The Road to Disunion
Secessionists Triumphant 1854–1861
By William W. Freehling
Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836
Willie Lee Rose, Slavery and Freedom (Editor)
Secession Debated: Georgia’s Showdown in 1860 (Editor, with Craig M. Simpson)
The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War
The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil
War
THE ROAD TO DISUNION
Volume I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854
Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861
The Road to Disunion
VOLUME II
Secessionists Triumphant 1854–1861
WILLIAM W. FREEHLING
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Freehling, William W., 1935–
The road to disunion / William W. Freehling
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Contents: v. 1. Secessionists at bay, 1776–1854
ISBN 0-19-505814-3 (v. 1)
1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Causes
2. Secession. 3. Southern States—Politics and
government—1775–1865. 4. United States—Politics and
government—1815–1861. I. Title.
E468.9.F84 1990
973.7′11—dc20 89-26511 CIP
135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Again and again
for
Alison
and in memory
of
Sheldon Meyer
Contents
Illustrations
Maps
Preface
Prologue: Yancey’s Rage
PART I
BETTER ECONOMIC TIMES GENERATE WORSE DEMOCRATIC DILEMMAS
1. Democracy and Despotism, 1776–1854: Road, Volume I, Revisited
2. Economic Bonanza, 1850–1860
PART II THE CLIMACTIC IDEOLOGICAL FRUSTRATIONS
3. James Henry Hammond and the Unsolvable Proslavery Puzzle
4. The Three Imperfect Solutions
5. The Puzzling Future and the Infuriating Scapegoats
PART III THE CLIMACTIC POLITICAL FRUSTRATIONS
6. Bleeding Kansas and Bloody Sumner
7. The Scattering of the Ex-Whigs
8. James Buchanan’s Precarious Election
9. The President-Elect as the Dred Scotts’ Judge
10. The Climactic Kansas Crisis
11. Caribbean Delusions
12. Reopening the African Slave Trade
13. Reenslaving Free Blacks
PART IV JOHN BROWN AND THREE OTHER MEN COINCIDENTALLY NAMED JOHN
14. John Brown and Violent Invasion
15. John G. Fee and Religious Invasion
16. John Underwood and Economic Invasion
17. John Clark and Political Invasion
PART V THE ELECTION OF 1860
18. Yancey’s Lethal Abstraction
19. The Democracy’s Charleston Convention
20. The Democracy’s Baltimore Convention
21. Suspicious Southerners and Lincoln’s Election
PART VI
SOUTH CAROLINA DARES
22. The State’s Rights Justification
23. The Motivation
24. The Tactics and Tacticians
25. The Triumph
Coda: Did the Coincidence Change History?
PART VII
LOWER SOUTH LANDSLIDE, UPPER SOUTH STALEMATE
26. Alexander Stephens’s Fleeting Moment
Coda: Did Stephens’s and Hammond’s Personalities Change History?
27. Southwestern Separatists’ Tactics and Messages
28. Compromise Rejected
29. Military Explosions
30. Snowball Rolling
31. Upper South Stalemate
32. Stalemate—and the South—Shattered
Coda: How Did Slavery Cause the Civil War?
Abbreviations Used in Notes
Notes
Index
Illustrations
Compiled with the help of Erik Alexander
William Lowndes Yancey and Nathan Beman
David Atchison and Stephen A. Douglas
Preston Brooks, Charles Sumner, and a Brooks/Sumner Drawing
James Buchanan and Howell Cobb
Harriet and Dred Scott and Roger B. Taney
Charleston Harbor and New Orleans Harbor
Natchez’s Monmouth and Dunleith
The Harpers Ferry Environs
Gentle John Brown and Violent John Brown
John Brown and Henry Wise
John G. Fee and Cassius Clay
Jefferson Davis and Albert Gallatin Brown
A Charleston Single House, a Charleston Double House, and a Charleston Spiked Fence
John Townsend, Robert Gourdin, Andrew Magrath, and Robert Barnwell Rhett, Sr.
