Ex Post Facto

Reading: Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Trade (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 1-77.

In the introduction and opening chapters of this book on the antebellum slave trade, Walter Johnson suggests two key arguments. The first argument is quite explicit. Johnson rejects the ideology of slaveholder paternalism by maintaining that the “chattel principle,” the notion of “a person with a price,” lay at the very heart and soul of antebellum slavery, for slaveholders and slaves alike. The chattel principle came glaringly to the forefront of an enslaved African American’s experience, of course, when he or she or a loved one was sold away. But Johnson also shows how the chattel principle played a more subtle role in the daily lives of both masters and slaves, even in the absence of the slave trader.

Johnson’s second argument about antebellum slavery exists in implicit tension with this first point about how the institution of slavery ruthlessly commodified its human victims. Despite the chattel principle, Johnson suggests, slaves did frequently assert their humanity, and slave traders and masters frequently found that they had to attend to and sometimes concede to the humanity of their human chattel. Even though the chattel principle remained inescapably fundamental, slavery involved a complex process of negotiation between masters, traders, buyers, and slaves.

Johnson fleshes out these points in substantial detail, and these early chapters suggest a few key questions:

1. What was the chattel principle, and how did it emerge in the everyday operation of the institution of slavery?
2. How did the chattel principle give the lie to the ideology of paternalism?
3. How did enslaved African Americans resist commodification and assert their humanity, even as they were being bought and sold?
4. How did slave traders acknowledge and deal with the humanity of their stock in trade?
5. How does Johnson’s depiction of slavery and the slave trade fit within the context of what other historians have said on these subjects?

Reading: Alisse Theodore [Portnoy], “‘A Right to Speak on the Subject’: The U.S. Women’s Antiremoval Petition Campaign, 1829-1831,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5 (2002), 601-24.

In late 1829, Catherine Beecher anonymously published a circular letter addressed to the “Benevolent Ladies” of the United States. In this letter, Beecher sympathetically portrayed the “poor Indian[s]” as a dignified people, no longer “naked and wandering savages,” who had made much progress towards becoming Christian and civilized. Although Beecher showed little interest in the native cultures of the Indians of the South, her remarks showed no sign of racism (as distinct from ethnocentrism). Instead, she focused on the fact that the U.S. government had promised to protect these Indians and their lands. (The Indian nations in question included the Cherokee, Chocktaw, Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw, which were often collectively referred to as the “Five Civilized Tribes” because of their notable adaptation to white, American ways.) Beecher was writing, she declared, because “it has become almost a certainty that these people are to have their lands torn from them, and to be driven into western wilds and to final annihilation, unless the feelings of a humane and Christian nation shall be aroused to prevent the unhallowed sacrifice.” Clearly, Beecher did not believe the rhetoric of the Jackson administration that removal would be voluntary and that it was necessary to protect Indians — instead, she said, Indians’s land would be “torn” from them, and their removal west would lead to their “annihilation.” In short, Beecher thought that she saw through the pro-removal rhetoric to the real reason that Indians were to move west — their “fertile and valuable” lands were “demanded by the whites as their own possessions.” [1]

This letter helped inspire a small but significant petition campaign on the part of American women. Alisse Portnoy has carefully studied this petition campaign. While her article helps document the political resistance to the Indian removal policy, it also shows how women in the early republic period began tentatively to assert a “right to speak” regarding political issues. Portnoy shows that how these women spoke is just as important as the fact that they did so.

Here are several questions to consider when reading this essay:

1. What main arguments does Portnoy make?
2. What evidence does she bring forward? Where did she get this evidence?
3. Where did the petitions come from? What might be the significance of their regional source?
4. Why are these petitions historically significant?
5. Why weren’t the petitions effective in changing Indian policy?

[1] Catherine Beecher, “Circular Addressed to the Benevolent Ladies of the U. States,” Dec. 25, 1829, in Theda Purdue and Michael D. Green, eds., The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005), 111-14.

Reading: Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians, ch. 2.

This chapter explores the shifting nature of U.S. Indian policy, starting with the late 1700s and moving forward to the 1830s.

• Officially, what was the relationship between the U.S. and Indian nations during the early 1800s?

Wallace also begins to explain the various programs intended to reform Indians, with the ultimate goal of assimilating them into mainstream American society. (Such plans would persist into the 20th century.)

• What were the two approaches to Indian policy during the early 1800s? How was the U.S. Indian policy divided against itself? What did the two approaches to Indian policy have in common?

Wallace also pays close attention to Lewis Cass, who stated his position in his 1830 article in the North American Review on the “Removal of the Indians.” (See especially page 439, in which Cass makes it clear that the Indians would voluntarily remove themselves rather than forcibly removed.)

• How, according to Wallace, did Cass misunderstand Indians?

Reading: Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), introduction and ch. 1.

In his introduction, Wallace describes the experiences of John Ross, who served as an important Cherokee leader (despite the fact that only one of his mother’s grandparents was of Cherokee descent) from the 1820s through the 1860s. Like Andrew Jackson, Ross had fought against the Creek Indians in the War of 1812, and he had gone on to become a successful plantation owner and slaveholder as well as an influential leader, politician, and diplomat for the Cherokee. Wallace goes so far as to call Ross a “mirror image” of Jackson (10). Because of these similarities rather than despite them, Ross represented a problem for President Jackson and for white settlers in Georgia who lusted after Cherokee land, with its rich soils (rich for cotton production and in some cases literally rich with gold). The problem was that Ross and his fellow Cherokee were not disappearing — they were becoming stronger, as they integrated themselves into the larger regional economy and adopted a written Constitution. In short, they gave the lie to official claims that all Indians had to be moved west for their own protection and benefit.

