The Worst Passions of Human Nature: White Supremacy in the Civil War North

The Worst Passions of Human Nature

A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era

Orville Vernon Burton and Elizabeth R. Varon, Editors

The Worst Passions of Human Nature

White Supremacy in the Civil War North

Paul D. Escott

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2020 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Escott, Paul D., 1947– author.

Title: The worst passions of human nature : white supremacy in the Civil War north / Paul D. Escott.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2020. | Series: A nation divided : studies in the Civil War era | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019024355 (print) | LCCN 2019024356 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813943848 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813943855 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Racism—United States—History—19th century. | White supremacy movements—United States—History—19th century. | African Americans—Social conditions—To 1964. | Political parties—United States—History—19th century. | United States—Race relations—History. | United States—Politics and government—1861–1865.

Classification: LCC E185 .E75 2020 (print) | LCC E185 (ebook) | DDC 305.800973/09034—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024355

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024356

Illustrations from the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Cover art: Leaders of the Democratic Party, 1868, political cartoon by Thomas Nast. (Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collection, Susan H. Douglas Political Americana Collection, #2214)

Para Candelas

como siempre

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Illustration gallery follows page 110

Six

Seven

Eight

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE the helpful comments of Professor Randall Miller and an anonymous reviewer, both of whom drew on their wide knowledge to help me improve the manuscript. I also want to register my gratitude, as a researcher, to the former Librarian of Congress, Dr. James H. Billington, to the directors of libraries at several major universities, and to their staffs, for making a growing quantity of primary source material available online. Their foresight and efforts have facilitated research for all of us. Finally, I am grateful for the unstinting generosity of many colleagues in the historical profession and especially, in my case, to Robert Durden, Raymond Gavins, Jeffrey Crow, David Goldfield, and John David Smith.

Introduction

"This is a white man’s country."

Today such a statement is offensive to any fair-minded citizen. However, it was an attitude nearly universal in the antebellum United States, North and South, either in aggressive or unspoken forms, underpinning a racism both pervasive and enduring. In the mid-nineteenth century many northerners had no objection to the enslavement of African Americans.¹ Of those who disapproved of slavery, the majority either defended the South’s constitutional right to hold slaves or scorned the idea of racial equality. Only among a small, despised, and dissenting minority of abolitionists was there support for equal rights. Respectable leaders in politics and society unhesitatingly voiced white supremacist views or attitudes.

Stephen Douglas, the leader of the northern Democratic party, repeatedly challenged Abraham Lincoln on race in the 1850s. This government was established on the white basis, insisted Douglas. It was made by the white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and never should be administered by any except white men. Abraham Lincoln and the rising Republican party were not as far from these views as many nonhistorians suppose. The new Republican party opposed the expansion of slavery, and Lincoln often quoted the Declaration of Independence to argue that African Americans should have some rights. But white people came first. The western territories were to be a place where white men may find a home. We want them for the homes of free white people, said Lincoln. Repeatedly he denied that he was contending for the establishment of political and social equality between the whites and blacks.²

More than two hundred years of history and deeply rooted social practice consigned African Americans to a degraded, inferior role in all parts of the North. They struggled gamely against cradle-to-grave discrimination in the economy, white hostility in social life, and exclusion from the political community in all but a few New England states. The West, where whites went to seek opportunity, was a frontier against slavery because it was also a frontier against Negroes. Various states adopted racist laws to prohibit the entry of African Americans. When settlers in the territory of Kansas voted against allowing slavery, they voted even more strongly against the very presence of African Americans.³

Moreover, the spirit of the age seemed to be finding in science a confirmation of racism. In 1853 Arthur de Gobineau published in France a four-volume work on the inequality of the races of humankind. His books, reviewed and praised in the United States, argued for separate creation of the races and a racial hierarchy in which Aryans were supreme. That same year in the United States, George Gliddon and the South’s Dr. Josiah Nott published an 800-page work, Types of Mankind, which also argued for polygenesis and an immutable racial hierarchy. They dedicated their tome to Philadelphia’s Dr. Samuel Morton, who had assembled a large collection of human skulls. Morton concluded that blacks had the smallest brains compared to whites and American Indians, and he asserted that God had intended separate dwelling places for the different races. Harvard’s Louis Agassiz too declared that the Negro race had been a separate creation, and even Charles Darwin’s writings discussed civilized and savage races and classified as the lowest savages people from certain parts of Africa.⁴

