A Disease in the Public Mind (19 page)

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A few months later, on Thomas Jefferson's birthday, President Jackson was the guest of honor at a public dinner celebrating the famed Virginian, who had died four years earlier. Calhoun—now Jackson's vice president—and some of his allies attempted to trap the president with a series of toasts that reminded everyone that Jefferson had endorsed the idea of nullification.

The plotters were confident of winning this not-so-subtle confrontation. Andrew Jackson had been born in South Carolina. His life had been molded by southern traditions. He was a rebel by instinct, with a long history of quarrels with his superiors. Perhaps most important, he was the virtual opposite of a political theorist; he had no education worth mentioning.

Finally, it was Jackson's turn to offer a toast. He raised his glass and riveted his flinty eyes on Vice President Calhoun. “Our federal Union,” he growled. “It
must
be preserved!”

The vice president replied with a defiant countertoast: “The Union—next to our liberty, the most dear!”

Those words ended all possibility of John C. Calhoun serving another term as vice president. In 1832, with Martin Van Buren of New York as his running mate, Jackson won a second term on a tidal wave of votes. He also signed a new tariff bill, which lowered some of the 1828 duties but still
retained high rates on textiles and other materials, such as iron, that South Carolina needed. The state's infuriated politicians summoned a convention that declared the law null and void. No federal officer would be permitted to collect a penny on imports in Charleston after February 1, 1833.
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The cavaliers of the Palmetto State were unaware that President Jackson was conferring almost daily with the man who had written much of the Constitution—James Madison. One of Jackson's aides, Nicholas Trist, had been Thomas Jefferson's secretary for the last two years of his life. (Trist had married a Jefferson granddaughter.) While at Monticello, he also became friendly with Madison. When the nullification crisis erupted, Trist asked Madison to advise President Jackson. The aged founder told Old Hickory he could and should condemn the nullifiers, and if they attempted to carry out their threat to secede from the Union, he should crush their revolt with all the force and authority of his presidential powers.

One of Jackson's old soldier friends, General Sam Dale of Mississippi, visited the White House not long after South Carolina had announced its nullification of the tariff. The two men discussed the situation over a decanter of whiskey. “Sam,” Jackson said. “They are trying me here. But by the God in heaven, I will uphold the laws.”

General Dale said he hoped things would go right.

“They shall go right, sir!” roared Old Hickory, and smashed his fist down on the table so hard he broke one of his clay pipes.

On December 10, 1832, President Jackson issued a proclamation to the people of South Carolina, warning them that their nullification decree was an absurdity. If they tried to support it with force, it would become disunion and treason. Jackson began sending South Carolina unionists grenades and rockets for street fighting. “Nullification means insurrection” he wrote to one of the unionist leaders. “I will meet it at the threshold and have the leaders arraigned for treason. In forty days I can have within the limits of South Carolina fifty thousand men and in forty days another fifty thousand.”

Senator Robert Y. Hayne had become South Carolina's governor. He defiantly made plans for a ten-thousand-man army and declared he would maintain the state's sovereignty or “perish beneath its ruins.” The nullifiers called on other southern states for support. Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama replied that they abhorred nullification, but Georgia proposed a Southern convention to discuss the situation.

In Washington, Vice President Martin Van Buren and other cautious politicians urged Jackson to go slowly. “Your policy,” Old Hickory replied, “would destroy all confidence in our government at home and abroad. I expect soon to hear a civil war has commenced. If the leaders are surrounded by twelve thousand bayonets, our [federal] marshal shall be aided by twenty four thousand and arrest them in the midst thereof.”

The president grimly directed Congress to prepare a force bill that would authorize him to invade South Carolina. But Jackson was a man who had seen war and loathed its death and destruction. He warned “the citizens of my native state” that as president he could not “avoid the performance of his duty.” He also announced his approval of a congressional revision of the tariff, to lower some of the rates that were distressing South Carolina.

The two bills passed almost simultaneously. The South Carolinians repealed the nullification ordinance—and voted to nullify the force bill. The president ignored this empty gesture of defiance and accepted a precarious peace. “I thought I would have to hang some of them,” Jackson said with more than a hint of regret. He feared the next time the nullification monster reared its head, “It will be the Negro, or slavery question.”
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CHAPTER 10

Another Thomas Jefferson Urges Virginia to Abolish Slavery

While South Carolina veered toward rebellion against the tariff, the future of slavery was agitating Virginia. The Old Dominion was still one of the nation's three largest states, with 1,211,405 people, including 469,737 slaves. In a dozen eastern counties the bondsmen heavily outnumbered whites. Nat Turner's rebellion had prompted Governor William Floyd to propose a select committee to examine “the subject of slaves, free Negroes and the melancholy occurrences growing out of the tragical massacre in Southampton County.” The committee was duly organized, with only a vague idea of how to proceed. Privately, Floyd confided to his diary his hope that they would find a way to gradually abolish slavery in the state.
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William Henry Roane, a grandson of Patrick Henry, submitted a Quaker petition calling for emancipation as a topic the committee should discuss. A violent debate erupted, with not a few lawmakers demanding that the subject be banned from the committee's agenda. They claimed that the mere mention of the word was likely to foment a larger and more horrendous replay of Nat Turner's rampage.

Committee Chairman William Henry Broadnax, a blunt-spoken slave owner from Dinwiddie County in eastern Virginia, was shocked by this proposed evasion. He asked the members if they wanted the rest of America to conclude that Virginia was unwilling or afraid to consider how to find “an ultimate delivery from the greatest curse that God in his wrath ever inflicted upon a people.” The legislature voted by a three-to-one majority to accept the Quaker proposal—and were soon wondering if they had made a mistake.

