History of Journalism in the United States/Chapter 22

by George Henry Payne

CHAPTER XXII

THE AUTOCRACY OF THE SLAVEHOLDERS

Backwardness of Southern press—First abolition movement at South—Effect of arrogance of slave-holders—Government without newspapers—Reasons for attitude of "poor whites"—South commercially outstripped—Northern papers steadily improved—Contrast between sections shown by press—"Honor"—Exemplified by Jennings Wise—Robert Barnwell Rhett—Charleston Mercury—Suggested resumption of slave importation—George D. Prentice.

We have followed thus far the development of journalism and its influence on democracy in the United States, but it has been to a large extent a story of the North and West. What was the progress at the South, where, with the literary inclinations of a wealthy leisure class, there was certain to be interest in a political press? How far did the ideas of the slaveholders affect the journalism of that section, and what were the processes that led to so sharp a division? These questions are important, especially when we consider that from the leading southern state, Virginia, came the democratic ideas that were to rule the country. The ideas of Thomas Jefferson, as we have seen, eventually dominated the Republic, and it was as a result of these democratic ideas that there sprang up a great democratic cheap press. The anomaly is that the section of the country in which it might be assumed that Jefferson had the greatest influence was the one that lagged farthest behind, in the development of both journalism and democracy.

The cause of this backwardness was the development of slavery as an economic factor in the South, following the invention of the cotton-gin. The South believed that, through the growth of the cotton industry, it was to be the wealthy section of the country; the cotton-gin made the use of slave labor imperative.

Up to the time that Whitney invented the cotton-gin, there was not, even in the South, a strong pro-slavery sentiment; in fact, in the early part of the century there was a great abolition sentiment in the South. Washington had, on his death, freed his slaves, and some of the most distinguished statesmen of that region, although they held slaves, believed that at some time or another slavery would be abolished.

Jefferson had, in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, a clause condemning slavery. It was omitted, however, because it was thought that such a clause might give offense to those in the North who had been engaged in the slave-traffic. Years afterward, this reproach came back to plague the abolitionists of the North, for the truth was that there were, at the North, as many who were willing to make profit out of the slaves as there originally were in the South. Even after the agitation against slavery had been fully launched, merchants of the North who had profitable business relations with the cotton states were opposed to all contention that might interfere with their profits.

As we have seen, it was in the slave states that the abolition feeling first developed, but we have also seen that that feeling was very quickly put down. This suppression, together with the fact that the South had come under the domination of an autocracy that brooked no public discussion, except within lines of its own setting, was the reason for the minor place in journalism occupied by the southern papers.

The first abolition newspapers were started in the South and the bitterest speeches against slavery were made there. But the movement was driven out and driven North by the slave-holding class, who, although in the minority, represented the material wealth of the country and were, under the social, -political and economic conditions which they had fostered, the sole representatives of public opinion. In those early days when abolition papers were being started in the South, it was a battle of principle against interest, of ideas against force.

But there can be no idealists, no great editors or journals, where brute force and material wealth so completely control, and the result was that the southern men of idealism were ignored in their own communities, or that they went North.

Making due allowances for population, it is interesting to compare the newspaper growth in the free soil states,—Ohio, Indiana or Illinois, for example,—with that of Louisiana, in which there had been, since before the beginning of the nineteenth century, a prosperous city. Even while Louisiana was a French colony, New Orleans had supported a paper; its .first English paper, however, was not published until 1804. But in 1828 there were only nine papers in Louisiana, while Ohio had sixty-six, Indiana seventeen and even Illinois could boast of four.

In 1 8 10 Ohio showed fourteen papers, as compared with Louisiana's ten, but in the period from 1810 to 1828, Ohio gained no less than fifty-two, while Louisiana actually shows a loss of one paper. In 1840 the figures were: Ohio, one hundred twenty-three, Indiana, seventy-three, Illinois, forty-three, Louisiana, thirty-four.

