Lone Star (66 page)

Houston was hardly ignorant either of sentiment or conditions. He had been governor of an important state, and President of an independent country. He had spent years in Washington, mixing with Americans of all kinds. He was certain the continued sectionalism of the South, and what he considered Calhoun's treasonous activities, would arouse their own Frankenstein in the North, because Northerners were basically the same kind of people; they could neither be threatened successfully nor overawed. But he possessed a perspective few Texans saw. And his contention that a Southern secession could not be successful, nor alliances made with European powers against the North, was simply not believed. Houston knew, and said, that before Britain would help the South, the South would first have to make some pledges toward ending slavery. Parochial in knowledge as well as vision, the radical lawyers he argued with did not believe it; the South did not realize how isolated it had become.

Houston was determined to build a Unionist base Texans could rally around. He felt that secession, already openly proposed by radical politicians, was rebellion against the nation—precisely as did Robert E. Lee. But Houston, like Lee, was one of a small group of men, holding to their own concepts of honor, helpless against a tide they deplored. In the summer of 1859, however, the cause did not yet seem hopeless.

Running as an independent against the organized majority party—in fact, the only party—Houston got significant support. This contest had unusual facets. Houston was opposed by the entire political structure, but not by the older power structure of the state. He had a majority of the planters on his side. He had former Governor Pease and many former Whigs, such as J. W. Throckmorton and B. H. Epperson. A significantly high percentage of substantial men agreed with his stand, but these were men of property, rarely politicians or professionals of the kind increasingly noticeable in the South.

Houston staged a famous, rip-roaring campaign. Knowing he could never win on his platform alone, he traveled Texas in a buggy. He wore an old linen duster; on hot days, when he worked up a sweat, he orated without his shirt. He slept in great plantation houses and farmers' dog-run shacks. Everywhere he went, his dust raised cheers. But they were for Houston the hero, Houston the man.

Runnels, running for reelection, had handicaps. He had nothing of Houston's mystique or personal popularity. He had neglected the Indian frontier, or so the western farmers believed. And his states' rights position had alienated most of the influential planter class; they felt he was moving much too fast. Still, it was something of a miracle when Houston won, by 9,000 votes. But it was a mandate for the hero, not for his Union precepts.

What now happened to Houston in office was part of a deepening national tragedy, which no man could any longer control. John Brown raided Harper's Ferry on October 16, 1859. Brown was most probably insane; his act was irrational by any test. With thirteen white men and five Negroes, he launched a movement to lead a mass insurrection and arm the Southern slaves, and to create an Abolitionist republic on the ruins of the plantation South.

The first step was to capture the U.S. Arsenal and rifle works at Harper's Ferry, in Virginia. Brown set out from Maryland, where he had been for some months, gathering funds and creating a base of operations. Harper's Ferry fell; the mayor was killed, and one Negro freedman. But as Lincoln said, "It was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed." No one, white or black, joined Brown, although he forcibly enlisted a few blacks. He was put down easily, his men killed or driven off, and captured by a detachment of Marines, under Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown was given a public trial in Virginia, and duly hanged for murder and other assorted crimes.

