The lower South in American history

Front matter

Class _E^6^.

GopiglitN?

GfiSiailGHT DEPOSIT.

Preface

The substance of the first three papers in this volume has been given in the form of public lectures at Harvard University and at various Southern colleges. The three essays which follow are reprinted by the consent of the publishers of The Atlantic Monthly, and are but slightly changed from the form in which they appeared in that magazine. The other two papers have not been published before. No one but myself is responsible for any opinions or any errors, but I am indebted to many persons, North and South, for facts, for suggestions, and for criticism. The criticisms of Professor Guy Stevens Callender, of Bowdoin College, on the title essay, were particularly helpful.

There is something I might say by way of apology for the thin and fragmentary effect which the whole must have, but my impulse is to leave it unsaid, and to say, instead, what the slight hope is which I have in the book. The viii PREFACE

utmost it can accomplish is to sketch what now I cannot paint ; to give an earnest of what waits on circumstance. For my true task, Uke many another task of many another man, must wait for better days : for days of confident mornings and calm evenings. Such his days and nights must be, and firm his will must be, his mind at peace, his silence undistracted, who would enter into the body of this civiHzation which I have tried to intimate with outlines, and make it live again through these and other of its times and seasons, he also living in it, and dying in it, and rising in it again. For that, and nothing less, is the demand it makes of its historian.

It will be something if these papers shall make it plain that my subject is a true body of human life, — a thing, and not a mass of facts, a topic in political science, an object lesson in large moralities. To know the thing itself should be our study; and the right study of it is thought and passion, not research alone. For this, like every other great and tragical human thing, passes forever into the mind and character and life of whosoever touches it, though he touch it never so lightly. If he himself be born of it, then he inherits all its past. It will forever strain him forth beyond his

PREFACE ix

narrow bounds of individual experience ; darken his doubt into bewilderment ; insist upon its share in his achievement; echo with its Appomatox his little failures and surrenders. There is no other such thing in the world. An eminent man of purpose, who will never condone a tragedy, called it once " the saddest fact in all the world," — and felt not, perhaps, how many dreary lives he compassed with his phrase.

And yet, it compensates sometimes, even while it damns. I have come out of it and stood apart, and it drew me back with a most potent charm. Through and through it I have plunged, — from end to end of it in history, from end to end of it in physical dimension. Emerging on the other side of it, I stood on the-' long hill by San Antonio, the low, gray cross of the Alamo beneath me, where once in death it grimly triumphed, and looked back upon it, and cursed it, and blessed the flag of the Republic, fluttering there on Fort Sam Houston, for a sign of the stronger and better thing that overthrew it. Nevertheless, there also it persisted, conquerable but indestructible, stretching thence back over the dark lands about the Gulf, the Georgian hills, the Carolinian rice swamps, on to the Potomac and the Virginian lowlands, where

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the first acquiescence was, and the first ease, and the first slow working out of sin. And then — I turned to the westward; and to me, as to Obermann on his Alp, as to every man, greater or less, who takes upon him the burden of a mystery too heavy for his weak heart, there came once more, unsought, unreasoned, hateful, the old reaction and resurrection from despair. Once more, with eyes like theirs who from the Alamo looked out upon the Spaniard, — like hers, the sweetvoiced child's beside me, heiress, as I am heir, to all the sorrow and all the tortured pride of it, — once more, defiantly and gently, I faced the future, charged with whatever repetitions, whatever fresh bewilderments, over the Texan plains.

Cambridge, April 24, 1902.

