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Introduction. Surrounded by Mirrors

In the winter of 1859 Julia Ward Howe, who would go on to write “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” stopped in Nassau en route to Cuba, where she was struck by something that had not particularly troubled her at home in Boston. Like many opponents of slavery, she was no great believer in racial equality. Nonetheless, she hesitated in making one observation because it effectively justified the human bondage she publicly deplored. Perceiving what she identified as the indolence and idleness of the free black population of the Bahamas, she guiltily indulged in an expression of doubt about black capacity; “you must allow us one heretical whisper,—very small and low,” Howe confided in one of a series of anonymous articles published in The Atlantic beginning in May 1859 and collected in a volume called A Trip to Cuba in 1860. While she declared herself “orthodox” on the subject of abolition, the results of emancipation raised for her “the unwelcome question, whether compulsory labor be not better than none.”¹

In the thirty-five years before the Civil War, Howe was not the only person of apparently “orthodox” beliefs about slavery who made a guarded confession of uncertainty. Across the great divide that separated antislavery activists from defenders of human bondage, few people were more indefatigable in slavery’s defense than the strident George Fitzhugh, who went so far as to argue in 1857 that so “natural, normal, and necessitous” was slavery that the enslavement of white people was justifiable.² Yet in an 1855 personal letter to his friend George Frederick Holmes he confessed, “I assure you, Sir, I see great evils in slavery, but in a controversial work I ought not to admit them.”³

Howe’s remark was made in a published text, Fitzhugh’s in private correspondence. In confessing their guilty suspicions, neither was humiliated or persecuted. But both felt obliged to check their speech. In a political climate characterized by shouting, neither Howe nor Fitzhugh felt entirely at liberty to express a whisper of doubt about slavery.

Consider also Aaron Hulin, a Northern schoolteacher looking for work in Louisiana during this period. Upon beginning his trip south he wrote a friend in upstate New York, “they are so tenacious of their privileges in slavery, that were I, or any other man to disseminate the doctrine of Arthur Tappen [sic], or Murrel, I’d be killed, hung by public consent, without a hearing—SANS jury or trial!!!” Hulin went south at the moment of the “Murrell Excitement” in 1835, when suspicion of a slave conspiracy planned and financed by northern abolitionists terrified the white population along the Mississippi.⁴ “It behooves those who come into the south, at this critical time, to be at peace, and attend to their own business,” he wrote.⁵ But the atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion he described was often reported by visitors to the South, who felt surrounded by spies on every railway platform and steamboat landing. They exchanged accounts of “persons who had expressed themselves too freely … [and] had been escorted to the station by a party of the inhabitants, and forced to take their departure.”⁶

Figure 1. Most Americans had no firsthand experiences of life in Latin America and relied on a limited vocabulary of stereotypes about the region. But even those like William Meyers, a sailor who visited Cuba in 1838 and recorded his impressions in delightful watercolor sketches, often went looking for sights they had been primed to see and emphasized the most exotic, like this scene of enslaved musicians and smiling senoritas at a dance. William H. Meyers Diary/Diary: Voyage of Schooner Ajax from Philadelphia to Baltimore, Havana, Santiago and Cuba, n.d. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

This book explores one instance of what happens when people hesitate to speak openly about a controversial subject—whether because they fear a kick under the table or a knife in the ribs—and resort to discussing it through metaphor. The people speaking behind this rhetorical mask were, like Howe and Fitzhugh, sometimes publicly associated with one side or the other of the slavery debate. They could not easily acknowledge the complexity of the situation, yet they were troubled by contradictions that threatened to dismantle their elaborate arguments. Just as often, they were ordinary Americans like Hulin, who saw discussions about slavery as volatile and destructive. The great mass of Americans who tried to keep their own counsel about slavery in the antebellum period were both black and white, male and female, northern and southern. They were bankers, farmers, politicians, merchants, publishers, preachers, and businesspeople. The majority kept silent because there was nothing to be gained by speaking up, and often a great deal to be gained by saying nothing.

But they found ways to talk about U.S. slavery without seeming to do so.

The impulse to indirection, to creative evasion, to criticism from a safe distance, has historically created rich and evocative political satire, children’s fables that comment on grown-up concerns, and subversive theatre and fiction.⁷ Sometimes the act of contextual substitution is obvious, even acknowledged. More often it is elusive, and the author’s intention is open to interpretation. Partisans do not write manifestos in this form, although they sometimes allow themselves to engage imaginatively with their opponents’ views. They playfully trespass into foreign territory, sampling the forbidden fruit.

The foreign territory invaded in this case was Latin America, a region most Americans had never visited and would never encounter directly but that they knew from news reports, travel accounts, commercial prospectuses, paintings, novels, and plays. The fact that most Americans had no firsthand knowledge of this area made it easier to reduce Latin America to stereotypes—sugar and coffee and gold; volantes, senoritas, and machetes; incense-clouded cathedrals, crumbling pyramids, and sultry jungles. It was a nearby world that was simultaneously and profoundly exotic: people spoke Spanish or Portuguese or African or Native American languages, practiced Catholicism, openly dined and slept with people of other races. In this context Americans could—and did—say things about slavery that they would never utter when talking about the United States.

The suggestion that slavery was the subject Americans displaced on this region for the purposes of inspection and analysis is apt to sound surprising. Surely in the thirty-five years leading up to the Civil War there was little reticence about slavery and little need for indirection. This period, after all, resounded with rabid proslavery invective and radical (and in the words of its opponents, fanatical) abolitionism. Proslavery propaganda filled books and journals, and abolitionist handbills and pamphlets featured illustrations of slave auctions and grisly whippings. This strident conflict was, moreover, made striking by its historical novelty. Until the early 1800s the inevitability, if not the rightness, of slavery went virtually unquestioned. Before the 1830s abolitionists remained a tiny minority, and slave owners felt little necessity for defending human bondage as a positive good. Then after a period of relative calm following the American Revolution, a series of events in rapid succession provoked open debate. William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his virulent antislavery Liberator newspaper in January 1831. Nat Turner’s rebellion roiled the South in August that same year. Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in the early 1830s, convincing many Southerners that their peculiar institution was besieged from without as well as within. For the next thirty years, with increasing vehemence, the United States rang with voices decrying and defending slavery.⁸