This was a small event. But it seems to have created a terrible crisis of ends and means in the North, particularly among an articulate, intellectual group in the East. John Brown, at his trial, threw up a facile, self-serving line of argument that was accepted at face value by some, because if they could not quite condone Brown's murders, they hated slavery more. While generally political figures of all parties considered Brown criminally insane, if not legally insane, and there were massive anti-Brown rallies in Boston and New York, there was an amazing reaction from what could only be considered the moral and cultural elite of the North of that time. This took the line that Brown might have been "insane," but his acts and intentions should be excused on the grounds that the compelling motive was "divine." Horace Greeley wrote the Harper's Ferry raid was "the work of a madman," but he had not "one reproachful word." Ralph Waldo Emerson described Brown as a "saint." Henry Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Longfellow, Bryant, and Lowell, the whole Northern pantheon, with the exception of Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne, took the position Brown was an "angel of light," and not Brown, but the society that hanged him was mad. The late, falling-leaf intellectuality of New England in the 19th century seems to have become infused with a newer, strikingly intolerant puritanism. Thoreau bitterly condemned both the public and the greater folk wisdom of Whitman for not agreeing. Thoreau as much as anyone pointed up one difference that had emerged between the American East and the American Southwest. Thoreau was willing to go to jail rather than support a war against Mexico for the ultimate control of the continent, in the long-term interests of the United States. But he was not pacifist: he was also willing to shed American blood in furtherance of his own ideology. Never far from the moral question of slavery was a deep and growing hatred of the American planter class in the industrial North, probably based in a revived puritanism, an almost Roundhead fervor. Garrison said bluntly, "Every slaveholder has forfeited his right to live." The planter had become an enemy class; although slavery was indefensible intellectually and morally, still something new and vicious had been injected into American public attitudes. The imperishable greatness of Abraham Lincoln, in this period and afterward, rests partly on the fact that he never succumbed to this malaise. He recognized slavery as a dangerous problem no amount of moral frenzy would solve; he was prepared to damage slavery if he could, but not if he had to damage the nation in the process. He considered slavery morally wrong, but that it could not "excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason." Lincoln was prepared to stand by the law, either as a private citizen or President, even when he thought the law in error; he made this very plain privately, in his 1860 campaign and afterward. It was a distinction the South understood too late.

The misunderstanding was understandable, however, because Lincoln, for whatever reason, made no real attempt to refute Seward and the other Republican fanatics who preached irreconcilable conflict. All Black Republicans were linked with their loudest spokesmen; Lincoln took on the same radical image.

On the day Brown died, church bells tolled from New England to Chicago; Albany fired off one hundred guns in salute, and a governor of a large Northern state wrote in his diary that men were ready to march to Virginia.

Further, a terrible suspicion of a widespread conspiracy in the North to foment a hideous slave insurrection in the South grew out of the investigation by Congress into the Brown affair.

The revelation that Brown had been able to collect $23,000 in four months in Boston in 1858, for an admitted guerrilla war against slavery, and that many intellectuals refused to pronounce him guilty after it was proven that he had engaged in bloody executions in Kansas, because it was "decreed by God, ordained from Eternity," had a blood-chilling effect south of the Ohio. Above all, the identity of the "Secret Six" who had financed Brown's raid came as a horrifying shock. These were out of the cream of Northern society: minister of religion, capitalist, philosopher, surgeon, professor, and philanthropist, four of them with Harvard degrees. They had knowingly diverted arms and money raised to be used in "bleeding Kansas" to Brown in Maryland. As one admitted many years later, "It is still a little difficult to explain." It could be explained only in the sense that fanaticism was clouding American decency, confusing ends and means. This acceptance of civil violence by intellectuals still throws a somber light over American history.

The conspiracy was neither widespread nor well-organized, although papers found on Brown seemed to prove so, and the puritan intellectuals who hated the South along with its peculiar institutions were a small minority. Although as some Southern historians like Woodward have pointed out, their view eventually became the dominant view, and the whole nation ceased to see the inherent blasphemy in the words of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," this probably could not have happened had not their sound and fury ignited a corresponding psychosis in Texas and other states. The notion that the entire North was determined to bring about bloody revolution not only paralyzed the planters, who were half convinced against their better judgment, but inflamed the average white. A Negro insurrection would not just affect the gentry; it would kill and burn out all white people in the counties.

Again, because Southerners had been defensive too long over slavery and had cut most of their bridges of communication with the North, they lived in a sort of self-imposed intellectual exile. This, and the eroding effects of a continual physical and psychological insecurity, now fired hysteria. Ready to believe the worst, Texans reacted with characteristic violence.