James and Mary Chesnut
The Younger James Hammond and the Older James Hammond
David Flavel Jamison and a South Carolina Palmetto Tree
Alexander Stephens and Stephens’s Liberty Hall
The Unfinished Capitol Building, John Crittenden, and Robert Toombs
James Holcombe and George Randolph
Edmund Ruffin, Fort Sumter Bombarded, and Fort Sumter Devastated
Maps
by David Fuller
The Three Souths and the Border North, 1860
The Kansas/Missouri Battleground
The New Orleans Dream of Empire
The Maryland Reenslavement Controversy
The Harpers Ferry Environs
South Carolina’s Key Railroads During the Secession Crisis
The Virginia Regions, 1860
Forts Sumter and Pickens
Preface
In this second and concluding volume of my southern Road to Disunion, Northerners sometimes step
front and center, to illuminate provokers, targets, and effects of southern defenders’ rage. But by
usually focusing on aggressively defensive Southerners, I seek to resurrect their pre–Civil War
political saga, one of America’s most important and mysterious epics.
The importance lies in the illumination of colliding democratic and despotic governing systems.
The Old South combined dictatorship over blacks with republicanism for whites, supposedly cleanly
severed by an All-Mighty Color Line. But to preserve dictatorial dominion over blacks, the
slaveholding minority sometimes trenched on majoritarian government for whites, in the nation as
well as in their section.
These preventative strikes leached much of the mystery from Yankees’ antisouthern responses.
Northerners called the militant slavocracy the Slave Power, meaning that those with autocratic power
over blacks also deployed undemocratic power over whites. Most Yankees hardly embraced blacks or
abolitionists. Yet racist Northerners would fight the Slave Power to the death to preserve their white
men’s majoritarian rights.1 More mysterious is why Southerners risked a potentially suicidal rebellion
against Northerners who disclaimed any intention of forcing abolition on southern states.
My explanation emphasizes that problems inside southern culture nurtured both fury at any outside
criticism and determination to prevent antislavery democratic discourse from seeping anywhere near
despots’ doors. The internal travail and its external consequences become clearest in widest
perspective. Thus my first volume of Road, published a decade and a half ago, traced the democraticdespotic section’s political traumas from the American Revolution through the 1854 passage of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act. This sequel moves from that law’s bloody Kansas aftermath to the Civil War’s
first blood. As the war nears, my narrative slows, to detail the spectacles that started with John
Brown’s raid and ended with Fort Sumter’s surrender. My slimmer epilogue volume, The South vs.
The South, published a half decade ago, traces my Road to Disunion themes from Fort Sumter through
the war.2
In this book, as in The South vs. The South and as in my previous Road volume, widening southern
divisions between regions, races, and classes frustrated attempts to forge a single civilization.3 To
bridge potentially corrosive differences, late antebellum Southerners deployed ever more intriguing
proslavery ideologies and ever more zany political crusades. Because these initiatives failed, the
secessionist faction of white Southerners considered President-elect Lincoln an immediate menace to
their imperfectly consolidated regime. Most Southerners at first retorted that secessionists
exaggerated the immediate threat and rushed to revolution prematurely. Yet disunionists strained,
struggled, and ultimately secured a southern majority, not least to preclude any Republican Party
attempt for a majority inside the most exposed southern states.
The minority of the minority’s stretch illuminated the tension that exists between majority will and
minority power whenever democracy exists—and the deeper difficulty of a democratic resolution
when a despotic social institution thrives. A wider understanding of why our peaceful democratic
processes failed at home may temper overconfidence that American republicanism will always work
abroad. Furthermore, slaveholders’ intolerance for contrary opinion devastated our House Divided;
and a broader awareness of that historical lesson may spare democracies from some cries that
disagreement proves disloyalty.
Once again in this volume, I resist academics’ tendency to maximize multicultural social history
and to minimize mainstream political history. Four million blacks’ emancipation, for example, a
central social history event, becomes unintelligible without establishment white males’ political (and
military) history. Instead of dismissing mainstream political history, social history must deeply
inform it. Thus the nature of masters’ dictatorship over blacks compelled their partial closure of
republicanism for whites. Furthermore, the nature of slaves’ resistances propelled their uninvited (and
important) intrusions into white men’s political upheavals.
I here also resist academic historians’ tendency to maximize abstract analysis and to minimize
dramatic writing. I write stories about striking individuals and fetching places for deeper reasons than
to make history intelligible beyond the academy (although historical lessons are too important to be
restricted to fellow professors). Where many academic historians dismiss epic stories as old-fashioned
fluff, I believe that classic tales of headline events, when retold from fresh angles, help sort out the
culture’s underlying forces.
