HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The American Civil War was fought, in Abraham Lincolns words, because the Union could no longer exist half slave and half free. Four million Americans in the southern states were held in bondage. Many northerners believed that slave owners wanted to extend this system, while southerners felt that northerners were out to destroy the source of their wealth, their peculiar institution of black chattel slavery. The issues involved were not only about race; they were also about work.
As Americans, we long have taken it for granted that men and women should be free to learn the trade, craft, or profession they choose or to start a business making, buying, or selling goods. Whether or not individuals really do have an equal opportunity to succeed, most people in this country assume that equal opportunity is a good thing, that individuals should be free to do the best they can for themselves and their families, and that they should be enabled to seek economic success. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, many Americans believed that southern slavery threatened these assumptions.
The ideal of equality is often referred to as liberalism. For our purposes, we use the term liberalism to mean maximum civil liberty and economic opportunity for each individual. A liberal society is one where individuals seek their own betterment, unobstructed by inherited traits like race, gender, religion, or caste. Liberalism assumes that humans are born equal and that no one deserves more or less than another because of ascribed status (e.g., being born a prince or a peasant, a duke or a slave). Ideally, a liberal society enhances the freedom of each individual to maximize his or her economic opportunity and to compete against others on equal terms.
Liberalism in this sense is so much a part of American ideology and seems so common to us that it is hard to imagine alternatives. Yet the liberal ideal is rather new. When Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations just two centuries ago, his argument that unobstructed individual freedom to compete in open markets rendered the greatest good to both individuals and soci eties was quite new. Open markets meant that neither prices of goods nor wages for labor should be fixed by custom; one could sell ones muscle power, skills, ideas, inventions, and goods for the maximum amount someone else was willing to pay. Before Smiths time, various forms of servitude were the predominant forms of labor: Serfs and peasants were obligated to work particular lands for particular individuals; African and Indian slaves in the Americas were bought and sold; and even apprentices and indentured servants in the American colonies were not able to render their labor freely to the highest bidder but instead owed it to others for years at a time. The ideal of a liberal society grew increasingly compelling throughout Europe and its colonial dependencies during the nineteenth century, though the reality of true equal opportunity remained elusive.
In his classic study entitled Democracy in America, published in the 1830s, the French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at how completely Americans accepted the ideology of equality; unlike in his country, no tradition of respect for kings and aristocrats called into question maximum equality as a social ideal. Perhaps better than anyone else, Abraham Lincoln articulated the liberal creed. Indeed, his ability to give poetic expression to it precisely when these cherished beliefs were being threatened by the breakup of the Union made him a compelling political figure. Lincoln declared on the eve of his race for the presidency against Steven A. Douglas:
The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free laborthe just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all, gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.
Such a system, it was argued, gave wealth, happiness, and autonomy to the greatest number of people; each individual seeking his own good maximized societys benefits.
Lincoln added that a person who continued through life as a hired laborer did so not because of any fault in the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune. Even on the eve of the Civil War, this was an overly optimistic assessment of opportunity in America. The trend was toward consolidation, and while the numbers of small businesses did grow, an ever- increasing proportion of Americans were working as employees, and the great majority of these would be employees for life. The division of labor grew always finer, factories and shops grew ever larger, and, even in the country, farms became places where hired hands worked for others. Yet the ideals that Lincoln espoused were so attractive to Americans that they would continue to be taken as descriptions of reality long after a minority of citizens owned productive property (farms, businesses, factories, and so on) and the vast majority worked for them.
The very belief that employees had every expectation of someday becoming employers muted potential conflict between the two classes. After all, both shared the values of hard work, productivity, self-improvement, and autonomy, and both believed they were part of a system that could fulfill those values. The problem, of course, was that individuals who were free to acquire productive property were also free to take charge of more and more resources, monopolize markets, keep others out of the system, and control prices and wages. A truly open and egalitarian society is one that is easily threatened because when wealth and power do accumulate, there are few institutions or individuals strong enough to check their influence.
Karl Marx viewed this problem as inherent in capitalist economies. Marx wrote his critique of liberal society during the middle of the nineteenth century. He argued that capitalism whether in his native Germany, in England, where he was writing, or in America, which he studied inevitably concentrated power and wealth in fewer and fewer hands and that, before long, a small number of individuals monopolized goods and serv ices and exploited the masses for their own private benefit. For Marx, the fact that individuals were equal in the eyes of the law and free to enter economic markets was a cruel sham; power rested with the ownership of productive property, liberal ideology notwithstanding.
But one did not have to be a follower of Marx to be a critic of capitalism. In the following documents, we see how the central liberal ideal of autonomyof individual independence from oppressive concentrations of powerseemed threatened on the eve of the Civil War.
