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Who Freed the Slaves?
The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment
By Leonard L. Richards The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 Leonard L. Richards
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-20894-7
CHAPTER 1
The Old Order and Its Defenders
From James Ashley's perspective, his failure on June 15 to get the Senate resolution outlawing slavery through the House stemmed from just one odious fact. Too many House members were like William Steele Holman of Indiana. They had been "molded and stamped with the brand of the slave barons," and even three years of the bloodiest war in the nation's history hadn't broken the hold the slave barons had on them.
This servility, contended Ashley, trumped everything else. Backstage, in his pursuit of more votes, he had repeatedly urged Holman and others to follow instead the teachings of Christ and do what they knew was "right." At the same time, he had insisted that the proposed amendment would benefit everyone but the "privileged" elite. Not only would it end chattel slavery in the South and stop Chinese coolies from being enslaved in the Far West. It would also be a godsend for all free workers. It would guarantee their right to work free of undue coercion, and it would elevate those at the bottom who now had to compete with slave labor. No longer would poor whites in the South have to work for "slave wages." No longer would they be under the thumbs of slave masters who denied them the benefits of free schools, a free press, and free speech. Like free laborers elsewhere, they would have a chance to get ahead and enjoy a better life.
Yet, try as he might, Ashley's powers of persuasion had fallen largely on deaf ears. Holman and others hadn't budged. Instead, they had attacked the proposed amendment from all sides, repeatedly lambasting it as unconstitutional and as a violation of states rights but also insisting that it would prolong the war, make peace impossible, ruin the Northern economy, cause the North to be overrun with black vagabonds, and undermine the property rights of all white Americans. The speeches had ranged in quality, from racist rants to carefully constructed constitutional arguments that legal scholars would later analyze meticulously. But did any of this matter? In Ashley's view, it was all window dressing, just a bunch of afterthoughts to justify the habit of always deferring to the slave barons.
This servility, lamented Ashley, was monstrous. Not only had it determined the outcome of the June vote, but it had governed national politics for decades as well. Some of his Republican colleagues even dated it back to the time of Washington and Jefferson. They insisted that many Northern members of Congress, and especially Northern Democrats, had been subservient to slaveholding interests from the very beginning. Ashley, however, refused to accept this view. He maintained that Congress had once been different.
The Founding Fathers, said Ashley, had not designed a Constitution that was proslavery. Their masterpiece had simply been hijacked by the likes of John C. Calhoun with the help of men like Holman. Not all Southern slaveholders, moreover, were slave barons. In his mind, two of his boyhood heroes, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, were noteworthy exceptions. Although both had owned hundreds of slaves over the course of their lifetimes, they had always put the country and its future far above their interests as slaveholders. They had never catered solely to the interests of the Deep South.
Ashley also insisted that Jackson and other leaders of Democratic Party, which was the party of his youth as well as Holman's youth, had once "shown a broader spirit in favor of human liberty than their political opponents." The big change, said Ashley, had come in 1841 when he was just sixteen years old working on a steamboat on the Ohio River. With the death that year of President William Henry Harrison and the "acting presidency" of John Tyler, the party of Jackson had fallen into the hands of John C. Calhoun and his states' rights disciples, and so began "the organized conspiracy of the slave barons, which culminated in the Rebellion."
As Ashley told the story, the first time he himself had to cope with this "conspiracy," face to face, came three years later. In May 1844, he attended the Democratic national convention in Baltimore. Even though he was only nineteen years old, he went as a dedicated supporter of Martin Van Buren, the Little Magician of New York, who was making his third bid for the presidency.
The former president had a majority of the delegates pledged to him, but he had also indicated that he opposed the immediate annexation of slaveholding Texas. To derail his candidacy, a pro-Texas contingent led by Robert J. Walker of Mississippi got the convention to uphold a rule that had been virtually ignored four years earlier. It required the Democratic nominee to have a two-thirds majority. Van Buren couldn't get the two-thirds, and after nine ballots the nomination went to James K. Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder. Ashley, like many of Van Buren's supporters, left Baltimore convinced that the "slave oligarchy" had cheated his man out of the nomination.
For the next decade, Ashley wavered, sometimes supporting the Democratic nominee, sometimes a third-party candidate. Then in January 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, delivered the final, crushing blow. The Illinois senator was anxious to organize into territories the northern half of the Louisiana Purchase, land that had been closed to slavery since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, partly to facilitate the building of a transcontinental railroad that would run from his hometown of Chicago to the gold country in northern California. Blocking his way was Senator David R. Atchinson, who represented a slaveholding constituency across the Missouri River from the land in question. Not only had Atchinson promised his constituents that they would be able to take their slaves into the new territory, he had virtually staked his political career on that promise as well. Joining Atchinson were several powerful Southern senators who insisted that no bill would pass unless it contained a clause repealing the Missouri Compromise. Douglas gave in to their demands, and President Franklin Pierce, a New Hampshire Democrat, used all the power of his office to get forty-four Northern House Democrats to vote for the repeal.
