03-04-1861 - How We Got Here

03-04-1861, The Capitol Building, Washington D.C.

Setting of time and place - ethos.colgate.edu-

There was a tall, lanky man wearing a black suit at the center of a crowd of about thirty thousand people. He rose his hand, repeated an oath, honors were performed, and he then gave a speech. At the podium, he took out his glasses. As he briefly looked at the crowd, someone yelled out, "Look at old goggles!" and was taken away, probably by capitol police. The clear, but high pitched voice of a man with a Kentucky accent eeked into the ears of anyone who was close enough to hear him. In his Presidential inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln voiced his concerns about the States to the south:

“Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension.”- Abraham Lincoln, first inaugural address

Lincoln is somewhere in there... - www.sonofthesouth.net

Abraham Lincoln knew that there was a class problem in the United States. He knew that the lowest class were black slaves. However, he never intended to abolish the institution of slavery when he first stepped into office, and he was trying to address that issue first hand when he took hold of the Nation. By this time, the institution of slavery was older than the United States of America, itself.

Personally, Lincoln didn’t like slavery and thought it was immoral, but his initial solution was to let the institution die on its own - let the states prohibit slavery one by one, and to then recolonize the remaining former slaves in Africa, even though by then these Africans had been in the Americas for generations. More importantly however, he was trying to appease the southern states in order to avoid a possible full scale rebellion, which was happening as he spoke.

Short History of Slavery

Slavery isn't just an African or an American issue, it's a human one. Since ancient times, human history has recorded the horrific echos of slavery but left little details. People would acquire other people as property, either by war or by debt, and force them to work and provide services for free. Slavery is mentioned in Susan Wise Bauer's book "History of the Ancient World" when she describes Sargon between 2334 and 2779 BCE:

"Workman had to beg for bread, and apprentices with unpaid and scrabbled in the rubbish for scraps of food. Officials demanded fees for everything from the sheering of white sheep, to the internment of dead bodies. If you wanted to bury your father, you needed seven pitchers of beer and four-hundred and twenty loaves of bread for the undertaker. The tax burden had become so unbearable, that parents were forced to sell their children into slavery in order to pay their debts. - Susan Wise Bauer, History of the Ancient World

This was a normal thing in ancient Greek and Roman times and was even sanctioned in the Bible – as long as the slaves were circumcised: 

“And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed..” - King James Bible, Genesis 17:12

This trend continued into the Renaissance. During the crusades, Christians would capture Muslims and other non-Christians in battle and use them for labor. They believed that it was a just thing to do because the people they were enslaving did not worship Jesus and that no matter the hardships, the  chance for their soul to be saved outweighed the shitty quality of life. This mentality was inherited in the late 1400s and 1500s when Spain and Portugal traveled to Africa and the Americas, and was even sanctioned by the Pope, as long as they weren't Christian.

In 1402, African people were discovered living in the Canary Islands and a French explorer decided that they needed Jesus. He set up an expedition and captured some of the inhabitants, brought them back and sold them as slaves. He then went to Castile and asked to become King of the Canaries under Castile, with the intention of converting the inhabitants to Christianity. This request was granted but instead of converting these natives, most of them were sold off as slaves and replaced by Castilians like Diego. Presto! Islands converted.

Portugal wanted their own little empire, so they decided to attack a North African city named Ceuta and were instantly successful, but spent the next few years defending it, which got expensive. They began looking for other ways to reach the east and so started sailing further and further south, down the western coast of the African Continent.

This had been the furthest south any Christian had ever sailed. At first they didn't find anybody, but once he reached the Azores, they found villages of Moors, or North-African Muslims. They took them and brought them back to Portugal where they sold them off to slavery. They made so much money off of doing that, other explorers began sailing past the Azores to find non-Christians to enslave.

After finding a decent port, sailors would anchor, map the area, then ride horses inland until they found a village of people and kidnapped them - men, woman and children, they didn't give a damn. The African parents would of course freak out and resist, so the Portuguese would take their children onto the ships, giving the parents little choice but to follow them on. Sometimes, rivers were so large, they could take long boats and row inland, happily displacing more families as they advanced. Anyone who resisted seizure was killed in probably the most inhumane ways.

