Abolition Societies
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The war with Mexico came, victories were won, and the national enthusiasm was running high when President Polk asked Congress in August, 1846, to vote him two million dollars in order that he might have the means of inducing Mexico to make satisfactory cessions of territory. The Western Democrats were smarting under the sting of the veto of their internal improvements bill, and the “people at home” were much disappointed at the loss of half of Oregon, “given away,” some said, by a President who was only interested in “Southern policies.”[6]Jacob Brinkerhoff, who had had a quarrel with Polk about the patronage, drew a proviso to be added to the appropriation bill, which declared that slavery should be forever forbidden throughout the proposed accessions of territory. Judge Wilmot, a quiet member from Pennsylvania, was induced to offer the amendment. He awoke next day a famous man.
Northern Whigs who had been compelled by popular sentiment to support the Administration in all its war measures seized the opportunity to vote for the proviso; of course the Northwestern Democrats, who were dissatisfied because of other matters, took this chance to pay the President for his neglect of them. The abolitionists who were in politics became more active, and many orthodox, that is non-voting, followers of Garrison changed their views and thenceforward fought in the ranks of party organization. It was a critical time for the dominant South. Only the conservative Senate saved the President from a second unpopular veto. A strong popular sentiment supported the proviso movement, and when Congress reassembled in December thedetermination of the opposition to prevent the extension of slavery into the new territory was stronger than ever. The House attached the proviso to the appropriation bill, which came up again, and the Senate a second time defeated the anti-slavery forces.
The South was by this time greatly excited, and Virginia, South Carolina, and Alabama declared that the passage of the proposed amendment would be resisted to the point of making open war. In the East and Northwest, where the abolitionists were numerous, the leaders were equally resolute in their purpose that slavery should not profit by the war with Mexico. Horace Greeley, William H. Seward, and Salmon P. Chase, a vigorous anti-slavery leader of Ohio, who now came into national prominence, were the most powerful spokesmen of the various elements of the opposition, and they were actively laying the foundations of an abolition and sectional party which should ere long outvote the South.
The candidacy of Zachary Taylor, strongly supported by Thurlow Weed, checked and even defeated the sectional purposes of the radicals. Taylor was the master of a great plantation in Louisiana, and John J. Crittenden, of Kentucky, Ballard Preston, of Virginia, and Alexander Stephens, of Georgia, all good pro-slavery men, rallied at once to the popular military chieftain. Clay was promptly snubbed and Webster's claims were unceremoniously brushed aside. The Whig Convention of 1848 met in Philadelphia in May. It was under the control of Weed and his Southern allies. Taylor was nominated, andWebster, Clay, and the other disgruntled leaders finally gave him their support. Nothing was said of the great issue, the spread of slavery over the new accessions; and the party, as in 1840, went before the country without a platform. Nor was the candidate allowed to make speeches or write public letters, which was doubtless wise, for Taylor knew little of public questions. It was said that he had never voted, and he claimed to belong to no party. The Whigs took him on his reputation as a soldier and on the recommendation of the great New York “boss.” His candidacy probably saved the party from breaking into two hostile wings.
When the Democratic Convention assembled in Baltimore in May, 1848, Cass met with little opposition. His stout imperialism had won him the leadership of the expansionist West and South. The radical pro-slavery men of the lower South, who feared his former friendliness to the Wilmot Proviso leaders, had been satisfied, with a few exceptions, by the Nicholson letter of December, 1847, in which Cass laid down the doctrine that the settlers in any new region should be allowed to determine for themselves whether they would have slaves or not. It was the same idea which Douglas made famous in his Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, and which the country then dubbed “squatter-sovereignty.” Cass was nominated and the Nicholson letter was made the platform; all the leaders of the party gave him hearty support, save those who had been humiliated at Baltimore four years before by the defeat of Van Buren. Van Buren himself doubtless remembered that Cass had lent assistance to the astute Southern politicians who had compassed his fall.
It was difficult to say which of the great parties was the weaker, the Whigs with both Webster and Clay sulking, or the Democrats with the shrewd Van Buren awaiting his opportunity to punish his enemies. The opportunity came in the nomination of Van Buren by the Liberty Party Convention, which met later in the summer at Syracuse. The Van Buren wing of the New York Democracy approved the Syracuse Convention, and the Free-Soil party began its first and only campaign with the ex-President as its candidate. Van Buren received nearly 300,000 votes in November and prevented Cass from becoming President. He had avenged himself. The South found her alliance with the Northwest broken, but a Southern slave-owner was to be the next President.
As so often happens in American history, the election settled nothing, for the victorious Whigs, as in 1840, had no program, and their candidate had no political record. When the Administration began its work, it was found expedient to underwrite practically all that the Polk Administration had accomplished. There was no idea of reopening the bank or financial questions; and the tariff was already so successful that it would have been plain folly to change it. In the foreign policy of the country the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with England dealt with the proposed isthmian canal. By this agreement the two contracting parties promised not to acquire furtherinterests in Central America, and thus in a way nullified the concessions of Colombia of 1846, under which Polk had hoped for the building of a canal across Panama.
The one absorbing question after the inauguration of Taylor was that which both the great parties had side-stepped during the campaign, namely, what should be done with slavery in the Territories. The Southern Whigs sought day and night to gain the ear of the President, and the Southern Democrats were not less persistent. Both aimed at the same thing, the extension of their favorite institution. And now that the fight for slavery in Oregon was recognized as lost, this Southern wooing of the new President became the more intense. It was a desperate situation for the South. The Northwest was rapidly expanding toward the Pacific and building up free States which might at any time repudiate their allegiance to the South. Now the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo opened a great hinterland for the South, extending by the easiest passes over the mountains to California. But the abolitionists declared that the South should not expand in that direction save at the expense of slavery. The President's attitude might determine the matter.