For Ashley, that was the last straw. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 alienated him from the Democratic Party forever. As the bill made its way through Congress, all hell broke out in the North, and Ashley joined the many thousands who lambasted Douglas and other "Janus-faced northern Democrats" for yielding to the slave barons. At a convention in Maumee, Ohio, he helped organize a new anti-Nebraska party. Then he flirted briefly with another new party, the Know-Nothings, which to his disgust turned out to be more anti-Catholic than antislavery. Within two years, he was campaigning for the new Republican Party. And in 1858, he was the Republican candidate for Congress in the large Toledo district. He won by a narrow margin. In 1860, Ashley backed Salmon P. Chase, a fellow Ohioan and another former Democrat, for the Republican presidential nomination. When the nomination went to Abraham Lincoln, Ashley campaigned hard for the party's nominee. He also ran for a second congressional term and was reelected.
From the beginning, Ashley was deemed a "wild-eyed radical." His willingness to help runaway slaves form their own church, as well as his support of school desegregation and voting rights for women and blacks, distinguished him from virtually every other politician in his district. He had his prejudices, to be sure. He was definitely an anti-Catholic. He assumed that whites were superior to blacks. The very thought of interracial marriage disgusted him. He also indicated on more than one occasion that given the level of white racial prejudice, blacks might be better off leaving the country and taking refuge in Central America or, even, going "back to Africa" as the American Colonization Society proposed. But, unlike virtually every Northern Democrat and many of his fellow Republicans, Ashley never pandered to Northern racism. On the contrary, he spoke out forcefully for granting blacks the same rights as white citizens—including the right to vote, the right to hold office, the right to sit on juries, and the right to join the militia—even when it clearly hurt him politically.
Following Lincoln's election in 1860, Ashley added to his radical credentials. The Republican victory triggered a national crisis, as seven Deep South states pulled out of the Union, beginning with South Carolina on December 20 and ending with Texas six weeks later. The outgoing administration of James Buchanan, a Pennsylvania Democrat who owed his presidency mainly to the slave states, fretted and then fretted some more. Few in Washington had any idea what the incoming president would do. Elected by a minority of the voters, Lincoln said little publicly about what his policy might be, while in private he opposed any plan, arrangement, or compromise that left the slightest room for slavery's expansion. Meanwhile, politicians in Washington and elsewhere scurried about trying to find a formula that would bring the Deep South back into the Union.
Ashley didn't join them. Instead, he opposed compromising in any way with the Deep South "conspirators." The federal government must stand firm, said Ashley. And, if war broke out, it must move quickly and decisively. Declare martial law. Blockade Southern ports. Hang rebel leaders. And confiscate all rebel property, including slave property. Was that legal? It definitely was, said Ashley. As John Quincy Adams had pointed out to Congress nearly twenty years earlier, the war power clause of the Constitution gave the president, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, all the legal authority he needed to emancipate every single slave in any state that dared to rebel. And the faster Lincoln did that, said Ashley, the better.
That winter and spring, however, Ashley was a lone voice shouting in the wilderness. The Toledo Blade, the party's chief newspaper in his district, even took him to task. The editor of the Blade, Clark Waggoner, thought Ashley's views were incendiary and told his readers as much. If there was a war, contended Waggoner, it should not be fought to destroy slavery and the slave oligarchy as Ashley insisted but to restore the Union as it had been before the war. He also called on Ashley to moderate his views. Instead, Ashley fired back with a series of letters to the editor. Thus Toledo's two leading Republicans got into a war of words, one saying that anything short of the destruction of slavery would be a victory for the slave barons, the other calling for the restoration of the old order.
The Republican editor, Clark Waggoner, clearly had the upper hand in 1860–61. He both had more influence locally and his views resonated among most of Ashley's fellow congressmen. Compromise was in the air.
On December 4, even before South Carolina officially seceded, the House of Representatives voted 145 to thirty-eight to create the Committee of Thirty-Three, a special committee of "one from each state," to deal with the crisis. Everyone knew what the committee was to do. It was to work out some sort of "compromise" with the Deep South leaders. Ashley was one of the thirty-eight to vote no. In debate, he lambasted the committee and its proposals, especially those coming from William Kellogg, an Illinois Republican, whom he hoped to see "kicked by a steam Jackass from Washington to Illinois." Kellogg should be against cutting a deal with the Deep South "conspirators," of giving in to any of their demands. The Congress had being doing that for years, said Ashley, and look what it gotten them. Just more demands.