There may have been many reasons for this; the chief one undoubtedly was that, where men are not free to discuss questions without endangering their lives, and where a small oligarchy, such as the slaveholders constituted, is in the ascendant and is the political power, a strong journalistic spirit cannot be developed. Had there been men in the South of the temper of old Ben Harris, or Zenger, or Sam Adams, there would have been a different story to tell. The slave-holders of the South were never so numerically strong that they could not have been crushed by the South itself.^[1]

By appealing to the other white inhabitants on the ground of fear and race prejudice, however, they succeeded in crushing out whatever minority there might have been. What was more important, they drove to the North the very men that they needed, men of independent judgment, of the type of Edward Coles, second Governor of Illinois,—a slave-holder in Virginia who left that state in order that he might liberate his slaves.

More important still, they discouraged those restless spirits who sought better conditions in life, and who, as emigrants, took into undeveloped territory a vigor and a freshness that made for liberty of discussion and democracy, the very life of Americanism.

This side of the Southern question still remains to be explained—preferably, one would think, by a student of Southern sympathies, broad enough to understand that the sentiment in the North was an inevitable political-sociological development. That the sentiment in the South was also inevitable, one is forced to believe when one finds such exponents of it as Governor Henry A. Wise, who declared that he was thankful there were few papers in Virginia,—almost a paraphrase of the statement of Governor Berkeley of Virginia in 1671, when he thanked God that "we have no free schools nor printing,—God keep us from both." The astounding thing is that this was supposed to be the sentiment of the state that gave to the world Jefferson, whose belief was that he would rather live in a land where there were newspapers and no government than in one where there was a government, but no newspapers.

What happened in the South was exactly what Jefferson considered the undesirable alternative, a government without newspapers,—that is, newspapers as the North knew them and in the proportion and relation to the people that the North had them. The number of white illiterates in the South was one of the results of a lack of democracy; it was also one of the causes. Journalism would have helped to cure this condition, paradox though that may seem. In recent times the success of a clever journalist,—Arthur Brisbane, editor of the New York Evening Journal,—has been due, in great measure, to the fact that he printed a certain section of his paper in type large enough to be read by many who could almost be classed as illiterates.

The people who eventually aroused the North were not the so-called aristocrats, not people of the type of Philip Hone, who suffered a nervous shock when he saw a Herald reporter enter Mrs. Brevoort's exclusive ballroom. It was the class of people who corresponded to the illiterates of the South who became a vital, moving power under the stimulation of free discussion; whose susceptibility to ideas and sensitiveness to moral conditions acted on northern journalism even when its beginnings were of the basest and most sordid description. These people, the "plain people," evolved their own leaders and champions,—Lincoln, Greeley, Samuel Bowles. of the Springfield Republican, William Lloyd Garrison,—whereas the same class at the South remained an inert mass, responsive only to the virtual command of the so-called better-class whites.

How thoroughly the "poor whites" were in the hands of their superiors is shown by the statement of a modern student of the South as to the reason why this particular class fought so valiantly for the Confederacy:

"An acute observer, a Confederate veteran, once said to me, 'When I was serving in the Army of Northern Virginia, I took great interest in finding out why mountaineers and poor whites, men who had never owned a slave, men who had no interest in slavery, were as keen for the war as any of us. I concluded that it was a war of caste. Rightly or wrongly, they had the notion that, if the North won, they would be reduced to the level of the negro. They were animated by an intense racial feeling. They fought for the racial idea.'"^[2]

In this connection it is well to recall that slavery was never formally established by statute in any of the southern states. It was a "tolerated anomaly." Had an effort been made to pass such statutes, there is no telling what the effect might have been on these lethargic "poor whites "; it might have stirred them to realization that their own condition, in a community where they had so little political power, was not too secure.

We must not be led into the error of thinking that there was, in the beginning, any difference in ability between the journalists at the North and those of the South.