To take a prime example from the following narrative, a current historical wisdom alleges that
southern planters thought they needed fresh land in new U.S. territories to endure economically. Thus
the slavocracy supposedly rose in revolution against President-elect Lincoln’s threatened containment
of Slave Power territorial expansions. Some parts of that abstraction illuminate some of the
disunionists, some of the time (and many mainstream southern political leaders, before secessionist
times).
But right after Lincoln’s election, as in the nullification and gag rule controversies of the 1830s,
the first precipitators of secession, the South Carolina extremists, usually tepidly if at all desired
territorial expansion. So too, the most important territorial expansionists, the New Orleans urban
imperialists, usually tepidly if at all desired secession. Moreover, neither the critical South Carolina
disunionists nor the pivotal New Orleans Caribbean expansionists primarily craved agricultural profits
from virgin terrain.
Instead, South Carolina reactionaries primarily sought to shield their uniquely old-fashioned,
aristocratic republican political system (and their uniquely top-heavy slavery system) from newfashioned American egalitarian democracy. So too, when territorial controversies became consuming,
slaveholders’ desire to protect their vulnerable peripheral areas from a neighbor’s open democratic
processes dictated which territories became most controversial. Sometimes the feared contagion of
liberty involved British antislavery influence on the Texas Republic, sometimes Spanish
“Africanization” of Cuba, sometimes Yankee free soilers’ capture of Kansas (bordering on enslaved
Missouri), sometimes ungagged abolitionist debate in Congress, sometimes Lincoln’s bid to build a
Southern Republican Party in the Border South. But always the clashing necessities of open
democracy for whites and closed despotism over blacks strained the national republic toward the
breaking point.4
Yet this narrative will fail if it only succeeds in substituting one theory about the impersonal
causes of the Civil War for another. The following history shows that personal emotions exploded past
impersonal drives, often uniting otherwise divided southern whites in rage against Yankees’
condemnations. Portraits of angry confrontations, not dissections of abstruse concepts, best lead to
empathy with insulted combatants. Moreover, a dissection of detached forces, barren of accidents or
coincidences or personalities, erases too much of the human condition.
One of this narrative’s climactic episodes illustrates the phenomenon. At South Carolina
disunionists’ critical moment, the impact of unexpected leaders, fleeting conspiracies, and one
incredible coincidence boosted jittery secessionists over the top. The collision of despotic and
democratic imperatives likely would have yielded disunion in other ways and/or at other times, if
other characters or alternate contingencies had exerted sway. The odds against averting military
combat in 1861 were large. The odds against avoiding some kind of civil war, at some moment, were
larger. The odds against abolishing slavery without bloodshed were larger still.
But as gamblers forget at their peril, unanticipated quirks of character and luck can slightly divert
the most relentless forces. Changes in how, where, and when a war commences can also condition the
course of the war. Analysts of epics large and small thus must illuminate both the relentless forces and
the little deflections. In that spirit, I offer this exploration and portrait of how secession actually
triumphed, in the eccentric ways and at the memorable places and during the suspenseful moments
when extremists strove to sever one of the world’s greatest republics. At the intersection of the
colorlessly impersonal and the colorfully personal came the climactic fractures, and there I most
cherish the storytelling style.
My narrative style has changed more than my analysis during the fifteen years since I wrote
Volume I. The aging process has sustained my taste for characters, locations, and confrontations. But I
have lost some zest for nicknames, imaginary conversations, and plays on words.
Changes in the Old South rather than in its intrigued historian compelled a stress on different
background materials in the two volumes. Slaveholders’ attempts at social control, whether over
contrary blacks or whites, had to be spotlighted in Volume I, for these social dynamics conditioned
southern politics from the beginning. In contrast, proslavery theorists had to star in this volume, for
their intellectual gymnastics matured very late (not in the 1830s, as is commonly supposed). Since
each volume omits background information that clarifies its political saga, and because earlier and
later political stories illuminate each other, the whole narrative becomes clearest when readers
experience both halves. But once again in this volume, I have strived to make half the epic stand on its
own, this time featuring the crowning episodes on the road to disunion.
