"I must look to my own interest"

The few pro-secession tracts specifically addressed to non-slaveholders that I have seen are not subtle affairs. The central message is generally race war. Lincoln's ascension to the presidency will spark a slave uprising. Wealthy planters and merchants will use their resources to escape. But you, the yeoman farmer, will be trapped with your family – you wife and your children – in a blood-drenched orgy of rapine and murder.

So measured, what is most remarkable about Georgia Governor Joseph E. Brown's December l860 public letter in favor of immediate secession (which may be found in Secession Debated: Georgia's Showdown in 1860) is its restraint. Bloodshed is not entirely absent – thousands of slaves, Brown warned his north Georgia neighbors, would flee the cotton and rice fields of the Black Belt

and make their way to the healthier climate in the mountain region. We should have them plundering and stealing, robbing and killing, in all the lovely vallies of the mountains . . . [that] contain the place of my nativity, the home of my manhood, and the theatre of most of the acts of my life . . ..

But most of Gov. Brown's argument is far more sophisticated. The end of slavery, Brown predicted, would drive poor whites into tenancy. Wealthy masters, no longer able to invest in slaves, would instead “soon buy all the lands of the South worth cultivating.” The result would be a Dickensian nightmare:

Then what? The poor would all become tenants, as they are in England, the New England States, and all old countries where slavery does not exist.

But that was not the end of the governor's analysis. Landless whites, he pointed out, would have to compete with millions of former slaves for work and tenancy – former slaves who would work for a pittance, forcing whites to work for slave wages. Brown spelled out the consequences:

In this capacity [as laborers] they [former slaves] would at once come in competition with the poor white laborers. Men of capital would see this, and fix the price of labor accordingly. The negro has only been accustomed to receive his victuals and clothes for his labor. Few of them, if free, would expect anything more. It would therefore be easy to employ them at a sum sufficient to supply only the actual necessaries of life.

Although a lawyer by profession (did you know that Brown attended Yale Law School?), the governor sketched a hypothetical transaction in terms worthy of an economics professor:

The poor white man would then go to the wealthy land-owner and say, I wish employment. Hire me to work. I have a wife and children who must have bread. The land-owner would offer probably twenty cents per day. The laborer would say, I cannot support my family on that sum. The landlord replies, That is not my business. I am sorry for you, but I must look to my own interest. The black man who lives on my land has as strong an arm, and as heavy muscles as you have, and can do as much labor. He works for me at that rate, you must work for the same price, or I cannot employ you. The negro comes into competition with the white man and fixes the price of his labor, and he must take it or get no employment.

The same scenario would play out, Brown explained, when “the poor white man” sought to rent land or find shelter for his family.

The negro therefore [Brown summed up], comes into competition with the poor white man, when he seeks to rent land on which to make his bread, or a shelter to protect his wife and his little ones, from the cold and from the rain; and when he seeks employment as a day laborer. In every such case if the negro will do the work the cheapest, he must be preferred.

I find this passage fascinating. First, ironically, Brown sounds very much like a Free Soiler, except that he is using Free Soil-ish arguments to justify the continuation of slavery where it already existed. Free labor cannot compete with slave-ish labor – and therefore the two types of labor must remain distinct and in their own spheres.

Second, his characterization of the “land-owner” is striking. While Brown apparently assumed that his “land-owner” was merely acting in accordance with what we would now refer to as the law of supply and demand, how many of his wary mountain audience would have seen nothing more than a confirmation of their suspicions about haughty, selfish planters?

About the illustration, entitled The Dis-United States, Or the Southern Confederacy:

The Confederate leaders are portrayed as a band of competing opportunists led by South Carolina governor and secessionist Francis Pickens (far left). The artist criticizes the January 1861 secession of five states from the lower South, following the lead of South Carolina, which had formally declared its independence a month before. Armed with a whip and a pistol, Pickens sits on the back of a young slave, pronouncing, "South Carolina claims to be file leader and general whipper in of the new Confederacy, a special edict! Obey and tremble!" The other leaders are also armed. Pickens's tyranny is met by expressions of self-interest from the other confederates. The nature of these individual interests are conveyed pictorially and in the text. Leaders from Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia sit on bales of cotton, while Florida and Louisiana sit on a wrecked ship's hull and a barrel of sugar respectively. Florida (represented by a bearded man, possibly Stephen R. Mallory, senator and later secretary of the Confederate navy ): "We want it distinctly understood that all the lights on the Coast will be put out, in order to facilitate wrecking business." Alabama (William L. Yancey): "Alabama proclaims that C̀otton is King,' and the rest of the Confederacy "must obey" that Sovereign. Mississippi (Jefferson Davis): "We came in, with the understanding that we shall issue bonds to an unlimited extent, with our ancient right of repudiation when they became due." Georgia (Governor Joseph E. Brown): "Georgia must have half the honors, and all the profits, or back she goes to old Pluribus Unum.'" Louisiana (a mustachioed man): "A heavy duty must be levied on foreign sweetening in order to make up for what we have sacrificed in leaving the Union, otherwise we shall be like a P̀elican in the wilderness!'" Although Texas, which seceded on February 1, is not represented here, the print probably appeared at the time of the Montgomery convention in early February when the Confederate States of America was formed, but before Jefferson Davis assumed its presidency. Texas did not attend that convention.

Ultisols and Alfisols

Ten days week ago, I posted an entry on John Majewski’s new book, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation, focusing on Prof. Majewski’s discussion of land use and agricultural practices in the antebellum south, and in particular the fact that southern farmers placed only about one-third of their land in cultivation at any given time, versus two-thirds on average in the north. I left you hanging concerning Prof. Majewski’s conclusions as to why southerners retained the practice of shifting cultivation, which accounted for this discrepancy. This post continues and concludes that review.

In the antebellum period, northerners regularly made note of and denigrated the effects of shifting cultivation in the south: the large tracts of unimproved and worn-out land, interspersed with occasional farmhouses and small settlements. With equal regularity they assumed that the desolate appearance of much of the rural south was somehow attributable to slavery, which rendered the inhabitants slovenly and lazy:

David Wilmot . . . frequently associated slavery with soil exhaustion. “Sterility follows its [slavery’s] path,” he declared in 1846. A decade later, Representative Israel Washburn of Maine noted that “their [southerners’] lands are being worn out and exhausted. . . . [T]hey have not the enterprise, skill or means to renovate them.”

The contrast between the tidy, prosperous farms of the north and (in the words of William Seward) the “old and decaying towns, wretchedly neglected roads, and, in every respect, an absence of enterprise and improvement” in the south provided a powerful argument to Free Soilers. “No wonder,” Prof.Majewski observes, “that many northerners wanted to stop slavery spreading to the western territories. Shifting cultivation, they believed, was sure to follow.”

Modern historians have to a large extent adopted this analysis. “Historians have frequently pointed to some combination of slavery, cheap western lands, and ingrained traditionalism.” The relative abundance of land and mobility of slave labor, so the argument goes, allowed southerners to work a given piece of land to exhaustion, and then move on.

Prof. Majewski rejects all such explanations. Shifting cultivation persisted, he argues, because southern soil and weather made crop rotation impracticable or impossible. It turns out that most of the south has soil classified as part of the ultisol soil order. “Ultisols generally lack key nutrients for plant growth and tend to be highly acidic. The acidity makes it difficult for plants to fully utilize whatever nutrients are present, which means that fertilizing the soil will not raise crop yields unless the acidity is first neutralized.”

Shifting cultivation was ideally suited to this soil because the ash produced by burning “provided a quick infusion of important nutrients, and its calcium content helped neutralize the acidic ultisol soils.” Northern farms, in contrast, generally consisted of alfisol soils, which contained “an abundance of phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and other essential plant nutrients.” The rotation systems that northerners successfully used on alfisol soils simply did not translate to the ultisols of the south.

Other environmental facts – heat and rainfall patterns – also conspired against the south to make rotation impractical. “Important fodder crops such as hay and clover that supported continuous cultivation failed to thrive in the warm and humid southern climate.” Southern cattle tended to be stunted and produced less manure – another important element of the rotation system in the north – both because they had to be raised on less nutritious substitutes and because they fell prey to tick-spread disease.