The discovery of gold in amazingly rich deposits in California hastened the conflict of the rival sections. During the second half of 1848 and all through 1849 thousands of Southerners, Easterners, and Westerners rushed pell-mell into the new Eldorado, bent on making hasty fortunes and oblivious of the anxious thoughts of statesmen. The motley gold-diggers needed government. They asked Polk to provide it. He failed to grant it. Congress could not do so because of the deadlock over slavery. Benton wrote a public letter to the Californians advising them to form a government for themselves, and his son-in-law, John C. Frémont, went to the new community to help the cause and perhaps to come back to Washington as one of their Senators. In 1849, the Californians formed a State Government, and the new legislature sent their constitution and two Senators, one of whom was Frémont, on to Washington early the next year. Admission as a full-fledged State was asked. They had failed to mention slavery in their constitution.
President Taylor had at last decided to admit to his counsels the anti-slavery leaders of the Whig party, and he filled his Cabinet with men who would support him as against Clay and Webster. William H. Seward became the confidential adviser to the President and a sort of Administration leader of the Senate. Southern Whigs like Stephens, who had done much to secure for Taylor the Presidency, were without influence, and they feared that all the anti-slavery elements of the North were combining to control the Government.
While California was shaping her own course and the President was making his decision as between the factions of his party, South Carolina and Mississippi took the lead in a movement to prevent that or any other State or Territory from being brought into the Union if slavery were not duly recognized. Whigs and Democrats joined in great mass meetings, which showed conclusively that the lower South was in earnest. All classes of the people united in what seemed to be almost the unanimous wish of the South, that the new Southwest should be preserved for the expansion of slavery. These meetings spread over all the lower Southern States, and as a result, a convention was called to meet in Nashville in June, 1850. The object of this general convention was to present to Congress a Southern ultimatum, and in the event that this should not be heeded, to urge the secession of the slaveholding States.
In the West the crisis did not seem so acute. But Clay, now seventy-four years old, and cured of his ambition to be President, was sent back to the Senate in the hope of averting the calamity of a disruption of the Union. Thomas H. Benton, though recently defeated in a campaign for reëlection, was still in the Senate. Cass was again a member of the Senate, and he, too, felt that the Union was about to be dissolved. Douglas and the other younger representatives of the Northwest, who had suffered somewhat from the legislation of 1846, ceased to nurse their grievances against the party, and deplored the “treason” of the abolitionists who were making all the trouble. There was undoubtedly a crisis which Southern leaders like Davis, Stephens, Yancey, and Robert Toombs, another able Georgian who now came into national prominence, took pains to lay to the charge of the radical anti-slavery people of the East; that is, to Seward and his followers, who were allowing Garrison and Phillips and the radical abolitionists to drive them into open opposition to the South.
When Clay came back to Washington, Taylor and his Cabinet had taken their stand, which was to recommend the admission of California as a free State. The Mormons in Deseret and a few Americans and Mexicans in New Mexico had taken steps toward organizing Territories in the region between Texas and eastern California, and they were to be made Territories with or without slavery, as they chose. If all this were done, the South would secede and the Administration would be in a dilemma. Taylor was a stubborn man; he had made up his mind, and he sent to Congress a fatherly message in which his devotion to the Union above everything else was very evident. If the Southerners, who were then offering Texas military assistance to make good her claim to a large part of New Mexico, chose to resist the lawful authority of the Administration and war came, the fault would be theirs, not his.
But Henry Clay and Daniel Webster still enjoyed much more of the confidence of the people of the country, North and South, than the President. Nor was Webster less popular because he had been ignored by the Administration. He was in his place in the Senate. Calhoun was also there. It was an exceedingly able Congress, that to which Taylor and Seward must look for support. With scant courtesy to the President, Clay took the lead in the Senate late in January and offered his plan of compromising the sectional quarrel. He would make a free State of California, allow Utah, as Deseret came to be called, and New Mexico to form Territorial Governments without mention of slavery, pay Texas ten milliondollars for her claims against New Mexico, abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and enact a Fugitive Slave Law which would satisfy the border Southern States.
Excitement was too intense for the two parties in the Senate and House to accept immediately this comprehensive plan. The President opposed it; the extreme men of the South opposed it. But Clay had not lost his power to charm, and he was still a good manager, according to the polite phraseology of the day. He quietly secured the support of Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Democratic organ at Washington,The Union; he broke the hold of Calhoun on Mississippi by winning to his side Senator Henry S. Foote, a fiery Democrat and foremost advocate of Southern resistance; and within the next three months most of the Southern Whigs who were preparing to take part in the Nashville convention indicated their change of heart. Clay's method, almost exactly parallel to that by which Jackson had defeated Calhoun in 1833, was to steal away the hearts of Whigs and Westerners, to whom the Union was still sacred, and leave the radical South isolated. And in support of his compromise the old statesman made most moving appeals during February and March. It was the greatest moment of his life, he thought, and in this his colleagues were fully agreed.
But Calhoun and the ardent representatives of the lower South, supported by nearly all of the spokesmen of Virginia and North Carolina, were the obstacles in the way of a settlement. They demanded a slave State in California and free access,under the protection of the Union, to all the new Mexican territory. The extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific would have satisfied them. Or failing in this, Calhoun asked for an amendment to the Federal Constitution which should create a dual presidency in which each section was always to have a veto over the legislation of Congress. Permanent deadlock was thus proposed as the remedy for the ills of sectional conflict. Resolute as the old nationalist was, he could not bring himself in these closing days of his life to pronounce to his party the word “secession.” It was pathetic to see the disappointed and broken leader of the South as he literally wore his life away trying to defeat Clay, his lifelong antagonist, or to conciliate Webster, for whom he had always entertained a hearty respect.
Upon Webster and his conservative Eastern support depended the outcome. He had never been a democrat, and as he had grown older, he had come to sympathize more than formerly with the great property interests of the South, which were not unlike the industrial interests of the East, for which he had broken many a lance. He, too, had been a rival of Clay since 1832, and three times a disappointed candidate for the Whig nomination for the Presidency. But both he and Clay had been brushed aside in 1848 by Thurlow Weed and the young William H. Seward with rather scant ceremony. And the abolitionists of New England were as noisome to him as were the radical secessionists to Henry Clay. Charles Sumner and his friends were already waging incessant war upon him. He took his stand onMarch 7, and he made the day famous. He spoke for the Union, and the effect of the speech was probably the postponement of the Civil War. Although he was again the follower of Clay, he was henceforth “the Godlike Webster” to Northern conservatives, and the large business interests of his section applauded him more heartily than they had ever done before. But the price which he paid for this epoch-making speech was fearful. The Massachusetts abolitionists groaned at the mention of his name, and the poet Whittier pilloried him in the famous lines:—
“So fallen! So lost! the light withdrawnWhich once he wore!The glory from his gray hairs goneForever more!Revile him not—the Tempter hathA snare for all;And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,Befit his fall.”