But in fact many people in the United States shrank from discussing the subject, or spoke about it in coded language. These people occupied the wide spectrum of opinion between fire eaters and immediate emancipationists, and they spoke about slavery much more circumspectly. Whether or not they were really prevented from speaking openly, Americans of many different backgrounds and in many different positions complained that they were. The sensation of being gagged was real enough. “We have various ways of covering slavery,” remarked Frederick Douglass in 1846. “We call it sometimes a peculiar institution—the patriarchal institution—the civil and domestic institution.”⁹ For many people in the South the greatest danger attending open discussion was planting thoughts of revenge and rebellion in the minds of otherwise docile servants. For many Northerners, to challenge slavery was to undermine the stability of the Union and the foundations of American economic prosperity. So grave were the potential consequences of irresponsible words that at certain moments an unwelcome remark about slavery could lead to violence, and a public gathering to discuss its future could incite a riot.¹⁰ But there were many other reasons why slavery proved a sore point and a source of conflict. Whether the subject could be debated publicly, whether greater danger attended its silencing or its open discussion, was almost as controversial as what was said. “The war of argument must come, or in its stead will come the war of arms,” foresaw the abolitionist Amos Phelps in 1834. “Is discussion free, frank, and unrestricted, fraught with danger? Discussion smothered, rely upon it, is fraught with ten-fold danger.”¹¹

During this period the opposing positions were so polarized that there was little room for casual inquiry or unheated debate. On the vast middle ground between the two extremes, many Americans kept quiet. Some continued to leave unquestioned an institution they considered unexceptional. Some held opinions certain to be unpopular in their families or communities and did not wish to be shunned by speaking out. Some felt guilty or anxious about profiting from human bondage, or brooded uneasily about the expected results of emancipation. Some had the foresight to recognize the destructive power of the argument over slavery and forced themselves to hold their tongues. The defense of slavery traded heavily in politics and religion, those two subjects conventionally acknowledged as threats to polite conversation. Abolition was popularly associated with ideas shocking to the mid-nineteenth-century bourgeoisie: feminism, free love, and communism. As with the subject of race in the twentieth and twenty-first century United States, there was much about slavery that remained unspoken or at least unrecorded, discussed with like-minded friends sotto voce but not committed to paper for posterity to analyze.

The sense of constraint people experienced was sometimes quite real, though not so real as to prevent public discussion entirely (Howe, after all, ultimately published her “heretical whisper” under her own name). A climate of mandatory silence only encourages the reckless show-off and the attention-seeking politician. Plenty of radical abolitionists and self-justifying slaveholders felt at perfect liberty to say exactly what they thought. But their contributions did little to advance an honest dialogue about an intractable problem, and made others more determined to keep silent. The exaggerated theatrics of radical abolitionism and proslavery advocacy have obscured the degree to which slavery remained for many people an uncomfortable topic, its very unpleasantness arising from the hostility of the public volleys. Suppression of free expression and self-censorship existed alongside, and because of, the acrimony and viciousness that characterized speaking out. Historian David Grimsted captured this self-conscious silence amid shouting in his American Mobbing: “Political parties and majority populations in both sections saw the wisdom of avoiding discussion of slavery and were racist enough so that turning African Americans into property seemed small cost, or a nice bonus, for union.… Clear in the riot conversation of 1835 was the idea that the only national answer regarding slavery was not to think, or at least to talk, about it.”¹²

Yet much of what people in the United States were unwilling or afraid to utter about slavery in their own country, they eagerly proclaimed in the context of Latin America. Thinking about the way Americans talked about Latin America reveals how people who would never have otherwise championed slavery or identified themselves as abolitionists meditated about the economic benefits and the flagrant injustice of the institution. In the thirty-five years before the Civil War, many Americans found an outlet for their doubts and concerns, fears and fascinations about slavery at home by talking about slavery south of the Rio Grande. Latin America, in other words, served as a proxy that allowed Americans to break many varieties of silence, from the studied tact of politicians who wanted to straddle both sides of a controversial issue, to the unspoken agenda of expansionists whose perception of the inferiority of blacks and Indians believed it justified claiming the land of a neighboring republic and instituting human bondage there, from the restraint of comfortable Northern white people who did not want to stir up trouble, to the rigorous self-censorship of proslavery Southerners who had no outlet for admitting the miscegenated realities of their own households. When they talked about Latin America, cautious and circumspect Americans of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s let down their guard and discussed slavery with candor. For example, Massachusetts historian William Hickling Prescott, though no radical abolitionist, used the history of the Spanish, who had sown the “seeds of the evil” in America to call for a national examination of conscience on the subject of the “wretchedness of the institution.” Meanwhile, proslavery Southerners appraising slavery in Cuba and Brazil insisted that the U.S. version of slavery was superior to all others—perfect, in fact.

Indeed, in certain respects, Latin America served as the perfect metaphorical surrogate for its northern neighbor. The Spanish American republics shared many things with the United States: a colonial past, a heritage of relations with native peoples and African slaves, a hemisphere. With an emulation that could not fail to flatter the young United States, the emerging Latin American nations had followed the example of their republican predecessor, fought for their independence, and copied their constitutions from that of the United States. Besides these similarities, the United States and Latin America had other points in common. Europeans and creoles of European descent shared territory with indigenous people, with black slaves and free people, and with admixtures of these races. Native-born Protestant Americans uneasy about the rapid influx of immigrant Papists shuddered at Cuba and Brazil as models of societies with Catholic majorities. Haiti and Jamaica offered some observers a preview of post-emancipation South Carolina or Mississippi.

On the other hand, because Latin America seemed so different to many people in the United States, they could discuss aspects of slavery and race relations there without risking offense. The Spanish and Portuguese, with their long subjugation to the dark-skinned Moors, with their brutal Inquisition, with a system of slavery considered uniquely barbarous by those who subscribed to the Black Legend of Iberian cruelty, appeared very different from the European ancestors claimed by many white U.S. citizens. Latin America’s casual race relations, unstable governments, and exotic Catholicism kept it at a secure remove from the United States. A safe distance separated the United States from its neighbors, even, ironically, as the imperatives of Manifest Destiny shrank that distance precipitously.

Other historical and geographical examples outside the contemporary Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking world south of the border served as points of reference as well. Both proslavery and antislavery Americans were especially obsessed with the former French colony of Haiti as a metaphor freighted with contradictory meanings—a symbol both of horror and destruction and of independence and autonomy.¹³ Haiti, a topsy-turvy republic disavowing the plantation export economy, birthed in a bloody revolution and growing to maturity with blacks in the majority and in charge, was as different from the United States as could be conceived. “The first feature that strikes us, is the difference, the next the rivalry of races,” summed up Littell’s Living Age in 1844.¹⁴ If Haiti was an “experiment of negro self-government,” the English colony of Jamaica, where slavery had ended in 1838, was an “experiment of free negro labour”—one interpreted as a success but often as failure.¹⁵

Farther west and south, the Spanish American republics, including Mexico, Peru, and Argentina, as well as the monarchy of Brazil, occupied a place in the American imagination somewhere between the United States and Haiti, subject to endless reinterpretation. Their resources were expansively estimated, their commitment to republican government endlessly debated, their racial composition extensively probed. Through all this discussion, these regions served as an invaluable context for displacing national apprehensions about slavery when the cost of speaking out was high. Some of the people who participated in this conversation set policies that affected or even determined the lives of dozens if not thousands of others, but many had no greater impact than contributing to culture through their voting patterns, reading habits, and consumer choices.