Many in Congress also sought guidance from the leaders of the eight slave states that bordered the South but still remained in the Union. What would they do? Ashley, however, thought seeking their advice was absurd. The border-state leaders were just dealmakers for the Deep South "conspirators." Nonetheless, all eyes that December turned to Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, a good-natured, proslavery Unionist who always had a chaw of chewing tobacco in his mouth. He had been chewing since he was a boy, and his teeth had turned brown. At age seventy-four, he was at the tail end of long and distinguished career.
Crittenden had first entered Kentucky politics in 1811, when he was twenty-one years old. When he took his first seat in the US Senate in 1817, he was only twenty-seven years old—three years shy of the constitutional requirement. He had served for two years before the Kentucky governor realized that the appointment was illegal and had him removed from office. Subsequently, Crittenden had been Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives, governor of Kentucky, attorney general of the United States on two different occasions, and US senator on three different occasions.
On the issues that led to the secession crisis, Crittenden's family was hopelessly split. His son Thomas would end up fighting for the Union, his son George for the Confederacy. Years before, the family had also split over the behavior of his nephew William, a twenty-eight-year-old West Point graduate who in 1851 had led over one hundred Southern volunteers on a futile filibustering expedition to seize Spanish Cuba, with its three hundred thousand slaves, and add it to the United States. Captured by Cuban authorities, William and fifty of his American comrades had been executed by a firing squad.
Torn almost as much as Crittenden's family was the white population Crittenden represented. Historians would later say that the Civil War in Kentucky was really a "brother's war," with one brother going one way, the other the opposite way. That is clearly an exaggeration. In the end, for every white brother who fought for the Confederacy, two fought for the Union, and a whopping seven out of ten sat out the war. No state east of the Mississippi had a greater percentage of nonparticipants.
While support for the Union was strong among some of Crittenden's followers, lackadaisical among others, support for slavery was widespread. Crittenden himself owned nine slaves on the eve of the Civil War. He had made his career mainly as a lawyer-politician and now had just household servants. But among his constituents and within his family were numerous planters, men and women who owned twenty or more field hands, and he was answerable to them and well aware of it.
Roughly 19 percent of all Kentuckians were slaves, and their masters had long had inordinate political power. In 1792, when the slave population was barely 16 percent, proslavery men had gotten a clause written into the state constitution that explicitly protected slavery. It prohibited the legislature from passing laws for the emancipation of slaves without getting the prior consent of their owners and without granting full compensation "in money for the slaves so emancipated." This article, the first in a state constitution, was later copied by other Southern states. Years later, in the state's constitution of 1850, proslavery forces in Kentucky had made emancipation virtually impossible. They had established a series of hurdles, so that would-be emancipationists would first have to get the backing of two consecutive legislative sessions, then the people, then a constitutional convention, before any legal change could take effect.
By this time, the demand for more slaves in Kentucky had lessened. Up until the early 1820s, Kentucky planters had imported thousands of slaves each year from Virginia. Since then, they had exported more slaves than they imported, and for at least thirty years the Crittendens and many other Kentucky planters had fattened their pocketbooks by selling off surplus slaves to the southwest—to the new labor-starved cotton plantations in Arkansas and Mississippi and to the dangerous and pestilent sugar plantations in Louisiana. It was a lucrative business, and by the 1850s Kentucky ranked third in the slave export trade. Only Virginia and South Carolina exported more slaves per year than Kentucky.
Thus every year, several thousand Kentucky-born slaves were on the road, the men in chains, heading south and west. Some were accompanied by their masters, but probably two out of three were in the hands of slave traders who had roamed the state looking especially for able-bodied young men who would fetch a good price in Natchez, New Orleans, and other Deep South markets. This trade, in turn, had probably ripped apart one out five slave families in Kentucky. Yet, at the same time, it had increased the value of every slave in Kentucky and had enriched nearly every Kentucky planter.
This lucrative business, however, was vulnerable. For nearly thirty years, Northern abolitionists had denounced it for ruining black families. Then in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe had made it the centerpiece of her best selling novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, and thousands of her readers had called on Congress to outlaw it. Could that be done? Yes, said pundits, under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. That also was what Harriet Beecher Stowe indirectly called for. And that, declared the editor of the Kentucky Statesman, was something that Crittenden and other Kentucky politicians must stop from ever happening.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Who Freed the Slaves? by Leonard L. Richards. Copyright © 2015 Leonard L. Richards. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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