Contents

I. The Lower South in American History (I 820-1 860)

1. The Rise of the Cotton States .

2. The Ascendency of the Lower South

II A Study Of An Agitator

In the study of American history, we seem to have attained a sufficient remoteness from the great antislavery agitators to justify confidence in the estimates of them and their work which historians like Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Schouler have been making for us. In these fresh and careful accounts of the great sectional controversy, Garrison and Phillips take their place close alongside the men of action who carried on the fight in Congress, in the White House, and on the battlefield. It is, therefore, somewhat surprising that the proslavery agitators are generally neglected by the historians of their times. The congressional side of the proslavery fight has been adequately portrayed, and some attention has been given to the governors and other officials in the South who were active champions of the doomed institution. But of the proslavery agitators, properly so called, we know very little. Even Mr. Rhodes, whose . "5

Il6 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION

account of Southern society exhibits so conscientious a desire to understand the springs of the secession movement, has told us far less than we should like to know of them, and particularly of the man who was foremost in that work.

The fact is not explained by any lack of striking and picturesque features in the man's career, for it was in many ways extraordinary ; nor can it be attributed to the failure of his enterprise, for he and his fellows accomplished their immediate purpose. They may at least share equally with Garrison and Phillips and their associates in the responsibihty for precipitating the conflict at one time instead of another, and for the lines on which the issue was finally joined. Yet for chapters on the work of the antislavery agitators — work that began and ended with agitation — one finds scarcely a line devoted to the life-work of William Lowndes Yancey. An industrious biographer^ has indeed published a mass of interesting facts about his life and times, but the book, though favorably known to investigators, has made little headway toward reestablishing his fame. His very name, which in the later fifties was a rallying cry to the defenders of slavery, and

THE ORATOR OF SECESSION WJ

to its assailants an execration, is known to few who cannot go back in memory to those terrible years. Thousands of youth, fresh from the study of their country's history even in our best colleges, would be astounded, no doubt, to hear a claim advanced for him, as it might be, and quite seriously, to a place among the half-dozen men who have had most to do with shaping American history in this century. A pause over his grave should not prove useless to those who are attempting a philosophical treatment of the period to which he belongs.

He was of good Virginian ancestry, but his father, Benjamin Cudworth Yancey, lived in South Carolina, and was numbered with Lowndes, Cheves, Calhoun, and Wilds, in the so-called "legal galaxy" of the Palmetto State. The father died in 1817, when the son was three years old, and left but a small fortune ; the boy's education was therefore limited to a single year at Williams College. After that, he studied law at Greenville, South Carolina, and at twenty he was a practitioner at the bar, the editor of a Unionist paper, and an anti-nullification orator. At twenty-one, he married a wealthy lady and became a planter. A year later, he went with his slaves to Alabama

Il8 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION

and established himself at Oakland, a plantation in the heart of the Black Belt, near Cahawba, the first capital of the young commonwealth, — a city of sudden birth and swift decay, now quite vanished from the earth.

Here he lived the quiet life of a cotton planter until an irretrievable disaster, the accidental poisoning of his slaves, drove him back into law and journalism ; and journalism and the law led him into politics. Meanwhile, the headship of a slave establishment had so strengthened the ties which bound him to his class and his section that no trace of Unionism was left in his mind when he entered the campaign of 1840 as a Van Buren man. Alabama was Democratic, but the Whigs were making a wonderful canvass. The demand for state rights oratory was great, and it was as a state rights Democrat of the strictest sect that Yancey first appeared, in the hard-cider year, before Alabama audiences. His success was such that for twenty years thereafter his sway over the people of the state was comparable to nothing that we of a cooler-headed generation have ever seen. Chief Justice Stone, a jurist not unknown to lawyers of the present day, once said: "I first heard Mr. Yancey in 1840. I thought then,

THE ORATOR OF SECESSION II9

and I yet think, he was the greatest orator I ever heard."

