmer and landless membership they had
opposed slavery and the whole aristocratic system before 1820, but as
the years passed, tobacco and cotton culture made many of them wealthy
and opened the way to all who were ambitious to rise. At once the
official attitude began to change. The preachers ceased first to
denounce "the institution," and finally without offense became
slave-owners themselves. The clergy's stern rebukes of fashion, of
dancing, and of "the wearing of fine raiment" ceased or lost its effect.
Presbyterians had long believed in an educated ministry, and when they
forced their influence into political life, they were already friendly
to the dominant ideas of the South. Now the Baptists and Methodists
built colleges for the training of young ministers, and preaching in
their simple churches was made to conform to the canons of good taste.
Throughout the South the churches became the allies of the existing
economic and social order, and they presented a solid front to those who
proposed to discipline men for holding other men in bondage. Their
clergy formulated a strong Biblical and patriarchal defense of the
South. Slavery, from being an institution to be lamented as an evil,
became a blessing sustained by the Holy Scriptures, according to the
ablest ministers of God.
When the Northern branches of these churches found how completely their
Southern brethren had yielded to the powerful social pressure of their
local life, a vigorous attempt was made to correct the tendency. It
failed, and in 1844-45 the Baptists of the East and those of the upper
Northwest refused to coöperate with Southern churches which insisted on
the right to send out missionaries who owned slaves. A Southern Baptist
Church was the immediate result. In the same year, 1844, the Methodists
of the East and upper West refused to recognize the ministrations of a
bishop who owned slaves, and a break-up of the church followed. The
Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was organized at Louisville the
following year. The Presbyterians and Episcopalians had become so
completely reconciled to the aristocratic life which slavery connoted
that they sustained no serious breach in their ranks. In the North as
well as in the South they accepted slavery. A notable result of these
breaks in the Baptist and Methodist churches was the rapid increase of
membership of both in the South. Within a period of ten years the
Southern Baptists were as powerful as the American Baptists had been in
1844. The same is true of the Methodists, and what happened in the South
was paralleled in the North. Pro-slavery churches in the South and
anti-slavery churches in the North seemed to be required by the people.
Revivals, educational improvements, and missionary zeal were the fruits
of the "reformation." Politicians like Calhoun, who watched and
counseled these peaceful schisms, urged that the Union must in due time
likewise break into pieces; but the great economic forces of the country
were as yet too strong; common markets, interlocking transportation
systems, and the extraordinary prosperity which followed the Polk régime
defeated the wishes of those who thought that two confederations within
the area of the United States would be better than one.
Thus, when Polk took up the forward program which had been outlined at
Baltimore, and which was to antiquate the "American System" over which
Clay and Jackson and their respective groups had fought so bitterly
since 1824, the South was rapidly crystallizing into a solid section
with definite ideas and purposes. The plantation owners were in full
command; the older and small-farmer element was falling into line behind
their pro-slavery leaders; the social and religious life had become
orthodox and stratified; and the clergy, who now preached acceptably to
great masses of people, were, like those of New England, in full
sympathy with the dominant economic interests of their time. The
immediate future of the South was fairly certain, and Southern leaders
assumed a militant tone indicative of the wishes of their people.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Justin H. Smith's _Annexation of Texas_ (1911) and G. P. Garrison's
_Westward Extension_ (1906), in _American Nation_ series, give full and
trustworthy accounts of the Texas movement; while Lyon G. Tyler's _Times
of the Tylers_ (1884); C. H. Ambler's _Life of Thomas Ritchie_ (1913);
J. W. DuBose's _Life of William L. Yancey_ (1892); and J. F. H.
Claiborne's _Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman_ (1860), supply
abundant material showing the temper and purposes of the different parts
of the South in 1840. U. B. Phillips's _The Plantation and Frontier_
(1909) is an excellent source-book for the period, and the Adams
_Memoir_, Clay _Correspondence_ (Colton), Calhoun _Correspondence_
(Jameson), and Mrs. A. M. Coleman's _The Life of John J. Crittenden_
(1871) are most useful for these years. The debates of Congress for the
period of 1833 to 1873 are found in the _Congressional Globe_ and
_Appendices_. For the philosophy of slavery and the Southern social
system of which slavery was the basis read _The Pro-Slavery Argument_
(1852), containing Thomas R. Dew's and James H. Hammond's writings on
the subject.