How Massachusetts And South Carolina Were at the Center of the Sectional Crisis, Part 1: Garrison and Rhett

 

William Lloyd Garrison and Robert Barnwell Rhett were on the complete opposite side of the question of slavery. But both men at their core had more in common in their ways of viewing the issue then they would have cared to admit – if they even acknowledged it.

Garrison believed from the moment he started writing The Liberator until the end of beginning of the Civil War that slavery was a moral wrong and should be viewed only by that lens. He spent his entire career as an activist and a journalist on that cause. And he made it very clear that any political solution or any politician who even tried to handle the slavery question – even those from his home state of Massachusetts  - were inadequate to the task because he rejected conventional politics – the system of democracy – as unsuited for his moral absolutism. He engaged in the kind of rhetoric that tended to isolate as many as it won over but he had no solutions as to how to bring about the end of slavery. He thought electoral political movements, even the ones devoted to it such as the Free Soil Party or the Republican Party were futile because they couldn’t go far enough in his mind. But as the nation grew closer to violence during the 1850s over the sectional crisis he had little use for it either and he increasingly rejected them. The nation was moving far too slow to get rid of slavery but he had no alternative to make it move faster. Garrison never saw the contradiction.

Rhett was the moral opposite of Garrison and not just in terms of slavery. Garrison believed in race equality, pacificism, free trade and was an early advocate for women’s suffrage. Rhett, by contrast, was a plantation owner, believed completely in the southern aristocracy, white supremacy and was known for being what was very close to a sexual predator – he certainly took liberties with many of his female slaves. And if Garrison advocate for slavery as a moral imperative but had no solutions to bring about its abolition, Rhett’s were if anything, more ludicrous. Considered the father of secession, he not only believed that the South could succeed as an independent nation but at one point thought that his home state of South Carolina would be perfectly fine if it alone were to secede. And the more economically untenable slavery became for a nation that was increasingly becoming industrial, he stubbornly resisted the idea of even the South trying to join an increasingly modern era. Indeed he would be one of the forces who advocated for not only the reopening of the slave trade but expanding it to South America and the Caribbean.

But both men were, when it came to the issue of slavery, two sides of the same coin. Both men believed that their respective position was the only acceptable one. Both men rejected the idea of the Congressional political system in order to bring about any solution that did not concur with their own. While Rhett was prominent in South Carolina politics he spent a far amount of time escalating the crisis from his own newspaper The Charleston Mercury. They abhorred compromise and anyone who didn’t keep loyal to their vision, even if it meant preservation of the Union. And perhaps most critically both men were more than willing to dissolve the Union if it did not meet the standards that they considered the realization of their dreams.

Both of these men had almost no direct political influence in the crisis that followed – Garrison never advocated for a political candidate and never even voted; Rhett briefly served as Senator of South Carolina but resigned having not even served one year of his original term. But because they represent the most extreme points in the issue of slavery leading up to the Civil War, a brief overview of both men is worth going into. Both men will be mentioned repeatedly in the articles that follow but for now I’ll just deal with their positions leading up to the passage of the Compromise of 1850 by Congress.

William Lloyd Garrison was an anti-slavery agitator from the agent of 18 on. Working in Baltimore for a Quaker advocacy sheet, in 1829 he published an item accusing a Massachusetts shipper of engaging in the domestic slave trade. The shipper sued and Garrison was charged with criminal libel and convicted. Unable to pay the $50 fine, he was sentenced to six months on prison but would serve seven weeks before a friend of his Arthur Tappan paid the fine. Garrison walked out defiant as ever.

On January 1, 1831 he published the first issue of The Liberator. The paper never made much money for Garrison but that mattered far less then his platform. He also founded the anti-Slavery society that was dedicated to the immediate abolition of slavery and full civil rights for freed blacks. How this was going to be possible under the democratic system he made no secret about reviling for being racist was something Garrison never chose to elucidate to his readers; from the start they thrived on morality rather than pragmatism. To Garrison, God’s law superseded the law of man.

And there was the contradiction of Garrison’s belief: slavery might be morally wrong but it was a political and economic reality. Absent divine intervention or a vast revolt by the masses slavery could only end through legislation and political power. Garrison and so many of his abolitionist colleagues never noticed or cared about the incongruity of their beliefs. He only believed in  a so-called moral standard that no one – certainly no mere elected official – could ever hope to meet.