Prof. Majewski appears to do an excellent job supporting his thesis that these environmental factors constituted the principal reason that southern farmed stuck with shifting cultivation. The core of his analysis involves the use of “multivariate regressions” to assess the impact of numerous variables, which are summarized as follows:

In summary, the regressions indicate that the environmental factors (soil types, typography, and climate) greatly influenced levels of improved land; they show a particularly strong association between alfisol soils and high levels of improved land. Ultisols and rugged topography (such as the mountains of Appalachia or the marshes of the coastal regions), on the other hand, led to low levels of improved land.

The book includes a 17-page “statistical appendix”, which I invite those more statistically literate than I to pick at for holes or discrepancies. What I found most interesting about the more detailed analysis there was the discussion concerning the relationship between slavery and shifting cultivation. It turns out, according to Prof. Majewski, that there is “a strongly positive” and “statistically significant” relationship between more slaves and higher levels of improved land.

Prof. Majewski cautions that “it is impossible to tell . . . whether slavery caused more land to be improved or whether slaveholders simply preferred to locate in areas with the best soils and the best access to transportation.” However the correlation does discredit the contrary claim, that slavery “caused” less land to be improved. “Slavery (or its absence) did not ‘cause’ shifting cultivation, strengthening the point that environmental factors plaed the most important role.”

Post-Civil War (and therefore post-slavery) evidence further buttresses this conclusion:

What makes the statistical results for 1860 even more compelling is that the same basic relationship holds for 1890 as well. Despite the greater availability of fertilizers, farmers in counties with poor soils cultivated far less land than farmers in areas with more favorable soils. The 1890 results cast further doubt that slavery and cheap western land caused shifting cultivation. Shifting cultivation, simply put, outlived both.

Prof. Majewski’s findings, if correct, point to a profound irony. Obviously, northerners came to adopt Free Soil ideology for a variety of reasons. But images of decrepit southern agriculture and agricultural lifestyles caused by slavery were a powerful weapon in the Free Soil arsenal, as some of the above quotes suggest. Was the assumption that slavery was the source of those images simply wrong? It would seem so.

The First Free Soil Party: Land monopoly and slavery are "combinations of wealth against the liberties of the masses"

In the fall of 1846, New Yorkers would vote for governor, lieutenant governor and congressmen, in addition to state legislators. Anti-Renters were determined to make their influence felt. However, in doing so, as I mentioned in the last post, they had a basic tactical decision to make. They could try to work through the existing Democratic and Whig parties, or they could nominate their own candidates.

As it turned out, the Anti-Renters were disorganized and divided as to how to proceed. As a result, efforts to hold an early convention – at which they could nominate their own candidates and then press one or the other of the major parties to endorse them – failed. The Anti-Renters wound up assembling only on October 6, 1846, after both the Whigs and the Democrats had made their nominations.

The Anti-Renters found much to dislike about the gubernatorial nominees of both major parties – Silas Wright for the Democrats and John Young for the Whigs. Both had expressed support in principle for the Anti-Rent cause, but both also had substantial negatives. Wright, the incumbent governor, had declared three Anti-Rent counties in rebellion in 1845 and sent in armed forces to suppress the “Indians.” As a legislator, Young had refused to back a bill authorizing court challenges to the Patroons’ titles, a central demand of the Anti-Renters. “Thus,” Reeve Huston has observed, “the major candidates held exactly the same position on the leasehold controversy: both supported the tenants’ least controversial demands and wished to destroy the leasehold system, but opposed doing so on the anti-renters’ terms.”

Faced with two unpalatable choices, the delegates’ other option was to forge ahead and nominate their own gubernatorial candidate. Unfortunately, the probable choice, Ira Harris, announced that if he were selected he would decline the nomination. In the end, therefore, the delegates reluctantly selected Young and the other Whig nominees as the Anti-Rent candidates. “Immediately, 7 of the 36 delegates, all of them National Reformers or Barnburners, walked out.”

Sixteen days later, the bolters and other dissident Anti-Renters reassembled at Albany City Hall, this time joined by National Reformers and Liberty Party activists, who had been eyeing each other as potential allies. As Professor Huston explains:

Reformers in both camps saw such alliances as a way to expand the influence of their movements. Abolitionists like [Gerrit] Smith and [Calvin] Pepper were also convinced by the National Reformers’ contention that access to land was a natural right; they endorsed the NRA’s program as an essential part of their struggle for human liberation.