Presidential Election of 1852
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Clay had won. The President, resisting to the last and following the counsels of Seward, saw the majority of Congress yield slowly to influences which favored compromise. Calhoun died early in April, and though his followers maintained their position resolutely, their Whig allies were deserting them, and the Nashville convention proved a fiasco when it assembled in June. President Taylor died on the 9th of July, and the last obstacle to the success of Clay and Webster was removed. Millard Fillmore, the Vice-President, a close friend of Clay, became President; the Cabinet was reorganized, Webster becoming Secretary of State. One by one during the month of August all the features of the “Omnibus Bill” becamelaw. The great majority of the Southerners indicated their ready acceptance of the compromise as a “finality”; and radicals like Jefferson Davis, Robert Barnwell Rhett, and William L. Yancey retired from public life, either voluntarily or by compulsion of the people. The big cities of the East and the Northwest celebrated the passage of the crisis with the firing of cannon, and everywhere the thanks of the people were expressed to the “great Congress” which had saved them from civil war.
If the logic of events ever pointed to one individual as the proper leader of the people or the fit man for the Presidency, it pointed to Daniel Webster in 1852. The Whigs had not all voted for the compromise, but their leaders had been its authors. The party was entitled to claim the glory for a great performance; and if they claimed it and nominated their candidate upon a platform of “henceforth there shall be peace between the sections,” they would undoubtedly win and control the Federal Government for at least two or three presidential terms.
But with a most remarkable aptitude for blundering, the Whigs in their convention of 1852 hesitated in their pronouncement upon the compromise, and refused to nominate Webster. The radical element procured the nomination of General Winfield Scott, a Southern man of anti-slavery proclivities, and Scott blundered through the campaign, losing votes every time he made a public statement. Heart-broken, the “Godlike Webster” died before the day of election. Nor was Clay spared to witness the crushing defeat which awaited his beloved party in November. TheWhig newspapers of that autumn appeared in mourning too frequently for the public mind not to be affected.
Conservative interests turned to the Democratic party, whose leaders promptly declared in their convention that the compromise was a finality. They nominated a popular but colorless young New Englander, Franklin Pierce, a colonel under Scott in the war with Mexico, and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the campaign biography. Pierce said little during the months of electioneering. His rôle and that of his party was now one of conciliation. If elected he would enforce the laws and maintain the Union. Every State but four, Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee, gave him their electoral votes. The support of the Free-Soil Democrats, 156,000 votes and all in the abolitionist sections, showed that the country was tired of agitation. The prolonged quarrel of the sections seemed definitely closed, and the future promised peace and prosperity.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
A. B. Hart'sSlavery and Abolition(1906), inAmerican Nationseries; F. J. and W. P. Garrison'sWilliam Lloyd Garrison: the Story of his Life Told by his Children(1885-89), and both McMaster and Schouler in their histories, already mentioned, give all the essential facts about the abolitionists and the Wilmot Proviso struggle. James Ford Rhodes'sHistory of the United States(from 1850 to 1877) is a work of the greatest importance, and it gives, in vol.I, the best account of the compromise measures of 1850. The following biographies are valuable for the period: T. W. Barnes,Memoir of Thurlow Weed(1884); William Birney,James G. Birney and his Times(1890); G. L. Austin,Life and Times of Wendell Phillips(1887); Henry Cleveland,Alexander Stephens in Publicand Private(1866); W. H. Haynes,Charles Sumner(1909), inAmerican Crisesseries; A. C. McLaughlin,Lewis Cass(1891), inAmerican Statesmenseries. Special for the lower South: Miss Cleo Hearon,Mississippi and the Compromise of 1850(1914); W. G. Brown,The Lower South in American History(1902); J. W. DuBose,The Life of William L. Yancey; and A. C. Cole,The Whig Party in the South(1913), named in a previous note. J. D. Richardson'sMessages and Papers of the Presidents(1900), vol. v; H. V. Ames'sState Documents on Federal Relations(1907); and theCongressional Globefor the 29th and 30th Congresses give the most important speeches and documents bearing on the crisis of 1850.
Partisan opposition to Franklin Pierce had almost disappeared before the day of his inauguration in 1853. Charles Sumner, to be sure, was in the Senate, but he was a silent member, and Massachusetts inclined to follow Edward Everett rather than Sumner. William H. Seward still spoke for the anti-slavery Whigs in Congress, and Salmon P. Chase maintained a precarious hold on Ohio. There was a handful of Free-Soilers in the House of Representatives who were ready to make trouble for the new Administration, and resistance to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law now and then broke out in riots in certain neighborhoods of New England and in the Western Reserve. But the opposition was everywhere declining until Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous novel,Uncle Tom's Cabin, with its exaggerated emphasis upon the cruelties of the slavery system, began to stir the consciences of men. Even so there was no substantial evidence that any great political upheaval or party change would occur within the next fifteen or twenty years. The people were contented with their country, and the growth of the population gave evidence of a great future.
When Jackson came to the Presidency there were about 12,500,000 people in the country; in 1850 the number had grown to 23,000,000, and in 1860 therewere 31,000,000. The Census Bureau estimated that the population of 1900 would be 100,000,000 if the growth of the Pierce period was maintained. Not only was the normal native increase phenomenal, but foreigners poured into “the land of the free” in unprecedented numbers. In 1850 there were 2,800,000 foreign-born people in the United States; in 1860 there were 5,400,000, and this tide of immigration was of a very high social and economic character. The German element was large, industrious, and liberty-loving, many of them being refugees from the political persecutions of 1832-33 and 1848-50. The English, Scotch, and Irish composed most of the remainder, and these were already familiar with the ideals and political habits of the country and therefore readily assimilable. By far the greater part of this rich contribution to American life fell to the cities of the East and the open country of the Northwest, where good land was abundant and available at low prices.
