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Image: Three Planters. After 1845. Daguerreotype. Unknown photographer.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Accessed July 28, 2026. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/286348
On August 21, 1858, Stephen A. Douglas stood before a crowd in Ottawa, Illinois, and said to them that slavery was not the most important question the country should be considering at that moment.
“There is a far more important one to you,” he said, “and that is, what shall be done with the Negro?”
Douglas wasn’t asking what rights belonged to Black people, not inquiring what obligations the American republic owed them. What he asked was, what white Americans should do with them.
In 1858, the question was hardly a new one.
What should be done with the enslaved Negro? Should he be freed or kept in subjugation. If kept a slave, would he, as his brethren in old Saint Domingue, turn to violence and massacre the whites?
And what should be done with the free Negro?Could he be educated and given the franchise?Was he capable of living alongside white people?Or should he be removed from American soil altogether?
For well over two centuries, White Americans enslaved the Negro; curtailed the liberties of those who managed to escape that dreadful condition; barred him from educating his children or working in decent professions. White people banned the Negro from serving on juries, denied him the right to fair trials, denied him the ballot box, then cast about for evidence that the Negro was uncivilized, a problem in need of a white solution.
They denied the Negro education, yet decried his ignorance; denied him gainful employment, yet mocked him as indolent; broke apart his family but wrote of his licentiousness. The slave was the problem; only the slaveholder could resolve it. The free Negro was the problem, but the government that bound him adjudicated his freedom.
The questions headlined in newspapers and dominated legislatures, pulpits, and classrooms. It inspired political campaigns and scientific treatises. The American Colonization Society spent decades clamoring for the removal of the free Negro, yet not his enslaved countrymen. Pastors exhorted the Negro to be a good slave and not conspire against his master; politicians made him the centerpiece of their campaigns: Physicians measured him and scholars studied him; scientists classified him on a hierarchy of human evolution.
The white American spoke of the Negro as if he had been found wandering inexplicably through the American wilderness, wholly detached from the slave ship hold, the auction block, the Negro codes, slave patrols, and judicial decisions that had rendered edicts on where he could live or where his fortunes lay.
But, before white people had made the Negro a question, they had a history all their own.
They had come in small numbers at first. They had crossed the Atlantic carrying Bibles, royal decrees, muskets, land claims, and unknown diseases. Before them stretched an immense continent already inhabited by nations with established governments and territories, trade and alliances, rivalries, and myriad languages, cultures, and memories extending backwards for a millennia.
Heedless and ignorant of this, the newcomers wanted land.
At first, the white people made agreements , signed documents, and made purchases and boundaries were marked as agreed upon. But then, the boundaries moved and the white man broke the agreements. First, there was a colony., then the colony reached beyond the land agreed upon by the treaty, then the bindings of the next treaty were broken and so on. Slowly, the people who had first inhabited the land were pushed Westward, then Westward again. Fields were seized and hunting grounds were fenced. Villages were set ablaze. Treaties were archived when the treaties the government had guaranteed passed into White hands.
By 1860, white Americans had spread across the breath of the land. They controlled the legislatures, the courthouses, the pulpits, and the Republic’s resources. Thus, they enjoyed the fruits of what generations before them had called by many names: John Winthrop’s providential mission, Jefferson’s “empire of liberty,” Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal, and John L. O’Sullivan’s “Manifest Destiny,” the succession of ideas and policies that, under James K. Polk, eventuated in war with Mexico and the conquest of much of the North American continent.
In February of that year, a man began to excavate the results.
William J. Wilson, journalist and schoolteacher, began writing a treatise under the name “Ethiop” in The Anglo-African Magazine, a Black literary and political magazine founded in New York by Thomas Hamilton. Its pages gave Black writers something rarely allowed them in 19th century American culture: a forum for not only defending black humanity, but for adjudicating America itself.
The journalist began in the manner of the racial theorists whose authority he intended to seize:, “This is,” he wrote, “a grave question, and gravely will we attempt to consider it.” He would study the white people by reviewing their history, inspecting their institutions, examining their collective habits, and determine whether they had shown the quality necessary for Republican governance.
