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A New Epoch

          Amon Haile (Jan. 21, 1793-Sept. 6, 1867) lived at a great divide in American history. The implements his family used to make a living from the soil, like their utensils for day-to-day living, were scarcely changed since ancient times. His understanding of the good life was patterned on the Biblical patriarchs.  His ideal of government was still that that of classical Athens.  During this one man's lifetime Robert Fulton launched his steamboat company (1807), Samuel Morse demonstrated the telegraph (1835), John Deere started producing the mouldboard plow (1837), and up the river to Nashville a locomotive was delivered in 1850, so that Middle Tennessee crops no longer went down the rivers to New Orleans, but direct to Atlantic ports. The table fork came into use even in America. The agrarian outlook which had shaped thought and religion for hundreds of generations, which Amon's children and grandchildren still took for granted, was being replaced during his own lifetime.

    Amon was a merchant planter on the Cumberland.  As I wrote this, six generations after Amon, the major issue of my day was much the same as the political-economic focus in Amon's Tennessee.  The word we use for this perennial problem varies.  In 1776, Adam Smith had identified it as "the wealth of nations."  Today, talk is of "globalization."  In Amon's early 19th century, he thought his problem was with "tariffs."

    Import duties were at that time the major source of government revenue.  That was just fine with manufacturers and their workers, since tariffs acted to shield their prices and wages from foreign competition. Today, such protection is the major purpose of import duties.  But the practice is still debated.  The Smoot Hawley tariff is said to have brought about the Great Depression of my childhood. More recently, compromises have been achieved with help from foreign manufacturers.  Furthermore,  the cost of import duties today is diffused among a large, affluent population of "consumers." In Amon's day, on the other hand, tariffs concentrated a double burden on the farm states, which were cash poor, anyhow. On the one hand, tariffs diminished the market for their farm products to be shipped out while at the same time increasing the cost of farm implements shipped in, or anything else Amon might hope to purchase. The confiscatory tariff of 1828 finally brought about a constitutional conflict with far-reaching implications.

    The important American political thinker after John Adams was John C. Calhoun, already congressman and senator when Amon was a young man, then vice president under John Quincy Adams and again under Andrew Jackson. Calhoun recognized that the fundamental political choice cannot be simply between "good" vs. "bad" laws, since opinions will always differ about that. The problem for government lies rather in forging the agreements which legitimize its laws in the first place. A democracy achieves this goal by vesting sovereignty in the people, so that making a decision goes to the majority. This means, so Calhoun concluded, that the fundamental task in a democratic government is to protect the minorities.  In his era, dissenting states constituted the most visible minority. They could not seek shelter from the federal government in the courts, because the judiciary is itself a federal branch.

    Calhoun's idea was that the majority should be compelled, in very important matters, to compromise. He cited the composition of the Senate (by region, not by population) as a Constitutional attempt to accommodate minority opinion.  In the common law, he pointed to the requirement for jury unanimity in capital cases.  Calhoun argued that where a federal law works to the disadvantage of a particular state or region, these should have recourse to a "concurrent majority." By this he meant something like the majority required for ratification or amendment of the Constitution. This was Calhoun's recommendation with any law if it penalized a particular region to the advantage of others.
Liberty vs. Democracy

       In accord with Calhoun's doctrine, his home state of South Carolina "nullified" the Tariff of 1828.  An imperious President Andrew Jackson promptly proclaimed the Force Act of 1830, and Congress followed with a statute enabling Jackson to use military force against the recalcitrant state.  Here Amon's family differed with their beloved president.  Amon was among those Virginians and Tennesseeans who still shared Thomas Jefferson's understanding of state sovereignty.  At the moment, their nation appeared to be following the very different vision of Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall.  The federal government was becoming far more powerful, and ever more apt to use force.   The fateful difference was memorialized in 1830, when Andrew Jackson offered his provocative toast, "Gentlemen, to the Union, it must be preserved."  His vice president, John C. Calhoun, arose responding, "The Union, next to liberty most dear." 

       The divide was between national power and local independence.  Toward the end of Amon's life, Abraham Lincoln famously shifted the problem to one of reconciling liberty with equality.  He spoke of "a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."  Lincoln's occasion was "a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure."   Obviously, Lincoln felt the old arguments about the structure of government (that difference between Hamilton and Jefferson, or between Jackson and Calhoun) could now be ignored--or simply written off as a dead letter.  Already in Jackson's day the nation had shown itself prepared to apply overwhelming force.  Amon would experience the culmination of the new federal power.  He was to learn how a powerful industrial democracy both formulates uniform national policy and enforces it--even on a merchant planter in some remote forest where Avery's Trace met the Cumberland River.