If we compare the distribution of the population of 1850-60 with that of 1830, we shall see how well the sectional balance, on which so much depended, was maintained. In 1830, the East[7]had a population of 6,000,000 in a total of almost 13,000,000. This had increased only 500,000 in 1850; but between 1850 and 1860 the increase was nearly 2,000,000. The South had a population of 6,000,000 in 1830; in 1850, 8,900,000, and in 1860 this had grown to 11,400,000. The Northwest had, however, grown faster than either of the other sections, for herincrease, including California and Oregon, had been from 4,800,000 in 1850 to 8,260,000 in 1860; that is, the growth of the East during the last decade ofante-bellumhistory was 21 per cent, that of the South, 28 per cent, and that of the Northwest, 77 per cent.
Keeping in mind the sectional conditions of 1830 as set forth in the third chapter of this volume, we shall come to a better understanding of the Civil War if the prosperity of the different parts of the Union be closely analyzed. The people of the United States were poor indeed in 1830 as compared with 1850-60. Between 1815 and 1846 the receipts of the Federal Treasury fluctuated violently; but from that date to 1860, except for two years of panic, the Federal Treasury was always full and there was generally an annual surplus of from $5,000,000 to $10,000,000. During the Jacksonian era the prices of staple commodities fluctuated as much as fifty per cent in single years. Cotton was twenty cents a pound during all of the twenties; it was as low as seven cents when nullification was the critical issue; but from 1850 to 1860 cotton sold at ten or twelve cents. Corn was in most places twenty-five cents a bushel during Jackson's and Van Buren's Administrations; between 1850 and 1860 it rose in price steadily and was almost everywhere readily marketable at fifty cents a bushel. In the era just preceding the war prices were steadily rising, and the demand for American produce, cotton, corn, tobacco, wheat, and sugar, was always greater than the supply.
This prosperity was unequally distributed, asalways. The East had developed her manufactures beyond all expectation, and the great mill belt stretched from southeastern Maine to New York City, its center of gravity, thence to Philadelphia and Baltimore, and from these cities westward to Pittsburg. Another belt ancillary to this began in western Massachusetts and extended along the Erie Canal to Buffalo, thence to Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. In these areas, or in the industrial belt as it may be termed, there lived about 4,000,000 mill operatives, whose annual output of wool, iron, and cotton manufactures alone was worth in 1860 $330,393,000 as compared to the $58,000,000 of 1830. Perhaps the meaning of these figures may become clearer if we note that the total investments in these industries was considerably less than the yearly product. Nor was the East less prosperous in other lines. Her tonnage had increased from a little more than 500,000 in 1830 to nearly 5,000,000 in 1860. The freight and passenger ships, built of iron, and encouraged by liberal subsidies from the Federal Government, employed 12,000 sailors and paid their owners $70,000,000 a year. They carried the manufactures of the East to the Southern plantations, to South America, and to the Far East. This great fleet of commercial vessels was owned almost exclusively in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, and its owners were at the end of the decade about to wrest from Great Britain her monopoly of the carrying trade of the world.
The Industrial Belt of 1860
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In spite of the efforts of President Jackson and of the purposes of the sub-treasury system, the concentration of capital in the Eastern towns and cities continued. Only New York, instead of Philadelphia, was the new center. The merchants of that city imported three fourths of the European goods consumed in the country, and they in turn exported nearly all of the great crops with which the balance of trade was maintained. New York was also a distributing center for the manufactures of the East which were sent to the South, the West, or the outside world. Thus the exchanges of all the sections were made there, and before 1860 its banks, with a capital of $130,000,000 and specie reserves of only $20,000,000, did a business of $7,000,000,000 a year. And while New York became the American London, the whole of the East was likewise securing the lion's share of the banking profits of the country. Although the assessed wealth of the section counted only one fourth of the total $16,000,000,000 for the country in 1860, the East had nearly two thirds of the banking capital; and the money in circulation there was $16.5per capitaas against $6.6 for the country as a whole.[8]Industry, commerce, shipping, and banking concentrated in the narrow area of less than 200,000 square miles, earned yearly returns equal as a rule to the total of the capital invested. Money changed hands rapidly, credits did the work of capital, and the rapid growth of population added large unearned increments to the fortunes of those who owned land or had established themselves in trade.
Railroads in Operation in 1850
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Railroads in Operation in 1860
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Naturally this concentration of industry and the economic resources of the country in the East led to the rapid extension of railways into the West and South. The New York Central, the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the Baltimore and Ohio systems had already been founded, and they made connections in 1850-53 with the canals and railways of the Middle West. The Illinois Central, which connected the lower South with Chicago, was affiliated by means of interlocking directorates with the New York Central before 1856. John M. Forbes, the Boston capitalist, was president of the Michigan Central during the decade, and laying the foundations of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy. Commodore Vanderbilt was organizing his steamboat and railroad properties and expanding the area of his activities till it reached, before 1860, the rich grain belt of the West, the cotton lands of the South, the Far Eastern tradeviahis Panama Railroad and Pacific steamers, and the great markets of Europe. During the decade under consideration the capitalists of the East built 4000 miles of railway east of Pittsburg, 7500 miles in the Northwest, and 5000 miles in the South. But the work was not all done at the expense of the capitalists. The Federal Government donated 20,000,000 acres of the most valuable lands in the country to the companies which built the roads; States, counties, and towns in the West and South voted many millions for the same purpose; and European capitalists loaned $450,000,000 secured by first mortgage bonds on the vast properties.
Thus the industrial belt of the East was reachingout toward Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans and beyond for a commerce that was already richer than the gold mines of California; and New York, Boston, Philadelphia, the canal towns, and Pittsburg were becoming centers of wealth and economic power which attracted the attention of the world. Great merchants, like the Lawrences of Boston and the Astors of New York, became the objects of emulation everywhere, and they in turn set the fashion of giving liberally of their means to the cause of education or the founding of hospitals, which has been a distinctive feature of the social history of the last thirty years.