He rose rapidly to power. At twenty-seven, he was in the lower house of the legislature. At twenty-nine, he was a state senator. At thirty, a by-election sent him to Congress. His reputation as an orator had preceded him, and his first speech at Washington extended it widely, while the immediate consequences of the speech made him for a time a national celebrity. Clingman, of North Carolina, had become a target for Southern invective when he opposed the annexation of Texas, the principal measure under debate during the winter of 1844-45. To Yancey, though a new member, his fellows granted the distinguished privilege of replying for them all ; and if he excelled in one sort of oratory more than another it was in impassioned invective. His speech made a pronounced impression on the House and the country, and Clingman, stung to the quick, demanded an explanation of certain personal allusions. Yancey haughtily declined to explain. Clingman then asked for **the satisfaction usual among gentlemen"; and with this demand his opponent, who had killed his man in an earlier affair, instantly complied.

The meeting was bloodless, and the opponents of dueling failed entirely in their efforts to make an example of the principals. Preston King's resolution for an investigation was beaten in the House, and the legislature of Alabama passed, over the governor's veto, an act relieving Yancey of the political disabilities which, under the laws of the state, he had incurred. To the Alabama Baptist, a religious paper which severely censured his course, Yancey wrote : " The laws of God, the laws of my own state, the solemn obligations due 'that young wife, the mother of my children,' to whom you so feelingly and chastely allude, were all considered ; but all yielded, as they have ever done from the earliest times to the present, to those laws which public opinion has framed, and which no one, however exalted his station, violates with impunity." It was a poor defence, but Alexander Hamilton's was little better.

Unopposed by the Whigs, Yancey was returned for the term beginning in 1845, and his reputation was much strengthened by his speeches during the first session. Apparently, he had every reason to look forward to a brilliant career in public life. But at the end of the session he resigned his seat, formed a partnership with a distinguished lawyer of Montgomery, and stated with the utmost clearness his reasons for retiring. He never again held office under the government of the United States. I have set down the facts of his career up to this point as briefly as I could, for the reason that his true life-work began with his withdrawal from Congress.

The address to his constituents in which he announced his retirement was in the main a bitter arraignment of the Northern Democrats. He charged them with subserviency to sectional interests antagonistic to the welfare of the South, and with infidelity to the party's historical principles. "If principle," he declared, "is dearer than mere party association, we will never again meet in common Democratic convention a large body of men who have vigorously opposed us on principle." The scorn of compromise was the key-note of his address ; resistance to compromise was the sum total of the endeavor to which he thus committed himself. The recreant party must be brought back to the principles of strict construction or no longer leaned upon as the bulwark of Southern rights. The South must cease to rely on party, and insist, regardless of party platforms and party interests, upon all it had a right to claim under the "compact of union." The ultimate remedy for Northern aggression he did not yet name; but when occasion arose, in the controversy over the territory acquired from Mexico, he named it promptly and clearly. It was not nullification, or interposition, or any other form of resistance inside the Union ; it was secession from the Union. To the fight against compromise Yancey gave the remainder of his life. To understand how he fought and why he won, it is necessary to have some knowledge of the people among whom he lived and the means of agitation that were available.

Politically, the people of the Cotton states were divided into three parties. There were, indeed, few who did not call themselves either Whigs or Democrats ; but the extreme state rights men, though they usually cooperated with the Democrats, repeatedly asserted themselves in such a way as to present the aspect of a third party. Although a majority of the great planters were probably Whigs in name, they usually stood for the interests of their class, and in consequence they frequently found themselves in closer accord with the state rights or " Southern Rights " Democrats of their own section than with the Whigs of the North. On the other hand, the bulk of the Democrats, small farmers, tradesmen, and the like were nowhere committed, except in South Carolina, to the extreme doctrines of Calhoun and other leaders in the resistance to centralization. There is no good reason to believe that either nullification or secession, considered as a policy, had a majority of the party in any state except South Carolina; and in South Carolina the Calhoun men controlled so completely that the ordinary party divisions can hardly be said to have prevailed there at all. It was to the state rights men, mingled as they were with the supporters of both the great national parties, that Yancey turned for help in the task he had undertaken.