During the half century and more since Avery Craven wrote the last synthesis of the South’s course to
secession, many fellow academics have discovered additional pieces of the story. Some discoverers
have been my friends during our shared decades of exploration, including Jean Baker, Ira Berlin, Dave
Bowman, Bill Cooper, Dan Crofts, David Brion Davis, Charles Dew, Ron Formisano, George
Fredrickson, Betsey Fox-Genovese, Gene Genovese, Jack Greene, Mike Holt, Chaz Joyner, Gary
Kornblith, Bill Miller, Willie Lee Rose, Anne Scott, Craig Simpson, Ken Stampp, Mark Summers,
Steve Weisenburger, Joel Williamson, and Bert Wyatt-Brown. I believe that we have together
enriched U.S. slavery studies and that each of us has been the more successful because we have been
together. I know hundreds of other fine scholars mostly or only through their illuminating work. As
my endnotes reveal, I have borrowed from them often, with admiration and gratitude.
I am also grateful to the Horace Rackham Fund of the University of Michigan, to the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and to the Guggenheim Foundation, for financing my study of the
many documents discovered since Professor Craven’s researches. I am equally indebted to the
American Antiquarian Society, to the University of Kentucky, and to my fine new professional home,
the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities at the University of Virginia, for aid, comfort, and
inspiration while writing this volume. My narrative would have been less effective without Sheldon
Meyer’s editing and David Fuller’s maps. But all professional debts pale compared to my obligations
to Alison, who creates even finer adventures than this labor of love.
William W. Freehling
Charlottesville, Virginia
Christmas Day 2006
The Road to Disunion
Secessionists Triumphant 1854–1861
Prologue: Yancey’s Rage
By the middle of the 1850s, William Lowndes Yancey and fellow secessionists had suffered through
two decades as a cornered minority. During this exasperating time, Yancey perhaps dreamed that he
would someday help prod half the South out of the Union. But the stymied Alabama extremist
probably never imagined that he would surrender to a reluctant secessionist, when secession remained
only half accomplished.
Yancey’s abdication occurred in Montgomery, Alabama, provisional capital of the Southern
Confederacy. The capitulation transpired on February 17, 1861, eve of Jefferson Davis’s inauguration
as president of the halfformed nation. Yancey introduced Davis, who had opposed secession as late as
December 1860, by declaring that “the man and the hour have met.” The extremist thereby bet his
revolution on a National Democratic Party moderate. Such opponents of extremism had long kept
revolutionaries at bay in the South.1
Mainstream politicians’ leverage inside the South began with their leverage inside the nation’s
majority party. For a quarter century, the Democratic Party’s southern establishment in Washington
had secured many proslavery protections. With the Union featuring minority bulwarks, why gamble
on disunion?
And why doubly gamble on reckless leaders? Revolutionary hotheads had long been called “fireeaters.” With their fiery rhetoric, they sought to incinerate the Union, whatever the risks. The less
agitated southern majority craved cooler rulers, especially during nervous revolutionary times. Even
in South Carolina, the most disunionist state, cautious revolutionaries had to drive an outraged Robert
Barnwell Rhett into the shadows before uneasy squires would dare disunion.
Yancey, unlike Rhett, scored a revolutionary coup before succumbing to less revolutionary leaders.
The subtle Alabamian, unlike the inflexible South Carolinian, saw how to turn mainstream
Democrats’ middle ground into extremist terrain. At the National Democratic Party’s 1860
convention, Yancey used one of Jefferson Davis’s watered-down proslavery crusades to strain the
party past the breaking point, realizing that Davis’s compromised southern extremism might be too
uncompromising for northern moderates to swallow. So too, in February 1861, Yancey prayed that
President-elect Davis, reluctant rebel, could lure hesitant Southerners into revolution. With such leery
revolutionaries directing the revolution, Rhett answered, fire-eaters “will only have changed
masters.”2
But in early 1861, Yancey knew that fire-eaters could not master the revolution. South Carolina’s
initial strike had provoked only the southernmost slaveholding states into rebellion. This so-called
Lower South included South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
Only in these seven secessionist states did cotton reign as king, slaves comprise almost half the
population, and enslaved blacks outnumber free blacks more than fifty to one.