       Old Jackson County papers mention Amon as a young fellow good at judging cattle.  The census records
Amon's birth in the old Watauga (later Washington County, Tennessee), where his father had settled.  As a young man he  joined those settling on the Cumberland River near the recently built Fort Blount.  Among these settlers were people from back up on the Virgina Blue Ridge, and Amon married a girl who had been born not far from Bedford, where Amon's own grandparents had lived.  Lockie, sometimes called "Lockney" (Charlotte [?]), was daughter of Thomas Brown and Nancy Litton, both  from Virginia families as old as the Hailes.  Amon seems to have been a litigious fellow--although this may just be my inference from the greater detail in which records are now preserved.  They reveal Amon at middle age as a well-to-do planter and trader.  He and Lockie raised fifteen children.  That they all survived childhood bespeaks the healthfulness of the frontier for babies born to good mothers.  Before the War, the family prospered.  Dudley became a preacher, Joshua a lawyer, Tom had the store in Flynn's Lick.

        When Amon was struck by a falling tree during a mountain thunderstorm, he had already lived, like his grandfather  (Nicholas of Watauga) and like his grandfather's grandfather (Nicholas of Baltimore), a long life.  From our point of view, Amon managed to span the entire first epoch of United States history.  Born during the administration of the nation's first president, Amon may indeed have had personal memory of George Washington.  Probably the earliest political discussions he could recall were about Thomas Jefferson's bold Louisiana Purchase.  In the eyes of the boy's elders, the country had at that time suddenly become virtually without boundaries.  Of course, young Amon quickly became aware that the vast hinterland was populated by hostile savages, themselves often allied with powerful European empires.  Amon's father had been killed fighting the alliance between Indians and British when he was just sixteen.

        As a young man, Amon could take pride in the nation's growing stature under Presidents Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and then his father's vindicator, the Indian fighter Andrew Jackson, who hanged the British representatives in Florida.  As families like Amon's own continued to come down out of Virginia, the Cumberland became more densely populated.  The nation thrived, Tennessee grew prosperous and, during most of Amon's life, blessedly boring.  It was the halcyon era of obscure one-term presidents:  Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan.  Amon witnessed the whole long line.  Any significant rivalries were between financial and farming interests.  Manufacture and commerce continued to thrive in the northern colonies while the western territories developed their own radically new ways of life.  The question as to whether new states should be aligned with the migrants' predominantly southern culture became a topic for heated national debate.
Cotton
    
          In the deep South, another great change arose during Amon's lifetime.  In the year of his birth cotton was still an exotic, far eastern plant known only experimentally in the American south.  So enormous was the labor required to extract its annoying seeds that cotton did not compete at all with wool and flax.  But in that year, 1793, a gifted Massachusetts teen-ager visiting in South Carolina devised a way to gin the particular variety which could be grown successfully there.  Eli Whitney’s radical mechanization of the tedious labor previously expended on the cotton boll enhanced the crop's economic significance--and stimulated vast new labor requirements for the growing of it.  Negro slavery had hitherto existed in America as the problematic, but transitory personal relationship which it remained in the northern states.  The African trade was abolished early (1808), but where soil and climate favored cotton, the essential field labor was already at hand. Cotton's success revived the despised slave trade.  During Amon's young manhood, he saw huge cotton plantations spread rapidly throughout the south, all the way to the Trinity River in Texas.  Each settlement was predominantly Negro, often with an absentee landowner, so that the only whites were the overseer's family.  That was the case, for example, with the Mississippi acreage purchased and cleared by Amon's fellow Tennessean James K. Polk after he became president.

    Although cotton farming scarcely found its way into Amon's Cumberland hills, the ancillary institution was ubiquitous.  Several of the documents in Amon's file show that Negroes could now constitute an important part of even a tobacco farmer's estate.  In one attempt to recover a bad debt, for example, Amon demands a number of cattle, hogs, etc., but also several Negroes by name.  Another unfortunate record asks the judge to put a "boy" named Jordan into receivership pending resolution of Amon's claim that Jordan's health is not as had been represented by the vendor.  Below are two pages from Amon's complaint:  the first page (of four) scanned so as to include the top, and the last page, with Amon's signature (the rest of the document is also scanned into my files).  In treating an individual as a commodity, Amon is conforming with a practice spread by the rise of King Cotton--even though Amon was himself no cotton grower.  The document strikes us today as touching, because of our natural human tendency to succor those who suffer (as this "boy" is alleged to do, from dropsy and liver problems), and it certainly casts Amon in a very harsh light.





        In the cruelty and gentleness which have ever attended human affairs, slavery was not new.  Indeed, slavery alone had made both ancient and modern civilizations possible.  Historians remind us how at the Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.) slaves and their masters fighting side by side preserved Western civilization against the Persian empire.  But of course we are not dealing here in ancient history, but only with our own recent forebear, and with an institution newly developed in the American colonies.  It remains today a "hot button" issue, seldom discussed apart from current events and current attitudes. 