It may be said, however, that the public mind of the entire South was in a state altogether favorable to revolutionary enterprises. A growing unrest was in many ways apparent. Industrial unrest, due to economic causes, was exhibited in a revival of the migratory impulse. Early in the fifties, we find Senator C. C. Clay complaining bitterly of the abandonment of lands near his home in the fertile valley of the Tennessee. Olmsted's books are full of allusions to the westward movement of cotton growers, even from regions so

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recently settled as the valleys of the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers. It was about this time that the failure of the state bank systems throughout the South was finally accepted by the legislatures and the people. The political signs of unrest were unmistakable. In Yancey's own state, party lines were drawn in so many ways during the decade from 1845 to 1855 that the party names are bewildering. Whigs and Democrats, Bank men and Anti-Bank men. Unionists and Southern Rights men. Know-nothings and Anti-Know-nothings sought the favor of the people. At such a time, tenacity of purpose counted. In the midst of hesitatiop and indecision, Yancey had the immense advantage of knowing his own mind.

He had another advantage in that he lived among a people peculiarly incapable of resisting any appeal that might be made to them as his was, — a people over whom the power of a real orator was incalculable. An editor like Garrison, a poet like Whittier or Lowell, a novelist like Mrs. Stowe, could hardly have swayed the planters of Alabama as they swayed the people of New England ; for it must be said of the lower South that its culture was not of books. Mr. Rhodes, guided by the testimony of European travellers, has reached the conclusion that the best society in the South was finer than in the North. "The palm," he declares, " must be awarded to the slaveholding section." But the qualities that made the Southern host so attractive to the travelled Englishman or Frenchman were not developed in an atmosphere of free libraries or free public schools. There were really no public libraries in the Cotton states, and the public school system did not flourish in a region so sparsely settled and so devoted to agriculture. The literary activity which gave to the world such new names as Hawthorne and Emerson had in no wise stirred the lower South. Certain newspapers, like those of Charleston and New Orleans and the Montgomery Advertiser^ were edited with ability, and were by no means unimportant forces in politics. Indeed, if one gives due weight to the fewness of cities, the influence of the newspaper press seems to have been fully as great as one could expect. But it was the spoken word, not the printed page, that guided thought, aroused enthusiasm, made history. It is doubtful if there ever has been a society in which the orator counted for more than he did in the Cotton Kingdom.

Yet at first blush it would seem that, as compared with the lyceum orator of New England, the oratorical agitator in the lower South had serious obstacles to contend with. He had, indeed, no such machinery as the lyceum to bring him before his audiences. Moreover, the railroads were few and short; there were no great cities and few important towns. But he did not need the device of the lyceum to get an audience. Its place was amply filled by the law courts, the political meetings and conventions, the camp-meetings, and the barbecues. For, from the nature of their chief industry, the people were unemployed during certain seasons ; and they were all familiar with the uses of horseflesh. Time was often heavy on their hands, and everybody rode and drove. The cross-roads church stood often quite out of sight of human habitations, but its pews were apt to be well filled on Sunday, and the branches of the trees in front of it were worn with bridles. The court-house, marking the county seat, might have no other neighbors than a "general" store and a wretched inn ; but when some famous lawyer rose to defend a notorious criminal, hundreds, even thousands, followed with flashing or tearful eyes the dramatic action which surely accompanied his appeal. An important convention was not without a "gallery" because it was held in a town of few inhabitants and the meanest hotel accommodations. As to the barbecues and camp-meetings, they were nothing less than outpourings of the people. At Indian Springs, in Georgia, during the hard-cider campaign, there was given a barbecue to which "the whole people of all Georgia " were invited. It was attended by thousands ; the orators, of whom Yancey was one, spoke by day and by night ; and it lasted a week.