Twice as many white Southerners resided in the less torrid, less enslaved, less secessionist Upper
South, comprised of Border South and Middle South tiers of states. When Yancey conceded the
disunion revolution to Davis, two weeks before Abraham Lincoln’s March 4 inauguration as president
of the United States, the Middle South shunned the Lower South’s republic, and the Border South had
even less use for the revolution. The borderland tier of southern states, located closest to the North,
included Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Here, the relatively few slaveholders almost
never grew cotton. Here, seven of eight residents were white, while one of five blacks was free. Here,
Yankee-style cities, immigrants, and industries were far more important than in the Lower South.
THE THREE SOUTHS AND THE BORDER NORTH, 1860
The four states of the Middle South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas) lay
between Lower and Border Souths. These Middle South states contained aspects of the colliding
southern cultures above and below them. Middle South fence sitters might rally behind a Lower South
moderate such as Jefferson Davis. But the Middle South shunned extremists, even an ultra like Yancey
who sometimes found judiciousness useful.
Yancey looked more like a judicious moderate than a fanatical extremist.3 Small in height, he was
large in girth and fat of face. His half-closed eyes gave him a drowsy appearance. Under his double
chin, his bow ties flopped in puffy ribbons. Over his slumped posture, his suits crumpled in disarray.
Since inflamed nerves tormented his ribs and spine, he hardly moved as he spoke. Because he had no
front teeth, his soft voice barely sounded distinct. How could such a motionless drawler arouse the
sleepy to fury?
Because both Yancey’s legend and his vocabulary screamed that Yankees’ libels demanded
stinging retorts. According to the perhaps apocryphal legend, Yancey began storming at northern
insulters as an undergraduate. He then allegedly hurled a pickle barrel through a window at Williams
College. The Massachusetts college supposedly disciplined the southern native, whose aunt called him
a youth of “wild notions, who never could rest in one place two months at a time.”4
The wild youth belied his genial façade again, a few years later, when he gunned down his wife’s
uncle after an obscure affront. Still later, Yancey would end his career sprawled on the floor of the
Southern Confederacy’s Senate, blood spurting from his face, after a fellow senator slit him with a
jagged ink container. Whether he insulted or suffered insult, whether pickle barrels or inkwells or
bullets augmented wounding words, Yancey, the fireeaters’ most apparently becalmed orator and
sometimes most disciplined tactician, always verged on reckless rage.
Northern abolitionists especially enraged the Alabamian. The South’s selfproclaimed paternalists,
according to abolitionist sneers, presided not over Christian hearths but over anti-Christian sewers.
Slaveholders supposedly gutted black families by selling children from parents and parents from each
other. The tyrants also allegedly trashed family life, white and black, by raping their female property.
American Slavery as It Is, Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses dwelled on these abominations. In
this best-selling American book (beside the Bible) until Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the American Antislavery
Society called slaveholders “as dead to their slaves’ domestic” agony as if serviles “were cattle.” In
planters’ houses, testified a Connecticut visitor, “I could distinguish the family resemblance in the
slaves who waited upon the table.” Female slaves commonly “have white children,” and “little or
nothing is ever said about it.” According to another Connecticut traveler, slaves “lived in a state of
promiscuous concubinage.” Their “master said he took pains to breed from his best stock—the whiter
the progeny, the higher they could sell for house servants.” A borderite added that “brothers and
sisters, husbands and wives, are torn asunder.” In every “neighborhood, … village or road,” one
observes “the sad procession of manacled outcasts, whose mournful countenances tell that they are
exiled by force from ALL THAT THEIR HEARTS HOLD DEAR.”5
By charging that slaveholders broke domestic hearts, abolitionists assaulted the slavocracy where it
claimed to be most virtuous. Southerners entitled slavery the Domestic Institution. The title asserted
that slaveholding patriarchs treated all lesser humans, whether children or wives or slaves, as
esteemed family members. Yankee capitalists, according to slaveholders’ familial logic, had no
familial compulsion about firing their employees or divorcing their wives. And now these antifamilial
hypocrites cursed Southerners as family breakers!
As William L. Yancey grew up, he closely observed a hypocrite who severed a family. Yancey’s
father died when the lad was three years old. The proud, penniless Yancey clan faced a bleak future.
But soon had appeared the ancient South Carolina family’s self-proclaimed savior. The Reverend Mr.
Nathan Beman, a migrant from the North, taught at Mt. Zion Academy in Georgia. This zealot married
the widowed Mrs. Yancey when William was seven.