The Problem of Slavery

        A good guess might be that in sixteenth-century England, where our forebears had lived since time out of mind,  the family regarded themselves as bound to the land and to their feudal status which attached them to it.  Nicholas on the Corotoman probably still saw his own condition in America and that of the servants whom he transported in that traditional way.  After he arrived in Virginia he continued to bring over indentured servants as a part of acquiring more land.  His sons and grandsons continued the practice.  Their servants no longer regarded themselves as bound for life, but were now able at the end of their contract (indenture) to go out and get land of their own.  Landlords thus not only proliferated, but so did their options.  Still, the economy remained focused on the land and the labor.  One can easily trace the the gradual inclusion of slaves, and see how the two forms of servitude overlap in the time of Nicholas of Watauga.        .

      The new element in the day of Nicholas's grandson Amon was, ironically, the advent of a technology which would sustain a civilization--for the first time--without slavery.  Technology, now in the form of a plow, a horse collar or stirrup, now as a compass, gunpowder, or moveable type, now as the steam-driven cotton gin, had continually, throughout history required accommodation and adaptation by the multitudes it affected.  Any advantage seized by one man is at first offset by disadvantages to others, so that change often entails human misery.  Still, benefits from new invention do eventually spread, despite all selfish efforts to the contrary.  In the wake of the cotton gin, however, a radical technological change was concentrated within only one generation, Amon's.  Its advantages were limited at first to the land speculators, developers, and slavers.  Was not judicious, gradual accommodation possible?
 Democracy

        A quick, obvious answer might be that democracy cannot favor disinterested decision making, so that balanced, judicious decisions are exceptional.  Shortly before Amon's birth and just before the invention of the cotton gin, Americans had shaken off the old authoritarianism. Now the telegraph rattled out instant news, the press forced mass decision making.  When cotton slavery in the south aroused widespread emotional revulsion and outcry, especially in Eli Whitney's home state of Massachusetts, the impassioned sentiments quickly proved decisive.

        The America of Amon's youth had been characterized by patient, deliberate compromise among regional interests.  It is true that Andrew Jackson's administration radicalized America's democratic fervor, and James K. Polk's energetic expansion from the Rio Grande to the Pacific had intensified factionalism.  Nonetheless, at the middle of the century Americans were confident and optimistic (in their own view, at any rate--in the view of today's academic historians America was jingoistic, even "racist").  From tidewater colonies, they had by now driven rapidly from coast to coast, first territorially by banishing the British, the French, and the Spanish empires from the continent, then with steamboats on the great waterways, with railroads across the prairies, and finally by telegraph wires strung from town to town.  All this came about during one man's adult years.  Among the famous men also born in 1793 were two who opened up Texas, Sam Houston from Virginia and Stephen F. Austin from Missouri.  President James K. Polk, born not far from Amon in North Carolina and just two years later, annexed Texas, settled the Oregon dispute, and acquired California, to finalize the nation's boundaries from the Gulf of Mexico to Vancouver.  Academic historians continue to quibble whether it was proper for Polk to make such acquisitions.  Their parade example is his contentious, divisive, yet successful and profitable conquest of Mexico.  In Amon's day, this was honestly felt to be America's Manifest Destiny.
North vs. South

        The tragic failure to accommodate America's regional differences did not finally come until Amon was a septuagenarian.  Before President elect Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861, South Carolina, already the most rambunctious when a colony, withdrew from the Union.  Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia quickly followed, but most people were still hoping for settlement by compromise, as had been the case in so many previous sectional disputes.  Amon probably shared the attitude most prevalent in the United States:  uncertainty about the new president, disdain both for the secessionists and for the abolitionists.  People in Amon's Tennessee, as in Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Missouri, saw no good reason to withdraw from the Union (where their family sentiments and their practical interests clearly lay).  Nor could they conceive taking up arms against their neighbors to the south.  Their best hope was that Virginia would lead the upper South in demonstrating a moderate, middle position, making it likely that the seceded states would eventually rejoin the Union.

        The precarious balance was tilted when the confusion surrounding Fort Sumter led to open hostilities on April 12th.  The firing on Sumpter provoked the new president to call up troops on April 15.  That then precipitated secession by Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Arkansas in May.  Within hours Federal troops had invaded Virginia.  At Alexandria, just outside the District of Columbia, a young colonel took down a Confederate flag from over an inn and was shot down by the innkeeper, who was instantly shot, bayonetted, and bludgeoned to death.  The scene portended disaster.

        But still for a year and more Lincoln's generals showed little enthusiasm for inflicting violence across the Potomac.  And farther afield, what might they find to attack?  The last of the Creek and Choktaw had recently been slaughtered by Jackson's troops, their towns in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi burned while Amon was still a young man.  Under Jackson's presidency the Cherokee had been driven down the legendary Trail of Tears into Arkansas, leaving a southern countryside still densely forested and pastoral.  When President Lincoln at last found generals willing to prosecute his attack, there was no defending such a landscape against a developed nation with modern arms.  Even the most passionate resistance was doomed.  Nevertheless, more boys were killed than in any other American war, partly because medical skills were as ineffectual as the Confederacy's antiquated flintlocks.  Amon lived to see his homeland devastated, his children imprisoned, wounded, killed, and scattered.  But he survived the conflict and even lived to see a fellow Tennessean succeed Lincoln as president.
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