Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

Gobineau, in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (published in four volumes from 1853 to 1855), located the unbridgeable differences of human nations in the biology of races. “I was gradually penetrated by the conviction,” wrote Gobineau, “that the racial question overshadows all other problems of history, that it holds the key to them all, and that the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny.” Americans seized on Romantic racism to protect themselves from the charge of kidnapping and murder by declaring that black Africans were members of a race that was irreversibly underdeveloped or perhaps even subhuman. “He is by nature a dependent,” argued a contributor to DeBow’s Review in 1861 of blacks, “his normal state is that of subordination to the white man,” and “his nature is eminently parasitical and imitative.” It was impossible, added Mississippi physician William Holcombe, that either “circumstances or culture could ever raise the negro race to any genuine equality with the white.” Even in a northern state such as Illinois, a farmer-politician from DeWitt County, George Lemon, “did not believe they were altogether human beings. … If any gentleman thought they were, he would ask them to… go and examine their nose; (roars of laughter) then look at their lips. Why, their sculls were three inches thicker than white people’s.” ⁵⁰

But slavery contained more deadly poisons than racism. A slave, by simple definition, has no legal or social existence: a slave could have no right to hold property, could enjoy no recognition of marriage or family, and could not give testimony (even in self-defense) before the law. Slaves could be beaten and whipped: Josiah Henson, born a slave in 1789 in Charles County, Maryland, remembered that his father had “received a hundred lashes on his back” and had “his right ear… cut off close to his head” for stopping a white overseer from beating Josiah’s mother. Slaves could be bullied and brutalized: Frederick Bailey, also born a slave in Maryland in 1818, was turned over by a fearful owner to a professional “slave-breaker,” Edward Covey, who whipped and beat Bailey without mercy for six months to bring him into “submission.” Slaves could be raped: in 1855, Celia, the slave of Robert Newsom, killed Newsom in self-defense when Newsom attempted to rape her. The Missouri court she appealed to in State of Missouri v. Celia would not admit her testimony, but it did execute her. ⁵¹ Above all, slaves could be bought and sold, and slave families broken up for auction, without any regard for ties of kinship or marriage. Francis Lieber was appalled to happen upon “a group of well-dressed negros” in Washington, “loudly talking while one them screemed and groaned and beat himself.”

I hurried toward them asking what was the matter, supposing at the time the man had been seized with the cholera. Only think said a woman, he just came home and found his house empty—wife, children—all gone. … Her master sold them all, and he did not know a word of it. My God, my God! And this is suffered? And slavery yet defended! Oh, God, what a black thing is man! ⁵²

And yet slaveholders could not have everything their own way, no matter what the law or race had to say. A black slave was a human being, and any master who aspired to civilized refinement had to recognize that fact just to get any work out of a slave at all. What was more, no master could easily deny that slaves spoke the same language, worshipped the same God, and obstinately behaved like people. It also went without saying that a beaten or dead slave was one less production unit, and in a system where the labor force represented the owner’s capital investment, it did not do to live too much by the whip alone. Many slave owners felt paralyzed by guilt, not necessarily because of slavery but because of the abuses endemic to Southern slaveholding. Nor did African American slaves wait upon the indulgence of whites to work out their own degrees of independence. They formed their own black Christian congregations, which became (and have remained) the center of African American community life; they sang their own songs; and to a degree that ordinarily would seem unimaginable, they kept their fragile families together. For their part, white masters frequently had little choice but to accept these manifestations of extremely human behavior and quietly tolerate them. All arrangements of employers and labors are negotiations, and the practical realization that real human beings were providing free goods and services induced among whites a sense of obligation that sometimes cushioned the slaves from the excesses of white behavior that the law otherwise permitted.⁵³

And as whites made the grudging concession that their slaves were human beings after all, this produced a clamorous urge on the part of white Southerners to justify the continuation of slavery on the grounds that slavery was actually a benefit of sorts to African Americans. The captain of the steamboat that carried William Howard Russell down the Alabama River in 1861 insisted on arranging a “dance of Negroes … on the lower deck” to demonstrate “how ‘happy they were.’” “Yes sir,” Russell’s host intoned, “they’re the happiest people on the face of the earth.” At almost the same moment, in Georgia, Susan Cornwall Shewmake was writing, “It is certain there is not so much want among them. They are the happiest laboring people on the globe.” Georgia senator T. R. R. Cobb repeated, “Our slaves are the most happy and contented, best fed and best clothed and best paid laboring population in the world, and I would add, also, the most faithful and least feared.” Concurrently in Virginia, Governor Henry Wise was claiming that “the descendants of Africa in bondage” find themselves in “bodily comfort, morality, enlightenment, Christianity. … universally fed and clothed well, and they are happy and contented.”⁵⁴

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