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that their peculiar institution was besieged from without as well as within. For the next thirty years, with increasing vehemence, the United States rang with voices decrying and defending slavery.⁸

      But in fact many people in the United States shrank from discussing the subject, or spoke about it in coded language. These people occupied the wide spectrum of opinion between fire eaters and immediate emancipationists, and they spoke about slavery much more circumspectly. Whether or not they were really prevented from speaking openly, Americans of many different backgrounds and in many different positions complained that they were. The sensation of being gagged was real enough. “We have various ways of covering slavery,” remarked Frederick Douglass in 1846. “We call it sometimes a peculiar institution—the patriarchal institution—the civil and domestic institution.”⁹ For many people in the South the greatest danger attending open discussion was planting thoughts of revenge and rebellion in the minds of otherwise docile servants. For many Northerners, to challenge slavery was to undermine the stability of the Union and the foundations of American economic prosperity. So grave were the potential consequences of irresponsible words that at certain moments an unwelcome remark about slavery could lead to violence, and a public gathering to discuss its future could incite a riot.¹⁰ But there were many other reasons why slavery proved a sore point and a source of conflict. Whether the subject could be debated publicly, whether greater danger attended its silencing or its open discussion, was almost as controversial as what was said. “The war of argument must come, or in its stead will come the war of arms,” foresaw the abolitionist Amos Phelps in 1834. “Is discussion free, frank, and unrestricted, fraught with danger? Discussion smothered, rely upon it, is fraught with ten-fold danger.”¹¹

      During this period the opposing positions were so polarized that there was little room for casual inquiry or unheated debate. On the vast middle ground between the two extremes, many Americans kept quiet. Some continued to leave unquestioned an institution they considered unexceptional. Some held opinions certain to be unpopular in their families or communities and did not wish to be shunned by speaking out. Some felt guilty or anxious about profiting from human bondage, or brooded uneasily about the expected results of emancipation. Some had the foresight to recognize the destructive power of the argument over slavery and forced themselves to hold their tongues. The defense of slavery traded heavily in politics and religion, those two subjects conventionally acknowledged as threats to polite conversation. Abolition was popularly associated with ideas shocking to the mid-nineteenth-century bourgeoisie: feminism, free love, and communism. As with the subject of race in the twentieth and twenty-first century United States, there was much about slavery that remained unspoken or at least unrecorded, discussed with like-minded friends sotto voce but not committed to paper for posterity to analyze.

      The sense of constraint people experienced was sometimes quite real, though not so real as to prevent public discussion entirely (Howe, after all, ultimately published her “heretical whisper” under her own name). A climate of mandatory silence only encourages the reckless show-off and the attention-seeking politician. Plenty of radical abolitionists and self-justifying slaveholders felt at perfect liberty to say exactly what they thought. But their contributions did little to advance an honest dialogue about an intractable problem, and made others more determined to keep silent. The exaggerated theatrics of radical abolitionism and proslavery advocacy have obscured the degree to which slavery remained for many people an uncomfortable topic, its very unpleasantness arising from the hostility of the public volleys. Suppression of free expression and self-censorship existed alongside, and because of, the acrimony and viciousness that characterized speaking out. Historian David Grimsted captured this self-conscious silence amid shouting in his American Mobbing: “Political parties and majority populations in both sections saw the wisdom of avoiding discussion of slavery and were racist enough so that turning African Americans into property seemed small cost, or a nice bonus, for union.… Clear in the riot conversation of 1835 was the idea that the only national answer regarding slavery was not to think, or at least to talk, about it.”¹²

      Yet much of what people in the United States were unwilling or afraid to utter about slavery in their own country, they eagerly proclaimed in the context of Latin America. Thinking about the way Americans talked about Latin America reveals how people who would never have otherwise championed slavery or identified themselves as abolitionists meditated about the economic benefits and the flagrant injustice of the institution. In the thirty-five years before the Civil War, many Americans found an outlet for their doubts and concerns, fears and fascinations about slavery at home by talking about slavery south of the Rio Grande. Latin America, in other words, served as a proxy that allowed Americans to break many varieties of silence, from the studied tact of politicians who wanted to straddle both sides of a controversial issue, to the unspoken agenda of expansionists whose perception of the inferiority of blacks and Indians believed it justified claiming the land of a neighboring republic and instituting human bondage there, from the restraint of comfortable Northern white people who did not want to stir up trouble, to the rigorous self-censorship of proslavery Southerners who had no outlet for admitting the miscegenated realities of their own households. When they talked about Latin America, cautious and circumspect Americans of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s let down their guard and discussed slavery with candor. For example, Massachusetts historian William Hickling Prescott, though no radical abolitionist, used the history of the Spanish, who had sown the “seeds of the evil” in America to call for a national examination of conscience on the subject of the “wretchedness of the institution.” Meanwhile, proslavery Southerners appraising slavery in Cuba and Brazil insisted that the U.S. version of slavery was superior to all others—perfect, in fact.

      Indeed, in certain respects, Latin America served as the perfect metaphorical surrogate for its northern neighbor. The Spanish American republics shared many things with the United States: a colonial past, a heritage of relations with native peoples and African slaves, a hemisphere. With an emulation that could not fail to flatter the young United States, the emerging Latin American nations had followed the example of their republican predecessor, fought for their independence, and copied their constitutions from that of the United States. Besides these similarities, the United States and Latin America had other points in common. Europeans and creoles of European descent shared territory with indigenous people, with black slaves and free people, and with admixtures of these races. Native-born Protestant Americans uneasy about the rapid influx of immigrant Papists shuddered at Cuba and Brazil as models of societies with Catholic majorities. Haiti and Jamaica offered some observers a preview of post-emancipation South Carolina or Mississippi.

      On the other hand, because Latin America seemed so different to many people in the United States, they could discuss aspects of slavery and race relations there without risking offense. The Spanish and Portuguese, with their long subjugation to the dark-skinned Moors, with their brutal Inquisition, with a system of slavery considered uniquely barbarous by those who subscribed to the Black Legend of Iberian cruelty, appeared very different from the European ancestors claimed by many white U.S. citizens. Latin America’s casual race relations, unstable governments, and exotic Catholicism kept it at a secure remove from the United States. A safe distance separated the United States from its neighbors, even, ironically, as the imperatives of Manifest Destiny shrank that distance precipitously.

      Other historical and geographical examples outside the contemporary Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking world south of the border served as points of reference as well. Both proslavery and antislavery Americans were especially obsessed with the former French colony of Haiti as a metaphor freighted with contradictory meanings—a symbol both of horror and destruction and of independence and autonomy.¹³ Haiti, a topsy-turvy republic disavowing the plantation export economy, birthed in a bloody revolution and growing to maturity with blacks in the majority and in charge, was as different from the United States as could be conceived. “The first feature that strikes us, is the difference, the next the rivalry of races,” summed up Littell’s Living Age in 1844.¹⁴ If Haiti was an “experiment of negro self-government,” the English colony of Jamaica, where slavery had ended in 1838, was an “experiment of free negro labour”—one interpreted as a success but often as failure.¹⁵

      Farther west and south, the Spanish American republics, including Mexico, Peru, and Argentina, as well as

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