The Black Belt 1860
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The planters, on the other hand, had spread their system over the lower South in a remarkable manner since 1830. From eastern Virginia their patriarchalestablishments had been pushed westward and southwestward until in 1860 the black belt reached to the Rio Grande. Tobacco, cotton, and sugar were still their great staples, and the annual returns from these were not less than $300,000,000; while the growth of their output between 1850 and 1860 was more than one hundred per cent. The number of slaves who worked the plantations had increased between 1830 and 1860 from 2,000,000 to nearly 4,000,000 souls, thus suggesting the comparison with the workers in the mills of the East. The exports of the black belt composed more than two thirds of the total exports of the country; but they were largely billed through Eastern ports, and most of the imports of the South came through New York, where a second toll was taken from the products of the plantation.
But the ratio of annual returns to the total investments was very unlike that of the East. In the South the assessed value of real estate and personal property, including slaves, in 1860 was $5,370,000,000, while the returns for the best years were somewhat over $300,000,000: that is, their investment was $1,000,000,000 greater than that of the East and their income not more than a third as great. Perhaps the banking statistics of the planter section will enable us to get a better view of their dependence upon the East. The South had in 1860 a banking capital of $89,131,000, a bank-note circulation of $68,344,000, and money on deposit, $56,342,000. Thus an annual return of $300,000,000 brought deposits of only $56,000,000; and theper capitacirculation was only $10. New York City alone hadtwice as much money on deposit as all the Southern States, though the personal property valuation of the whole State of New York, with a population four times as great, was only $320,000,000 as against $240,000,000 for Virginia.
Although the system of agriculture in the South had not greatly improved since 1830, the annual crops sold for about four times as much as they had brought when Jackson was President. In spite of the “red gullies” and the waste lands, the owners of plantations were the wealthy men of the time. The Hairstons of Virginia and the Aikens of South Carolina were counted as the peers of the Astors of New York. But a Southern man worth $4,000,000 or $5,000,000 would not receive an annual income of more than $100,000 unless he happened to be in the midst of a new cotton region. Still the hold of the planters on the state and county governments of the South was, as we have seen in a former chapter, even more secure than it had been in 1830, and Southern public opinion was almost always the opinion of the planters. Yet there was great uneasiness in the South as to the future, and public officials, railway magnates, and newspaper men gathered in annual conventions to devise ways and means of increasing the power of the South and of competing with the East in the race for economic supremacy.
The Cotton Belt of 1860
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Tobacco areas in 1860
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These conventions discussed scientific agriculture, the proper size of a plantation, and the duties of “Christian masters to their servants”; they outlined plans for connecting Southern ports with the Northwest, for opening a direct trade with Europe, and for annexing territory which might increase the area of the staple producing States. They supported Narciso Lopez and John A. Quitman in their filibustering expeditions against Cuba, and they heralded William Walker, who sought to make Nicaragua an American slave State in 1854-59, as a statesman and “man of destiny.” The reopening of the African slave trade was the subject of long and earnest debate, and Southern delegations in Congress were urged to exert themselves to secure a repeal of the law against the slave trade in order that the South might have some means of increasing its laboring population to counterbalance the advantages which the East and Northwest derived from immigration. A paramount purpose of these gatherings was to solidify the South and to harmonize the interests of the border States with those of the lower South. In the background of all this, and especially after the struggle over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854, there was the ever-recurring probability of secession from the Union.
What added to the anxieties of Southern leaders was the extraordinary growth and expansion of the Northwest. In 1830 it had been the East that most feared the development of the Mississippi Valley; now it was the South that took pains to hedge and limit the opportunities of the newer States. And there was reason for the masterful politicians of the cotton country to watch the Northwestern frontier. Michigan had become a State in 1837, Iowa and Wisconsin in 1846, and Minnesota was to enter theUnion in 1858. There were four Territories, Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon, and Washington, that might be admitted at any time. California was growing powerful, and she was already lost to slavery if not to the South. And a free State was likely to be formed in Colorado. Seven thriving Northwestern States and five promising Territories gave every assurance that the seat of political influence was about to be shifted to the upper Mississippi Valley. Moreover, the economic changes that were taking place in that region were such as might have alarmed conservative men both South and East.
The removal of the Indians from Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois had paralleled the similar removal from the lower South. But during the fifties, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota succeeded in pushing the natives into the arid Nebraska Territory. And now as the great “American Desert” proved to be desirable country for the pioneers, it was proposed to shift the Northwestern Indians into the Southern hinterland, now known as Oklahoma, and thus to bar the way of the planter civilization to New Mexico and California.
An equally important factor in the development of the Northwest was the invention and manufacture of grain-planting and harvesting machinery by Cyrus McCormick and others about 1845. This enabled the farmers to increase their operations very much as the Whitney gin had done for the cotton farmers of 1800. Still the transportation of wheat and corn is so difficult that no great revolution would have been possible but for the simultaneous building ofthousands of miles of railways which opened to grain production the vast prairie lands remote from the rivers. The manufacture of farm implements and the building of railroads made the Northwest a staple-producing area of greater importance than the South had been, though this was recognized by only a few men before the beginning of the Civil War.
The Wheat Areas in 1860
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The value of the wheat and corn crops of the Northwest increased from $80,000,000 in 1850 to $225,000,000 in 1860. In addition to this the Northwest produced pork in great quantities for the cotton plantations, and fresh meats for the industrial cities of the East. The railways, of which mention has already been made, thus brought the isolated farmers of the Western interior into close contact with the markets of the world, and the Northwest was fast becoming the food-producing region of the country and at the same time exporting grain worth at least $50,000,000 a year. In New York, Pennsylvania, and other Eastern States the corn and wheat output steadily declined between 1850 and 1860, while the up-country of the South failed to produce the foodstuffs needed by the planters. Thus the manufacturing and the older staple-producing States came to rely on the Northwest for a large part of their provisions.
