While the keeping of the Sabbath as a day free of worldly
activities and amusements was a common practice in many parts
of the United States in centuries past, that was not the practice
among the rednecks and crackers of the antebellum South. South-
erners “had fun on Sundays,” to the consternation of Northern
observers:
“One of the strangest sights to a New England man, on visiting
Southern states, is the desecration of the Sabbath,” wrote a Yan-
kee. “In some of the cities, especially if a good number of the
business men are from the North, the churches are tolerably
well attended,—there being but one sermon for the day. But
even here the afternoon and evening are much devoted to
amusements.” Another Northerner declared that in the south
“there is no Sabbath…they work, run, swear, and drink here on
Sundays just as they do on any other day of the week.”139
Many Southerners did not go to church at all, or did so inter-
mittently, or when not distracted by other activities.140 Again, this
was a pattern found among their ancestors in Britain.141 Among
the reasons given by contemporaries for low church-attendance
among Southerners was that they often got drunk on Satur-
day night and were in no condition to go to church on Sunday
morning.
...
…I know that while men seldom want an abundance of coarse
food in the Cotton States, the proportion of the free white men
who live as well in any aspect as our working classes in the
North, on an average, is small, and that the citizens of the cot-
ton States, as a whole, are poor. They work little, and that little,
badly; they earn little; they sell little; they buy little, and they
have little—very little—of the common comforts and consola-
tions of civilized life. Their destitution is not material only; it is
intellectual and it is moral.62
When Olmsted found work done efficiently, promptly, and
well during his travels through the South—when he found well-
run businesses,good libraries,impressive churches,and efficiently
functioning institutions in general—he almost invariably found
them to be run by Northerners, foreigners, or Jews.63
...
Free-
ing in their midst millions of people of an alien race and unknown
disposition, and with no history in either Africa or America that
would prepare them to be citizens of a society such as the United
States, was not an experiment that many were willing to risk in
these states. Not when it could mean risking their lives.
Only those on opposite ends of a spectrum of opinion found
the issue of slavery easy—those like Senator John C. Calhoun of
South Carolina, who wished to keep blacks enslaved indefinitely,
and those like Massachusetts’ William Lloyd Garrison, who advo-
cated immediate emancipation of blacks with the full rights of
citizenship. Ironically, both men reasoned on the basis of abstract
principles—legalistic principles in the case of Calhoun and moral-
istic principles in the case of Garrison.95 In both cases, the
relentless march of their syllogisms left the painful human realities
and dilemmas fading into the dim background. For the majority
of Americans in between, neither option was acceptable, nor was
any other option able to command a general consensus.
The kind of strange cross-currents this situation generated
were perhaps epitomized by the career of Congressman John Ran-
dolph of Virginia, a prominent and bitter opponent of the
abolitionists, who nevertheless hated slavery. Slavery was to him
“a cancer” but one which “must not be tampered with by quacks,
who never saw the disease or the patient,” for this could end in
the race war that he too feared, threatening “the life’s blood of
the little ones,which are lying in their cradles,in happy ignorance
of what is passing around them; and not the white ones only, for
shall not we too kill?”96
Fears of a race war were not confined to Southerners, how-
ever, or even to Americans. Alexis de Tocqueville saw a race war
in the South as a very real possibility in the wake of mass emanci-
pation and one of many painful prospects created by the
institution of slavery,especially a slavery in which the freed people
and their descendants would be physically distinct and could not
readily vanish by assimilation into the larger society, as in some
earlier times and in other parts of the world. Moreover,slavery was
a very poor preparation for freedom for blacks, economically,
socially or otherwise. Free blacks were already very dispropor-
tionately represented in prison populations,creating fears of what
would happen if the much larger slave population were suddenly
freed.
Even a Northern opponent of slavery like Frederick Law Olm-
sted, having encountered and been appalled by slave field hands
during his travels through the South,feared that their “presence in
large numbers must be considered a dangerous circumstance to a
civilized people.”97
...