By 1444, six large ships sailed from the Portuguese city of Lagos with the intent of stealing more people, as well as their property, and selling them off. They returned with two hundred and fifty Africans and sold them right on the dock, breaking up many families right then and there: Mothers and fathers who tried to protect their children by following them onto the ships were now trapped on a new continent and would now never see their children again and for the rest of their own lives be forced to live under servitude, because Capitalism.

The Christians to took them thought these native Africans were dirty and living in damnation and that at least as slaves, they would be dressed and civil. In 1452, the King of Portugal asked the Pope to sanction his actions as a crusade, "a holy war on the enemies of the Church". The Pope agreed and released a papal bull called "Dum Diversas" making the perpetual enslavement of non-Christians into law. When others disputed Portugal's Monopoly, the Pope doubled down in 1455 with a papal bull called "Romanus Pontifex".

I would quote the 1493 Papal doctrine, called the "Bull Inter Caetera", but it is long winded and the message is hidden within constant praises for the glory of God throughout the document. It basically congratulates Christopher Columbus for his “discovery”, splits American and African  lands and islands between Portugal and Spain, and declares any land that any Christian finds, that is not inhabited by other Christians, as a “discovery”. Having been “discovered”, the Christian party was free to take what they find as property: The lands and non-Christian people living on those lands, with the hope that they would convert and become “civilized”. Then in 1537, due to drastic drops in the native American population, the Pope forbade slavery of native Americans, but not of native Africans.

The Portuguese captured natives from their colonies in Africa and put them to work, while the Spanish captured natives from their colonies in the Americas, and put them to work. However, within the first half century, a majority of the Native Americans would die of war and diseases, leaving the Spanish with a lack of help when it came to mining for metals and planting crops. The Spanish and Portuguese decided to work together and the Spanish began to purchase African natives from the Portuguese. The Portuguese would now depend on native tribal leaders in Africa to capture people and send them on a boat to the Americas, beginning the African Slave Trade. At first, these slaves were just sent to the Caribbean, then they were sent to South America and Mexico. By the 1600s the Africans began to outnumber Europeans in major American cities like Mexico, Lima and Havana.

The French and Spanish first colonized Florida and the Carolinas in the mid-1500s. The first indentured servants came to Jamestown in 1607. Indentured servatide was allowed under the Headright system, an agreement to provide seven years of labor in return for a trip to the Americas and after the seven years was up, the servant was freed and given a plot of land to start their own farm. Yet, about half of the servants that arrived wouldnt survive in Virginia's climate and many that did would have their servatude extended for various reasons. There was a 1655 court case called Johnson vs. Parker where the two disputed whether an indentured servant named John Casor still belonged to Anthony Johnson, or was free to work for Robert Parker. The outcome affirmed that Casor did in fact belong to Johnson for life and it suddenly became easier to enslave indentured servants.

The French founded New Orleans in 1718 and the same year, the Spanish founded San Antonio and in 1769, San Diego was founded. With the founding of cities in the Spanish frontier, the number of slaves grew. Spanish territories spread as far north as today’s southern United States, and so for generations, African slavery became a main staple of Agricultural life in the South. As England continued planting colonies in the Americas, slavery would spread throughout the Eastern Seaboard. By the time of the American Revolution, most of the Founding Fathers owned slaves.

While writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that "all men are created equal". Though he established this equality in "men" as sacred and undeniable, he didn't actually mean ALL men, otherwise, he would have freed his own slaves after writing the document. It's possible that Jefferson's idea of "men" didn't include this lower class of men, just his class of gentleman. By the time of the American Revolution, England had been sending its orphans and unwanted poor to the Americas for almost two hundred years, and within that time, some of them stopped being poor. They learned how to exploit others and made a lot of money bringing people over and working them to death.

English history is full of stories of people and how they owned,  controlled or defended their lands. That was actually a small percentage of the population though. Most of the population lived on land they could not own, and so in exchange for living on the land, they would be under the control of the land lords. These land lords could tax, or draft these people for battle and in return, they would offer them protection.

Land lords on the other hand, were under the authority of the King, who owned all the land. Normally, if the King wanted to enact a law, he would depend on his land lords to enforce them, but the King did not have absolute authority. Because a King only rules by permission of those he rules over, the land lords knew that if they got together, they could challenge the King and prevent him from going too far. It was this middle class that Jefferson may have been defending when he wrote that famous sentence. By the 1770s, the American Colonies had developed a similar class structure and were just realizing they that they too, could challenge the King.