Beman scorned one possession of his new family. The preacher sold the ex–Mrs. Yancey’s three
slaves, a mother and two infants. The black family brought $700. A year later, Beman moved his white
family to Troy, New York. There, Yancey’s stepfather demanded that the national General Assembly
of the Presbyterian Church resolve that “selling … a human being as property, is in the sight of God, a
heinous sin.”6
Yancey recalled more than the moralist who pocketed $700 for indulging in heinous sin. Up in
Troy, after Yancey’s mother defended slavery as morally decent, Beman banned her allegedly
indecent opinion from his presence. He possibly beat her physically. He assuredly abused her verbally
and sometimes nailed her in her room. She still called the Domestic Institution virtuous. Beman
responded that her reconciliation of “the pure system of Jesus Christ” with “the abomination of
slavery” was “a complete failure.”7 Beman sent the Christian failure down to the barbarous South, for
a year and a half of reconsideration.
The exiled wife sought to bury “the hatchet” by “dividing the blame equally between us.” I would
be “a fool or a knave,” Beman answered, to admit “any part of the blame.” Instead, “all our difficulties
have commenced with yourself.” His “sole object has been to save your reputation and [the] character
and standing of my family, in a Christian community.” Since Satan had forever blinded her to virtue,
this “once beloved but fallen woman … must stay at the South and keep quiet,” so “that the disgrace
and turmoil occasioned by your conduct may die away.”8
When Mrs. Beman instead came back to Troy, her spouse barred her at the door. Yancey’s mother
spent the rest of her life wandering between other people’s homes, ever battling Beman to see their
daughter. As she eked out a miserable subsistence, her condemner spent part of his pulpit time
castigating slave sellers who smashed black homes.
To reemphasize his self-proclaimed moral ascendancy, Nathan Beman savored a pulpit that made
him seem taller; and he was a huge man, with a tough square face, a stern expression, and spectacles
that magnified his frowning eyes.9 When accused of sinning by selling his wife’s three slaves, he
dismissed the insinuation. He had merely swept the unchristian filth from his Christian home.
Had he then been wrong to sweep his wife from her home? Of course not, he thundered. “I shall
never keep house” with a servant of Lucifer “a day while life lasts.”10 Could the South reconcile white
democracy and black slavery? Of course not, Beman snarled. That “brotherhood” resembled “an
alliance between Jerusalem and Sodom,” or “a friendly league between an archangel and Lucifer,” or
“the consummation of nuptials … between heaven and hell.” The slaveholders’ “loathsome… political
hypocrisy” would make “Benedict Arnold … blush” and “would lead Judas Iscariot to cast down thirty
pieces of silver and go hang himself.”11
William Lowndes Yancey (left), looking like the opposite of a ferocious southern fire-eater, and his
stepfather, Nathan Beman (right), looking just like an imperious northern critic. Courtesy of the
Library of Congress (Yancey) and the Archives and Special Collections, Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, Troy, New York (Beman).
Not for a hundred pieces of gold could William Lowndes Yancey tolerate such slurs from such
frauds. Whenever righteous Yankees heaped ridicule on Southerners, Yancey poured contempt right
back. No American egalitarian could abide a critic’s better-than-thou posture. Nor could a slaveholder
tolerate being labeled as scum. That epitaph only fit slaves.
With whites being called morally filthier than slaves, Yancey the orator, that stationary drawler,
needed no gestures, no screams to play on Southerners’ prickly rectitude. In the South and in the North
too, this genial fanatic softly demanded that Southerners must be treated as Yankees’ equal. “Do not
destroy our self respect; do not overtax our manliness,” Yancey warned citizens of Syracuse, New
York (under 100 miles from Beman in Troy). Do not “walk in a field and tread on a caterpillar,” he
cautioned Boston abolitionists, or “the poor creature will turn on your boot and try to sting you.”12
By insisting that Southerners turn on stinging moral enslavers, disunionists had long hoped to
escape from confinement at the edge of southern politics. For years, Yancey had prayed that
Southerners’ fury at Yankee maligners would someday defeat the compromising Jefferson Davises,
propel uncompromising revolutionaries to power, fuse one South out of many subregions and classes,
and burn the Nathan Bemans in a firestorm of revenge. But the prewar question always remained,
whether in mid-1854 or in early 1861: Could most Southerners’ hatred of northern critics overcome
their love of Union, their dread of disunion, their divisions from each other, and their distrust of the
fire-eaters?
