Snow-Storm in August by Jefferson Morley

Author:Jefferson Morley [Morley, Jefferson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53338-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

With the restoration of calm, the recriminations began.

“What causes have produced the declension in American character and the present supremacy of Mobocracy?” asked the Richmond Whig, one of the most widely read newspapers in the country. In an editorial headlined “CAUSES OF THE PUBLIC DISORDERS,” the rival Richmond Enquirer replied that President Jackson and “the policy of the ruling dynasty and its demagogue adherents” were to blame.

In the view of editor Thomas Ritchie, the source of the problem was not the free Negroes, who constituted a small portion of the population, or the antislavery agitators who had little public support. The problem was Jackson’s appeal to the common man and his supporters’ hostility to traditional elites.

“In pursuit of a majority to sustain their power, they have classified the rich and intelligent and denounced them as aristocrats,” Ritchie wrote. “They have caressed, soothed and flattered the heavy class of the poor and ignorant, because they held the power which they wanted.”

“The Republic,” Ritchie famously declared, “has degenerated into a Democracy.”

Rubbish, replied Francis Blair in the Globe. The Washington disturbances, he insisted, should be blamed on antislavery financier Arthur Tappan, “the arch enemy of the Jackson administration.” Arthur Bowen’s attack on Mrs. Thornton had been instigated by Tappan’s pamphlet campaign, which had “stimulated the servant, cherished in the bosom of families, to immolate those who have protected and reared him from infancy.” Tappan’s incitements had forced white men to act in their own self-defense, prompting “the father, the husband and master to rush beyond the laws to destroy the instigators of a servile war, to save himself and the hapless inmates of his household from its horrible consequences.” The mob, he insisted, was an expression of American self-defense.

The violent summer of 1835 had diverse and subtle causes, but one stood out. Amidst the disorder, it was clear that the burgeoning antislavery movement had forced Americans to consider its core message: that democracy could not coexist with the right to property in people. The northern abolitionists insisted that American slavery and the democratic government of the United States, based in Washington, were intertwined, mutually reinforcing, and ultimately incompatible.

That was a radical and disconcerting thought in the capital city. The emancipationist alternative proposed that Negroes should be free to become citizens, equal to whites before the law. The white men of Washington responded violently because they had seen the results of partial emancipation. Some black men like Beverly Snow wound up with more money and prestige than the average white man. That was the problem, and Mobocracy was the answer.

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