“For many years have they had entire rule and sway,” he observed, “yet they are to-day no nearer the solution of the problem, ‘are they fit for self-government’—than they were at the commencement of their career.” Then came the judgment: “Discontent and disaffection have marked every footstep, and the word ‘failure’ is to-day written on every door-post.”
Wilson began when white rule begun: “The Aborigines,” he wrote, “were the first victims of their cupidity.” He didn’t write of Indigenous dispossession as the inevitable culmination of the meeting of two civilizations. He named the acts: White settlers had “robbed them of their lands, plundered their wigwams, burned their villages, and murdered their wives and children.”
Wilson knew the defense that would follow: some lands had been purchased; some agreements had been made; some treaties bore Indigenous marks alongside European ones. But those purchases, he wrote, were often only “a kind of entering-wedge.” Once the opening had been obtained, “the work of ravage and devastation would commence.”
“Thus, step by step they advanced,” he wrote, “until now they have almost the entire possession of the continent.” They possessed almost everything, yet wanted more. “Restless, grasping, unsatiated,” Wilson called them. They looked not for “what is, or ought to be theirs,” but “for what they can get.” They were, Wilson proclaimed, like pirates who stripped a ship of its treasure and then heaved the captain, crew, and passengers over the side. White Americans wanted “country and government and everything else therein,” but insisted that the rightful owners “vacate and tread the plank in the bargain.”
Possession did not satisfy them; it trained them, for each successful seizure enlarged their appetite for the next. Their ability to take came to stand as evidence of their right to possess. Conquest supplied its own moral vindication. White Americans had fought Britain and won independence, then fought them again in 1812.
They then turned their eyes southwest.
American soldiers crossed into disputed territory claimed by both America and Mexico in 1846 and by September of the next year the American flag flew over Mexico City. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848, ceded over one half of Mexican territory, 525,000 square miles, to the United States: California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and large portions of what became Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming.
Wilson described Mexico as the “weaker and more pacific neighbor” whom white Americans had “most unmercifully beaten,” then stripped of “a large portion of his lands.” Even afterward, he wrote, Mexicans remained “tormented with longings after the balance.”
But, the taking of land was only one page in the record.
Turn the page, Wilson told his readers, and there were ships. In their holds lay bound men, women, and children seized from the nations of Africa, carried across the expanse of ocean, sold in American ports, and condemned to lifelong labor in an unknown land for people who claimed ownership not only of them but of their children not yet born.
Wilson stripped the transaction of the respectable language that had accumulated around it. He did not call it commerce or an inherited institution, a labor system, or, as Jefferson had put it, an unfortunate necessity. He called it stealing. “If we go back to an earlier page in their history,” he wrote, “we find them stealing and appropriating what?” Then he answered the question: “Why, men, women and children from abroad and consigning them to a perpetual bondage; them and their children, and their childrens’ children forever.”
In 1808, Congress banned the legal importation of enslaved Africans into the United States and White Americans rushed to hold up that prohibition as evidence of their progress. But, Wilson was not deceived. He looked inland. The auction blocks remained as did the traders, the pens, the advertisements, and the human bodies in coffles moving southward along the dusty roads. Men and women born in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina were inspected, priced, purchased, chained together, and marched or shipped from Carolina low country into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. Husbands disappeared from wives; children disappeared from mothers and fathers. Nearly a million enslaved people were forced from the Upper South into the expanding cotton and sugar kingdoms during the first half of the nineteenth century.
The ocean route had been closed by law; the market had moved inside the country. The foreign trade had been abandoned, Wilson wrote, “certainly not from any convictions of wrong.” The domestic trade was now “more actively carried on” and yielded “great pecuniary advantages.” For white America, he wrote, that was “sufficient for a full justification of the business.” The wealth to be made settled the moral question. The same society that asked whether Black people possessed the discipline necessary for freedom had built fortunes by stealing their labor. It declared Black people dependent while making its agriculture, credit, commerce, and territorial expansion dependent upon their enslavement.