Western farmers were now well-to-do. They deserted their log cabins and built frame houses; they bought large quantities of the finer goods of the East. Pianos made in Germany and silks from France found their way to Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. Villages became towns and towns grew rapidly intocities. Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Chicago imitated the ways and manners of Boston and New York. It was a busy, ambitious life that animated the West and produced industrial leaders like Cyrus McCormick, William B. Ogden, and John Y. Scammon, and politicians like Stephen A. Douglas, Salmon P. Chase, and the Dodges of Iowa and Wisconsin.
But in this busy region with its self-sufficing agriculture, the actual surplus capital, as in the South, found its way to Eastern cities. With a population of nearly 8,000,000 and foreign exports of more than $50,000,000, the Northwest still had only $10,425,000 on deposit in her banks and $27,000,000 invested in banking enterprises. Herper capitacirculation was only $4. Here as in the South the amount of specie in the banks was twice as great in proportion to population and the volume of business transacted as in the East. The debts of the Northwest to the East and to Europe cannot well be estimated, but they were enormous. States, counties, and corporations owed hundreds of millions, and when the interest on these obligations was paid at the end of each year, the remaining net increase was small indeed. The West had been badly in debt during the Jackson period; it was still in debt.
While the growing Northwest owed more to the rest of the world than it was likely to pay in half a century, its leaders saw that it must continue to expand its area and improve its economic life. Undoubtedly the one leader who best understood the needs of his region was Stephen A. Douglas, Senator from Illinois andperpetual candidate for the office of President of the United States. Young, active, and ardently patriotic, Douglas had been among the first to see during the Polk Presidency that the old Western policy of internal improvements and freer lands for all who might come must be changed. The West, even the Northwest, was firmly attached to the Democratic party; but the center of that great organization was the South. The leaders of that section looked more and more to free trade as a national policy. If they succeeded, as there was every reason to expect they would succeed, there would be no more easy money for the building of canals and roadways. Moreover, the South was now jealous of the expanding Northwest, and her leaders were growing more hostile toward the idea of free lands for the Northwestern settlers.
Douglas and his friends in both houses of Congress worked out a new policy during the years 1845 to 1850. It was to induce the Federal Government to give large tracts of public land to the Northwestern States on condition that they be given again by the States to railroad corporations as aids to the building of new lines. The roads would sell their lands at good prices, the Government would sell its remaining lands at high prices after the building of the roads, and the farmers would cheerfully pay these higher prices if markets for wheat and corn could be created. The leaders of the lower South were interested in this new American system, for there was government land in their States and they needed railroads quite as much as the Northwesterners. Capitalists of the East and Europe would be enlistedbecause the great tracts of rich land would be security for money they might lend at high rates to the roads. Finally, the increasing armies of immigrants gave assurance that the railroad lands could be sold easily.
The outcome was the building of the Illinois Central, the Mobile and Ohio, and other shorter lines in each of the Western and Northwestern States during the decade of 1850-60. The railroad lands sold as high as $8 or $10 an acre, and the government lands advanced in value accordingly, though the Federal Treasury did not profit to the full extent of these promises. The growth and expansion of the Northwest described above was due largely to this policy of Douglas. Chicago bankers loaned all the money they had and borrowed all they could borrow for the building of railroads. The thriving young city, always the pet of Senator Douglas, increased its business in marvelous manner during the decade. It soon distanced St. Louis in the race for wealth and population, and before 1854 conceived of the scheme of building a great railway, long ago proposed by Asa Whitney, of Michigan, to the Pacific. This road was to connect with the Illinois Central in Iowa, thread its way through the Indian lands in Nebraska, and finally bring San Francisco and the Far East into touch with the commercial center of the Middle West. It was a magnificent undertaking, not unlike that of the Erie Canal, which had made New York the Emporium of the East; it was even more daring for a section already in debt to the limit of its ability to pay. But these ambitious Northwestern men andpoliticians had already won the support of the railway men of New York and Boston, and their agents still borrowed money with ease in London and Liverpool. And with States like Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa doubling their population each decade, and hence increasing their land values three or fourfold, even the impossible became possible. The most ambitious section of the Union during the Pierce Administration was the Northwest, and it need not surprise us to learn that Douglas, her mouthpiece, was the most ambitious leader of his party.
As compared with all former standards, the country of 1850-60 was exceedingly prosperous. A series of good crop years, the low tariff of the United States, and the free-trade policy of England stimulated the unprecedented commercial activity. The financial system was more stable than it had ever been before, and the inter-sectional trade was assuming proportions never dreamed of in the earlier days of the Republic. The manufactures of the East, which approximated $800,000,000 in value each year, were sold to the South in exchange for bills on Liverpool or London, or to the West in return for its grain and other foodstuffs. The banks and railroads brought all sections closer together, especially the East and the West; while the expanding merchant marine promised soon to give the United States the mastery of international commerce.
Thus the East had learned to prosper without a high tariff, and the South was voting for large subsidies to Eastern shipping. The West had found a way to develop her resources in spite of Southern andEastern jealousy, and the laws of commerce were daily weakening the influence of state rights and sectional dislike. A new era had begun. Big business interests and great railway schemes had developed the corporation in its modern connotation; large harvests and a most enterprising industry were producing the capital for a new economic era; and all the social tendencies seemed to be working out a national life which was no longer parochial. It was the business of politics so to guide and regulate the varying activities of the people that sectional hatreds should pass away and that the resources of the country should not be squandered. Such was the task of Franklin Pierce, the new leader, who had not known personally the fears and dislikes of earlier days. But a country so rich and prosperous as the United States in 1850-60 had other interests, a social and intellectual life which must engage our attention before we take up the political evolution of the period.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
James Ford Rhodes'sHistory of the United Slates, vols.IandII, already mentioned, remains the best treatment of the period of 1850-60. T. C. Smith'sParties and Slavery, inAmerican Nationseries (1906), and McMaster'sHistory of the United States, vol.VIII, are very valuable. T. P. Kettell'sSouthern Wealth and Northern Profits(New York, 1860), is a suggestive study in sectionalism not too well known to scholars. But theCensus Reportsof 1850 and 1860; J. E. B. DeBow'sIndustrial Resources of the South and West(1857); and U.S. SenateExecutive Documents, no. 38, part 1, 52d Cong., 1st Sess., supply the needful statistics on population, crops, manufactures, and finance. Freeman Hunt'sLives of American Merchants, 2 vols. (New York, 1858), gives some interesting information about leadingante-bellummerchants and manufacturers. And the volumes ofHunt's Merchant's Magazine, 1839-60,DeBow's Review, 1846-60, and theAmerican Banker's Magazinefor the same period are storehouses of the economic history of the time, K. Coman'sIndustrial History of the United States(1910); E. L. Bogart'sThe Economic History of the United States(1908); and Horace White'sMoney and Banking Illustrated by American History(1911), are the best special works in their several lines.