Jonathan H. Earle’s perspective is similar:

NRA anti-renters . . . found [new allies] among the state’s growing population of political abolitionists, including Gerrit Smith and William Chaplin. Smith, following a long correspondence with [George Henry] Evans, had come to believe that the eradication of land monopoly was a necessary first step to abolishing chattel slavery. Chaplin, the editor of the Albany Patriot, wished to move abolitionism beyond the Liberty Party’s “one idea” (abolition) and work for other reforms.

On October 22, 1846, this assembly of “land reformers, land-hungry farmers, and abolitionists forged their first political alliance” – a coalition they called the Free Soil party, “the first to use the name.” They nominated a National Reformer (Lewis Masquerier) for governor, an abolitionist (William Chaplin) for lieutenant governor, National Reformer and Anti-Rent editor Thomas Devyr for Congress, and two long-time anti-rent activists for the state legislature.

Perhaps more important for the future, the party platform sought to recognize the goals of the various groups participating in the coalition. Professor Huston characterizes it as follows:

[T]he platform . . . appealed to the anti-renters’ hopes of destroying both the leasehold system and the rule of professional politicians. At the same time, it sought to link these aims to broader land and labor reform. The delegates offered resolutions calling for the abrogation of all leasehold contracts, a homestead act, and an equalization of the rewards to labor.

Professor Earle adds that the “delegates labeled both land monopoly and slavery ‘combinations of wealth against the liberties of the masses.’”

Coming only twelve days before the election, the Free Soil nominations had no impact on the 1846 races. Young won the governorship handily. Reeve Huston reports, “The Free-Soil vote was so small that it was left out of the statewide tally; in Albany County, where support for the National Reformers was as strong as anywhere, the ticket garnered fewer than one hundred votes.”

As Professor Earle reminds us, however, the delegates had stumbled across a concept that would grow rapidly:

[T]he platform and resolutions presaged a larger political movement that would fare better in the near future. Linking the Free Soil parties of 1846 and the one christened in 1848 were commitments to two distinct yet complementary ideas: free homesteads on the public lands for needy settlers and hostility to the spread of slavery. What made 1848 so different from 1846 were two factors: the addition of thousands of square miles of territory to the United States as a result of the war with Mexico and a full-bore schism within the once mighty New York Democracy.

The First Free Soil Party: "Land . . . is the natural inheritance of every individual"

Most standard accounts of the Free Soil movement date the birth of the Free Soil Party to the Buffalo Convention held in August 1848. The Wikipedia entry, for example, states that, "In 1848, the first [Free Soil] party convention was held in Buffalo, New York . . .."

In fact, the Free Soil party that contested the 1848 national election was not the first to bear that name. That distinction goes to the Free Soil party that contested state elections in New York in the autumn of 1846.

The 1846 Free Soil party was born out of the convulsions of New York's Anti-Rent Wars, which roiled the state from roughly 1839 until the early 1850s (and beyond). The Anti-Rent Wars are fascinating in their own right and tremendously complex. Mercifully, for present purposes the most basic outline will suffice to set the stage.

In the 1600s and 1700s, Dutch and English authorities granted large tracts of undeveloped land in eastern New York to individual men. The properties, known as Patents or Manors, dominated large parts of what became Albany, Rensselaer, Columbia, Schoharie and Delaware Counties, which are shown in white on the map above. Smaller manors were scattered across a number of other adjacent counties, shown in pale blue on the map. Shortly after independence, the New York State legislature ratified the grants of those owners, known as Patroons, who had sided with the revolution.

Meanwhile, in the 1700s and early 1800s, the Patroons began leasing farm-sized plots of land within the manors to thousands of settlers and their families. The “leases” (technically, many or most of the conveyances were not leases, but that’s another story) were often perpetual, or at least extended over many generations. They typically required annual payment in kind (in, for example, in wheat and “fat fowl”). In addition, they contained provisions that permitted the lessees to sell the property. However, if they did so they were obligated to remit a portion of the price (often one-quarter, hence the term “quarter sale”) to the Patroon.

Over the decades, settlers cleared, fenced and farmed their plots and improved their parcels by building homes, barns, saw mills, grist mills and other outbuildings on them. Relations between the farmers and the Patroons were often unsettled and tense in a society where land ownership rather than rental was the norm. Individual farmers dragged their feet in making payment; Patroons generally used the carrot rather than the stick to encourage at least partial payment.

