A Self-Evident Lie by Jeremy J. Tewell

Author:Jeremy J. Tewell [Tewell, Jeremy J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877)
ISBN: 9781606352250
Google: UsHuoAEACAAJ
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Published: 2014-04-14T15:58:54+00:00

5

The Slaveocracy

Given most Southerners’ apparent embrace of an Old World social order, some Northerners feared the rise of an aristocracy in the United States. This fear was implicit in northern denunciations of the Slave Power, the slaveocracy, and the southern oligarchy, as it was in their comparisons of southern slavery with medieval serfdom and divine-right monarchy. All the arguments Southerners advanced in favor of slavery had been used at one time or another in the defense of hereditary privilege. They insisted that laborers were better off in a state of servitude, and that society benefited from the suppression of the poor and the contributions of the leisure class. Consequently, as some Northerners came to believe that Americans of any race could fall victim to proslavery arguments, they worried that slaveholders, debauched by power and luxury, would use their wealth and political influence to transform America’s egalitarian experiment into a European-style hierarchy.

First, Northerners had a detailed understanding of the constitutional provisions and political arrangements that gave Southerners a disproportionally large share of political power in the national government. Second, they believed the experience of mastery fostered a tyrannical disposition among slaveholders. In short, slavery taught behaviors contrary to those necessary for a viable republic. It effectively destroyed the republican principle of “virtue.” Furthermore, the degradation of the southern work ethic led to a disparity of wealth that could not sustain an egalitarian society.

Fear of the slaveocracy was one of the most common themes in the antislavery movement. In 1853, the abolitionist William Jay, president of the New York City Anti-Slavery Society, estimated that there were no more than 248,000 slaveholders in the United States. “Yet this small body of men engross the greater portion of the slave region, forming in fact a powerful feudal aristocracy, possessing nearly three millions of serfs, and governing and oppressing at pleasure the rest of the population.” In addition to the South itself, many Northerners believed that the slaveholding minority dominated the national government, riding roughshod over the people’s rights and shaping national policy to serve their own interests. During the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Henry Bennett of New York argued that southern slaveholders had more political influence “than any aristocracy of Europe.” William Lloyd Garrison likewise believed that the evils inflicted by the Slave Power “are worse than ever were inflicted by the most kingly aristocracy, or the most despotic tyranny.” And according to Moses M. Davis of Wisconsin, “the tyrannical Slave power has got possession of the people, and will crush out their liberties before many more years pass by.”1

Nevertheless, historians have long debated the legitimacy of the “slave-power conspiracy.” Writing in the early 1870s, Henry Wilson suggested that “freedom became timid, hesitating, [and] yielding” after the Missouri crisis, while “slavery became bolder, more aggressive, and more dominating.” Wilson, of course, was recounting his own experiences as a Republican senator in the 1850s. After the publication of Chauncey Boucher’s influential article “In Re That Aggressive Slaveocracy” in 1921, many historians dismissed the Slave Power thesis, viewing it primarily as an example of paranoia in American politics.

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