The Americans engaged in the project of using these regions to displace discussion of U.S. slavery were not necessarily making calculated estimates or rational comparisons. They often based their conclusions on hearsay, assumption, and prejudice. Many of them should have known better, and perhaps they did. Their proclamations were sustained by repetition, but collapsed under the weight of serious investigation. Their purpose was first to vent their repressed anxieties, and ultimately to proclaim their safety because of the differences that separated them and the objects of their comparisons. They could not have failed to notice the ways in which their supposedly peculiar institution mirrored slavery in other places, but rather than proclaiming common cause, they often insisted on points of distinction. Their protestations of exceptionalism created a space in which they could freely say what was otherwise unspeakable.

The reasons Americans kept silent about U.S. slavery varied by context, geography, and historical moment. Politicians anxious to build national coalitions had different motives than merchants wary of offending customers or suppliers, and Northern tutors seeking jobs in Southern planters’ families had still other concerns. But people with these varied agendas shared in common the release of geographical (and often temporal) displacement. In a multiplicity of cultural contexts, men and women from diverse backgrounds inserted critiques, vented objections, and acknowledged fears by proxy.

While countless histories have analyzed the noisy pronouncements of slavery’s bombastic defenders and the searing cries of abolitionists, there exists a smaller body of literature about how the debate over slavery was silenced. Until the publication of papers by moderate abolitionists like Theodore Weld and James Birney in the 1930s, historians generally understood antislavery activists as a fanatical fringe movement.¹⁶ Clement Eaton’s 1939 Freedom of Thought in the Old South, among others, reframed the argument, proposing that the death of Jefferson in 1826 ushered in a repressive regime of censorship and thought control that stifled minority opinion below the Mason-Dixon Line.¹⁷ Eaton made himself extremely unpopular with Southern historians in the process. “It did not seem to occur to Mr. Eaton that the abolitionists and their political allies were threatening the existence of the South as seriously as the Nazis threaten the existence of England,” seethed Frank L. Owsley of Vanderbilt in a review in the Journal of Southern History.¹⁸ When Eaton reissued his book as The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South in 1964, he identified the anti-abolitionist crusade as the ideological antecedent of the white South’s furious midtwentieth-century pushback against the civil rights movement: “both the old and the new societies have suppressed freedom of speech and forced their moderate citizens to acquiescence or to silence.”¹⁹

The very vocal protests and the acknowledgement of the therapeutic value of free discussion in the noisy 1960s made periods of enforced silence more difficult to imagine. Nonetheless, a number of works since 1970 have considered the way the subject of slavery was quashed in the antebellum era.²⁰ These studies demonstrate that free speech is not always restrained through riots and torchlight processions, nor is censorship always enabled by tyrannical fiat. In the nineteenth century as in the twenty-first, there were social and economic costs when uttering opinions against what was understood as the position of the majority. The consequences of running afoul of common wisdom included social shunning and neglect, and as a result self-censorship was often stunningly effective at shutting down minority opinion.²¹

In the antebellum period, outright violence was more characteristic of some years than others. During the period considered in this book, there were two moments when the tension between freedom of speech and the press and the hazards of discussing slavery did in fact erupt in hysteria. The first outburst, most severe from 1834 to 1838, included rioting by anti-abolitionists, the hindering of mail delivery, and the tabling of antislavery petitions submitted to Congress. The second period, awakened by the attack on Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner in 1856, lasted until the Civil War. At these moments, even to pose questions about the peculiar institution was considered tantamount to undermining the safety of half the country.²² So combustible did many Americans consider the South that outright criticism of slavery was deemed quite literally incendiary: “The torch of free speech and press, which gives light to the house of Liberty, is very apt to set on fire the house of Slavery,” declared Republican reformer Carl Schurz in 1860.²³

Why the spike in abolitionist agitation and proslavery suppression in the mid-1830s? Looking back from the vantage point of the late 1850s, northern antislavery journalist George Weston in The Progress of Slavery maintained that “1835 is the designated epoch of this outbreak of abolitionism,” not because antislavery voices suddenly rose in shrillness, but because of Southern paranoia over despotic federal power. According to Weston, the tariff controversy made Southern legislators aware of how tenuous was their hold over national affairs, and imputations of Northern interference in the Southern political economy contracted to a narrow focus on slavery. And white Southerners clung to slavery because it was profitable, and becoming fabulously more so in the antebellum period.²⁴

And yet, even if the abolitionism of the post-1831 period was a response to Southern proslavery hysteria rather than the cause of it, the face of abolitionism was assuredly changing. Abolitionists increasingly included blacks as well as whites, common people as well as elites, women as well as men.²⁵ Colonization—the project of sending emancipated slaves back to Africa—lost favor with many abolitionists, who now insisted free black people had every right to remain in the United States. Abolitionists were more outspoken—“I WILL BE HEARD” vowed editor William Lloyd Garrison in the first issue of the Liberator—and spoke out against a society they considered complacent and cowardly.²⁶ To amplify their message, they took advantage of new technologies like telegraphy and steam-powered presses that vastly increased the volume of their output and helped them broadcast their message more quickly: the American Anti-Slavery Society’s production of 122,000 tracts in 1834 paled beside the million tracts, many of them lavishly illustrated, produced only a year later.²⁷

Antislavery rhetoric from the North met a firm response from the South. Loose talk about possible slave insurrections could lead to violence—often perpetrated against the slaves themselves, executed on suspicion of malicious intent when nervous white people worked themselves into a froth of anxiety over rumors of wrath to come. Paranoia was particularly rife in areas where black people outnumbered whites or a put-upon class of nonslaveholders resented what it perceived as a local Slave Power oligarchy.²⁸ Indeed, as Frederick Douglass noted, by 1830, “Speaking and writing on the subject of slavery became dangerous.”²⁹

According to defenders of slavery, the prospect of abolitionist materials provoking insurrection justified censorship and the seizure of mail. Although naturally content, the slaves could be roused to revolt by the diabolical persuasion of canny traitors from the North who polluted the channels of the postal system with their libelous materials, including picture books and handkerchiefs printed with graphic depictions of abuse.³⁰ In Charleston, postmaster Alfred Huger, working with the cooperation of New York postmaster Samuel L. Gouverneur, established a cordon sanitaire that remained in force from 1835 to the Civil War to intercept the delivery of abolitionist materials sent through the mail.³¹ In such a time of crisis, insisted former U.S. Representative William Drayton in 1836, “extra judicial” trials and punishments meted out according to the decisions of hastily assembled tribunals “composed of the best citizens” were perfectly defensible. He asked, “who dares say that such tribunals have, in a single instance, exercised the powers conferred upon them unjustly or improperly?”³² Dismissing the implications of such interference with the free exchange of ideas in the American republic, Drayton declared that “it would be folly to hesitate in removing a great and imminent danger, in the apprehension of incurring a slight and remote one.”³³