Decades of neglect led to a crisis in the late 1830s. A new generation of Patroons inherited massive debts from their indulgent forbears, and they were neither willing nor able to use gentle persuasion to convince farmers to pay their debts. The farmers, for their part, were now faced with the fact that their debts had accumulated to point where many could not pay. Many were farming marginal land in mountainous terrain, and some were, in effect, squatters, having purchased their farms from sellers who had failed to pay the quarter sale.

To make a long story short, the Patroons began filing suits, and something close to a war developed on the manors. The farmers organized rent strikes, and young men in disguise formed themselves into bands of “Indians” (pictured below) that threatened and menaced any agent or sheriff who entered the manors seeking to execute on a judgment.

The farmers also organized politically, although different groups emphasized different tactics. Some concentrated on reaching out to the two existing political parties – the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs – to enlist their help. Others were more inclined to nominate their own candidates to the state legislature.

There was also a divergence of views over time concerning the underlying basis of the farmers’ complaints. The more conservative (for want of a better term) approach accepted, tacitly at least, the assumption that, if the Patroons owned the land, they were entitled to lease it, at least on reasonable terms. These more conservative elements adamantly maintained, however, that the original grants to the Patroons were legally void. For years they sought court rulings declaring that the Patroons had never had good title in the first place.

More radical elements did not disagree with the contention that the grants were void. But more fundamentally they rejected the premise that land was an article of commerce that could, or at least should, be bought and sold like wheat or a cow. They contended that each citizen had a natural right to the soil. In his fine book Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in New York, Reeve Huston describes an 1845 letter to an Anti-Rent newspaper that expressed the idea:

“Experience” of Columbia County argued that while equal laws “allow all, by their own honest exertion, to acquire as much wealth as they can, from the products of labor, they should not allow the more wealthy to seize and draw to themselves the main sources of such products. Land is the life blood of the community, and therefore, is the natural inheritance of every individual.” By defending the “natural right” of all to the “use” of the land, government would “make the success of the rich, as well as of the poor, depend upon their own exertions, and not upon partial or unjust laws.”

Because mainstream elements of both major parties firmly embraced the idea that land was a marketable commodity, neither endorsed “Experience’s” formulation. Instead, the “natural right” conception was spread among the Anti-Rent farmers primarily by Thomas Ainge Devyr, an Irishman who had fled from England to Brooklyn in 1840. In 1844, Devyr “helped found the National Reform Association, an organization led and supported by New York City craftsmen and dedicated to land reform.” Another founder of the NRA was George Henry Evans, described by Jonathan H. Earle as “a freethinker, mechanic, newspaper publisher, and land reformer [who] personified the radical tradition in antebellum America.”

In April 1845, Devyr “signed on as editor of the Albany Freeholder, the central organ of the statewide [Anti-Rent] movement.” Devyr used that pulpit to preach the doctrine that all citizens had a natural right to the land, and he drew many followers. When the publisher of the Freeholder, a conservative Democrat, fired Devyr for his radical views later the same year, Devyr simply “moved his office down the street and opened the Anti-Renter, a newspaper dedicated to the tenants’ cause and openly allied with the National Reformers.”

By mid-1846, the Anti-Renter and its “natural right” position had gathered a wide following among the Anti-Rent farmers:

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ordinary tenants became converts to National Reform. Devyr’s new newspaper enjoyed a circulation of 2,000. Scores of letters poured into the offices of the Anti-Renter and Young America, endorsing the notion that each citizen had a natural right to the land. Over a dozen local anti-rent associations held meetings to support the Anti-Renter and call for the freedom of the public lands.

These radical ideas did no go unchallenged. In particular, both Democratic and Whig politicians who were wooing the anti-rent bloc nonetheless urged the farmers to reject attempts to meddle with existing property rights. Many farmers adopted an amalgam of views, holding that the landlords’ titles, if valid, entitled them only to the value of the unimproved land; the value of the improvements rightfully belonged to the tenants whose labor had created them.

With this lengthy background, in the next post we’ll look at (finally!) the New York state elections of 1846 and the creation of the first Free Soil party.