A southern critic of the South, Hinton Rowan Helper, insisted that there were able journalists there, and that it was the lack of enterprise and the lack of freedom which made them seem inferior to their brethren at the North. At this day, looking calmly back over this turbulent period, we can realize how true this statement was. What is more, for the men who were fighting the battles of the slave power, slavery had little real influence, and that influence was unquestionably deadened by the fact that the very breath of the institution of journalism was freedom. Their bitter denunciations of those northern politicians and fanatical abolitionists,—who wished, they declared, to rob them of their property,—concealed in many a case the heavy sense of impending doom.

Although the South claimed to be wealthier than the North, its people were fast being confronted on all sides with evidences that, commercially, the North was leaving them far behind. Little as the local southern editors wished to call attention to this fact, they were frequently obliged to do so, in order to stir their constituents. In the early fifties the Whig, of Vicksburg, Mississippi, complained that the Mississippi Legislature had been obliged, not only to send its session laws to Boston to be printed, but to appropriate $3,000 to pay one of its members to go there and read proofs. "What a commentary on the Yankee-hater!"—A little later, the Greensboro' Patriot criticized the legislature of North Carolina for doing the same thing, adding, "It is a little humiliating that no work except the commonest labor can be done in North Carolina; that everything which requires a little skill, capital, or ingenuity, must be sent North."^[3]

For twenty years preceding the war, the fact was evident that the northern papers were steadily becoming more comprehensive in their scope and more complete in every department, and that they were enlisting more talent than were those at the South. It was the complaint of the southerner. Helper, that "the very highest literary ability in finances, in political economy, in science, in statism, in law, in theology, in medicine, in the belles-lettres, is laid under contribution by the journals of the non-slave-holding states." Certainly, the same could not be said of the southern journals.^[4]

It was stated in 1850, undoubtedly with truth, that the press of the South, taken as a whole, was about twenty years behind that of the North, and that, while it was exceptional at the North to find a newspaper or magazine that had not improved during the decade from 1840 to 1850, in the South the reverse held true.^[5]

This book. Helper's Impending Crisis, was indeed an anomaly, for its thesis was that slavery depressed the poor whites and enabled the slave-owners to profit at their expense; but it was unsuccessful as an attempt to arouse the non-slave-holding whites.^[6]

For twenty years or more the wide difference between the two sections of the country showed itself more openly in the newspapers and journals than in any other way. The assumption on the part of southerners that their people were descendants of the Cavaliers, while those of the north represented the socially inferior Roundheads, resulted, once the cleavage began, in a sharpness of treatment of each by the other. The lack of ambition, lack of mobility, and the very sensitive "honor," so characteristic of the Southerner, made it more and more impossible for the man at the North to understand his Southern brother, especially when, to avenge his honor, the Southerner was obliged to employ personal violence, as in the case of Brooks and Sumner.

This class "honor "was at the very base of the difference between the two sections; it made the Southern editor and thinker, who was a victim to it, unable to appreciate the truth of either Turgot's conception of progress or the immorality of slavery.

In fifty years there had been no change in the attitude of mind of the people south of the Mason and Dixon line, with the result that society was encrusted with a leadership, social and political, through which it was impossible for either an individual or an idea to break. The election to the Governorship of his state and to the United States Senate of such a man as Andrew Johnson, a really illiterate tailor, was a great exception; we have seen in the cases of Coles of Illinois, Birney and others how, the moment men began to think contrary to the views of the slave-holding leadership, it became necessary for them to move north. It has been pointed out that, with all the literary inclination on the part of the educated southerners, only one book, that of Helper, was written to stimulate thought as to the possible social effect of slave-holding on the poor whites.

An example of the absurd lengths to which this self-established superiority led some of its votaries is related of young Jennings Wise,—editor of the Richmond Enquirer, and son of the Wise who was thankful that there were few papers in Virginia. The young man had had unusual opportunity for broadening of character, having served in the American Embassies at Paris and Berlin, but he returned to Virginia apparently more than ever imbued with the aristocratic ideas of that section. He was said to be so amiable that "he never had a personal quarrel," but in two years of his career as the editor of the Enquirer, he fought eight duels in defense of his father, for he thought it was his duty to challenge anyone who criticized the Governor in the slightest way. This young man was not only a model of all the virtues, but genuinely religious, according to his brother. Were such characters the exception, they would baffle psychology. They were not rare, however, and the fact that they appeared in number shows why it was easy for this class idea to finally become a political one, until there had developed a local patriotism that burned far more fiercely than did the love of the entire country, at the North.