Even the fledgling political movements that showed anti-slavery views were becoming more prominent by 1848 did little to change his mind. By 1848 the new political party called the Free Soil party was becoming  a fixture in American politics. That year it ran former President Martin Van Buren as its Presidential candidate and local Massachusetts political figure Charles Francis Adams as Vice President. But when it met in Buffalo Garrison mocked it as being politically impure claiming “it aimed not at the life, but only the growth of slavery.”  Even it’s success during the Presidential election – the new party won nearly ten percent of the vote and gained nine seats in the House and elected Salmon Chase to the Senate – did little to earn his political loyalty. All that he said was that once men like Van Buren and Adams, loyal party men before, had joined the cause of anti-slavery “the Revolution has at least begun” How it was to be carried out was not his concern.

If Garrison thought politics couldn’t solve the problem of slavery the man who would one day be called the father of the Secessionist movement believed the opposite well until the Compromise of 1850.

Robert Barnwell Rhett was born in 1800 in Carolina low country, the eighth of fifteen children. The father had failed as a planter, so the son born Robert Barnwell Smith, felt compelled to gloss over the recent years of family hardship and harken back to his prominent forbears, including Abigail Adams. At 37 he adopted the surname of Rhett.

He had established a lucrative law practice with a cousin in Walterboro and captured a seat in the state house of representatives at 26. A year later he married Elizabeth Washington Burnett, an orphan who was the ward of a prosperous Huguenot family. Rhett would bolster his wealth by exploiting property values when the Britain outlawed slavery ownership by the Britons living outside the empire. He would purchase several hundred acres of rice land and more than a hundred slaves.

He was described as a man with nervous temperament, quick in both movement and temper,  with his mind on huge conclusions with little regard for nuance or subtlety. He was regarded as a fiery speaker, wain, self-conscious, impracticable and selfish in the extreme, who nevertheless developed a huge following in South Carolina. Like many South Carolinians, he was prominent for many major rules, most notably nullification, the so-called gag rule designed to quash anti-slavery petitions from citizens and slavery itself. Like all South Carolina politicians he spent most of his early career under the shadow of John C. Calhoun – in many ways going further than even the great man wanted.

Rhett was firmly devoted to Calhoun and stayed loyal to him through many of his major position changes, most notably when Calhoun supported then President Van Buren’s call for an independent treasury in 1838, a move that shocked the states political establishment and left him isolated from the South Carolina congressional delegation. Rhett was one of the few members of that delegation that stayed loyal to him.

But when Calhoun attempted to run for President in 1844, Rhett went against him, attacking front-runner Van Buren for the inability of his allies to trim the tariff rates of the Whig’s under John Tyler’s presidency. Calhoun worked deftly behind the scenes to isolate Rhett’s actions and maintain a semblance of party peace during the campaign, which would eventually lead to James Polk becoming President that November. But Calhoun would also quietly pull away from his disloyal protégé. Rhett, certain that he was infallible, took the opportunity to increase his independence.

Polk’s administration was very effective in the minds of Democrats. He slashed the rates of tariff’s, pushed through Van Buren’s independent treasury, and completed the process begun by Tyler of annexing Texas. He led America into the war with Mexico which would bring about manifest destiny and lead to the tumult that would lead to the crisis that only the Compromise of 1850 would avert. During this period the rift between the two men began to heal – something Rhett would need if he were to achieve his next goal: to become Senator from South Carolina.

He had tried before when a vacancy opened in 1846 but it would be filled by Andrew Pickens Butler. Now when Calhoun passed away in June of 1850 he set his sites on filling the remainder of his term. His major competition was James Hammond, a former member of the South Carolina delegation plagued by ill health throughout his life. In 1840 Hammond had run for governor, in opposition to the statewide machine that Rhett had set up in the state. Hammond’s nullification credentials were, ironically, to strong for Calhoun: they needed a unionist to serve as governor. When the machine chose to endorse him in 1842, he would glide to the governorship.

But that elevation led to the revelation of a horrible scandal, which involved a deviant relationship with all four of his teenage daughters-in-law  which went on for nearly two years and according to Hammond’s only journal included “everything short of direct sexual intercourse. When his brother in law Wade Hampton learned the extent of the truth, he considered destroying him socially or even killing him. Instead he just let the rumors gestate and spread through plantation society which led to the Hammonds becoming deservedly ostracized throughout the community. He lost his opportunity for a Senate seat to Butler in 1846. With Calhoun’s death, his political fortunes momentarily brightened.