Thus, it was easy to understand why William Lloyd Garrison declared in 1829 that the emancipation of all the slaves of this generation is most assuredly out of the question. Prejudice had built a fortress that towers above the Alps, said Garrison, who regretted that many years may elapse until progress could dismantle racism brick by brick, and foot by foot. Although Garrison soon recanted his gradualist views and called for the immediate end of slavery, his analysis of the power of racism was sound. To end slavery, even more years than Garrison first imagined might have been required . . . but for the unprecedented impact of the Civil War.⁵

War brings unpredictable change. It breaks through norms, eradicates established conventions, intensifies experience, and compresses many processes of development. The Civil War struck the mental and political landscape in northern society with hurricane-force winds, often making the unimaginable possible and bringing astonishing change. Progress was so sudden that it surprised and sometimes confused white abolitionists. Black leaders quickly sensed their opportunity—it is now, if ever, wrote the Weekly Anglo-African. A century may elapse before another opportunity shall be afforded for reclaiming and holding our withheld rights. And progress did come. By 1862 Fredrick Douglass exclaimed, I trust I am not dreaming, but the events taking place seem like a dream. With similar amazement Henry McNeil Turner described the war years as a time of times . . . nothing like it will ever be seen again in this life. The old things are passing away, marveled Robert Purvis, all things are becoming new. Even a normally staid, conservative magazine like the North American Review commented with awe on the current of freedom that was sweeping through the country.⁶

Such rapid change surprised members of Lincoln’s administration. The president had never been one of the minority of Republicans who came to power eagerly looking for a way to end slavery. Yet within a year Lincoln was startled to recall that in his Inaugural Address he had supported a proposed constitutional amendment forbidding federal interference with slavery forever. Even Republicans who before the war had been in the vanguard of the party’s antislavery efforts marveled that the Emancipation Proclamation had become a fact by 1863. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase celebrated the Proclamation by inviting some friends to his home, where they shared their amazement at the rapidity of antislavery progress. The pace of change exhilarated them, said Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay; they breathed freer. . . . They gleefully and merrily called each other and themselves abolitionists, and seemed to enjoy the novel sensation of appropriating the horrible name.⁷

But the unprecedented advances of the war years had, like the submerged parts of an iceberg, a huge and dangerous underside—a substructure of ideas that obdurately resisted progress and remained in unbroken communion with the racist past. These ideas, attitudes, and unspoken assumptions continue to fuel prejudice even today. During the Civil War they were evident, for example, in the contradictory way reformist northern leaders talked about southerners and African Americans. On the one hand, Republican congressmen and senators frequently denounced treason, condemned rebels, and praised black soldiers and Unionists; as the war intensified, a variety of theories justified the idea of harsh treatment of the South once it would be defeated. Yet at the same time Republican legislators talked about our [white] brethren of the South, asserted that southern rebels deserved at least as much consideration as freed slaves, and repeated invidious racial stereotypes or doubted that African Americans were destined to remain as citizens of the United States.⁸

Assumptions of white supremacy—the belief that the United States was a white man’s country—were enduring. Slavery was one thing, but racial equality was another. A member of Lincoln’s Cabinet continued to condemn abolitionists as examples of fanaticism, zeal without discretion and declared that he did not want [the Negro] at my table, nor do I care to have him in the jury-box, or in the legislative hall, or on the bench. Despite rebellion, he believed that the rights of the States are unimpaired. This man, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, was not atypical. Change in the North was great but greatly incomplete. The events that ended slavery did little to end racism in the North. Abolishing slavery in the South proved to be something very different from eradicating northern prejudice.⁹

This book focuses on the issues of slavery and race in the North. Thus, it is a study of that fundamental historical riddle: continuity and change. It traces and analyzes the battle between change and resistance to change. It aims to identify and assess the forces that promoted rapid progress against slavery, while it also analyzes the social factors, ideas, and organizations that maintained and buttressed racism. The story of emancipation is heartening but comparatively simple; the narrative of racist attitudes is distressing but terribly extensive. The destruction of slavery was a profound change, but the persistence of profound racism should alert us to the power of white supremacist thinking.