An inferiority and insecurity complex gripped almost the entire white frontier farming middle class. An old American practice, the "witch hunt," was revived. In such an atmosphere any irresponsible evidence was easily swallowed; everyone who had ever spoken against slavery, upheld Negroes or the North, was suspect. The countryside, from the evidence of letters to authorities and private correspondence, in the year 1860 was in panic. It was thought the South was honeycombed with traitors, and that every Negro was bloody-minded and ready to rise and kill.

The panic took all its recognizable forms. A sixty-year-old preacher, a Democrat born in Kentucky who believed the Bible sanctioned slavery, criticized the flogging of Negroes in a sermon. His Texas congregation tied him to a post and almost killed the old man with seventy lashes on the back. In Palestine, Texas, a self-appointed committee collected all "dangerous books for destruction by public burning." People also burned possessions of Northern manufacture. Northern-born schoolteachers were hounded out; Yankee seamen were mobbed in the port towns. Guilt by association, if a man had Yankee friends, was accepted without question. Vigilance committees, the vigilantes, were formed everywhere. A secret organization known as the Knights of the Golden Circle sprang up across the state. The Knights' aims were to make the South safe for slavery and to conquer Mexico as a side order. Two filibusters were actually armed and organized, but before they reached Mexico, they were diverted to another, bigger war.

During the summer of 1860, a series of mysterious fires blazed along the North Texas frontier. Barns and buildings went up in flames in Dallas, Denton, Waxahachie, and several other towns. Newspapers reported "abolitionists" were trying to burn out the South; horrible atrocity tales of slave risings, poisonings, and political murder—for which there was no basis in truth—pervaded the western counties of the heartland. At Dallas a large mob hanged three unfortunate Negroes, for no known cause. Three white men were lynched in Fort Worth, on the suspicion they had "tampered" with slaves. A spirit of paranoia and intolerance seems to have been everywhere, but noticeably, the wildest rumors and violence were confined to the white regions, west of the "black belt." In the old counties along the Colorado and Brazos the slaves continued to hoe and pick cotton peacefully, while the great planters agonized with Governor Sam Houston about the state of local and national politics.

Similar violence and panic was occurring in some degree across the whole South; the wildest rumors seem to have begun in Texas, but they rapidly spread northward as far as the Potomac. In Virginia and Mississippi, many people believed Texas was in a state of chaos, induced by Northern conspiracies. One historian compared this mass delusion and mass fear with the "Great Fear" that seized France in 1789; in any event it precipitated political crisis.

The great American tragedy was that in both Texas and in Northern states otherwise decent men had come to believe in diabolism and depravity on the other side. There were ugly aspects on each side. The repellent slavering by intellectuals over John Brown's body was matched by editorials in Texas advocating the restoration of the slave trade and violence against anyone who disagreed. Abolitionists ranted that the South must be "cleansed by fire" while Southerners grimly determined that the "higher law of self-preservation" was the only defense against the higher law defying their institutions and property rights preached by the Abolitionists. The failure of the North to condemn John Brown unequivocally produced a psychology of lynch law. While Garrison, in the North, asked the North how much outrage it would continue to take from the slavers, Albert Gallatin Brown, in the South, demanded "to what depth of infamy" his people were sinking if they took the provocations heaped on them. The Northern papers printed diatribes against slaveowners and "waved the bloody shirt." Texas editors told their readers if they permitted the North's conception of Negro equality, they were not men. Thus paranoia fed on paranoia, and in this poisonous atmosphere the ruling Democratic Party in the South convened at Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1860.

In Texas, the Calhoun Democrats had already gained complete control; now, they "abandoned restraint." In the state convention, the leadership resolved that Texas had the sovereign right to secede and resume its place as an independent nation. The party platform attacked the "unnatural" efforts of a "sectional party" in the North, the Republicans, to fight slavery. The men sent to the national convention at Charleston were radicals: Runnels, Lubbock, Bryan, Hubbard, and Ochiltree.