Wallace also provides a brief but helpful overview of Indian history from the Mississippian period (hundreds of years before European contact) through the War of 1812, which so devastated the Indian nations east of the Mississippi River. This context is important, because it helps to suggest the disadvantages faced by those Indians, like the Cherokee, who continued to resist removal.

These opening sections raise a couple of questions:

1. What kind of societies did the Cherokee create? How might you describe their history, up to the early 19th century?
2. How does Wallace’s description of the Cherokee fit with your own presuppositions about American Indians during this period?
3. Reaching back to the colonial period and moving forward to 1820, why did American Indians have such a problematic time dealing with European Americans?

Reading: Harry Watson, Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay: Democracy and Development in Antebellum America, 1-55.

In the opening sections of this book, Harry Watson (with whom I had the pleasure of studying at UNC-Chapel Hill) provides a sweeping panorama of the economic and political changes that transformed the young U.S. after 1800. Although he focuses attention on the early careers of Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, he does not neglect to explore how the changes during this period were affecting ordinary Americans. In fact, he shows how Jackson and Clay gained political influence precisely because of the political democratization — for white men only — and economic development that were reshaping everyday life.

Jackson and Clay had much in common, as Watson shows, including their self-conception as Jeffersonian Republicans during their early political careers. Nevertheless, the two men developed a profound dislike for and suspicion of one another. Their primary disagreements, in terms of political policy, centered on the appropriate role of the federal government in promoting economic development. The most polarizing issue, of course, revolved around the Second Bank of the United States, which Jackson eventually helped destroy. Although Jackson deplored the BUS, it’s important to note that he did not oppose capitalism per se. The political debates of the day were a bit more subtle and complex than that.

Watson will cover the disputes between Jackson and Clay in more detail later. For the moment, then, the most salient questions deal with the broader historical context:

1. What were the main features of the Market Revolution?
2. What kinds of positive and negative impacts did the Market Revolution have on Americans. (Consider, separately, white men, white women, enslaved African Americans, and American Indians.)
3. How did American politics change after 1800? How might those changes have been connected with the Market Revolution?
4. How did Jackson and Clay, respectively, rise to prominence?

Reading: Cunningham, Jefferson vs. Hamilton, 77-82, 86 (bottom)-103 (top), 110-18, 136 (bottom)-42, 169-71; & “Sedition Act.”

The evolving dispute between Jefferson and Hamilton in the early 1790s helped give rise to a two-party struggle that was unforeseen by the framers of the Constitution. By 1792, Jefferson and Hamilton had become very suspicious and resentful of one another, and President Washington was left to try to steer a course between these two forceful members of his cabinet. As Cunningham points out, Jefferson and Hamilton agreed that Washington needed to seek re-election in 1792. Both men feared — though for different reasons — that the infant nation was poised on the edge of a knife. In large part (but not exclusively) because of the French Revolution, the remainder of the decade was fraught with political uncertainty and conflict.

To understand the anxieties of Jefferson and Hamilton, one needs some context about the international relations of the time. The U.S. had made a treaty with France during the War for Independence. Starting in 1789, France underwent a republican revolution of its own, but the revolution had a much greater destabilizing effect than had the American Revolution. In 1793, in fact, the radical French government executed King Louis XVI, and instituted a “reign of terror,” during which thousands of aristocrats and opponents to the revolution were executed. Soon, revolutionary France was at war against Great Britain, a major commercial partner of the U.S. This European conflict put the U.S. in a difficult situation. The radical turn of the French Revolution thus ignited fears of war and disorder among many Americans.

Disorder did seem to be emerging. In 1794 George Washington himself, accompanied by Hamilton, rode at the head of an army determined to quell the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. Farmers in that region had taken violent action to prevent the enforcement of the tax on whiskey, which Hamilton had implemented in part as a demonstration of federal power. Rebels tarred and feathered tax collectors (and tax payers) and assembled a substantial militia. In the face of Washington’s militia of 13,000 men, however, this rebellion melted away — there was no battle.

The Whiskey Rebellion emerged, at least partially, out of the “Democratic Republican Society” movement. Washington condemned these “self-created societies,” which had been inspired by the French Revolution. Nevertheless, similar societies helped form the grassroots of the emerging Republican Party led up by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

By 1798, the Federalist-dominated Congress was sufficiently concerned about disorder that it took a number of reactionary steps. As Cunningham mentioned, Washington came out of retirement for a third time in order to lead the army in the event of a French invasion. Congress also passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were intended to protect the U.S. against internal enemies, including both radical immigrants and disloyal citizens. In practice, the Sedition Act was used to silence Republican critics of Federalist policies. Newspaper editors and even a member of Congress (Matthew Lyon) were tried, convicted, and imprisoned for sedition. Republicans became increasingly concerned about the protection of the Constitution (and civil liberties), and they managed to win rather handily in the electoral college in the election of 1800 (despite the subsequent deadlock in the House of Representatives due to the fact that Jefferson and Aaron Burr, both Republicans, tied in the electoral college).

Within this larger context, the following questions seem especially important:

1. What major concerns did Jefferson reveal to Washington in his May 23, 1792 letter to the president?
2. What fears and worries did Hamilton likewise share with Edward Carrington in his letter of May 26, 1792? Was Hamilton aligned against republican government, as Jefferson suspected?
3. What major challenges or threats did the U.S. in fact face in 1792?
4. What was the Sedition Act, and how did Jefferson respond to it?
5. What key political principles did Jefferson articulate in his first Inaugural Address in March, 1801?

Note: My comments on the Whiskey Rebellion and the Democratic Republican Societies were informed in part by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 (New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 461-85.