Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 6: Fears and assumptions, 1860

Runaway slave, 1837

We looked back to 1860 in yesterday's post to a message by the Honorable C.G. Memminger (Christopher Gustavus Memminger) on behalf of the South Carolina legislature to the Virginia legislature in 1860, encouraging them to join South Carolina in convening a Southern Convention in the event of Abraham Lincoln's election as President. His remarks were published in a post-election issue of the influential Southern journal, De Bow's Review Nov 1860, under the title "The South Carolina Mission to Viginia".

John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, even though it was a failure as a military operation and as a political operation in the sense that it was intended, set off real panic among Southerners. It can be hard to know in any individual case whether a particular speaker or writer believes his own claims. But the panic was widespread and real.

The Hon. C.G. Memminger was more than willing to fan the flames. And his language about Harper's Ferry and its implications offer some real insight into the fevered, paranoid defensive frenzy into which many Southerners were working themselves in 1859-60.

In the following passage, the Honorable Gentleman cites two events that pro-slavery agitators linked in their minds and their propaganda. One was Brown's Harper's Ferry raid and the aftermath. The other was the revelation that several leading Republicans in 1859 had decided to distribute excerpt's from the anti-slavery book by Hinton Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How To Meet It (1857). Memminger refers here to a controversy then very familiar, in which the Democrats had blocked the election of Republican Congressman John Sherman to the Speakership of the House of Representatives for the Session that began in December 1859, because Sherman had specifically endorse Helper's book. The Honorable Gentleman complains bitterly that their Northern enemies had refused to denounce John Brown, although leading Republicans politics had been denouncing him all over the place:

In our country, so far from there being any proper indication of disavowal [of Brown], the indications are the other way. Elections have taken place at the North since the Harper's Ferry invasion, in which the public sentiment has been exhibited. Those who maintain the abolition views have proved stronger than they ever were before. In New-York they have triumphed over the other parties combined together; and in Boston, notwithstanding an attempt to stay the tide, the same result has followed. In Congress, the same lamentable exhibition is afforded. More than one hundred members prefer to keep the government disorganized, rather than abandon a candidate whose recommendation of a book inviting a combined effort to introduce anarchy and servile war [slave insurrection] at the South, makes him obnoxious to the South: and of these some sixty have signed a recommendation of the same book; and there they stand, and have stood for more than six weeks, with unbroken front, refusing any kind of concessions to the outraged feelings of the South.

Although De Bow's Review doesn't give the actual date, Memminger delivered his message to a joint session of the Virginia legislature on January 19, 1860.

This undated paper by David Brown of Sheffied University, "We have whipped out Sherman and the Helperites": Hinton Rowan Helper, the Speakership Contest, and the Origins of the American Civil War, gives some background on the controversy over John Sherman's candidacy for the Speakership and the Helper book and on how the Harper's Ferry raid and the Republicans' support of the Helper book were so closely related in the fears of pro-slavery Southerners. Brown's paper as of this writing gives a misleading impression of Helper's phrase in the book about waging an "exterminating war" against slavery. It's clear he is speaking about exterminating the institution of slavery, not the slaveowners themselves.

Defenders of slavery were desperately afraid of two things, slave revolts and anti-slavery sentiment among Southern whites. Freedom of speech and the press for whites in large parts of the South had ceased to exist on the issue of slavery and everything touching it. Not only were abolitionist articles or books not allowed to be published or sold. But overt critics of slavery were persecuted harshly by both nominally legal and blatantly illegal means.

Fear of slave revolts, though largely unrealistic given the particular conditions prevailing in the South, had become endemic to the slave system. By compelling non-slaveowning whites to take part in regular "slave patrols", they were also trained in fear and hostility toward slaves. It was one method among others that the slaveowners used to try to maintain practical solidarity between slaveowners and non-slaveowning whites.

Brown's raid had sent many Southerners into a frenzy over both worries, slave revolts and anti-slavery white Southerners. The Honorable Gentleman's account of the intentions of John Brown's guerrilla group was factually false, but nevertheless revealing about the fears of many white Southerners. He described Brown's mission as follows. Reciting the glorious history of the state of Virginia and its contributions to America, he said:

... yet all this could not preserve her [Virginia] from the invasion of her soil, the murder of her citizens, and the attempt to involved her in the horrors of servile and civil war. That very North, to whom she had surrendered a territorial empire - who had grown great through her generous confidence - sent forth the assassins, furnished them with arms and money, and would fain rescue them from the infamy and punishment due to crimes so atrocious.

To estimate aright the character of the outrage at Harper's Ferry, we must realize the intentions of those who planned it. They expected the slaves to rise in mass as soon as the banner of abolitionism should be unfurled. Knowing nothing of the kindly feeling which exists throughout the South between the master and his slaves, they judged of that feeling by their own hatred, and expected that the tocsin which they sounded would at once arouse to rebellion every slave who hear it. Accordingly they prepared such arms as an infuriated and untrained peasantry could most readily use.