* THE DOCUMENTS
Introduction to Documents 1 and 2
The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case was a bombshell. It is not an exaggeration to say that many northerners found the decision so threatening and immoral that antislavery ideas, previously seen as too radical, now were appealing. A clear path led from Dred Scott to the popularity of the new Republican Party, the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the secession of the southern states.
The case seemed like a simple one. Dred Scott, a slave, sued for freedom for himself and his family in his home state of Missouri in 1846. He had been taken into territory declared free under the Missouri Compromise, and many slaves previously had been manumitted by judicial decision under similar circumstances. In 1850, a St. Louis court, not unexpectedly, decided in Scotts favor. Two years later, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned that decision. As we have seen, the conflict over slavery was beginning to boil in the 1850s; everyone knew that the Dred Scott decision would be important, but no one expected what the U.S. Supreme Court was about to do.
Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote the majority opinion, though the decision was so momentous that all nine justices, including the two who voted in the minority, offered written remarks. Taney took an extreme view, and his opinion, legal scholars and histori ans seem to agree, was one of the most poorly conceived in the Courts history. The federal government, he declared, had no right to limit slavery in the territories, which it had done with some success in the compromises of 1820, 1850, and 1854. The Missouri Compromise and all succeeding efforts to keep a lid on the volatile issue of slavery in the territories were now null and void. He went further, writing that the right to hold slaves was as absolute as the right to hold any property, which all states were bound to enforce. More, he ruled that blacks were granted neither rights nor protections under the Constitution, that from the founding, African Americans were viewed as beings of an inferior order; that they were unfit to associate with the white race; that they possessed no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that they had been justly and lawfully reduced to slavery.
There was, of course, abundant racism in the free states, and most northerners were willing to let slavery be. But they were not willing to accept what looked like an assault on their land and their ideals. Taneys decision opened the door to endless problems, not the least of which was the spectacle of southern slave hunters unrestrained in their invasion of northern cities as they searched for lost property. It was not a long stretch from Justice McCleans dissent to the feeling that an’ aggressive southern Slave Power now ran roughshod over northern law and custom.
… The right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. The right to traffic in it, like an ordinary article of merchandise and property, was guarantied to the cit izens of the United States, every State that might desire it, for twenty years. And the Government in express terms is pledged to protect it in all future time, if the slave escapes from his owner. This is done in plain wordstoo plain to be misunderstood. And no word can be found in the Constitution which gives Congress a greater power over slave property, or which entitles property of that kind to less protection than property of any other description. The only power conferred is the power coupled with the duty of guarding and protecting the owner in his rights.
Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the court that the act of Congress which pro hibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void; and that neither Dred Scott himself, nor any of his family, were made free by being carried into this territory; even if they had been carried there by the owner, with the intention of becom ing a permanent resident.
We have so far examined the case as it stands under the Constitution of the United States and the powers thereby delegated to the Federal Government.
But there is another point in the case which depends on State power and State law. And it is contended, on the part of the plaintiff, that he is made free by being taken to Rock Island, in the State of Illinois, independently of his residence in the territory of the United States; and being so made free, he was not again reduced to a state of slavery by being brought back to Missouri.
Our notice of this part of the case will be very brief; for the principle on which it depends was decided in this court upon much consideration in the case of Strader et al. v. Graham. … In that case, the slaves had been taken from Kentucky to Ohio, with the consent of the owner, and afterwards brought back to Kentucky. And this court held that their status or condition, as free or slave, depended on the laws Kentucky, when they were brought back into that State, and not of Ohio; and that this court had no jurisdiction to revise the judgment of a state court upon its own laws. This was the point directly before the court, and the decision that this court had no jurisdic tion turned upon it, as will be seen by the report of the case.
So in this case. As Scott was a slave when taken into the state of Illinois by his owner, and was there held as such, and brought back in that character, his status as free or slave depended on the laws of Missouri, and not of Illinois. . . .
Upon the whole, therefore, it is the judgment of this court, that it appears by the record before us that the plaintiff in error is not a citizen of Missouri, in the sense in which the word is used in the Constitution; and that the Circuit Court of the United States, for that reason, had no jurisdiction in the case, and could give no judgment in it. Its judgment for the defendant must, consequently, be reversed, and a mandate issued, directing the suit to be dismissed for want of jurisdiction.