These, in fact, were the true universities of the lower South, — the law courts, and the great religious and political gatherings ; as truly as a grove was the university of Athens, or a church, with its sculpture and paintings, the Bible of a mediaeval town. The man who wished to lead or to teach must be able to speak. He could not touch the artistic sense of the people with pictures or statues or verses or plays ; he must charm them with voice and gesture. There could be no hiding of the personality, no burying of the man in his art or his mission. The powerful man was above all a person ; his power was himself. How such a great man mounted the rostrum, with what demeanor he endured an interruption, with what gesture he silenced a murmur, — such things were remembered and talked about when his reasoning was perhaps forgotten.

Nor can it be said that the convictions thus implanted were less deep and lasting than if they had resulted, as in other communities, from appeals addressed more especially to the intellect. The peculiarly impressionable character of Southern audiences of that day, their quick responsiveness to any plea that graced itself with the devices of the one art they loved, might very well have led a cool-headed observer to measure the outcome by the criterion of Latin-American civilization. Instability, lightness, might with reason have been attributed to such a people. But whatever changes had come over the temper of the English stock in the Cotton states, it had never lost its habit of fidelity to the cause once espoused, its sternly practical way of turning words into deeds. What many a Northern optimist considered mere bluster in the fifties took on the horrid front of war in the sixties ; what seemed credulity in the farmer audiences who merely listened and shouted rose into the dignity of faith in the Petersburg trenches. He who cannot reconcile excitability with strength of purpose can never understand the people to whom Yancey spoke. ^

Nowhere were these characteristics of the men of the lower South more strongly marked than in Yancey's own home and the region of which it was the centre. The country wagons that always filled the main square of the Alabama capital brought every day the two most forcible illustrations of his contention. The cotton bale was his object-lesson when he sought to quicken his people's sense of the interests which were endangered when the manufacturing states controlled at Washington. The negro on top of it was a constant reminder of mastery, a constant incitement to a heightened appreciation of the liberty that was still, as in Burke's day, not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and

1 Even so perspicacious a Northern man as Lowell, on the very eve of the election in i860, was assuring his countrymen that the Union was not in danger. " Mr. W. L. Yancey, to be sure, threatens to secede ; but the country can get along without him, and we wish him a prosperous career in foreign parts. . . . That gentleman's throwing a solitary somerset will hardly turn the continent head over heels." How grimly history glozes that ridicule !

privilege. To the Southerner, liberty meant nothing less than the right of himself and his community to be free from all interference by the peculiar outside world which had neither cotton nor slaves, — the meddlesome outside world which kept prating of a higher law, above the Constitution, above the Scriptures, rolling its /s the while in such a disagreeable way.

It was not, however, after the fashion of the common demagogue that Yancey sought to lead his people. His claim to our respect as a political thinker is far stronger than that. He did not show them merely the obvious aspects of the sectional controversy. On the contrary, it is doubtful if any mind in the country dwelt more fixedly than his on the relations of the South to the rest of the Union, and of slavery to American civilization ; or if any more remorselessly pursued the facts, from one point of view, to their remoter consequences and significance. In this regard, Yancey was no unworthy successor to Calhoun. He was never clamorous or shrill, however vehement he grew, because no particular exigency ever drew his attention from the main question. Perceiving from the outset that the crucial test of strength between slavery and its assailants must come in dealing with the territories, he took his stand on that question, and never changed it.

His first effort was to bring his party to his position ; and his position was first clearly stated in a political document once famous as the "Alabama platform" of 1848. To the Alabama Democratic convention of that year, called to choose delegates to the national convention, Yancey went as a delegate, carrying this document in his pocket. The committee on resolutions brought in a much milder declaration, but by a notable oratorical triumph he got his own views adopted instead. Following the line of Calhoun's resolutions of 1847, the platform declared that it was the duty of Congress not merely to permit slavery in the territories acquired from Mexico, but to protect it there. The most important clause was a denunciation of the new theory of squatter sovereignty, — a theory which Yancey always regarded as the most insidious of all attacks on the equality of the Southern states in the Union. The resolution on this doctrine became the true gospel of the fire-eaters. It read as follows : —

" Resolved, That the opinion advanced or maintained by some that the people of a territory acquired by the common toil, suffering, blood, and treasure of the people of all the states can, in other event than the forming of a state constitution, preparatory to admittance as a state in the Union, lawfully or constitutionally prevent any citizen of any such state from removing to or settling in such territory with his property, be it slave property or other, is a restriction as indefensible in principle as if such restriction were imposed by Congress."