Russia, Portugal and England had abolished slavery in the 1700s, and in response to the United States' Revolution, England temporarily suspended the African slave trade. Feelings about the issue of slavery began to change in 1789, when the Constitution was written. Slavery would be phased out in the northern states as industry replaced agriculture, but the southern states thrived on agriculture. In order to get a majority of States to ratify the Constitution, the first Congress had to produce a Bill of Rights, which ultimately left a few unsettled issues untouched. One of those issues was of slavery, with the Constitution forbidding any legislation over it for the first twenty years.

In 1799, New York freed slave children born after July 4th and eventually, all slavery would end in the State. Ohio abolished slavery in 1802 and New Jersey gradually did so starting in 1804. When Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory that same year though, tensions began to rise over whether or not the new territories would allow slavery.

Thomas Jefferson called for criminalizing the slave trade in 1806 and factions emerged. By 1820, the factions in Congress compromised on the issue of slavery: In the new Louisiana territory, minus the future lands of Missouri on parallel 36°30′, slavery would be prohibited. In return, Maine would enter the Union as a free state. When Mexico gained their independence from Spain around the same time, they did abolish slavery, but many slave owners got around it by declaring their slaves as “indentured servants”.

The Missouri Compromise would settle things for the next thirty years. During that time, the industrial revolution kicked into full swing in the northern United States. With all of the new available jobs that came from industry, many people flocked to larger northern cities for work. With a mixture of both agricultural and industrial work, the North became more diversified, and often embraced reform. The South used slaves to plant and harvest cotton, tobacco, sugar and rice and the North would use industry to process those goods and export them.

In this way, the Northern and Southern states formed distinct identities and over time, grew more separate and suspicious of one another. There were still similarities though. Many people commuted throughout the states for work and pleasure. There were no unions or workers rights in either the North or South, so employed or enslaved, you were still getting exploited, and despite the different views over slavery, both sides were still pretty racist by modern standards.

In 1831, an African preacher name Nat Turner, along with some of his congregation, started a slave revolt in Virginia, killing dozens. There is a movie now that tells that story. That same year, a man named William Lloyd Garrison began publishing an abolitionist newspaper called "the Liberator". The Liberty Party , with the goal of abolishing slavery, put up a presidential candidate in 1840.

In 1843, England made a series of treaties between other American countries with the intention of suppressing the slave trade, and then assigned a fleet of ships to combat the trade. When Texas won its independence from Mexico, they brought slavery back to the state, though in reality, it never left. In 1846, with suspicions that acquiring the southwest was an attempt to expand slavery, there was an attempt to outlaw slavery in whatever land was acquired from Mexico called "the Wilmot Proviso", but that measure failed. The leaders of the Southern states, believing slaves to be property, accused the leaders of the Northern states of wanting to deprive them of the freedom to take their "property" wherever they wanted.

In 1847, during the Mexican American War, Pennsylvania abolished slavery. After taking the northern half of Mexico and claiming it for the U.S., Congress had to once again compromise over what would be slave territory. California was excluded because it entered as a free state in exchange for updated and harsher fugitive slave laws.

Acquiring the southwest would become more expensive than anticipated though. With California entering the Union as a State in 1850, in conjunction with the population boom in industrial northern cities, congressional power in both the House and the Senate switched towards the North.

Media in the 1850s would also raise tensions. Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852, and sold hundred of thousands of copies. The book opened many people's eyes on the hardships of slavery and took a lot of criticism in the South for it. By 1854, Congress came out with the Kansas-Nebraska compromise, which drew a line from Missouri to the border of California, allowing slavery south of that line, with a provision of popular sovereignty.

Sectional tensions started to became violent in May 22, 1856 when two days after Senator Charles Sumner gave an impassioned antislavery speech, a Representative named Preston Brooks beat him with a cane in the Senate Chamber. Really, he came up to him, shared few words and went to town, beating Sumner up. He beat him so bad; Brooks broke his cane and nearly killed Sumner. That same year, a new political party, the Republicans, put out their first presidential candidate: John C. Freemont from California. The Republican Party became known as an abolitionist party.