Even when private manumissions of individual slaves was
legally possible, it was not wholly without its dilemmas. Modern
historian David Brion Davis denounced Congressman John Ran-
dolph for “hypocrisy” because Randolph publicly condemned the
slave trade during a visit to England,125 while he himself contin-
ued to hold slaves in the United States. However, Randolph was
not just speaking for public consumption in England. He said sim-
ilar things both in public and in private letters to friends in the
United States.126 Why, then, did Randolph not simply free his own
slaves? This question reaches beyond one man and has implica-
tions for the whole set of contradictions which slavery presented
in a free society.
At a personal level, the answer was clearest: Randolph could
not simply free his own slaves legally, since he had inherited a
mortgaged estate and the slaves were part of that estate.127 Only
after he had removed both financial and legal encumbrances was
freeing his slaves possible, and only after he made some provision
for their economic viability as free people did he consider it
humane. During hard economic times,Randolph wrote to a friend
of “more than two hundred mouths looking up to me for food”
and though it would be “easy to rid myself of the burthen,”
morally it would be “more difficult to abandon them to the cruel
fate to which our laws would consign them than to suffer with
them.”128 Thomas Jefferson likewise owned a plantation encum-
bered by debt, as did many other Southerners, so emancipation of
all of Jefferson’s slaves was never a real possibility, though he did
manage to free nine of them.
Like Burke and Randolph, Jefferson did not see slavery as an
abstract issue. He saw the heavy moral stigma of slavery but also
the social dangers to flesh and blood people. He wrote in a letter:
I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth
who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this
heavy reproach,in any practicable way. The cession of that kind
of property (for so it is misnamed) is a bagatelle, which would
not cost me a second thought, if in that way a general emanci-
pation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually, and
with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But, as it is, we have the
wolf by the ears,and we can neither hold him nor safety let him
go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.129
Many other slaveowners of course saw their slaves as simply
a source of wealth and were therefore determined to hold on to
them for that reason. However, even those slaveholders with aver-
sions to slavery in principle were constrained by a strong tradition
of stewardship, in which the family inheritance was not theirs to
dispose of in their own lifetime, but to pass on to others as it had
been passed on to them. George Washington was one of those
who had inherited slaves and, dying childless, freed his slaves in
his will, effective on the death of his wife. His will also provided
that slaves too old or too beset with “bodily infirmities” to take
care of themselves should be taken care of by his estate, and that
the children were to be “taught to read and write” and trained for
“some useful occupation.”130 His estate in fact continued to pay
for the support of some freed slaves for decades after his death, in
accordance with his will.131
The part of Washington’s will dealing with slaves filled
almost three pages,and the tone as well as the length of it showed
his concerns:
The emancipation clause stands out from the rest of Washing-
ton’s will in the unique forcefulness of its language. Elsewhere
in it Washington used the standard legal expressions—“I give
and bequeath,” “it is my will and direction.” In one instance he
politely wrote, “by way of advice, I recommend to my Execu-
tors…” But the emancipation clause rings with the voice of
The Real History of Slavery
149
command; it has the iron firmness of a field order: “I do hereby
expressly forbid the sale…of any Slave I may die possessed of,
under any pretext whatsoever.”132
Long before reaching this point in his personal life, George
Washington had said of slavery as a national issue: “There is not a
man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan
adopted for the abolition of it.”133 But,like Burke,he saw a need for
a plan of some sort,rather than simply freeing millions of slaves in
a newly emerging nation surrounded by threatening powers, just
as the freed slaves themselves would be surrounded by a hostile
population. In short, the moral principle was easy but figuring
out how to apply it in practice was not. Moreover, in a country
with an elected government, how the white population at large
felt could not be ignored. When Washington congratulated
Lafayette for the latter’s purchase of a plantation where former
slaves could live, he added: “Would to God a like spirit would dif-
fuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country;
but I despair of seeing it.” He saw legislation as the only way to
end slavery and said that a legislator who did that would get his
vote.134