The delegates pledged themselves to support no candidate for the presidency who would not openly oppose both methods of excluding slavery from the territories — by the action of Congress, and by the action of territorial legislatures. The delegates to the national convention at Baltimore, with Yancey at their head, were instructed to act in accordance with the resolutions. With Democrats elsewhere who would not accept the resolutions as good party doctrine the Alabama Democrats would have no fellowship. Yancey immediately wrote to the various aspirants for the presidential nomination for an expression of their views, in order that he and his associates might be governed by their replies.

This was the most advanced stand that any party convention had yet taken in the controversy ; but for a moment it looked as if the whole of the Southern democracy were going to take it at once. The Alabama platform had done for the proslavery agitation what the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, at the close of the eighteenth century, did for the Anti-Federalist impulse. Democratic conventions in Florida and Virginia hastened to adopt it; the legislatures of Georgia and Alabama indorsed it. Then suddenly it fell into disfavor. Moderate men who loved the Union saw in it danger to the country's peace ; politicians, looking forward to the campaign, scented danger to the party. Yancey returned from a circuit of the courts to find the newspapers turning against him, the presidential aspirants replying evasively to his letters, and even his fellow-delegates wavering. He himself did not waver for an instant. At Baltimore, he spoke firmly, first objecting to the nomination of a candidate until a platform should be agreed on, and then urging his views in a minority report from the committee on resolutions. His amendment being rejected, and Cass, the reputed author of the squatter sovereignty doctrine, being named as the candidate, he arose, and with a single follower left the hall.

The situation when he returned to his home was an admirable one to try the temper of an agitator. The people crowded to hear him defend his course ; at one meeting after another the Democrats urged him in affectionate terms to reconsider his purpose and yield to the will of the majority. But he had the born agitator's inability to accept defeat. He declined to support Cass, or in any way to recede from his position. On the contrary, he denounced with the utmost bitterness the course of his fellow-delegates at Baltimore. He would come back into the party when it abandoned squatter sovereignty, and not before. Alabama cast her electoral votes for Cass and Butler, and his labors seemed to have gone for nothing. He had failed in his attempt at party leadership. But one thing was left to him : his prestige as an orator always sufficed to get him a hearing. On one occasion, a public meeting first voted that he should not be heard, and then, when it was announced that he would speak on the other side of the street, adjourned thither en masse without the formality of a vote.

He kept on speaking, and before long the crisis of 1849-50 gave him another opening. As the time for the decision of the territorial question approached, party lines in the Cotton states grew weaker and weaker. Democrats who feared for the Union favored a compromise ; many Whigs, moved by their attachment to slavery and the plantation system, favored a firm stand for the Southern contention. Yancey found himself in the forefront of the opposition to Clay's plan for saving the Union. He believed that the rights of the Southern states had been sacrificed in the compromise of 1820. To accept another arrangement that would hinder the extension of slavery was to his mind like submitting to a second branding. The honor of the South was at stake, not its material interests alone. With this appeal he won many to his side ; it played upon the instinct that had kept the duello alive. He even found his way back into the councils of the Democratic party. That party, in fact, seemed on the eve of disruption throughout the South. Union men and Southern Rights men were struggling for the mastery in the organization. The people were really dividing, with little regard to parties, on the issue of compromise or resistance, and the Whigs were for the most part joining the Union Democrats. For the first time, there was a clear division in Yancey's own state between those who thought the plantation system safe inside the Union and those who were ready to weigh the peculiar interests and the honor of the South against the value of the Union.