Still more ominously, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a gag rule in 1836 in response to a perceived deluge of antislavery petitions directed to Congress.³⁴ Legislators in the Senate similarly protested the increase in petitions received. “They do not come as heretofore, singly, and far apart: from the quiet routine of the Society of Friends, or the obscure vanity of some philanthropic club,” complained Senator William Preston of South Carolina, “but they are sent to us in vast numbers, from soured and agitated communities; poured in upon us from the overflowing of public sentiment, which, every where, in all western Europe and eastern America, has been lashed into excitement on this subject.” Preston advised the Senate to be mindful of the precedents of Jamaica and St. Domingo and to follow the example of the House.³⁵ Keeping silent seemed to be the key to the safety and prosperity of the nation. In 1840 Representative William Cost, dissatisfied by the fact that the 1836 House rule had to be renewed at each session of Congress, pushed for the permanent rejection of antislavery petitions.³⁶

Eclipsed by economic anxiety and the splintering of the antislavery cause into various reform efforts, these hyperbolic apprehensions subsided somewhat in the early 1840s (although mobbing, destruction of property, and personal attacks certainly did not disappear entirely).³⁷ The Wilmot Proviso, the acquisition of Texas, and the U.S. War with Mexico generated extensive debate in Congress about slavery in the mid-1840s. Then a second spike in calls for silence on the subject of slavery occurred between 1856 and 1860. In an 1856 speech called “The Crime Against Kansas,” Massachusetts Senator Sumner likened South Carolina senator Andrew Butler to Don Quixote. Like that misguided would-be knight, Sumner said, Butler had dedicated his life to the honor of his mistress who, “though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight:—I mean the harlot Slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse with words.”³⁸ In retaliation, Butler’s nephew, Representative Preston Brooks, beat Sumner unconscious with his gold-handled cane. Abolitionists characterized the assault as the suppression of free speech. However “profuse with words” Butler was in defense of slavery, the South would tolerate no utterance in its condemnation. The Slave Power demanded the concession of silence. An article in The Independent with the sarcastic title “Silence Must Be Nationalized” began, “Liberty of speech in a despotic government means a liberty of the despot to say what he pleases, and a liberty of everybody else to hold their tongues. This is the idea in the South now.”³⁹

John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 amplified the demand for silence. Proslavery members of the Thirty-Sixth Congress blamed Hinton Rowan Helper’s 1857 The Impending Crisis for inciting Brown’s activities and called for the book’s suppression.⁴⁰ Heated exchanges in Washington in late 1859 and early 1860 confirmed that there were definite limits to freedom of speech in the South. Representative Owen Lovejoy, Republican from Illinois and brother of antislavery martyr Elijah Lovejoy who had lost his life in a raid on his press during the eruption of violence of the 1830s, demanded, “Has not an American citizen a right to speak to an American citizen? I want the right of uttering what I say here in Richmond. I claim the right to say what I say here in Charleston.” Representative Elbert Martin of Virginia threatened that if Lovejoy made his remarks publicly in the South, “we would hang you higher than Haman.”⁴¹

Attempts to regulate speech reached a climax in a resolution proposed by Stephen Douglas of Illinois in the Senate on January 16, 1860. Called “Invasion of States,” the resolution called for the Committee on the Judiciary to prepare a bill for the “suppression and punishment of conspiracies or combinations.”⁴² Douglas indicated that he considered as “conspirators” those from the North who sent “agents” to “seduce” slaves to flee to Canada via the Underground Railroad.⁴³ Because of its potential for outlawing speech judged to be seditious, one scholar has called this proposal the culmination of “the slave interest’s long battle to impose intellectual conformity on the Republic.”⁴⁴ Although Douglas’s resolution was tabled, it demonstrates both the way speech was regarded as an act of aggression and the hostility employed in quashing it.

At these dramatic junctures in the mid-1830s and late 1850s, provocative words about slavery were, with some justification, considered a matter of life and death. But throughout the thirty-five years before the Civil War, many people thought consciously about how to give the least offense while discussing slavery, and often decided that the best tack was not saying anything at all. In a letter to his cousin, Northern-born Zelotus Holmes, who had moved to South Carolina to study for the ministry, allowed that firsthand observation of slavery had altered his views, which had once been “perhaps somewhat ultra … [but] No logic can plead with the power of ocular demonstration.” He admitted, “I have not written my northern friends freely upon this subject since in the South, knowing that no good could arise from it.”⁴⁵ Opinions about slavery divided families, and the outspoken discovered there was no going back. “Thou knowest what I have passed thro’ on the subject of slavery, thou knowest I am an exile from the home of my birth because of slavery,” wrote Charleston-born Angelina Grimké to her sister Sarah after her antislavery views became public.⁴⁶

Just as it is important to notice the temporal context of discourse about slavery, it is necessary to pay attention to the place where remarks were made and the audiences attending them. The hazards of discussing slavery differed greatly in the North and the South, and within the regions there were different accents and inflections. Nineteenth-century Americans thought of themselves in a global context and looked to Latin America, among other places, to understand themselves. They did not live in an autarky, but in a global economy where they needed to be conscious of available resources, changing markets, and foreign tastes and attitudes.⁴⁷ In particular, white Southern elites considered themselves cosmopolitans who understood their political and economic goals in relation to their slaveholding brethren in the Caribbean and Brazil. Whatever their expressions of superiority, they were tied to Latin America by both business and blood.⁴⁸ But this commonality of economic interests did not preclude expressions of distaste about conditions south of the border and an insistence that the ways of the United States were superior.

The Latin American context was invaluable for an American claiming to speak on behalf of the whole nation, particularly on a global stage before an international audience. In the 1850s, the South closed ranks around its defense of slavery, and white Southerners often presumed to represent the entire region. In such circumstances the temptation to disparage Latin America by highlighting the cruelty or lack of discipline in the slave systems of Cuba and Brazil proved almost irresistible.

