Slavery and Silence - Paul D. Naish

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a mechanic who found work repairing cotton gins in Georgia, fulfilled Cazneau’s prediction: he sounded like a true son of the South when he declared he was “gitting to hate the people of the North” and complained to his father in Maine that abolitionists “Dont look around them & see their own privations but must have something in somebodies business to shriek over.”54 Indeed, since many Northerners knowingly or unwittingly profited from the dominance of cotton in the U.S. economy, they wanted no interference with its production. Northern ships insured by Northern firms bore cotton to Northern factories capitalized by Northern banks.55 Cotton had become the most important U.S. export by 1820, and accounted for half of all exports on the eve of the Civil War.56

      Edward Neufville Tailer, a prolific New York diarist, expressed his ambivalence about slavery in seemingly contradictory reflections. He was not without sympathy for enslaved people: he avidly read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and attended two stage versions of the novel, and on a trip to Baltimore he contributed to a purse for the manumission of a slave who worked in a hotel. But as a staunch Unionist, he saw abolitionism tearing at the national fabric by stirring up unnecessary dissent. He understood the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry primarily in terms of the effect it would have on his own fortunes in the dry goods trade: “John Brown’s foray in the South has created a bad feeling between North & South and it remains yet to be seen, whether the Southern merchants will buy goods from us at the North as liberally as formerly,” he wrote. He was eager to see the whole affair hushed up and forgotten.57 Talking about such an explosive issue could do no good.

      The necessity of silence characterized much of the South. Publicly it was necessary for the proslavery faithful to insist that all slaveholders supported the institution; privately they knew that the commitment of the Upper South to slavery wavered. In written apologias they proclaimed the attachment of the enslaved laborer to the land where he or she was born; in private correspondence they arranged the sale of slaves whose presence was an inconvenience because of their insolence, their incorrigibility, or awkward suspicions about the identity of their fathers.58 The dominant proslavery stance, insisting that the slaves were not merely patrolled but so content that they would not rebel, left little room for the articulation of doubts about white safety. Too much public airing of rebellion fears might lead Southerners, especially those who could not afford to own bond people, to question whether the benefits of slavery were worth the eternal anxiety.59 Conversely, Southerners worried that too-frequent mention of slave revolts might somehow conjure these horrors into existence, presumably by awakening slaves to the possibility of their success. Southerners were not alone in their concern about the possibility of race war; European cotton manufacturers, who uneasily watched the growing dominance of U.S.-grown cotton during the antebellum period, worried about the potential interruption of supplies because of slave revolt or voluntary emancipation.60 If it was impossible to stop the printing of inflammatory texts, it might be possible to prevent their being read: in the years after 1831 all slave states but Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas declared it a crime to teach slaves to read or write.61

      Some settings and situations bred a particular aversion to frank discussion. The question of the morality of slavery tore at the unity of American churches, dividing Protestant denominations.62 By 1857 the Baptists, Methodists, and New School Presbyterians had split into Northern and Southern branches.63 In 1834 Weld and other students at the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati debated slavery in public for nine days, concluding with a vote supporting immediate abolition. The seminary trustees summarily prohibited all public meetings on seminary grounds and ordered the dissolution of the school’s Anti-Slavery Society, deploring the students’ inciting of “civil commotion.” Town/gown relations suffered as the citizens of Cincinnati feared the stirring up of trouble. “The scenes of France and Hayti recur to their imagination,” shivered a trustee.64

      Churches refrained from endorsing antislavery activities or declaring slavery a sin, fearful of driving congregants away and discouraging fundraising.65 Anna Quincy Thaxter Cushing, a comfortably situated doctor’s wife of Dorchester, Massachusetts, generally attended the First Church (Unitarian) twice on Sundays, hearing one sermon “in the forenoon” and another in the afternoon, the topics of which she dutifully noted in her diary. In August 1855 a sermon by a visiting divine stirred up trouble in the congregation. “Mr. Fred. Frothingham, of Montreal, … introduced the subject of slavery by way of illustrating the subject about which he was speaking, and spoke of it at some length,” wrote Cushing that Sunday; “some twenty people saw fit to leave the church. A very undignified and illbred proceeding, to say no more.” Congregants demanded whether the pastor had known what the visiting clergyman had planned to say: “some of his friends, most of them, probably, think that it will be better to let the whole affair pass over in silence,” wrote Cushing—which is apparently exactly what happened.66

      Sometimes silence on the subject of slavery signaled the despair Americans felt at the possibility of ever finding a remedy. Harriet Beecher Stowe, of all people (referring to herself in the third person), was later to recall, “It was a sort of general impression upon her mind, as upon that of many humane people in those days, that the subject was so dark and painful a one, so involved in difficulty and obscurity, so utterly beyond human hope or help, that it was of no use to read, or think, or distress oneself about it.”67 Stowe ultimately decided there was something she could do, and almost singlehandedly piloted the subject of U.S. slavery to the foreground of mainstream fiction in 1852 with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But before she put slavery front and center in her bestselling novel, most American literature aiming at a national audience kept slave characters on the periphery in the “plantation novel” tradition, where they bowed to their masters and joked merrily with each other.

      Alternately, for people like Howe and Fitzhugh who had chosen sides in this most charged and vociferous of contexts, there were certain hidden doubts or buried suspicions that could be neither safely spoken nor entirely stilled. Among radical abolitionists, there was the guilty fear that blacks and whites were essentially different, that amalgamation was unnatural, and that emancipation might be a disaster. Among the proslavery faithful, there was the quiet knowledge that they shared more with their black slaves than they dared admit, and that enslavement of their fellow human beings was indeed inhumane, unjust, and sinful.

      It should be pointed out that while Americans often kept dumb about slavery, they were quite vocal and unselfconscious in their expressions of racism. If they were reticent, it was not out of shame or discomfort so much as out of a reflexive sense that the superiority of whites and inferiority of blacks were so generally understood as not to need articulation. Two famous Americans—by any measure giants in the antislavery cause—demonstrate the way hatred of slavery coexisted with kneejerk racism in a way that is apt to make modern Americans wince.

      After John Quincy Adams lost his bid for a second term in the presidential election of 1828 to Andrew Jackson, he began a new career in the U.S. House of Representatives. What might be seen as a significant demotion in status demonstrated a genuine commitment to public service. During his long career in the House, he butted frequently—and sometimes in amusing ways—against the strictures of the gag rule, finding ways to introduce antislavery petitions into the public record.68 In 1841 he defended the rebels of the Spanish slave ship Amistad before the Supreme Court, and won his case.69 But by twenty-first-century standards he is hardly a model of tolerance. In particular, he was revolted by the idea of sexual congress between the races, declaring that “the intermarrying of black and white blood is a violation of the law of nature.”70 In a dinner-table conversation with the English actress Fanny Kemble about Othello, Adams, freely using what Kemble called “that opprobrious title” for a black person, diagnosed Shakespeare’s play as flawed because audiences could never fully sympathize with Desdemona’s love for her husband.71

      Likewise, no American politician is more associated with the ending of slavery than Abraham Lincoln. The South’s secession was occasioned by the expectation that he and his Republican Party would begin undermining slaveholders’ rights to their human property.72 His 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, if it was not in fact as immediately effective as is remembered in the popular imagination, certainly

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