Much of this story is political, especially at certain times, but the history of public policy is well known, and the goal of this book is broader than the analysis of policy. It assumes a familiarity with the main events in the political and military history of the war in order to give more attention to public attitudes, as expressed in magazines, books, and newspapers, and how those attitudes interacted with events. It will analyze the variety of viewpoints on slavery, race, and equality arising from different parts of society and how these views changed with time and the events of war.

The facts are not comforting for those who believe in the exceptional virtue of the United States. To most northerners slavery and racial equality were and remained separate issues, and the distinction between abolition of slavery in the South and racial equality in the North and elsewhere was a powerful one. At times, in the rush of wartime events, actions against slavery seemed also to promote a new and more equitable attitude toward African Americans. But just as that revolution in feeling could go forward, it also could slip back, and some fought continuously against any movement whatsoever.

The most effective forces that promoted emancipation during the war were not usually idealistic ones grounded in morality or religious principle. Abolitionists had been making arguments based on those ideals and beliefs for decades with only limited effect. Although their efforts continued during the war years, the need to preserve the Union proved more influential than any moral awakening in the North. It was the logic of war, rather than Christianity and American ideals of equality, that most effectively moved the North toward a policy of ending slavery. Within a surprisingly short time growing numbers of northerners came to see slavery as the primary cause of the war and as an institution that must be destroyed in order to win the war and safeguard the Union. Support for ending slavery gained ground rapidly, while at the intellectual level a variety of factors promoted a more favorable assessment of African Americans. These included educated analysis of the results of abolition in the Caribbean, studies of the history of Africa, ideas of social environmentalism, and actual experience with black contrabands, slaves, and soldiers. But on matters of racial equality change was very limited.

Thus, the primary focus of this book is on racism and the factors that made it far more indestructible than the institution of slavery itself. Racial stereotypes, cultural traditions, and pernicious comparisons of blacks to whites militated against any movement toward racial equality. Opponents of equality promoted racism at least as energetically as abolitionists worked in the opposite direction. The Democratic party, motivated by white supremacist convictions, states’ rights ideology, and its interpretation of the causes of the war, proved time and again to be a massive barrier to racial progress. Partisan politics responded to and magnified powerful currents of popular prejudice. The border states, where slavery remained a legal practice within the Union, were another source of potent opposition to equality and even to emancipation.

As soon as the war made emancipation part of the Union’s strategy to end the war, attention turned to what would come afterward. This book will examine the variety of answers suggested to a frequently asked question—What Shall We Do with the Negro?—a question that, in itself, reveals the racist outlook of the white majority. The possibility that freed slaves might leave the South to claim some place in northern society proved an intense stimulus to racist fears and stereotypes. Democrats used the merest hint of a postwar diaspora of the Confederacy’s African Americans to galvanize political debate in the fall campaigns of 1862 and 1864. Republicans countered that former slaves would stay in the South, where they could pose no threat to northern workers or racial customs. Colonization, the removal of black Americans from the United States or to some thinly settled, less desirable part of the nation, was an attractive solution for many Republicans.

Cutting against these trends, many soldiers moved beyond acceptance of emancipation as a means to win the war. Some, at least for a time, even embraced ideas of equal rights as they fought beside black troops. But soldiers were experiencing a different reality from the lives of citizens on the home front, whose reference points changed less. How lack of experience with African Americans—a seemingly alien or exotic people to many northerners—shaped social outlooks and buttressed racism must claim notice as well, for most northern whites had little or no contact with black people. As this book puts forward its interpretation of the forces that fed the worst passions of human nature, it will aim always to ground its analysis in extensive data and evidence from the Civil War years.¹⁰

There is a reason for the use of extensive data and evidence on racial attitudes. My experience with students, friends, and acquaintances repeatedly has confirmed that Americans today have little awareness and even less knowledge of the depth of racism and white supremacist thinking in the nation’s history. To the contrary, most view the Civil War era as an inspiring period of idealism and the realization of the country’s highest human values. Patterns of thought in popular culture that celebrate the triumph of freedom in the United States have obscured an important part of historical reality. Although enormous social progress occurred during the Civil War era, tremendous problems remained, problems that were tenacious and deeply rooted. Racism and white supremacist attitudes from the nineteenth century live on into the twenty-first century, for racism was a deeply rooted, central part of nineteenth-century culture, and culture is often our master. Its influence is ubiquitous, powerful, and persistent, even when unspoken. The more frequently that racist attitudes are expressed, the more they become accepted, normal, and given. The Civil War years, despite bringing enormous progress against slavery, saturated the environment with messages of white supremacy and black inferiority. For that reason, it is important to document the racism in a period that is usually remembered for the realization of cherished American ideals. Without an awareness of the disillusioning parts of our history, analysis of problems is shallow and progress toward a just society is unlikely. Therefore, this study seeks to document that part of our history and encourage awareness of an unsavory past that requires more attention from us all. Problems must be acknowledged in order to be solved.