There were “many Souths” and “many Norths” as well.⁴⁹ Talking about slavery exposed these fault lines. Since it was far easier to speak openly before a local audience than a regional or national one, politicians—especially those in national office—had to be particularly careful of what they said. As long as they were confident that they expressed the beliefs of the majority of their constituents, they could be boldly outspoken. But if they presumed to speak for a whole region rather than a particular locality, or if they aspired to national office, they needed to exercise more caution. Similarly, local newspapers dared say what national journals and books did not. Authors hoping to sell their publications to a broad audience resorted to more obfuscation than those writing for local consumption. Writers, editors, and publishers surveying a nation with many irreconcilable opinions about slavery consciously sought to commodify an “average racism” that was inoffensive (at least to white readers)⁵⁰

Even in a small community, one could not always tell where an American stood on the subject of slavery. Geography could not be depended upon to determine opinion. By no means was every Northerner an abolitionist, nor was every Southerner a defender of slavery (the slaves themselves hardly rose to its defense).⁵¹ Southerners doing business, making purchases, attending school, and escaping sultry summers thronged Northern cities and vacation spots.⁵² Northerners sought business opportunities in the South. Journalist Jane Cazneau confidently predicted that all would be won over to the benefits of slavery, because American consciences “like that peculiarly useful article of which we make shoes and life preservers … stretch indefinitely when they come among cotton fields, and melt altogether in the ardent heat of sugar and rice plantations.”⁵³ Northern transplant Tillson Harris, a mechanic who found work repairing cotton gins in Georgia, fulfilled Cazneau’s prediction: he sounded like a true son of the South when he declared he was “gitting to hate the people of the North” and complained to his father in Maine that abolitionists “Dont look around them & see their own privations but must have something in somebodies business to shriek over.”⁵⁴ Indeed, since many Northerners knowingly or unwittingly profited from the dominance of cotton in the U.S. economy, they wanted no interference with its production. Northern ships insured by Northern firms bore cotton to Northern factories capitalized by Northern banks.⁵⁵ Cotton had become the most important U.S. export by 1820, and accounted for half of all exports on the eve of the Civil War.⁵⁶

Edward Neufville Tailer, a prolific New York diarist, expressed his ambivalence about slavery in seemingly contradictory reflections. He was not without sympathy for enslaved people: he avidly read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and attended two stage versions of the novel, and on a trip to Baltimore he contributed to a purse for the manumission of a slave who worked in a hotel. But as a staunch Unionist, he saw abolitionism tearing at the national fabric by stirring up unnecessary dissent. He understood the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry primarily in terms of the effect it would have on his own fortunes in the dry goods trade: “John Brown’s foray in the South has created a bad feeling between North & South and it remains yet to be seen, whether the Southern merchants will buy goods from us at the North as liberally as formerly,” he wrote. He was eager to see the whole affair hushed up and forgotten.⁵⁷ Talking about such an explosive issue could do no good.

The necessity of silence characterized much of the South. Publicly it was necessary for the proslavery faithful to insist that all slaveholders supported the institution; privately they knew that the commitment of the Upper South to slavery wavered. In written apologias they proclaimed the attachment of the enslaved laborer to the land where he or she was born; in private correspondence they arranged the sale of slaves whose presence was an inconvenience because of their insolence, their incorrigibility, or awkward suspicions about the identity of their fathers.⁵⁸ The dominant proslavery stance, insisting that the slaves were not merely patrolled but so content that they would not rebel, left little room for the articulation of doubts about white safety. Too much public airing of rebellion fears might lead Southerners, especially those who could not afford to own bond people, to question whether the benefits of slavery were worth the eternal anxiety.⁵⁹ Conversely, Southerners worried that too-frequent mention of slave revolts might somehow conjure these horrors into existence, presumably by awakening slaves to the possibility of their success. Southerners were not alone in their concern about the possibility of race war; European cotton manufacturers, who uneasily watched the growing dominance of U.S.-grown cotton during the antebellum period, worried about the potential interruption of supplies because of slave revolt or voluntary emancipation.⁶⁰ If it was impossible to stop the printing of inflammatory texts, it might be possible to prevent their being read: in the years after 1831 all slave states but Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas declared it a crime to teach slaves to read or write.⁶¹

Some settings and situations bred a particular aversion to frank discussion. The question of the morality of slavery tore at the unity of American churches, dividing Protestant denominations.⁶² By 1857 the Baptists, Methodists, and New School Presbyterians had split into Northern and Southern branches.⁶³ In 1834 Weld and other students at the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati debated slavery in public for nine days, concluding with a vote supporting immediate abolition. The seminary trustees summarily prohibited all public meetings on seminary grounds and ordered the dissolution of the school’s Anti-Slavery Society, deploring the students’ inciting of “civil commotion.” Town/gown relations suffered as the citizens of Cincinnati feared the stirring up of trouble. “The scenes of France and Hayti recur to their imagination,” shivered a trustee.⁶⁴

Churches refrained from endorsing antislavery activities or declaring slavery a sin, fearful of driving congregants away and discouraging fundraising.⁶⁵ Anna Quincy Thaxter Cushing, a comfortably situated doctor’s wife of Dorchester, Massachusetts, generally attended the First Church (Unitarian) twice on Sundays, hearing one sermon “in the forenoon” and another in the afternoon, the topics of which she dutifully noted in her diary. In August 1855 a sermon by a visiting divine stirred up trouble in the congregation. “Mr. Fred. Frothingham, of Montreal, … introduced the subject of slavery by way of illustrating the subject about which he was speaking, and spoke of it at some length,” wrote Cushing that Sunday; “some twenty people saw fit to leave the church. A very undignified and illbred proceeding, to say no more.” Congregants demanded whether the pastor had known what the visiting clergyman had planned to say: “some of his friends, most of them, probably, think that it will be better to let the whole affair pass over in silence,” wrote Cushing—which is apparently exactly what happened.⁶⁶

Sometimes silence on the subject of slavery signaled the despair Americans felt at the possibility of ever finding a remedy. Harriet Beecher Stowe, of all people (referring to herself in the third person), was later to recall, “It was a sort of general impression upon her mind, as upon that of many humane people in those days, that the subject was so dark and painful a one, so involved in difficulty and obscurity, so utterly beyond human hope or help, that it was of no use to read, or think, or distress oneself about it.”⁶⁷ Stowe ultimately decided there was something she could do, and almost singlehandedly piloted the subject of U.S. slavery to the foreground of mainstream fiction in 1852 with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But before she put slavery front and center in her bestselling novel, most American literature aiming at a national audience kept slave characters on the periphery in the “plantation novel” tradition, where they bowed to their masters and joked merrily with each other.

Alternately, for people like Howe and Fitzhugh who had chosen sides in this most charged and vociferous of contexts, there were certain hidden doubts or buried suspicions that could be neither safely spoken nor entirely stilled. Among radical abolitionists, there was the guilty fear that blacks and whites were essentially different, that amalgamation was unnatural, and that emancipation might be a disaster. Among the proslavery faithful, there was the quiet knowledge that they shared more with their black slaves than they dared admit, and that enslavement of their fellow human beings was indeed inhumane, unjust, and sinful.