Sectional tensions got even worse on March 6, 1857 when the Supreme Court struck the Kansas Nebraska Compromise down as unconstitutional in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. It did so by declaring that Scott, a slave and a black man, could not sue for his freedom after entering a free state with his master, because Scott was not considered a citizen of the United States, he was considered property instead. They also talked about how “dangerous” it would be if the “negros” became citizens:

“It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its [a slave State's] own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon public affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.”

-Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of the United States Supreme Court, Dred Scott V. Sandford, 1857
.

By now, the Republican Party had established itself with a platform against the spread of slavery, and just short of supporting abolition.

In October of 1859, the same year the African slave trade ended, a white man named John Brown, along with twenty-five others, entered Jefferson County, Virginia, with the intent of raiding an armory in Harper’s Ferry. Brown was an abolitionist who was hoping break into an armory and give stolen guns to run-away slaves in order start a full scale slave revolt. When the raid started though, he received little help. President James Buchanan called in a unit of Marines to quell the rebellion. A hero of the Mexican American War named Colonel Robert E. Lee, led the unit.

Brown didn’t last long, his small band of fighters were killed and when he tried to make a final stand, the Marines broke in and he was subdued. He was taken to Charlestown, VA, tried and sentenced to death by hanging. About two thousand people had arrived in Charlestown to participate in or witness the execution, including some notable figures, as Nora Titone writes in “My Thoughts be Bloody”:

“Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson watched the scene intently, noting that the coffin was a handsome affair of dark walnut, protected by a poplar crate. Brown was conveyed a short distance out of town to an open pasture where his gallows loomed… John Wilkes (Booth) had been awake since dawn, along with the other Richmond Greys. They lined up by height close to the scaffold, no more than 30 feet away, and stood at attention in the rough grass.”

When the 22-year-old Booth learned of the looming execution, he ditched his role at the Marshall Theater, obtained a uniform and snuck on a train to Charlestown. He stayed there for two weeks, standing watch with the Richmond Greys and performing Shakespeare for them at night. On the morning of the execution, December 2nd, he had a perfect view of the gallows. As soon as he saw Brown step onto the platform, Booth started feeling sorry for the man:

“Booth watched Brown scan the tree-line hemming the field. No mob armed with hand grenades made its appearance. The surrounding forest was undisturbed. Watching comprehension dawn on Brown’s face, John Wilkes later said he felt ‘a throb of anguish in his chest’. ‘He was a brave old man’, John Wilkes told Asa, ‘his heart must have broken when he felt himself deserted’. Brown may have been a villain and a vigilante, but John Wilkes could not help honoring the man for his courage.”

Others around Booth noted the agitation in his face; it could have been that he was reminded of his own father, who had lived a rough life, or it could have just been his first execution. However, despite the abandonment, Brown was acting differently from what Booth had thought – Brown quietly cooperated and showed no fear. There was some difficulty getting the ropes to properly function, so the executioner decided to take an ax to them. It worked and the trap door dropped, sending John Brown to his demise. Watching Brown die affected Booth. The agitation on his face had changed into a look of sickness. He was trembling, and said he felt faint. Stonewall Jackson would later write of Brown’s death:

“His arms below the elbows flew up horizontally. His hands clenched, and his arms gradually fell, but by spasmodic motions. Only then did a strong wind blow the lifeless body to and fro.”

Then Abraham Lincoln was elected. The southerns states didn't like him.

The American Civil War began and was fought mostly over the issue of slavery. Lincoln had been elected November 6, 1860. By December 20th, before he was even inaugurated, South Carolina declared their independence from the Union. Mississippi soon left on January 9 1961, followed by Florida on the 10th, Alabama on the 11th, Georgia on the 19th, Louisiana on the 26th, and Texas on February 1st. These states then joined to create the Confederate States of America, which was born on February 8th.

Back at the Capitol during Lincoln’s inaugural address, on March 4, 1861, his message to the South ended:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Later that month, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens gave a speech in Savannah, Georgia in what is known as the “Cornerstone Speech”, declaring that the separation was specifically over the issue of slavery:

“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact… The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature… Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.”

The Confederates were taking a huge risk. They had tried to preserve the institution of slavery by law and ballet and failed. Violence would be the next step.