Slave-Holders Knew Secession Was Doomed To Failure

Rhea Cole

Major
Joined
Nov 2, 2019
Location
Murfreesboro, Tennessee
SlaveHolders Knew Secession Was Doomed To Failure

John Bell Song.jpeg

Tennessee Library & Archive
John Bell of Tennessee was the candidate of the Constitutional Union Party in the election of 1860. His name & the party he led is all but lost to history.

Union Party poster.jpeg

Bell held the very narrow ground between the secessionists & the slave-holding Unionists.
All too often left out of the narrative of the year leading up to secession was the part played by Unionist slave-holders. The banner carrier for them was John Bell. Unionist slave-holders were appalled by the prospect of secession. As we know, secession was intended to protect the right of white men to hold other human beings as property in perpetuity. Unionists rightly feared that secession would effectively destroy slavery in the U.S.A. In fact, they accurately predicted the outcome of the Civil War, something that might have been unique at the time.

Secessionists either did not know or ignored the complex system that powered the institution of slavery. For example, the vast majority of Kentucky slaves were held in bondage in a few counties in the Bluegrass Region. Absent the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, most Kentucky slaves were a short raft ride across the Ohio River. With secession, the "freedom line" would be moved southward from the Canadian border to the Ohio. It would make slave-holding in the Bluegrass all but impossible.

It was not just the 75 families in Kentucky that owned 50 or more slaves that saw the threat secession would bring all too clearly. In South Carolina, the anxiety took on a very different, darker form. Mary Chestnut's father in law, a man who knew a thing or two about slave-holding, expressed to her his anxiety about secession. He stated that it was only the majesty & power of the United States Government that kept the slaves in thrall. In 1860, South Carolina was 60% slave & demographics were headed for an 70-80% slave population within a decade or so. The small white population of the state would be powerless to suppress a servile insurrection on its own. It would require the intervention of the national army & legal system to prevent a Haiti-like extermination of the white population.

The plantations in the Deep South & Coastal Carolina consumed workers at prodigious rate. It was a well known principle of slave-holding that stock only had a seven year productive life. That reality drove a flow of extra labor from Virginia & other border states to the slave markets in Mississippi & Charleston SC. It was the production of human beings in border states that provided the cash flow that kept Virginia, etc, elite families solvent. Without the replacement labor provided by the extras from the border states, the Deep South plantations could not continue to operate. The halt in waterborne traffic that secession & the inevitable war would curtail would strangle both the border state producers of human beings & the Deep South consumers of human beings. It would ruin them both.

In the first half of the 19th Century, gravity powered the American economy. Hemp from Kentucky rode down the Erie Canal to the ship yards & chandlers of New England. Thousands of turkeys, ducks & geese were herded to Louisville for transshipment downriver to markets as far away as New Orleans. A look at the 1860 slave census map shows that the greatest concentrations of slaves are along rivers & harbors. There simply was no way to ship cargo of any bulk overland. Cotton farms on the upper reaches of the Tennessee & Cumberland River watersheds sometimes had to wait two or three years for water levels to rise in order to send their crops to market.

The tools, mules, food & equipment that Deep South plantations depended on came from up the Mississippi & Ohio Rivers. The Shakers at Pleasant Hill produced tons of smoked sweet potatoes that were loaded at their riverboat landing for shipment to feed Deep South slaves. Virtually all of the mules produced in the U.S. were raised above the Ohio River. Truly staggering volumes of smoked & salted meat bound for plantations was produced in Cincinnati. In the event of secession, that essential flow of supplies would bring the Deep South plantations to a halt sooner, not later.

The coastal traffic that brought extra labor to the many slave jails that lined the water front in Charleston was absolutely dependent on a free flow North & South. Unionist slave-holders depended on the cashflow from their extras. South Carolina fortunes depended on the flow of cash generated by the coastal trade. Secession was seen as an existential threat to the cash flow engine that powered the slave-holding economy.

As we know, John Bell & the Constitutional Union Party's clarion call to economic sanity was ignored. Sometimes, the events leading up to secession take on an inevitability for those of us who know what a Thelma & Louise thing it really was. It is fascinating to realize that Unionist slave-holders had a clear understanding of the economy that their secessionist slave-holding peers did not.

If you want an insight into John Bell's thinking, I recommend: Library of Congress, Speech of Hon. John Bell, of Tennessee. On the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton constitution. Delivered in the Senate of the United States. March 18, 1858. 16 pages.
 
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