Transcript
The Fifth
1852
JULY 5 · 1852
In Rochester, New York, the posters promised a Fourth of July oration. The speaker gave it on Monday, the fifth.
The Fourth fell on a Sunday that year. Rochester already had a reason to remember the fifth. On July 5, 1827, Rochester's Black community had gathered to celebrate the end of slavery in New York.
Five or six hundred people paid twelve and a half cents each to hear Frederick Douglass. Nearly fourteen years earlier, he had escaped from slavery in Maryland.
Frederick Douglass What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?
Frederick Douglass This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.
Frederick Douglass What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?
Frederick Douglass I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
In the 1850s, the North and the South looked like two countries. They were tied together more tightly than either side liked to admit. And they were pulling apart.
South Street
1855 (and 1861)
New York, spring 1855. On South Street, ships' bowsprits reach right across the road. No port in the country handled more goods.
Two ships have just tied up at neighboring piers. One came from Liverpool. One came from New Orleans.
Cotton came in from New Orleans and went out to Liverpool on the packets that had brought emigrants.
New York's merchants and banks lent planters money against the next crop, then shipped and insured the bales.
In January 1861, with South Carolina already out of the Union, New York's mayor had an idea.
Fernando Wood As a free city, with but nominal duty on imports, her local Government could be supported without taxation upon her people.
Fernando Wood In this she would have the whole and united support of the Southern States…
A Northern mayor had said out loud what cotton was worth to his city.
The Newcomers
1845–1855
In September 1845, a blight began rotting Ireland's potatoes in the ground.
For the poorest families, potatoes were almost all they ate. About a million people died.
Frederick Douglass was lecturing in Ireland that autumn.
Frederick Douglass …I know the cause of humanity is one the world over.
About two million people left Ireland in ten years, most of them for America.
Margaret McCarthy wrote home from New York in 1850. She sent twenty dollars with the letter.
Margaret McCarthy …Come to this plentiful Country where no man or woman ever Hungered or ever will…
Margaret McCarthy …there are Dangers upon Dangers Attending comeing here…
Most of the Irish stayed where they landed: poor, Catholic, and taking the hardest jobs.
They built parishes, some with services in Irish. By the 1850s, Irish voters were a power in New York's Tammany Hall.
In the 1850s almost as many Germans came: farmers, craftsmen, and some Forty-Eighters, refugees from the failed 1848 revolutions.
By 1855, only Berlin and Vienna had more German speakers than New York. Its Kleindeutschland had churches, newspapers, singing clubs and lager beer.
Together, the Irish and Germans made up about seven in ten immigrants.
About twenty thousand Chinese reached California in 1852 alone. In San Francisco they built temples to Tin How, goddess of the sea.
In 1854 alone, 427,833 immigrants arrived. Most of them settled in the North.
I Know Nothing
1844–1856
Many native-born Protestants blamed newcomers for low wages, crowded slums and crooked city politics. Some of that had a basis.
Others feared that Catholics took orders from the Pope. That part was fantasy.
In 1844, Philadelphia rioted over which Bible Catholic children could read in school. Mobs burned two churches in May.
On July 5, the day after a nativist parade, a crowd surrounded a third church. Militia and rioters fired cannon at each other.
More than twenty people died in the two riots.
Nativists organized a secret society, the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. Asked about it, members answered, 'I know nothing.'
So everyone called them the Know-Nothings.
Their American Party wanted immigrants to wait twenty-one years for citizenship. Its slogan: Americans must rule America.
In 1854 they swept Massachusetts: the governor, every state senator and nearly every representative.
That same legislature banned segregated schools and defied the Fugitive Slave Act. In the North, nativism and antislavery often traveled together.
In 1854, someone stole the marble block the Pope sent for the Washington Monument. Nativists got the blame.
Know-Nothings soon took over the monument's society. Work stalled for more than twenty years. You can still see the line.
A California jury convicted George Hall of murdering a Chinese miner, Ling Sing. In 1854 the state Supreme Court threw out the verdict.
Hugh C. Murray The same rule which would admit them to testify, would admit them to all the equal rights of citizenship,
Hugh C. Murray and we might soon see them at the polls, in the jury box…
Chinese witnesses could not testify against a white man. Hall went free.
In 1856 the Know-Nothings ran Millard Fillmore for president and carried one state. By then they had split over slavery.
A Light in the Window
1843–1856
On July 4, 1854, in Framingham, Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution. He called it “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” because it protected slavery.
William Lloyd Garrison So perish all compromises with tyranny!
Douglass disagreed.