PART I
BETTER ECONOMIC TIMES GENERATE WORSE
DEMOCRATIC DILEMMAS
During the first two decades of the slavery controversy, 1835–54, the huge majority of Southerners
believed that the William L. Yanceys counterproductively exaggerated the South’s peril. Then, in the
mid- and late 1850s, a more respectable minority of Southerners believed that the secessionists
offered a productive escape from imminent danger. Yet at the very time more Southerners saw
themselves as disastrously afflicted politically, their economic afflictions largely lifted. Why should a
sunnier economic outlook have coincided with a stormier political mood?
In part because the South’s stormiest disunionists, the South Carolina aristocrats, enjoyed less of
the brighter economic prospects. In part because southern prosperity elsewhere widened the section’s
provoking divisions: not only between contracting South Carolinians and expanding Southwesterners
but also between slaveholders and nonslaveholders, between black belt and white belt areas, between
the Lower South and the Border South. Meanwhile, at the very time that southern divisions widened,
northern antagonism swelled. Never had the minority of masters in the South, or the minority of
Southerners in the Union, or the minority of South Carolinians in the master class felt so vulnerable,
defending an unrepublican institution inside republican government.
CHAPTER 1
Democracy and Despotism, 1776–1854: Road, Volume I, Revisited
As in Road to Disunion, Volume I, let us focus on the immersion of the world’s most powerful
slaveholders in the world’s most advanced republic, for that phenomenon most paved the southern
road to disunion.1 From the moment that road began amidst the American Revolution, republican
ideology and government posed special threats to despotism’s antirepublican essence. Yet the
American republican system also lent special protections to an aggressively defensive slavocracy. The
dialectic between extra threats and extra protection tipped toward slaveholder safety until the mid1850s. Then the balance shifted, at the very time the slavocracy’s internal divisions widened.
–1–
Where republican rule over whites required free speech and the consent to be governed, dominion over
blacks invited dictatorial compulsions and the coercion of the nonconsenting. The slaveholders needed
an All-Mighty Color Line to keep such irreconcilable regimes severed. But the color line leaked.
Whites freed some blacks. Some citizens became so-called poor white trash—trashier than slaves.
Some masters used supposedly inferior blacks to direct their slaves. Many enslavers inhibited white
antislavery debate, lest the enslaved—or the citizens—challenge despotism’s compatibility with
democracy. At their most undemocratic, white censors deployed lynch mobs, anticipating the most
savage postwar South’s terrorizing.
Yet the democrat in the slaveholder resisted physical violence against white citizens. Rather than
impose lynch law, the establishment preferred nonviolent pressure to conform, especially the
accusation that hesitation about proslavery tactics revealed softness on slavery. Every four years in
presidential campaigns and whenever agitation about slavery threatened, southern politics featured
loyalty finger pointing. Accusations of “traitor” became rife and politically lethal.2
The slaveholding democrat found the relentless brutalizer of slaves as repulsive as the relentless
lyncher of citizens. Masters preferred to control their slaves with familial kindness, Christmas
presents, and soothing concessions (especially the granting of private garden plots). Slaves, mastering
their job of wrenching maximum concessions from would-be paternalists, often played the role that
slaveholders desired. They pretended to love their patriarch and to consent, just like citizens, to his
supposedly fatherly dominion.
Sometimes, pretense edged toward reality, among both the charade’s would-be “fathers” and its
would-be “boys.” The ideal master’s most revealing word for the ideal servile was not “boy,” not even
“Sambo,” but “Cuffee.” Just cuff a childish black, declared the condescending word, and he will
become that alleged impossibility, the consenting slave.
But most often, Cuffee’s and Massa’s role slipped, belied by duplicity on both sides of the color
line. Dubious paternalists regularly faced exasperating slaves’ lies, misunderstood orders, slovenly
work, and dark glances. Occasionally pretenses altogether disappeared. In the nineteenth century,
massive slave revolts almost never ripped apart the Massa-Cuffee charade. The last slave revolt, Nat
Turner’s in 1831, came to seem ages ago. But individual slaves who ambushed masters were not as
rare. Individual slave runaways were not rare at all, especially in the South closest to the North.