The chapters in this book follow chronology; chapters 4 and 5 are more topical but appear in the most appropriate place chronologically. Chapter 1 examines how and why northern sentiment in favor of attacking slavery developed; it takes the story through the first year of the war. Chapter 2 focuses on the Democratic party in the same period and begins the analysis of that party’s ideology, racist convictions, and deep discontent with the direction of Union policy. In chapter 3 I focus on the Emancipation Proclamations, the Republicans’ defense of them, and the Democrats’ hostile reaction to that changed reality, which soon included riots in many northern cities. The extensive discussion in society about the problem of freed slaves—what were their capacities and what would be their place in a postwar society is examined in chapter 4. Chapter 5 traces evidence of the contributions that freed slaves were making to the war effort, evidence that was often ignored or denied. Chapter 6 returns chronologically to developments in the latter half of 1863, with attention to growing tension and divergence within the Democratic party. The last two chapters, 7 and 8, follow issues of race and politics in 1864 through the presidential election, and I conclude with an examination of the last several months of the war and Lincoln’s leadership.

One

War Hastens Abolition amid Prejudice, 1861–1862

The leaders of the South seceded to protect slavery, but their decision proved to be an enormous miscalculation, for it led to the Civil War. War unleashed forces that rapidly and relentlessly undermined their peculiar institution; it proved to be a greater and more immediate threat to slavery than fanatical abolitionists or antislavery politicians had ever been. When William Lloyd Garrison in 1829 described slavery as a mighty edifice that towered high above the Alps, he admitted that years may elapse before it could be dismantled brick by brick, and foot by foot. He was right, for in 1860 it seemed that the abolitionists’ task might still require many years of labor.

But war changed everything and created a new reality—four anomalous years of crisis and emergency, in which thousands of lives and the fate of the nation were at stake. War had its own logic, which demonstrated that slavery aided the rebellion and imperiled the Union. Attacking slavery, however, was sure to contribute to victory. Even before Abraham Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, a very different attitude among northerners had become apparent. The unprecedented change and the unexpected measures brought on by war soon convinced many citizens and a majority in the Congress that the end of slavery was necessary.

But another reality also was evident during these months. Despite great change, events revealed a racism that was stubbornly intractable, nearly ubiquitous, and more difficult to uproot than slavery. Few joined abolitionists and the most radical Republicans in the cause of fighting against prejudice, and among the growing advocates of abolition racist attitudes were common. The war years would show that prejudice was more extensive than slavery and equality a more radical idea than emancipation.

Slavery’s Mighty Edifice

Few foresaw war’s powerful effect on northern attitudes toward abolition, for ending slavery had not been at issue in the sectional conflict. As the widely circulated magazine Harper’s Weekly put it, We of the North have never liked slavery. But the bulk of us have believed that it was not our business to interfere with it where it existed.¹ The territories, however, were a different matter, and the crux of prewar conflict had been the future of the territories west of the Mississippi River. Southern politicians wanted to be able to take slavery into all the nation’s territories. After the Dred Scott decision in 1857 they demanded this as their clear constitutional right. In the North, however, political passions ran in the opposite direction. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed key parts of the Missouri Compromise and opened the Great Plains to slavery, popular outrage sparked a remarkable political mobilization. A new party, the Republican party, sprang into being with one central goal: to prohibit the extension of slavery.

