William S. King - To Raise Up a Nation: John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and the Making of a Free Country

SEVERAL EVENTS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY gave the impetus for the expansion of slavery in the southern portion of the new American Republic. The first was the so-called cotton gina mechanical invention allowing the easy separation of the cotton seed from the fiber, increasing by a hundredfold the yield of one day's labor cleaning cotton bolls. Another, at about the same time, was the black revolution in St. Domingo, which was to deprive Napoleon of his essential base in the New World. These proceedings were followed in 1803 by the United States purchase of France's vast holdings on the northern continentthe Louisiana Territory. All these developments were consequent to the beginning of large-scale cultivation of cotton as a cash crop.

Extensive planting in cotton began in South Carolina and Georgia; by 1820 these states were growing half the cotton in the United States. By the 1830s cotton production was ranging into the Gulf states, which in only five years would exceed the output in the Atlantic states; an astonishing development that brought as its twain redoubled demand for black slaves. By 1830 the number of slaves utilized in the burgeoning Southern economy surpassed two million, twenty years later there were three million, and on the eve of the contest for their freedom, there were nearly four million blacks laboring in bondage in the American South.

Production of staple crops for exportwhether cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, or hempcould only be remunerative using slave labor ifcarried out by large gangs on expanses of naturally fertile soil. But as this system flourished, the sullen presence of a black population formed a shadow over the minds of the slave owners and other whites in the South. This was not just a manifestation of guilt, if such existed, but sprang from recognition of the fact that as blacks continued to increase in proportion to whites, no amount of coercion could make them tamely submit.

A fateful decision had been made in the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the slave economy flourished, both to maintain its extraordinary profitability and in a contest for political hegemony in the national government, the planters needed an outlet in the opening of new territory. This became the basis for the famous compromise measures adopted between 1820 and 1850, providing a new slave state to offset the addition of any new free state, which, along with the South's increasing sway over the northern Democratic Party, would ensure the region's dominance in the Senate, and control of the presidency. But an equally portentous factor was strikingly formulated by Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia when he declared at the Montgomery secessionist Congress in 1860 that in 1790 we had less than eight hundred thousand slaves. Under our mild and humane administration of the system they have increased above four millions. The country has expanded to meet this growing want, and Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, have received this increasing tide of African labor; before the end of this century, at precisely the same rate of increase, the Africans among us in a subordinate condition will amount to eleven millions of persons. What shall be done with them? We must expand or perish.

As the decades passed there developed across the South broad areas of adjacent counties where blacks predominated. Throughout these areas there was, without doubt, an extraordinary and growing communication among black communitiesthe holler, voices, signals (conditions and understandings)passing through fields, across plantations, among families and into neighborhoods, and into the towns and villages along all the roads of the South. A mysterious spiritual telegraph, as one observer called it, linking slave quarter to slave quarter, spoken without the hearing of the whitesas it were, out the back door of the big house.

As the whites fled into their obdurate denial of black humanity, everywhere they turned they faced this quandary, and they were notprepared to accept it. But even as he sought to repose behind the faade of supposedly more advanced civilization, the planter was ever mindful of the warning in the slave song:

You might be rich as cream

And drive you coach and four-horse team,

But you can't keep de world from movin' round

Nor Nat Turner from gainin' ground.

In W. E. B. DuBois's biography of John Brownan alternative to a study of Nat Turner his publisher had rejectedone reads an intriguing tale of a clandestine rendezvous in an abandoned stone quarry outside Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, between Frederick Douglass and John Brown. Also in attendance were the young adjunct and confidant of Brown named John Henry Kagi, a talented journalist, and a fugitive slave from South Carolina and young protg of Douglass who went by the name Shields Green. This quartet had settled down among the stones and detritus of an old quarry fifteen miles above the Mason-Dixon Line to discuss Brown's pending campaign into the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. He proposed to fortify and hold an area of the southern states with an army of freed slaves and their abolitionist allies, black and white, from the northern states and Canada.

The only firsthand account of this council of war, as Douglass later called it, is to be found in his autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. There one reads it was only at this meeting, after extensive planning and cooperation with Douglass, that Brown designated the seizure of the United States Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, as the inaugural stroke for a war for the liberty of the American slave. The blow was intended to resound as a tocsin across a divided nationalarming southern slaveholders into carrying out their threats of secession, while rousing the northern people to the threat posed by slavery. It was also designed to be heard by the slaves across the South and serve to rally them to his standard.

Not only did Brown want Douglass's opinion about the foray; if favorable, he wanted him to join in it as co-leader. This, indeed, was stuff portending a strong relationship between the men. The denouement came after what was surely a comprehensive and far-ranging debate over many hours of two daysAugust 20 and 21, a Saturdayand Sundayeight weeks before the Harper's Ferry raid. Finally convinced he will not be able to dissuade Brown from his course, Douglass declares he cannot countenance such an action. In announcing his decision he rises, saying he will be returning to his home in Rochester. Turning to Green, whom he had brought as a recruit to Brown's original plan, Douglass tells him because that plan has changed in favor of the one discussed, Green should feel free to return with him. It was evident to Douglass, and he said as much, that Brown and any who joined him would only be hastening to their graves in Virginia.