147 enslaved Africans — which then came under his control. The land initially produced $600 in wealth, but increased to $21,000 with his highly controlling measures. He wrote down how enslaved children were to be fed and how they were to be named, what enslaved people were assigned to do, as well as the punishments to be administered to those who opted to flee from his plantations scattered along the Savannah River in South Carolina, including Redcliffe, which today is preserved as a historic site. He was a wealthy and influential South Carolina planter and politician who advocated for maintaining slavery through what he referred to as the Mudsill Theory.
In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the common “consent of mankind,” which, according to Cicero, “lex naturae est.” The highest proof of what is Nature’s law. We are old-fashioned at the South yet; slave is a word discarded now by “ears polite;” I will not characterize that class at the North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal. The Senator from New York said yesterday that the whole world had abolished slavery. Aye, the name, but not the thing; all the powers of the earth cannot abolish that. God only can do it when he repeals the fiat, “the poor ye always have with you;” for the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and “operatives,” as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street in any of your large towns. Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South. We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations. Yours are white, of your own race; you are brothers of one blood. They are your equals in natural endowment of intellect, and they feel galled by their degradation. Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than “an army with banners,” and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided, not as they have mistakenly attempted to initiate such proceedings by meeting in parks, with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box. You have been making war upon us to our very hearthstones. How would you like for us to send lecturers and agitators North, to teach these people this, to aid in combining, and to lead them?
“The ‘Mudsill’ Theory,” by James Henry Hammond. Speech to the U.S. Senate, March 4, 1858.
While this “theory” is attributable to Hammond, it may well have informed and been informed by the Southern gentry, the eventual Confederate South, about what was important, about how to be religiously observant and a slave owner at the same time, and about how important and necessary their efforts were in moving American civilization forward. It was about the need for land, labour, and products, that is, for power to remain in the hands of those who were already powerful — that meant wealthy, white Southern men. With this type of entrenched view, how else but through war could there be a change in the United States at that time?
John Brown visited St. Catharines with J.W. Longuen in April 1858. John Brown arrived in Chatham on April 29, 1858, to recruit men to end slavery and overthrow the American government. As a white abolitionist, he envisioned surprise attacks being made against plantations from bases in the Appalachians. He felt that slaves freed in this manner would join his trained group, continue attacking plantations, and freeing other slaves until finally setting up a new provisional government. Brown recruited in Chatham, Buxton, Ingersoll, Hamilton, and Toronto and was feeling confident of his support when he met Harriet in St. Catharines. Brown found a black printer in St. Catharines and gave him the provisional constitution to reproduce. Brown asked Harriet to bring as many fugitives to join the pending battle as she could and to be the chief guide to Canada for the many who would want to settle there after the war was waged and won. Brown said that Harriet Tubman was “the most of a man naturally; that [he] ever met with.” Brown was greatly impressed with Tubman and referred to her in the male gender as a sign of his admiration for her proven military skill. He advised his son by letter that “General Tubman” had hooked her “whole team” to his cause — Harriett assured Brown of her support. However, when the time came to help, Harriet was unable to come to Brown’s assistance due to her illness. Harriet later realized that a recurring dream of hers seemed to mean that Brown and his sons would die in this conflict. Harriet later is known to have said that Brown died because he was too impatient.
With the failure at Harpers Ferry came the death of John Brown, and the heightening of the tensions between slave owners and abolitionists. From A Voice From Harper’s Ferry written by Osborne Anderson (and edited by Mary Ann Shadd), the only black from Canada to join John Brown on the raid and the only one to survive, we know that John Brown’s raid did not go according to plan. A white recruit from Chatham defected and told of the plans, which caused a delay in the raid. Communication problems prevented the maximum number of attackers from getting to the area in time (only twenty were in the raid), whites were being released rather than imprisoned or killed, and they warned others so that by the time John Brown and his party reached their target they were ambushed and hung after a court trial. Their bodies were then fed to pigs instead of being buried.
While there had been at least 250 slave revolts in the United States by the time of Brown’s raid, his was one of the first that had white leadership and international support. He raised white fears, forced people to take a stand on slavery, and widened the gap between northern, anti-slavery industrial views and southern, pro-slavery agricultural views. It marked a significant turning point in relations between the Union and the Confederacy which culminated in the American Civil War.
George Stearns - Frank Sanborn
Theodore Parker - Gerrit Smith
Thomas Wentworth Higginson - Samuel Gridley Howe
These men were known as the “Secret Six.”
Harriet was too ill to come to John Brown’s aid because she had spent the spring of 1859 recruiting throughout New England until the point of exhaustion, one of the only black women to do so. She was recuperating in New Bedford when the raid on Harpers Ferry occurred. As soon as she was able, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and three members of the “Secret Six” — the white, northern abolitionists who helped to finance Brown’s work — Franklin B. Sanborn, George L. Stearns,