The Republicans pledged themselves to be an antislavery party only in the sense that they staunchly opposed any extension of slavery to new territory. From the party’s founding Republicans promised to leave slavery undisturbed where it already existed. Abraham Lincoln, protesting the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, called slavery a monstrous injustice, but he also made clear that he accepted slave states—and the additional representation slavery gave them in Congress—as matters already settled and established in the Constitution. The Republican platform in 1860 was comprehensive and explicit: The maintenance inviolate of the Rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends.²

Many northerners had become increasingly uncomfortable about slavery or disapproving of it, but racism was potent, and the Democratic party went much further than Republicans in defending both slavery itself and the right of white southerners to own human beings. Thus, Republicans were politically wise to define their antislavery stance in this limited way and to offer additional programs and appeals to the electorate. In 1856 Horace Greeley, the pro-abolition editor of the influential New York Tribune, said, It is beaten into my bones that the American people are not yet anti-slavery. Four years later he again concluded that an Anti-Slavery man per se cannot be elected, but "a Tariff, River-and-Harbor, Pacific Railroad, Free Homestead man, may succeed although he is Anti-Slavery." This broader Republican platform, joined to northern anxiety over the spread of slavery to new territories, helped the Republicans win the presidency in 1860.³

Even when states began to secede, Lincoln continued resolutely to oppose the extension of slavery to new territories. He decided that Republicans in the House or Senate would not support an amendment to the Constitution proposed by Senator John J. Crittenden. That amendment would have divided all territory, owned then or in the future, along the Missouri Compromise line, with slavery permitted to spread south of that line. But Lincoln and Republicans remained pledged not to attack slavery where it already existed. In his Inaugural Address Lincoln quoted his party’s platform in defense of states determining their domestic institutions. He called that platform a law to Republicans and to me. Quoting from his earlier speeches, he emphasized that, I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. He also stated in the Inaugural that he had no objection to an amendment successfully proposed by Congress. That amendment, authored by Representative Thomas Corwin of Ohio, would prohibit Congress from interfering forever with slavery in the states.⁴

On matters of race, the Republicans were more egalitarian than most northerners, but their beliefs stopped far short of equality.⁵ The Founding Fathers, Republicans declared, had spoken for humanity in the Declaration of Independence, a document that had central importance to the party’s ideology. Like Lincoln, Republicans insisted that African Americans had some rights. Those rights did not extend very far into the political realm, however. Lincoln condemned the injustice of slavery, deplored the increasing hostility to black people, and insisted on a moral component to the American love of liberty. He argued that African Americans were entitled to the bread that they earned by their own toil. But he also declared that he was not in favor of

bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, not to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.⁶

As for slavery’s future, Lincoln and most Republicans hoped that it would eventually disappear. But the majority in the party had no active plan to accomplish that, beyond keeping slavery out of new territories. Lincoln was representative in his call to see [slavery] placed where the public mind will rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction. And when I say that I desire to see the further spread of it arrested I only say I desire to see that done which the [Founding] fathers have first done. The nation should resolve not to extend or enlarge the difficult problem of slavery, just as any person would want to stop the spread of a wen or a cancer that could not be cut out of his body. Of course, some remembered John Quincy Adams’s prediction that slavery might be destroyed in a war, and a few Republicans were committed to abolition and hoped for an opportunity to strike soon against slavery. They wanted not only to contain slavery but also to exclude it from all areas under federal control, repeal the fugitive slave laws, and educate public opinion to weaken it wherever possible. But these individuals were exceptions rather than typical representatives of the party. Interpretations to the contrary are products of patriotic mythology that reads history backwards.⁷

When seceding southerners fired on Fort Sumter, this limited opposition to slavery put the Republicans in an advantageous position. Secession seemed wrong and unjustifiable, and modern scholarship agrees that most northerners did not want a war. The descent into armed conflict, wrote the editor of the North American Review, struck the great part of the citizens of our republic like a thunderbolt out of the clear sky.⁸ Rebellion appeared as an evil attempt to destroy what most regarded as the best government ever created. Republicans, Democrats, and other northerners united to condemn what churches called a wicked rebellion that must be subdued. That unwanted war was not begun as a war for abolition. Although southern leaders aimed to protect slavery, northerners joined together to defend the nation. They were proud of their country as the world’s model representative democracy in that day, a land of opportunity and a rebuke to the aristocracies of Europe. They did not go to war to abolish slavery.⁹

For many months Lincoln remained true to the words of his Inaugural Address and tried not to interfere with the institution of slavery. He sought to respect the rights of slaveholders, not only in the four slave states that remained in the Union but also among loyal men living in rebellious areas. For a considerable period