DOCUMENT 2: Dissenting Opinion, Justice John McClean, March 6,1857
. . . The sovereignty of the Federal Government extends to the entire limits of our territory. Should any foreign power invade our jurisdiction, it would be repelled. There is a law of Congress to punish our citizens for crimes committed in districts of country where there is no organized Government. … If there be a right to acquire territory, there necessarily must be an implied power to govern it. …
The States of Missouri and Illinois are bounded by a common line. The one prohibits slavery, the other admits it. This has been done by the exercise of that sovereign power which appertains to each. We are bound to respect the institutions of each, as emanating from the voluntary action of people. Have the people of either any right to disturb the relations of the other? Each State rests upon the basis of its own sovereignty, protected by the Constitution. Our Union has been the foundation of our prosperity and national glory. Shall we not cherish and maintain it? This can only be done by respecting the legal rights of each State.
If a citizen of a State shall entice or enable a slave to escape from the service of his master, the law holds him responsible, not only for the loss of the slave, but he is liable to be indicted and fined for the misdemeanor. . ..
Let these facts be contrasted with the case now before the Court. Illinois has declared in the most solemn and impressive form that there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in that State, and that any slave brought into it, with a view of becoming a resident shall be emanci pated. And effect has been given to this provision of the Constitution by the decision of the Supreme Court of that State. With a full knowledge of these facts, a slave is brought from Missouri to Rock Island, in the State of Illinois, and is retained there as a slave for two years, and then taken to Fort Snelling, where slavery is prohibited by the Missouri Compromise Act, and there he is detained two years longer in a state of slavery. Harriet, his wife, was also kept at the same place four years as a slave, having been purchased in Missouri. They were then removed to the State of Missouri, and sold as slaves, and in the action before us they are not only claimed as slaves, but a majority of my brethren have held that on their being returned to Missouri the status of slavery attached to them.
I am not able to reconcile this result with respect due to the State of Illinois. Having the same rights of sovereignty as the State of Missouri in adopting a Constitution, I can perceive no reason why the institutions of Illinois should not receive the same consideration as those of Missouri. Allowing to my brethren the same right of judgment that I exercise myself, I must be permitted to say that it seems to me the principle laid down will enable the people of a slave State to introduce slavery into a free State, for a longer or shorter time, as may suit their convenience; and by returning the slave to the State whence he was brought, by force or otherwise, the status of slavery attaches, and protects the rights of the master, and defies the sovereignty of the free State. . . .
Introduction to Documents 3 and 4
Hinton Rowan Helpers Impending Crisis of the South and George Fitzhughs Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters were extreme books in their day. Both were published in 1857, just as the fragile compromises that had kept the union together were coming apart. Helper went much further than most northerners in his vituperation against the slaveholders. Similarly, Fitzhughs argument that slavery should not be confined to blacks but was the appropriate condition for most people was an extremist stance that was rejected by his fellow slave holders. But by taking radical positions, each man sharpened the debate. Southerners suspected that most northerners secretly agreed with Helper but were unwilling to admit it; northerners feared that Fitzhugh actually spoke for a power-hungry slavepower conspiracy that wanted to enslave most free white men in the North as well as in the South.
Note that Helpers hatred of slavery did not arise from sympathy for African Americans. On the contrary, he believed they were, whether slave or free, an undesirable population and that, once emancipated, they should be colonized in Africa, though nearly all had been born and raised in America. Rather, it was the alleged contrast of what free labor did for the North and slave labor for the South that he dwelled on: In the former, wealth, intelligence, power, progress, and prosperity are the prominent characteristics; In the latter, poverty, ignorance, imbecility, inertia, and extravagance, are the distinguishing features. Slaverys impact on poor whites most concerned Helper, for by concentrating wealth (land and slaves) in the hands of the few, he argued, the system degraded the majority.
George Fitzhugh, on the other hand, argued that so-called free society made cannibals of all and rendered humans selfish and heartless. The solution was not, as many northern reformers would have it, to tinker with society to make it more humane. To secure true progress, Fitzhugh declared, we must unfetter genius and chain down mediocrity. Liberty for the fewrSlavery, in every form, for the mass. Or, even more pithily: Some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride themand the riding does them good.
Fitzhugh explicitly rejected race as the basis for enslavement; racism, he felt, hardened masters hearts toward their slaves. He was a true conservative in the classical sense of the word. He argued that humans, white or black, were not born with equal inheritances of money or talent, so that, for most, liberty meant merely the chance to be exploited by those more rich, powerful, or intelligent. Freedom, progress, equality of opportunity, and autonomous individualism were all pipe dreams. Human beings, Fitzhugh believed, were predators, and only systems of bondage recognized this fact, but they mollified it by imposing mutual rights and obligations on masters and slaves. The ideology of equal opportunity, of capitalism, he argued, was merely a ruse by which the strong exploited the weak. The world, he concluded, was too little governed; most people needed masters to tell them what to do.