They also expected aid from another element of revolution. They did not believe in the loyalty to the government of Virginia of that part of her population which owned no slaves. They seized upon the armory, and they expected help from its operatives, and from the farming population; and to gain time for combining all these elements of mischief, as they conceived them to be, they seized upon a pass in the mountains [the town of Harper's Ferry], well adapted to their purpose. For months had they worked with fiendish and unwearied diligence, and it is hazarding little to conjecture, that the banditti who had been trained in Kansas, were in readiness to obey the summons to new scenes of rapine and murder, as soon as a lodgment were affected. [my emphasis]

Brown did expect slaves from nearby plantations to immediately come to join his band of fighters. But not as part of some general slave uprising. His intent was to steal weapons and ammunition from the federal armory at Harper's Ferry and to escape into the hills of Virginia where he would establish guerrilla bases and conduct raids to free slaves and thus further destabilize the slave system.

He wasn't counting on white Virginians to rise on his behalf, though.

But Memminger's claims present the obvious question: if the Slave Power was so confident of "the kindly feeling which exists throughout the South between the master and his slaves", and of the loyalty of non-slaveowning white Southerners to the slave system, why were they so terrified of slave revolts ("servile insurrection") and of free speech among Southern whites?

The answer is mostly likely that white Southerners were asked to pretend not to see the most obvious facts about their slave-states societies. And the Honorable Gentlemen was one of the most famous of those asking them to so pretend. Bertram Waytt-Brown writes in The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace,a nd War, 1760s-1880s (2001):

In contrast to unfeeling masterhood, Christopher Memminger, a Charleston layman, offered the ideal, which steadily became the most popular rendering of regional self-congratulation: "The Slave Institution at the South increases her tendency to dignify the family. Each planter in fact is a Patriarch - his position compels him to be a ruler in his household," guiding children, female dependents, and slaves alike with steady hand and loving voice. Like the image of the Southern lady, gracious and ethereal, the model of the Christian slaveholder was a stereotype that served a cultural function. It celebrated the alleged disappearance of old barbarisms and offered a standard of behavior to which respectable folk were to aspire. The lines between what was and what ought to be were sadly blurred, but the instructional function remained. [my emphasis]

The Republican Party had no intention of mounting a war of liberation against the slave system in the South. They were operating on the idea that if the further expansion of slavery were blocked, it would die out as an institution in the South as it had in the Eastern seaboard states of the North. But there is one sense in which the worry about Republican incursion into the South was justified, the workings of the normal process of political parties. The Honorable Gentleman told the Virginians:

The immense patronage and spoils of the government, and the large interest involved in the public expenditures, and in discriminating tariffs, bring to the aid of the dominant party every selfish interest, and enable it to rivet its fetters upon the South; while the hope held out to Southern aspirants for office is used to corrupt our leaders and confound our people.

In other words, if the Republicans won the Presidency, the power of federal patronage would allow them to establish themselves as a party in the South. And that would bring the dangerous ideas of abolition into the immediate hearing of those loyal slaves and the non-slaveowning Southern whites who were so loyally dedicated to preserving the slave system.

The Honorable Gentleman strikes other themes of Slave Power propaganda, as well. Because representatives of the free states objected to the extension of slavery after the Mexican War, this meant that they wanted that "no Southern man should stand upon the conquered territory [of Mexico] upon the same footing with the Northern." This reduced the Southern white man to a lower status than the Mormon, the "Chinaman", the infidel, "the Sandwich-Islander, or the Zambo".

All those, he whined, were expected to enjoy "equal protection and right, but the most valuable property of the the Southern man must be left behind." This imagery, that the Southern white man would be reduced to inferiority - much like a slave - if the North would not support slavery was a common theme in secessionist and Confederate propaganda. To be deprived of the right to hold other human beings, most of them fellow Christian believers, as human property would be an awful humiliation at the hands of the Northern man, in this argument. "It is not surprising that the Southern States should have been fired with indignation at this attack," said the Honorable Gentleman.

He used explicit emasculation imagery, as well: "The Delilah of the North had already cried out, 'The Philistines be upon thee, O Samson'."

But the object of the alleged desire of the Northern man to humiliate the humble slaveowner was always the same. "The generation which now has possession of the political power of the North has been regularly trained from childhood to the course which they are now pursuing. At their mother's knee they were taught that slavery was a sin." The Northern ministers contribute to this terrible desire to humiliate the Southern slavedriver: "The utterance of anathemas from the minister clothes the sentiment with the solemnity of religious truth. Slavery is denounced as a sin, and the conscience is misled to assume jurisdiction over Southern conduct."

Tags: christopher gustavus memminger, confederate heritage month 2009, slavery, us civil war