It should be pointed out that while Americans often kept dumb about slavery, they were quite vocal and unselfconscious in their expressions of racism. If they were reticent, it was not out of shame or discomfort so much as out of a reflexive sense that the superiority of whites and inferiority of blacks were so generally understood as not to need articulation. Two famous Americans—by any measure giants in the antislavery cause—demonstrate the way hatred of slavery coexisted with kneejerk racism in a way that is apt to make modern Americans wince.

After John Quincy Adams lost his bid for a second term in the presidential election of 1828 to Andrew Jackson, he began a new career in the U.S. House of Representatives. What might be seen as a significant demotion in status demonstrated a genuine commitment to public service. During his long career in the House, he butted frequently—and sometimes in amusing ways—against the strictures of the gag rule, finding ways to introduce antislavery petitions into the public record.⁶⁸ In 1841 he defended the rebels of the Spanish slave ship Amistad before the Supreme Court, and won his case.⁶⁹ But by twenty-first-century standards he is hardly a model of tolerance. In particular, he was revolted by the idea of sexual congress between the races, declaring that “the intermarrying of black and white blood is a violation of the law of nature.”⁷⁰ In a dinner-table conversation with the English actress Fanny Kemble about Othello, Adams, freely using what Kemble called “that opprobrious title” for a black person, diagnosed Shakespeare’s play as flawed because audiences could never fully sympathize with Desdemona’s love for her husband.⁷¹

Likewise, no American politician is more associated with the ending of slavery than Abraham Lincoln. The South’s secession was occasioned by the expectation that he and his Republican Party would begin undermining slaveholders’ rights to their human property.⁷² His 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, if it was not in fact as immediately effective as is remembered in the popular imagination, certainly opened the door to universal freedom for slaves in the United States. But black voters were not among Lincoln’s constituents, and the extension of equal opportunities to them was not one of his principal concerns. Lincoln enjoyed the music and comedy of blackface minstrels. He told “darky” jokes. He was not above using Adams’s “opprobrious title” himself.⁷³ Inconsistency of opinion over a lifetime hardly makes someone a hypocrite. But these snapshots do suggest that racism and antislavery identities coexisted amicably in nineteenth-century white thought.

Although the battle lines between proslavery and antislavery were clearly drawn, there were no corresponding camps gathering racists and antiracists.⁷⁴ Expressions of intolerance generally went unchallenged. Claims of white superiority provided the underpinning of a system that rewarded a few plantation plutocrats at the expense of their exploited labor force, but those same claims also soothed poor whites who received no other benefits from slavery. One significant difference between racism and slavery is that while racism was a straightforward proclamation of supposed biological superiority, advocacy of or opposition to slavery erupted from a wide variety of impulses.⁷⁵ Many Northern and Western farmers opposed slavery because they perceived (correctly) that the Slave Power monopolized the best farmland. Factory operatives often opposed abolition because they believed free black labor undercut their wages. Slavery offended some people only when they had to see it, or its most troublesome aspects. A revealing letter from Northern educator and reformer Elizabeth Palmer Peabody encouraging a young friend to take a job as a governess in a slaveholding Baltimore family described the situation in a way that suggested the young woman’s delicate sensibilities would not be compromised: “There never was a whipping while [the previous governess] was there. The severest punishment was shutting up in a closet in the entry and that happened but once or twice. [The slaves] are well clothed and fed and taken care of as children and in fact slavery is as much robbed of its evils as it can be possibly.”⁷⁶

Many Republicans abhorred slavery more for causing economic backwardness than because of its cruelty or injustice.⁷⁷ Poor whites moved from the South to the Northwest to escape economically devastating competition with slave labor. By any measure, they were antislavery. But they were also racist, bringing with them not only Southern prejudices but also fears that free blacks might compete with them in the socially fluid milieu of the fast-developing West. By the 1850s, the Democratic and Republican parties sometimes appeared to be in a contest to demonstrate which more stridently championed white privilege at the expense of black equality.⁷⁸

Slavery’s critics shared no common solution to the problem. Those who favored immediate abolition had little patience for those who favored gradual abolition, and still less with advocates of colonization.⁷⁹ While full-fledged abolitionists were not hated and vilified in the North to the same degree as in the South, they nevertheless inspired little admiration for most of the antebellum period. Although not always silenced, they were often ridiculed. Some Southerners regarded abolitionists as foolish but harmless. Maria Dubois of New Orleans, visiting her mother and sister in the canal town of Canastota, New York, spoke to participants at an abolition meeting in 1848: “one says it is true that when a slave gets to [sic] old or is otherwise disenabled that the Master kills him and sells his skin for shoe leather … it is very amusing to hear their ideas of slavery.”⁸⁰ Their reputation was not a great deal higher in the North. “The Liberator is the most unpopular paper in New England,” complained antislavery activist A. Sydney Southworth, who had charged himself with selling subscriptions. “The reason is obvious. The clergy are almost universally opposed to it, and of course the most of their people must follow them and do as they say, without inquiring whether they are right or wrong.”⁸¹

The passion of abolitionists was generally received as unseemly enthusiasm, and they were associated with soiled collars, uncombed hair, and sexual irregularity. A matrimonial advertisement placed in the Water-Cure Journal in 1855 by a female devotee of hydrotherapy suggests how abolitionism was conflated with a number of unconventional interests: “[I] must be mated phrenologically and spiritually, or not at all. Should wish one who could do without tea, coffee, pork, beef, mutton, and feather-beds; a practical anti-slavery man, anti-tobacco, and I care not if anti-razor.”⁸² John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the utopian Oneida Community, probably did the abolitionist movement no favors when, in a pamphlet called Slavery and Marriage. A Dialogue, he equated the liberating possibilities of free love with antislavery. The dialogue concluded with a formerly equivocating participant deciding that if slavery is a monstrous abuse, it shares many characteristics with marriage: “I must either let Slavery alone, or go for a revolution of society at the north as well as the south.”⁸³

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that so many squelched impulses should find expression elsewhere. Americans of the early republic spent a great deal of energy trying to define the national character against foreign models and gauging what other nations might say or think about them. Through comparisons with other countries, the young United States defined itself.⁸⁴ England, the mother country of the colonies that ultimately became the United States, from which its inhabitants drew their language, their conception of freedom, and the basis of their law, was the major touchstone. France, England’s age-old enemy, which had followed the United States into the republican experiment, with less happy consequences as it lapsed into violent revolution, dictatorship, empire, and finally a reestablished monarchy, provided a powerful but very different kind of comparison. Federalists admired England, while Republicans—notably Thomas Jefferson—chose France as their beau ideal. The nation’s early political parties slandered one another by applying the most reviled characteristics of these respective countries to their opponents—thus Federalists reviled Republicans as dangerous Jacobins and Republicans condemned Federalists as would-be aristocrats.⁸⁵

Just as they did with England and France, Americans tried to understand their identity and national character by considering themselves in relation to Latin America, a region with which they had essential commercial and diplomatic ties, whose territory they traversed in order to reach the Pacific, in which they fought a major war. During the thirty-five years before the Civil War, between the jubilee celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of U.S independence and the year the Union broke into pieces, people in the United States cast the nations of Latin America in a variety of roles. The countries to the south were promising disciples of republicanism following in the footsteps of the path-breaking United States; cautionary examples of democracy subject to foreign domination; lurid cultures in the thrall of Roman Catholicism; and fertile fields for mining, discovery, and conquest. Latin America was at once a destination and a gateway through which white America’s unwanted black and Native American populations would pass on their way out of a nation purged of its racial cast-offs.