If the following passages are extreme, they give a good sense of the clash of northern and southern economic systems and the underlying values that would soon explode in civil war.
DOCUMENT 3: From Cannibals All!
George Fitzhugh
The universal Trade
We are all, North and South, engaged in the White Slave Trade, and he who succeeds best is esteemed most respectable. It is far more cruel than the Black Slave Trade, because it exacts more of its slaves, and neither protects nor governs them. We boast that it exacts more when we say, that the profits made from employing free labor are greater than those from slave labor. The profits, made from free labor are the amount of the products of such labor, which the employer, by means of the command which capital or skill gives him, takes away, exacts, or exploitâtes from the free laborer. The profits of slave labor are that portion of the products of such labor which the power of the master enables him to appropriate. These profits are less, because the master allows the slave to retain a larger share of the results of his own labor than do the employers of free labor. But we not only boast that the White Slave Trade is more exacting and fraudulent (in fact, though not in intention) than Black Slavery; but we also boast that it is more cruel, in leaving the laborer to take care of himself and family out of the pittance which skill or capital have allowed him to retain. When the days labor is ended, he is free, but is overburdened with the cares of family and household, which make his freedom an empty and delusive mockery. But his employer is really free, and may enjoy the profits made by others labor, without a care, or a trouble, as to their well being. The negro slave is free, too, when the labors of the day are over, and free in mind as well as body; for the master provides food, raiment, house, fuel, and everything else necessary to the physical well-being of himself and family. The masters labors commence just when the slaves end. No wonder men should prefer white slavery to capital, to negro slavery, since it is more prof itable, and is free from all the cares and labors of black slave-holding… .
The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters. The negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon. Besides, they have their Sabbaths and holidays. White men, with so much of license and liberty, would die of ennui; but negroes luxuriate in corporeal and mental repose. With their faces upturned to the sun, they can sleep at any hour; and quiet sleep is the greatest of human enjoyments. Blessed be the man who invented sleep. Tis happiness in itselfand results from contentment with the present, and confident assurance of the future. We do not know whether free laborers ever sleep. They are fools to do so; for, whilst they sleep, the wily and watchful capitalist is devising means to ensnare and exploitate them. The free laborer must work or starve. He is more of a slave than the negro, because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave, and has no holiday, because the cares of life with him begin when its labors end. He has no liberty, and not a single right.. ..
We agree with Mr. Jefferson that all men have natural and inalienable rights. To violate or disregard such rights, is to oppose the designs and plans of Providence, and cannot come to good. The order and subordination observable in the physical, animal, and human world show that some are formed for higher, others for lower stationsthe few to command, the many to obey. We conclude that about nineteen out of every twenty individuals have a natural and inalienable right to be taken care of and protected, to have guardians, trustees, husbands, or masters; in other words, they have a natural and inalienable right to be slaves. The one in twenty are as clearly bom or educated or some way fitted for command and liberty. Not to make them rulers or masters is as great a violation of natural right as not to make slaves of the mass. A very little individuality is use ful and necessary to societymuch of it begets discord, chaos and anarchy….
Liberty and Slavery
… What is falsely called Free Society is a very recent invention. It proposes to make the weak, ignorant, and poor, free, by turning them loose in a world owned exclusively by the few (whom nature and education have made strong, and whom property has made stronger) to get a living. In the fanciful state of nature, where property is unappropriated, the strong have no weapons but superior physical and mental power with which to oppress the weak. Their power of oppression is increased a thousand fold when they become the exclusive owners of the earth and all the things thereon. They are masters without the obligations of masters, and the poor are slaves without the rights of slaves.
It is generally conceded, even by abolitionists, that the serfs of Europe were liberated because the multitude of laborers and their competition as freemen to get employment, had rendered free labor cheaper than slave labor. But, strange to say, few seem to have seen that this is in fact asserting that they were less free after emancipation than before. Their obligation to labor was increased; for they were compelled to labor more than before to obtain a livelihood, else their free labor would not have been cheaper than their labor as slaves. They lost something in liberty, and everything in rightsfor emancipation liberated or released the masters from all their burdens, cares, and liabilities, whilst it increased both the labors and the cares of the liberated serf… .
The Family
All modern philosophy converges to a single pointthe overthrow of all government, the substitution of the untrammelled Sovereignty of the Individual for the Sovereignty of Society, and the inauguration of anarchy. First domestic slavery, next religious institutions,
then separate property, then political government, and, finally, family government and family relations, are to be swept away. This is the distinctly avowed programme of all able abolition ists and socialists; and towards this end the doctrines and the practices of the weakest and most timid among them tend. . . .