Frederick Douglass …take the constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single proslavery clause in it.
Abolitionists were a small minority in the North, and impossible to miss.
Black abolitionists led much of this fight. In 1843, Henry Highland Garnet told enslaved people to act for themselves.
Henry Highland Garnet Let your motto be RESISTANCE! RESISTANCE! RESISTANCE!
The convention rejected his call by one vote. Douglass spoke against it.
Martin Delany, a doctor and editor, urged emigration instead.
After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, no free state was safe. The goal became Canada. The Underground Railroad was people, many of them Black, guiding others north.
Harriet Tubman, who escaped Maryland in 1849, went back about thirteen times and led about seventy people out.
At Ripley, Ohio, the river was the line between slavery and freedom. People remembered a light in the Rankin family’s window on the hill.
John P. Parker A lighted candle stood as beacon which could be seen from across the river,
John P. Parker and like the north star was the guide to the fleeing slave.
John Parker, an iron-founder who had bought his own freedom, went into Kentucky himself to bring people out.
Some were ready to fight. In 1851, at Christiana, Pennsylvania, Black neighbors armed themselves against a Maryland slaveholder hunting four men. He was killed. Dozens were charged with treason. None was convicted.
Two Cabins
1851–1853
Harriet Beecher Stowe lived eighteen years in Cincinnati, across the river from Kentucky. After the Fugitive Slave Act, she started a novel in weekly installments.
In the novel, Eliza carries her son across the Ohio on floating ice.
Harriet Beecher Stowe The incident of the mother's crossing the Ohio river on the ice is a well-known fact.
Uncle Tom's Cabin sold about three hundred thousand copies in America in its first year. Defenders of slavery answered with some two dozen novels of their own.
By the fall of 1853, four books about slavery sat on one New York counter.
Two are novels and two are nonfiction. All four claim to tell the truth. So ask who wrote each one, for whom, and why.
Cotton Is King
1851–1858
The first census, in 1790, counted fewer than 700,000 enslaved people. By 1860, nearly four million people were enslaved.
In 1857 a financial panic closed banks and idled factories across the North. The cotton South bounced back within a year.
In the Senate, James Henry Hammond of South Carolina drew the lesson.
James Henry Hammond No, you dare not make war on cotton.
James Henry Hammond No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.
James Henry Hammond In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.
In the South, that meant enslaved people. In the North:
James Henry Hammond …your whole hireling class of manual laborers and 'operatives,' as you call them, are essentially slaves.
Defenders dressed racial theories up as science. In 1851, Dr. Samuel Cartwright invented a disease for enslaved people who ran away: drapetomania.
Calhoun had called slavery a positive good. In 1857 George Fitzhugh of Virginia went further.
George Fitzhugh The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.
Two of the people he described had already told their side in print. Solomon Northup, in 1853. Frederick Douglass, in 1852.
Above all, defenders said the Constitution was on their side. It counted three-fifths of enslaved people toward Congress and required escaped people to be returned.
Enslaved people were property, they argued, and slavery was each state's business.
In the North, Hammond's word 'mudsill' landed like a slap. Workers organized Mud-Sill Clubs and turned the word into a badge.
Free Soil
1846–1859
The North ran on wages. And by 1860, its railroads tied Midwestern farms to New York, not New Orleans.
In 1859 Abraham Lincoln answered the mudsill theory.
Abraham Lincoln The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself;
Abraham Lincoln then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.
Free labor needed free land, so the West mattered. David Wilmot wanted slavery banned from every acre won from Mexico. He said why:
David Wilmot I plead the cause and the rights of white freemen.
Free-soilers wanted to stop slavery's spread. Many also wanted the West free of Black people. Indiana, Illinois and Oregon barred free Black people from settling.
Some Northerners objected on principle. Charles Sumner blamed his own state's mill owners for backing the planters:
Charles Sumner …between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.
That August, antislavery Whigs, Democrats and abolitionists met in Buffalo and formed the Free Soil Party. By 1856, many of its voters were Republicans.
So North and South were now fighting over the same place: the West, and who would work it.
With Hope
1852 · 1854
Back in Rochester, the speech was nearly over. Douglass had called the celebration a sham.
Frederick Douglass I do not despair of this country.
Frederick Douglass I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope.
Earlier, he had used a shipyard word.
Frederick Douglass I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the RINGBOLT to the chain of your nation's destiny; so, indeed, I regard it.
In 1854, Congress let settlers in Kansas and Nebraska decide on slavery, erasing the old Missouri line. Every argument in this film got louder.