For all his horrible evils for his justification of slavery Calhoun had managed to maintain a southern-security formula that had lasted for decades: regional unity as a counterweight to the ascendant north and that would securing institutional protections – aka slavery – for the south even in a Northern-dominant Union. This flimsy arrangement was done to keep Calhoun’s position in the South more than any long term prospects for peace and now that the ‘Great Man’ was gone younger men rejected his formula. As Hammond put it: “Calhoun was so unyielding and so unpersuasive that he could never consolidate sufficient power to accomplish anything great.” And to those to men ‘greatness’ required recognizing slavery was doomed as long as the South was still part of the Union.

Hammond had rejected the initial proposal for the Compromise, arguing that peace was not something both sides desired. South Carolinians generally agreed. The rest of the South was basically harder to determine

In June of 1850 a Southern convention was held in Nashville. South Carolina sent 18 delegates including Rhett and Hammond. Rhett wrote the convention’s final ‘address’, a laundry list of complaints about the North’s antislavery agitations, saying that they had been ‘arraigned as criminals’ in a hostile Congress, arguing Congress had become little else than a grand instrument in the hands of abolitionists to degrade and ruin the South. (Men like Garrison would have argued otherwise.)

But the delegate were full of sound and fury and couldn’t come up with any bold action, other then a proposal to extend the so-called Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean, something few believed the North would go with. They adjourned with a resolution to reconvene in November after Congress had met again.

The delegation was restrained but back home Rhett threw of the shackles at a dinner in his honor. “I see but one course left for the peace and salvation of the South – a dissolution of the Union.” He described a strong and prosperous Southern nation, free of tariffs, insults from the north and most important free from the threat of emancipation. “By our physical power we can protect ourselves against foreign nations whilst by our productions we can command their peace or support….Wealth, honor, and power, and one of the most glorious destines which ever crowned a great and happy people await the South.”

Rhett’s brazen words swept across the country and he quickly became a leading figure among the fire-eaters of the South, crisscrossing the state then traveling to Alabama to meet a fellow firebrand secessionist. In the process he outraged establishment politicians everywhere, including Henry Clay. On the Senate floor the Great Compromiser said that if Rhett actually led the flag of disunion “he will be a traitor and I hope he will meet the fate of a traitor. Even Hammond condemned the speech as not merely injudicious but criminal. He suspects Rhett was doing so as a hope to be sent to the Senate by the South Carolina legislature, where his passion for disunion was felt by many members. But many wondered, even if South Carolina were reading for secession, was the rest of the South?

 Governor Whitemarsh Seabrook engaged in communication with other Southern governors to test the waters. He found a lot of bluster but also caution with no clear idea that if any other state was willing to take the lead or even follow if South Carolina declared itself the vanguard in this movement. The result was a new political fault line: those who wanted immediate bold action, known as ‘disunionists’ and those who urged caution, labeled ‘cooperationists’. Rhett was the former and was certain that other states, most likely Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi would follow suit if South Carolina made the first move. The bolder (or more deluded) thought even if that didn’t happen South Carolina could survive on its own with its agricultural prowess, efficient harbor and vibrant culture. The latter embraced that South Carolina would likely do so but though if they went alone, it would end in disaster. On that side were prominent South Carolinians – including Robert Barnwell, Rhett’s own cousin.

The follow-up session met in November but with most moderates and only seven states sending delegation in all, it fizzled out. Hammond boycotted, saying that while he had favored it for 20 years “the fruit is not yet ripe.”

By the end of 1850 the legislative selection of a Senator to fill Calhoun’s vacancy was made. Rhett and Hammond were the leading contenders from the start and Rhett won on the fourth ballot. Hammond wrote in his journal thinking his political life was over and that South Carolina had chosen its fate. He didn’t think much leadership from Rhett beyond ‘abortive violence’ And so on January 6^th 1851 Rhett would swear allegiance to a constitutional system he desired as a Senator, determined to rise above the rancor that had characterized his 12 years in Congress.

He would be gone from Congress in little more than a year.

In the next article I will deal with the various political figures who would rise in both Massachusetts and South Carolina and who would play a major role as the sectional crisis deepened in the next decade.