It is pleasing, however, to turn from the world of political economy, in which might makes right, and strength of mind and of body are employed to oppress and exact from the weak, to that other and better, and far more numerous world, in which weakness rules, clad in the armor of affection and benevolence. . . . The infant, in its capricious dominion over mother, father, brothers and sisters, exhibits, in strongest colors, the strength of weakness, the power of affection. The wife and daughters are more carefully attended by the father, than the sons, because they are weaker and elicit more of his affection. .. .
But, besides wife and children, brothers and sister, dogs, horses, birds and flowersslaves, also, belong to the family circle. Does their common humanity, their abject weakness and dependence, their great value, their ministering to our wants in childhood, manhood, sickness and old age, cut them off from that affection which everything else in the family elicits? No; the interests of master and slave are bound up together, and each in his appropriate sphere naturally endeavors to promote the happiness of the other.
The humble and obedient slave exercises more or less control over the most brutal and hard-hearted master. It is an invariable law of nature, that weakness and dependence are elements of strength, and generally sufficiently limit that universal despotism, observable throughout human and animal nature. The moral and physical world is but a series of subordinations, and the more perfect the subordination, the greater the harmony and the happiness. . ..
Government a Thing of Force, Not of Consent
We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The women, the children, the negroes, and but few of the non-property holders were consulted, or consented to the Revolution, or the govern ments that ensued from its success. As to these, the new governments were self-elected despo tisms, and the governing class self-elected despots. Those governments originated in force, and have been continued by force. All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force. The very term, government, implies that it is carried on against the consent of the governed. Fathers do not derive their authority, as heads of families, from the consent of wife and children, nor do they govern their families by their consent. They never take the vote of the family as to the labors to be performed, the moneys to be expended, or as to anything else. Masters dare not take the vote of slaves as to their government. If they did, constant holiday, dissipation, and extrava gance would be the result. Captains of ships are not appointed by the consent of the crew, and never take their vote, even in doubling Cape Hom. If they did, the crew would generally vote to get drunk, and the ship would never weather the cape. Not even in the most democratic countries are soldiers governed by their consent, nor is their vote taken on the eve of battle. They have some how lost (or never had) the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and, whether Americans or Russians, are forced into battle without and often against their consent. Riots, mobs, strikes, and revolutions are daily occurring. The mass of mankind cannot be gov erned by Law. More of despotic discretion, and less of Law, is what the world wants. We take our leave by saying There is too much of Law and too little of Government in this world.
. . . The negro sees the drivers lash, becomes accustomed to obedient cheerful industry, and is not aware that the lash is the force that impels him. The free citizen fulfills con amore, his round of social, political, and domestic duties, and never dreams that the Law, with its fines and jails, penitentiaries and halters, or Public Opinion, with its ostracism, its mobs, and its tar and feathers, help to keep him revolving in his orbit. Yet, remove these physical forces, and how many good citizens would shoot, like firey comets, from their spheres, and disturb society with their eccentricities and their crimes.
DOCUMENT 4: From The Impending crisis of the South
Hinton Rowan Helper
It is a fact well known to every intelligent Southerner that we are compelled to go to the North for almost every article of utility and adornment, from matches, shoepegs and paintings up to cotton mills, steamships and statuary; that we have no foreign trade, no princely merchants, nor respectable artists; that, in comparison with the free states, we contribute nothing to the literature, polite arts and inventions of the age . .. that almost everything produced at the North meets with ready sale, while, at the same time, there is no demand, even among our own citizens, for the pro ductions of Southern industry; that, owing to the absence of a proper system of business amongst us, the North becomes, in one way or another, the proprietor and dispenser of all our floating wealth, and that we are dependent on Northern capitalists for the means necessary to build our railroads, canals and other public improvements … and that nearly all the profits arising from the exchange of commodities, from insurance and shipping offices, and from the thousand and one industrial pursuits of the country, accrue to the North, and are there invested in the erection of those magnificent cities and stupendous works of art which dazzle the eyes of the South, and attest the superiority of free institutions! . . .
In our opinion . . . , the causes which have impeded the progress and prosperity of the South, which have dwindled our commerce, and other similar pursuits, into the most con temptible insignificance; sunk a large majority of our people in galling poverty and ignorance, rendered a small minority conceited and tyrannical, and driven the rest away from their homes; entailed upon us a humiliating dependence on the Free States; disgraced us in the recesses of our own souls, and brought us under reproach in the eyes of all civilized and enlightened nations may all be traced to one common source, and there find solution in the most hateful and horrible word, that was ever incorporated into the vocabulary of human economySlavery!
Reared amidst the institution of slavery, believing it to be w
