Slavery and Silence - Paul D. Naish

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imagination somewhere between the United States and Haiti, subject to endless reinterpretation. Their resources were expansively estimated, their commitment to republican government endlessly debated, their racial composition extensively probed. Through all this discussion, these regions served as an invaluable context for displacing national apprehensions about slavery when the cost of speaking out was high. Some of the people who participated in this conversation set policies that affected or even determined the lives of dozens if not thousands of others, but many had no greater impact than contributing to culture through their voting patterns, reading habits, and consumer choices.

      The Americans engaged in the project of using these regions to displace discussion of U.S. slavery were not necessarily making calculated estimates or rational comparisons. They often based their conclusions on hearsay, assumption, and prejudice. Many of them should have known better, and perhaps they did. Their proclamations were sustained by repetition, but collapsed under the weight of serious investigation. Their purpose was first to vent their repressed anxieties, and ultimately to proclaim their safety because of the differences that separated them and the objects of their comparisons. They could not have failed to notice the ways in which their supposedly peculiar institution mirrored slavery in other places, but rather than proclaiming common cause, they often insisted on points of distinction. Their protestations of exceptionalism created a space in which they could freely say what was otherwise unspeakable.

      The reasons Americans kept silent about U.S. slavery varied by context, geography, and historical moment. Politicians anxious to build national coalitions had different motives than merchants wary of offending customers or suppliers, and Northern tutors seeking jobs in Southern planters’ families had still other concerns. But people with these varied agendas shared in common the release of geographical (and often temporal) displacement. In a multiplicity of cultural contexts, men and women from diverse backgrounds inserted critiques, vented objections, and acknowledged fears by proxy.

      While countless histories have analyzed the noisy pronouncements of slavery’s bombastic defenders and the searing cries of abolitionists, there exists a smaller body of literature about how the debate over slavery was silenced. Until the publication of papers by moderate abolitionists like Theodore Weld and James Birney in the 1930s, historians generally understood antislavery activists as a fanatical fringe movement.16 Clement Eaton’s 1939 Freedom of Thought in the Old South, among others, reframed the argument, proposing that the death of Jefferson in 1826 ushered in a repressive regime of censorship and thought control that stifled minority opinion below the Mason-Dixon Line.17 Eaton made himself extremely unpopular with Southern historians in the process. “It did not seem to occur to Mr. Eaton that the abolitionists and their political allies were threatening the existence of the South as seriously as the Nazis threaten the existence of England,” seethed Frank L. Owsley of Vanderbilt in a review in the Journal of Southern History.18 When Eaton reissued his book as The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South in 1964, he identified the anti-abolitionist crusade as the ideological antecedent of the white South’s furious midtwentieth-century pushback against the civil rights movement: “both the old and the new societies have suppressed freedom of speech and forced their moderate citizens to acquiescence or to silence.”19

      The very vocal protests and the acknowledgement of the therapeutic value of free discussion in the noisy 1960s made periods of enforced silence more difficult to imagine. Nonetheless, a number of works since 1970 have considered the way the subject of slavery was quashed in the antebellum era.20 These studies demonstrate that free speech is not always restrained through riots and torchlight processions, nor is censorship always enabled by tyrannical fiat. In the nineteenth century as in the twenty-first, there were social and economic costs when uttering opinions against what was understood as the position of the majority. The consequences of running afoul of common wisdom included social shunning and neglect, and as a result self-censorship was often stunningly effective at shutting down minority opinion.21

      In the antebellum period, outright violence was more characteristic of some years than others. During the period considered in this book, there were two moments when the tension between freedom of speech and the press and the hazards of discussing slavery did in fact erupt in hysteria. The first outburst, most severe from 1834 to 1838, included rioting by anti-abolitionists, the hindering of mail delivery, and the tabling of antislavery petitions submitted to Congress. The second period, awakened by the attack on Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner in 1856, lasted until the Civil War. At these moments, even to pose questions about the peculiar institution was considered tantamount to undermining the safety of half the country.22 So combustible did many Americans consider the South that outright criticism of slavery was deemed quite literally incendiary: “The torch of free speech and press, which gives light to the house of Liberty, is very apt to set on fire the house of Slavery,” declared Republican reformer Carl Schurz in 1860.23

      Why the spike in abolitionist agitation and proslavery suppression in the mid-1830s? Looking back from the vantage point of the late 1850s, northern antislavery journalist George Weston in The Progress of Slavery maintained that “1835 is the designated epoch of this outbreak of abolitionism,” not because antislavery voices suddenly rose in shrillness, but because of Southern paranoia over despotic federal power. According to Weston, the tariff controversy made Southern legislators aware of how tenuous was their hold over national affairs, and imputations of Northern interference in the Southern political economy contracted to a narrow focus on slavery. And white Southerners clung to slavery because it was profitable, and becoming fabulously more so in the antebellum period.24

      And yet, even if the abolitionism of the post-1831 period was a response to Southern proslavery hysteria rather than the cause of it, the face of abolitionism was assuredly changing. Abolitionists increasingly included blacks as well as whites, common people as well as elites, women as well as men.25 Colonization—the project of sending emancipated slaves back to Africa—lost favor with many abolitionists, who now insisted free black people had every right to remain in the United States. Abolitionists were more outspoken—“I WILL BE HEARD” vowed editor William Lloyd Garrison in the first issue of the Liberator—and spoke out against a society they considered complacent and cowardly.26 To amplify their message, they took advantage of new technologies like telegraphy and steam-powered presses that vastly increased the volume of their output and helped them broadcast their message more quickly: the American Anti-Slavery Society’s production of 122,000 tracts in 1834 paled beside the million tracts, many of them lavishly illustrated, produced only a year later.27

      Antislavery rhetoric from the North met a firm response from the South. Loose talk about possible slave insurrections could lead to violence—often perpetrated against the slaves themselves, executed on suspicion of malicious intent when nervous white people worked themselves into a froth of anxiety over rumors of wrath to come. Paranoia was particularly rife in areas where black people outnumbered whites or a put-upon class of nonslaveholders resented what it perceived as a local Slave Power oligarchy.28 Indeed, as Frederick Douglass noted, by 1830, “Speaking and writing on the subject of slavery became dangerous.”29

      According to defenders of slavery, the prospect of abolitionist materials provoking insurrection justified censorship and the seizure of mail. Although naturally content, the slaves could be roused to revolt by the diabolical persuasion of canny traitors from the North who polluted the channels of the postal system with their libelous materials, including picture books and handkerchiefs printed with graphic depictions of abuse.30 In Charleston, postmaster Alfred Huger, working with the cooperation of New York postmaster Samuel L. Gouverneur, established a cordon sanitaire that remained in force from 1835 to the Civil War to intercept the delivery of abolitionist materials sent through the mail.31 In such a time of crisis, insisted former U.S. Representative William Drayton in 1836, “extra judicial” trials and punishments meted out according to the decisions of hastily assembled tribunals “composed of the best citizens” were perfectly defensible. He asked, “who dares say that such tribunals have, in a single instance, exercised the powers conferred upon them unjustly or improperly?”32 Dismissing the implications of such interference with the free exchange of ideas in the American republic, Drayton

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