While Americans understood themselves in relation to other nations, foreign visitors—especially Europeans—were busy observing them, describing the new republic in travel accounts that were eagerly consumed on both sides of the Atlantic. These foreign visitors showed no reserve in analyzing the peculiar institution—increasingly peculiar as slavery was progressively shunned by the rest of the world.⁸⁶ Northerners suffered torments in the face of European excoriations. Southerners found themselves called upon to apologize for an institution branded backward and barbaric. Nationalists in the young republic were especially concerned with setting the United States apart from its European origins. They saw their country setting off on a grand and conspicuous experiment, but it was certainly not for slavery that they wanted to be exceptional. If, in the company of foreign visitors, Americans were reticent about human bondage, their motive is understandable enough: they instinctively recognized slavery not only as an issue that held the potential for tearing apart the new nation but also as a magnet for foreign censure: “foreigners heap [reproaches] upon our national character on account of the existence of this stain upon it,” brooded the North American Review in 1835.⁸⁷

European travelers to the United States not infrequently observed that the self-proclaimed free society maintained a tight-lipped reserve about topics that might provoke controversy or depict the nation in a less-than-flattering light. “I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America,” proclaimed Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835.⁸⁸ Similarly, Charles Dickens’s 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit, written after the author’s American tour, includes among its pompous, self-absorbed American characters only one, Mr. Bevan, who is capable of honest analysis. “I believe no satirist could breathe this air,” he says, in words that echo de Tocqueville. “If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us to-morrow, he would be hunted down.”⁸⁹ Americans were capable of censuring those who deviated from the will of the majority, maligning members of rival political factions, and readily identifying the splinter in their neighbor’s eye. But they refrained from speaking openly about the shortcomings of the nation as a whole.

Europeans ridiculed this willful ignorance: “one of the most remarkable traits in the national character of the Americans,” wrote Frances Trollope, “[is] their exquisite sensitiveness and soreness respecting every thing said or written concerning them.”⁹⁰ With laser-like sharpness, her 1832 Domestic Manners of the Americans lacerated U.S. pretension to justice and gentility; her scathing criticisms were all the more damning for being so barbed and witty. “At every table d’hôte, on board of every steam-boat, in every stagecoach, and in all societies, the first question was, ‘Have you read Mrs. Trollope?’ ” reported a British traveler.⁹¹ Sensitivity to the opinion of foreign visitors persisted throughout the antebellum period: Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer, who toured the United States twenty years later (and also turned her experiences into a much-discussed travel narrative) everywhere met anxious natives who pestered her with questions, trying to make sure her impressions were positive. On one occasion she was denied passage on a boat because the captain “did not wish to have any authors on board his ship who would laugh to scorn his accommodations, and would put him in a book.… And for this I have to thank Mrs. Trollope and Dickens,” Bremer added drolly.⁹²

Descriptions of Latin America written by U.S. travelers can be read as a response to these European snubs. As American patriots discovered in the 1830s through the 1850s, descriptions of their southern neighbors worked as a way to present issues of race and slavery before both foreign and domestic audiences without striking too close to home. By asserting the differences between the United States and the Latin American nations, U.S. nationalists hoped to ascribe the worst abuses of the slave system to others. If foreign critics commented on the brutality of labor in the cotton fields, they needed to compare it to the sugar plantations of Cuba. If European visitors remarked on the Quadroon population of New Orleans, writers in the United States hoped to distract them with the mixed-race chaos of Peru: “Instead of resulting in one common uniform race, [amalgamation] has multiplied races to such an extent as is hardly conceivable,” sniffed the Democratic Review in 1853. “The state of these colonies, both before and since their independence, so different from that of the United States, may be in a great measure traced to the amalgamation of different races in one, and the purity of blood in the other.”⁹³

In some ways the limitations of knowing the region only secondhand, or allowing it to be mediated by familiar stereotypes, allowed Americans the freedom of uncritical and highly selective use of particular tropes.⁹⁴ They often emphasized what made the United States different (and better). Many Americans spoke confidently about conditions in Latin America with absolutely no direct acquaintance with the region. But even those who did encounter the region firsthand relied on common ways of seeing and interpreting what they saw. No matter how foreign and unfamiliar Latin America seemed on first glance, U.S. visitors fell back on a vocabulary that prescribed its own deterministic taxonomy. Mary Gardner Lowell left Boston for Cuba when her husband’s business took him there in 1831–1832. “I came upon deck just after the custom house officers were there, and never shall I forget the astonishment & delight experienced at the scene which burst upon my view. Every thing [—] buildings, trees, boats, men, costumes, were unlike any I had ever seen; the whole had the effect of magic,” she marveled. But upon reaching shore and settling in, she was soon describing the indolence of the women, the cockfights, and the mummery of the Catholic mass where “blacks and whites kneel together promiscuously”—all staples of the travel literature.⁹⁵

To maximize its potential as a screen upon which portrayals of U.S. slavery could be projected, Latin America had to be characterized as incapable of living up to the U.S. model. Describing Latin America as a region of profligate racial mixing and political instability suggested a United States that was by contrast pure and well regulated. That this determined effort intensified in 1826 is perhaps not coincidental: only fifty years old, the country was nostalgic for a primal innocence and a racial integrity that had never existed. In the 1820s it could no longer be imagined that slavery was dying out in the United States; the abolition of the African slave trade did little to arrest the growth of the flourishing slave economy, and the profits from cotton cultivation promised no easy waning of enslaved labor in the future. If slavery could not be suppressed, it could perhaps be kept out of sight, banished from the nation’s capital, moved ever farther west while displacing the Indians.⁹⁶

The assertion of U.S. preeminence colored discussion of Latin America throughout the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Latin America served as a negative example by which the comparative integrity and achievement of the United States was thrown into sharp relief. Latin American revolutions were smudged carbon copies of the U.S. war for independence; Latin American governments were unsteady and corrupt. From similar beginnings, the United States quickly vaulted ahead of Latin America economically. Preening comparisons with its southern neighbors defined a nation that, however fragmented by politics or sectional interest, was unified by its superiority.