Four fifths of the people of the United States of 1860 lived in the country, and it is perhaps fair to say that half of these dwelt in log houses of one or two rooms. Comforts such as most of us enjoy daily were as good as unknown. Even in the cities baths were exceedingly rare, while in the country the very decencies of life were neglected. Mosquitoes, flies, and other germ-harboring pests were regarded with equanimity, screens and disinfectants being used only in the best of hospitals. Malaria, typhoid, and other diseases claimed a large toll upon life each year. Physicians were less numerous than now and their art was only in its infancy. Trained nurses were just coming into their present rôle. Men regarded sickness as a visitation of Providence, and when the yellow fever epidemics seized the lower Southern cities, the losses and suffering were such as the present generation cannot appreciate.
Improvements in the matter of dress since 1830 were evident, but for the workaday world shirtsleeves, heavy brogan boots and shoes, and rough wool hats were, of course, the rule. Salt bacon and “greens,” with corn bread and thin coffee, composed the common diet, though milk and butter relieved the monotonous fare for the farmers. “Hog-killing time” was always a happy season, for fresh meats were thenabundant. Only in the larger towns did the people have fresh meats throughout the year. An explanation of the enthusiasm ofante-bellumpeople for political speaking is found in the fact that barbecues either preceded or followed the oratory; and to a man who had lived for months on fat bacon and corn bread a fresh roast pig was a delight which would enable him to endure long hours of poor speaking. But in the cities and towns there was, of course, a better life. Frame houses, two stories high, painted white and adorned with green window blinds, were everywhere in good form, except where men were able to build brick or stone mansions or maintain the establishments of wealthy ancestors. In the South it was still the custom to guard the entrances to great plantation houses with chiseled lions or crouching greyhounds; in the East more attention was paid to flowers and shrubbery. Wealthy families of the East sometimes maintained more than one house servant, but the greater number counted themselves eminently respectable with cook, maid, and house girl all in one, and the pay was one or two dollars a week. Liveries and silver plate persisted mainly in the very exclusive circles of Philadelphia and New York, in Washington, and on the great plantations.
Factory hands and common laborers worked twelve hours a day under circumstances and conditions hardly better than those of 1830, for labor unions had only begun their agitation, and foreign immigrants were always ready to accept work without asking any questions. One or two States had passed laws regulating hours of labor; but none had thoughtof the cost to the race of hard toil and long hours for women and children, and most men regarded the builder of a mill as a public benefactor because he furnished employment to just this element of the population. A man who had steady work on a farm was paid from ten to fifteen dollars a month with board; a day-laborer received a dollar a day without perquisites. Skilled laborers were paid two dollars a day in the South and slightly less in the East. The industrial belt continued to draw upon the country districts of the East, which, with the continued migration to the West, greatly impoverished the rural life and resulted in many abandoned farms. In the city housing conditions of the poor were worse if anything than they had been thirty years before. Crowded tenements, filthy streets, flies, and vermin abounded. Under the English common law accidents in the mills were matters of concern only to the employees, and the human toll of the railways was enormous. Years of toil, a worn-out frame, a dependent old age, and finally the potter's field was the weary round of life to the millions of dependent people who swarmed about the industrial centers.
Under the pressure of outside criticism and the influence of religion, the lot of the slave was mending, though there was room enough for improvement. From sun to sun was always the plantation day, and the weekly ration was a peck of meal and four pounds of meat—salted “side meat” packed in Cincinnati or Chicago. Each negro family had a single-room cabin, where man, wife, and a dozen children were tucked away in the loft or slept on the floor, though therewas usually a bed for the parents. There was, however, always plenty of fresh air, a big open fireplace, and generally shade trees about the negro quarters, which conditions probably account for the lower mortality rate in the South than in the East. Of clothing the slave had only what was absolutely necessary, children being limited to a single garment which reached slightly below the knees. Against accidents and disease more precautions were taken by masters of plantations than by masters of mills, for the life of a negro man or child-bearing woman was equal to twelve hundred dollars. Heavy ditching in malarial swamps was therefore done by Irishmen, whose lives were less important to the planter. Physicians were promptly called for the slaves, and women in labor were generally cared for, because a negro baby was worth one hundred dollars.
If there was some public concern for the slaves in the fields and some beginnings of legislation on the conditions of employment in the industrial States, there was no thought for the isolated, lean, heavy-fisted farmer of the Southern up-country or the Western prairies. Land was still cheap, crops were increasing in bulk and value every year. Nor did the farmer desire the attentions of society, provided the new railroads were laid through his districts and rates were not too exorbitant. He worked hard for a few months, then rested till harvest time, after which he hunted and fished. During the long cold winters of the Northwest he sat in his chimney corner or tended his cattle. Few thought of fertilizing their land; terracing against rains and floods was almost unknown,and for most farmers plowing was done up and down the hills, which only hastened the washing-away process so characteristic of the Southern agriculture. Very few farmers thought it worth while to rotate their crops when fresh lands were to be had at a few dollars an acre. The area of the United States seemed limitless, and hardly a tenth of its arable land had ever been brought under cultivation. The inventions of 1840-50 enabled the Western farmer to grow larger crops, and harvest time was not so burdensome; corn-shellers and grain-fans shortened the hours of labor for the men. Sewing-machines and the revolving churns from the factories gave some relief to the women, whose round of labor, milking, cooking, cleaning, washing, and attending children, was still almost ceaseless. Even the picnics and barbecues offered little to them, for they must still prepare the great baskets of food and serve their lords and masters while they deliberated on “bleeding Kansas,” new railroad schemes, or negro slavery.