The chief exponent of that brand of patriotism was Robert Barnwell Rhett, editor of the Charleston Mercury, who, ten years before the war, was an ardent advocate of secession, and who saw in South Carolina's struggle a repetition of the story of the Greek republics. "Smaller states," he said, "have before us struggled successfully for their freedom against greater odds." Rhett's paper was the intellectual voice of the South. When Calhoun died in 1852, it was Rhett who took his place in the United States Senate; it was he who wrote South Carolina's appeal to the other states to secede;^[7] when Jefferson Davis was inaugurated President of the Confederacy, it was on the arm of Rhett that he leaned when he entered the hall. The testimony of Rhodes is paid to Rhett, without mention of his name:

"Before the war," he states, "Charleston was one of the most interesting cities of the country. It was a small aristocratic community, with an air of refinement and distinction. The story of Athens proclaims that a large population is not necessary to exercise a powerful influence on the world; and, after the election of Lincoln in 1860, the 40,000 people of Charleston, or rather the few patricians who controlled its fate and that of South Carolina, attracted the attention of the whole country. The story of the secession movement of November and December, 1860, cannot be told with correctness and life, without frequent references to the Charleston Mercury and the Charleston Courier. The Mercury especially was an index of opinion, and so vivid is its daily chronicle of events that the historian is able to put himself in the place of those ardent South Carolinians and understand their point of view."^[8]

Given a man of Rhett's temperament, (his real name was Smith, which he changed to Rhett on entering Congress in 1837), one can understand the development of a local feeling of nationality; one cannot grasp as easily the reasons for the failure to see where the slave issue was leading. We have shown that there were those, here and there, who admitted that the South was falling far behind the North in the things that made for progress, but it remained for Rhett's paper,—though the article was signed by another—to suggest, a few years before the war began, a return to the barbarous practice of slave importation, a relic of the preceding century.

"There are many minds among us," said this writer, "firmly convinced that the Slave Trade is almost the only possible measure, the last resource to arrest the decline of the South in the Union. They see that it would develop resources which have slept for the great want of labor; that it would increase the area of cultivation in the South six times what it is now; that it would create a demand for land and raise its price, so as to compensate the planter for the depreciation of the slaves; that it would admit the poor white man to the advantages of our social system; that it would give him clearer interests in the country he loves now only from simple patriotism that it would strengthen our representation in Congress, and that it would revive and engender public spirit in the South."^[9]

But there was one southern editor and one southern journal that maintained independence, and that was George D. Prentice and his Louisville Journal. It was said of Prentice that "he built the city of Louisville,"^[10] and to him is also given the credit of "preventing the secession of Kentucky."

Henry Watterson, his distinguished successor, says that "from 1830 to 1861 the influence of Prentice was perhaps greater than the influence of any political writer who ever lived." Prentice was a Connecticut Yankee, who could shoot as well as write, and when he established himself in Louisville, he identified himself at once as a man ready and willing to fight. iHis course after that was smoother.

When Fort Sumter was fired upon. Prentice wavered, and his "indecision was fatal to his national influence. He opposed the Rebellion but not for radical reasons and not with zeal."^[11] Behind the arras, even here, there was tragedy. Prentice fought to keep Kentucky in the Union, he was loyal—but both his sons, his only children, were in the Confederate arniy.

1. See Appendix, Note E.
2. N. W. Stephenson, Atlantic Monthly, June, 1919.
3. Helper, The Impending Crisis, 391.
4. Impending Crisis, 387.
5. See Appendix, Note F.
6. T. C. Smith, Parties and Slavery, 288.
7. Wilson, Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, iii, 110.
8. Historical Essays, 91, 92.
9. Charleston , February 17, 1857.
10. Venable, 391.
11. Ibid, 399