But complicating this easy display of difference was the fact that even as its people scorned Latin American culture, the United States progressively laid claim to Latin American land. No modern reader can escape the conclusion that, when people in the United States discussed Latin America in this, the age of Manifest Destiny, expansionism was frequently the subtext. From the earliest days of the republic, people in the United States looked to the eventual acquisition of territory south of its borders. “Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South is to be peopled,” Thomas Jefferson had written in 1786. “We should take care to not … press too soon on the Spaniards. Those countries cannot be in better hands. My fear is that they are too feeble to hold them till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them peice by peice [sic]. The navigation of the Mississippi we must have. This is all we are as yet ready to receive.”⁹⁷ When the navigation of the Mississippi—as well as the control of the vast Louisiana territory—fell unexpectedly into Jefferson’s grasp seventeen years later, the nation faced the task of absorbing not only land but people they immediately understood as foreign. Massachusetts Federalist Fisher Ames described them as a “Gallo-Hispano-Indian omnium gatherum of savages and adventurers” who could hardly be expected to “sustain and glorify our republic.”⁹⁸ In Louisiana, Washington politicians worked out—often through a process of improvisation—a blueprint for the future addition of non-English territory and non-English people into the national polity. In this project they were aided on the ground by federal administrators and local white Louisianans who saw benefits in incorporation rather than separatism or resistance.⁹⁹

Louisiana similarly established an early precedent of Pandora’s box disguised as fabulous bargain. Rather than sating the desire for further acquisition, the purchase of this territory from France seemed to stimulate the nation’s greed for additional real estate.¹⁰⁰ And out of every acre of newly acquired ground sprang up the same question about its disposition. “The United States’ purchase of Louisiana and the expansion it engendered made slavery the issue of American politics—trumping partisanship, nationalism and nativism, and the tariff.”¹⁰¹

Yet until territory was actually absorbed by the United States, Americans focused not on overcoming the differences they perceived, but expressing and reifying those differences. If anything, comparisons with Latin America in the antebellum republic served to unify and reassure rather than to fracture and provoke. Even as the displacement of domestic conflicts over slavery onto Latin American society provided a safe context in which these issues could be explored, the disparagement of Latin America proved to be something about which many disparate groups could agree. Writers from old families that had settled the original thirteen colonies and immigrants on the western edges of white settlement, black Northern abolitionists and anxious white Southerners, scholars hungering for fame and scribblers trying to earn the cost of their next meal, all found Latin America a convenient tablet upon which to inscribe their ideas about U.S. preeminence. The output of these Americans extended across a variety of disciplines, from sermons to scientific inquiry, from the well-rehearsed speeches of lawmakers to the dashed-off screeds of newspaper squibs, from the low doggerel of third-rate versifiers to the blank verse of five-act dramas. In the antebellum period, congressmen quoted poetry and scientists cited the Bible as evidence; novelists and historians tackled political subjects in their fiction that they knew intimately from their work in politics. The audiences that received this material were similarly diverse.¹⁰²

This book describes the process by which Americans from many backgrounds and with varying agendas redefined their image of Latin America from an immature and somewhat hapless younger brother to an estranged and finally unrelated alien. Latin America’s likeness to the United States could not be entirely denied—its colonial past, its struggles for independence, its efforts at republican reinvention. Some common elements, like the contiguousness of territory, were indeed emphasized; others, like its ancient past, were effectively invented. But the crushing weight of difference was more useful than what was shared, providing the necessary cover for Americans to speak about themselves.

Latin America provided a staging area for dramas that people of the United States preferred to rehearse out of town. Here they tried out in the 1820s the racial attitudes usually associated with Democratic politics of the 1830s. The Panama Congress debates of 1826, for example, included articulations of white arrogance and black unworthiness heard more loudly in the strident 1830s and 1840s. Within this context, the challenges of absorbing a free black population became possible to imagine. Similarly, acknowledging that Manifest Destiny pushed south as well as west, appropriating the property of a fellow sovereign republic as well as the territory occupied by Indian tribes, necessitates a reinterpretation of antebellum expansionism. From this perspective the Texas land grab anticipates the imperialist ambition the United States would demonstrate in the late nineteenth century.¹⁰³ Indeed, the chauvinistic confidence in the rightness of U.S. approaches expressed by the rejection of foreign models is much more characteristic of twentieth-and twenty-first-century America than the apologetic inferiority complex the United States assumed in its comparisons with Europe in the early national period.

Considering the ways Americans discussed their southern neighbors illuminates and complicates many frameworks for understanding the early republic with which historians would do well to engage. Although slavery is the primary concern here, this project necessarily has implications for other historical perspectives of the antebellum United States. Because slavery was so integral to the economy, diplomacy, and reform efforts of the first half of the nineteenth century, recognizing the role played by Latin America in the national imaginary raises new questions and suggests new approaches toward our understanding of the period. Thinking about how Americans displaced their anxieties and conjectures upon Latin America clarifies some of the paradoxes of the Jacksonian era, reveals neglected aspects of the politics of Manifest Destiny, and enriches the modern picture of antebellum nationalism and transnationalism.

In more than one way, this book is all about boundaries. It is most obviously about the physical lines on a map that separated Anglo America from Spanish America, as well as the political and social differences that made Mexico and Cuba and Peru and Brazil so exotic to travelers from the United States. It is also about the boundaries between races and national groups: how did U.S. nationalists insert the hidalgo of obviously mixed race, or the Brazilian soldier of color, into the limited dichotomies of white/black, slave/free with which most people in the United States were comfortable? The period covered in this project is one in which the physical boundaries of the United States were constantly being negotiated, with much of the new territory—Texas, the Mexican cession, the Gadsden Purchase—the former property of Mexico. Just as the mapmakers of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s were busy drawing and redrawing borderlines, Americans of the early republic had to reconsider where their counterparts south of the border belonged in relation to them.

During this period, among the many roles Latin America played for its U.S. neighbors, the most useful was as a window through which could be viewed the vexed and volatile reality of slavery many Americans did not want to discuss openly. Through this window they gazed with condescension at their counterparts failing to live up to the United States standard even as they beheld something at once familiar and foreign, a simulacrum both exotic and uncomfortably recognizable.

Yet sometimes in the unstable reflection of the glass, Americans glimpsed themselves. “The people of the United States are like persons surrounded by mirrors. They may catch their likeness from every quarter, and in every possible light, attitude, and movement,” declared The North American Review in 1838. “Turn we as we may, we catch our reflected features; the vista seems to lengthen at every sight.”¹⁰⁴ Whether the reflection of the United States in the mirror of Latin America was flattering or unsettling, whether it was heeded or ignored, depended upon the circumstances. But in the thirty-five years before the Civil War it consistently served as a measure by which people in the United States judged themselves.