Whether the lot of the landless and the less talented had improved since the day of Jackson would be hard to determine. If it was easier to purchase land, or if there was an actual increase in wages, the number of the poorer class of Americans had increased both actually and relatively, and thus competition operated to prevent improved housing and a better country life. Still the life of the great majority in the United States was less grinding than that of Europeans of the same class, and the opportunity for a poor man to rise in the social and economic scale was distinctly better. That is what madeAmerica the Mecca of so many thousands during the decade of 1850-60. Yet illiteracy and dependency, causes and results of poverty, were almost appalling. Georgia had a population of 43,684 white illiterates, to say nothing of the 500,000 blacks; Massachusetts had 46,262; Indiana, 60,943; Pennsylvania, 72,156, and North Carolina, 68,128. There were 101 persons in the jails of Georgia on June 1, 1860; Virginia had 189; Massachusetts, 1161, and Illinois, 485. In the open life of the South and West, where men could easily get to the land, there was little crime and jails were often empty; in the industrial belt the prisons were always occupied. In like manner and for the same reasons Southern and Western hospitals for the insane and homes for the poor often showed very small percentages of these unfortunates. Perhaps the unrelieved poverty of the industrial workers and the stress of uncertainty in the matter of employment made the differences. Certainly the weight of the old English common law system, adopted in all the States, bore hardly on the dependent classes of the East; and the courts were not loath to send undefended men to prison. In the South the worker was punished by his master on the plantation for all the minor offenses, and it was only free negroes and the poorer whites who were the subjects of the ordinary social discipline and punishment.
The abounding wealth and strenuous zest of American life were creating just those gradations in society and distinctions of caste against which constitutions and laws inveighed. On the broad basis of African slavery the enterprising Southerner hadbuilt and was now perfecting a social class hardly inferior to the aristocracies of Europe. Soft hands and exclusive manners were there as elsewhere in the world the evidences of a gentle life; sturdy personal independence and rough ways, here as in England, were the marks of middle-class training, through which recruits to the privileged order had generally come. Openly and on all proper occasions the Southerners announced the break-down of democracy and the benefits of a cultured élite; the few thousand “first families,” who lived upon the incomes of plantations, spent their winters in New Orleans, their springs in Charleston, and their summers at the Virginia springs. Among these, tutors were engaged to train children, and every man had his valet, every lady her maid. Travel in Europe, sojourns at Newport and Saratoga, and acquaintance with the best hotels of Philadelphia and New York were common to this group of most attractive people. When Congress was in session, they dominated the social life of the capital, gave elaborate balls, and brought effective pressure to bear upon aspiring Eastern and Western public leaders. Douglas had married a beautiful North Carolina heiress, the wife of Jefferson Davis was the granddaughter of a governor of New Jersey, and even William H. Seward was strongly influenced by the graces of his planter friends. Senators, representatives, and judges of the federal courts owned estates in the lower South which yielded incomes ofttimes greater than their official salaries. The very flower and beauty of the land were Southern gentlemen like Robert E. Lee and Wade Hampton, or ladies like the sprightly Mrs. Chestnut or the genial Mrs. Pryor.
Nor did the commercial and industrial life of the East fail to produce a similar fruit. If the Eastern gentleman were less dependent on his valet and less averse to work with his hands, he was nevertheless a gentleman, and the chasm between him and the toiler in the mills was difficult to bridge. There was nowhere in the United States a more exclusive society than that in which the Danas and the Winthrops of Boston moved. And the New England élite were never so happy as when they could run off to England and frequent the dinners and receptions of the British aristocracy; both the manners and the ideals of the Eastern upper class resembled strikingly those of the “best people” of Old England. It was all in striking contrast to the ideals of the Puritans of old times, but it was natural. In New England, as in the South, democracy was flouted and a privileged position greatly prized. The old American “equality” was only skin deep, as any one would have recognized if he had attempted familiarities with either the Eastern or the Southern social leaders. The difference was that the one group lived in cities when they were at home, and the other in the country.
Nor was this American social life scorned by European noblemen. Charles Sumner was always welcome in the greatest houses of London, and the Slidells and the Masons of the South received no less flattering attentions from their European economic and social kinsmen. One of Bismarck's most intimate friends was John L. Motley, and the friendship had been contracted long before Motley had won fame as a historian. American heiresses had already found suitors among the British nobility. The kinship of Eastern social life with that of Europe was recognized, and the relations of the well-to-do at the North with the wealthy of the South were many and intimate. Thus in America as elsewhere talent, birth, and money produced social strata, and before 1860 the distinctions of class were only less sharply drawn here than in the older countries of the world.
But, next to the very necessaries of life, religion was the most important subject to Americans of 1860. The Puritan spirit, while losing some of its hold in New England, had captured the people of the rest of the country. Except as to the Catholics and the Episcopalians, all Americans were born, or thought themselves born, utterly depraved and weighted down with the sin of Adam and Eve, their “first parents,” from which burden the only way of escape was through prayer and agony of soul. Even this prospect was denied to many, for some influential religious teachers urged that God could not hear the supplications of sinners. These must await the call of Heaven, and if this failed, they were bound for the “lake of fire,” whence there was no return. The intelligent and well-informed spoke with all seriousness of “getting religion,” and in the vast country districts the most suitable season for this was the hot July and August days. Revivals among nearly all the leading denominations were held at this time in the churches or under widespread arbors made from the branches of trees. The preaching and the singing were notunlike that which brought the Germans of the eighth century to the Roman communion. The other worlds were just two: one the city of the golden gates and pearly streets, the other the bottomless pit of liquid fire into which Satan would surely plunge all who failed to make their peace with God in this life. The old Puritan lines formerly learned by every child—