The lawmakers were flooded with pro and con petitions and resolutions. Emancipation was a topic that obviously stirred deep emotions. Once more the alarmists rose to demand an end of the discussion. Their slaves, one man warned, “were not unconscious of what was going on here.” There was no hope of finding a practical plan for freeing them. A debate on the topic would only create massive unhappiness and very possibly another outbreak of violence.
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A new delegate stepped forward with a plan. Six feet four, with the shoulders of a champion wrestler, thirty-nine-year-old Thomas Jefferson Randolph was the founder's oldest grandson. He was deeply devoted to his grandfather. “Jefferson,” as the family called him, was in the midst of paying all the debts that the bankrupt Master of Monticello had left on his ledgers. It would take Randolph and his wife another twenty years of painful sacrifices, but the money would ultimately be paid, to the last penny.

Randolph had run for the legislature to present a plan for gradual emancipation and realize his grandfather's yearning to solve the problem that had tormented his old age. Another reason for his presence as a delegate was the anxiety Nat Turner had stirred in Randolph's wife, Jane. Like many Virginia women her age, a fear of slave violence had all but vanished from her mind. But Turner's eruption had aroused her anxiety “to the most agonizing degree.” In a way, slavery, too, was an inherited debt that Thomas Jefferson Randolph wanted to remove from his family's escutcheon.

Another spur was a letter from Edward Coles, a Virginia neighbor who had written to Thomas Jefferson in 1814, urging him to lead a crusade against slavery. Jefferson had replied that he was too old to undertake such a
huge task but assured Coles and fellow idealists of his generation that they had his blessing. Coles had transported his slaves to Illinois and freed them. In the 1820s, when proslavery men in that state tried to persuade the legislature to repeal the Northwest Ordinance, Coles had run for governor and defeated them. Now Coles urged Thomas Jefferson Randolph to take the lead in ridding Virginia of slavery. It was a virtual command the younger man could not ignore.
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Slowly, earnestly, Randolph presented his plan: Starting on July 4, 1840, all the slaves born in Virginia would become the property of the state government when they reached maturity. Before they matured, their owners would be free to sell them to masters in other southern states. Those who remained would be hired out to earn the cost of transporting them “beyond the limits of the United States.”
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The huge number of Virginia's slaves made the cost of sending the slaves to another country almost prohibitive. Randolph was clinging to his grandfather's solution, but time had rendered it dubious. The speech left much to be desired in other ways. Later Randolph would confess that the brave words marching through his head as he rose to speak had somehow vanished “as mist before the sun.” He had inherited his grandfather's limitations as a public speaker. The best he could do was close by reading Thomas Jefferson's reply to Edward Coles, proving that he passionately wished to see slavery vanish from Virginia.

Another fierce debate exploded. Sharpening tempers was a not-so-secret division in the legislature between delegates from western Virginia, where slaves were few, and the east, where the original settlers had created large plantations, some with hundreds of bondsmen. The westerners had recently demanded more delegates to the legislature, based on a count of white voters. The easterners insisted on counting their slaves and retained a majority. To no one's surprise, the westerners were far more willing to consider a proposal to eliminate the evil institution. They did not even blink when one delegate called slavery “a calamity” and predicted Virginia was heading for a “servile” war, with the extermination of one of the races the outcome. Santo Domingo was obviously still a nightmare in many memories.

The candor and passion with which these men spoke was remarkable proof of the desire to solve the problem. James MacDowell expressed his dread of a “ruptured brotherhood” and the creation of two sections of their formerly united country, each hunched behind barriers of mutual hatred. Virginians were in danger of being held up as “common enemies of man whom it will be a duty to overthrow and justice to despoil.” A century later, those words drew an anguished exclamation from a veteran historian. For “prophetic vision,” he wrote, those words were “never surpassed by anyone who opposed the holding of Negroes in bondage!”
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Eastern Virginians, living in the midst of thousands of slaves, were far less likely to favor emancipation. One spokesman for the eastern delegates called Randolph's plan “monstrous and unconstitutional.” Some of them dismissed Turner's revolt as a minor tragedy, triggered by an “ignorant religious fanatic.” Others claimed Virginia's slaves were “as happy a laboring class as exists upon the habitable globe.” At this point in the industrial revolution, these words were hardly a tribute to slavery. Workers in British and New England factories were toiling twelve hours a day for starvation wages. But it was a way of portraying slave owners as no worse than other businessmen.

Another eastern delegate rejected the whole idea of debating the “abstract” question of slavery's morality. Didn't these antislavery do-gooders know the nation's founders owned slaves? he asked. Not a word was said by anyone about George Washington freeing his slaves—more evidence that this gesture had made little impact on the public mind, even in Virginia. Growing heated, the speaker predicted that if this plan of future emancipation passed the legislature, it would ignite a race war and destroy the liberty and justice for which the founders had fought.

Finally, Committee Chairman William Broadnax intervened. They were getting nowhere, he said. There was little chance of the committee endorsing a plan as explicit and far-reaching as Thomas Jefferson Randolph's. But he strongly disagreed with the delegates who were saying slavery should not even be discussed. It was agitating people around the world. (Britain was in the midst of her West Indies abolition debates.) Broadnax said he also
disagreed strongly with the people who claimed slavery was not immoral. As it was practiced in Virginia, the institution was a “transcendent evil.”

If anything was to be done about it, Broadnax continued, it had to meet three requirements: freed slaves had to be removed from the state as soon as possible; the inviolability of private property had to be respected; no owner should be forced to part with a slave without “ample compensation” for his or her value. Thomas Jefferson Randolph's plan did not pass this test, and Broadnax dismissed it as “nauseous to the palate.”