And still it asked:
What shall be done with the Negro? Should he remain enslaved or should he be freed; should he vote? If allowed to vote, would he corrupt the republic? Could he live among white people or should he be sent back to Africa? White Americans had placed Black people on trial while reserving for themselves the inquisitor’s chair.
Wilson asked the judges to produce their credentials.
The white people had written a Declaration. Its words had crossed the oceans. They reached people living beneath monarchies and aristocracies, people who possessed little political power but who understood the promise before them: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created free and equal; and endowed with certain and inalienable rights; among which are life, liberty, and the pursuits of happiness.” Wilson called these words America’s “four corner stones.” European masses looked toward them with hope; kings looked toward them with fear. Both expected a republic founded upon natural rights to raise what Wilson called “a beacon light” announcing a new age in democratic government.
“Both,” he wrote, “have been disappointed.”
Beneath those words, enslaved people continued working. They worked in fields owned by men who had declared liberty an inalienable right and waited at tables where equality was toasted. They raised the children of men who spoke of government by consent, yet were mortgaged, inherited, and sold alongside livestock, silver, furniture, and land.
This contradiction didn’t disappear as the republic matured; it widened. The American Constitution bound the new nation to slavery in consequential ways. For twenty years, Congress could not prohibit the international trade that carried enslaved people across the Atlantic. A black person who escaped bondage could be legally chased across state lines and returned to enslavement. And, most gallling of all, those held in bondage became a source of political power for the men who held them there. Three-fifths of the enslaved we’re counted in determining representation in Congress. They could not vote, not choose the men who spoke in their name, yet their numbers sent more representatives from the slaveholding states to Washington. The nation denied them a political voice, then used their bodies to amplify the voices of their enslavers.
By the 1850s, some of America’s most influential leaders had moved beyond violating the Declaration to attacking its language. In 1856, Massachusetts lawyer, Rufus Choate, dismissed the Declaration’s natural-rights principles as “glittering and sounding generalities.” That phrase, “glittering, and sounding generalities,” traveled because it gave respectable form to a growing sentiment: that equality was too broad, natural rights too dangerous, and the Declaration too easily cast against slavery.
Wilson seized the phrase. “Scarce three-fourths of a century has passed away since the basis of the government was laid,” he wrote, and already the foremost white leaders were “pulling out the foundation stones thereof and anathematizing them as ‘glittering generalities.’” At America’s founding, white people had proclaimed equality, but practiced slavery. Now many wanted the authority of the founding without the obligation its language imposed. The Declaration of Independence remain behind glass; its sentences could be repeated on anniversaries; and its authors could be carved into marble. But its words could not be permitted to govern. The building could remain, but its cornerstones had to be excavated. Wilson watched the men above continue their work while the structure stood over them: “Dissolution and overthrow,” he wrote, had become “the war-whoop” of their leaders.
The white republic possessed institutions intended to convert conflict into law. Wilson entered them one by one.
First, came the newspapers which he called “the true index of the general mind.” There he found “grumblings, murmurings and moanings,” accompanied by “gross language and shameful vituperation.”
Then came the Congress.
On May 22, 1856, Senator Charles Sumner sat at his desk in the Senate chamber, attaching copies of a speech to be sent through the mail. Two days earlier, he had denounced slavery’s expansion into Kansas and mocked Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, a slaveholder and relative of Representative Preston Brooks. Brooks entered the chamber carrying a cane and vengeance on his mind. He confronted Sumner and struck him across the head. Sumner tried to rise, but his desk was bolted to the floor. Brooks continued striking the Senator until the cane broke. Blood ran over Sumner’s face and he collapsed unconscious. Brooks resigned after the House failed to obtain the two-thirds majority necessary to expel him. His South Carolina constituents congratulated him and returned him to office. Admirers sent him replacement canes.
Two years later, while the House debated whether Kansas should enter the Union under the proslavery Lecompton Constitution, an argument on the chamber floor widened into a floor brawl with more than thirty representatives. Men threw punches and pummeled each other beneath the galleries. The Speaker pounded for order; the sergeant-at-arms raised the House mace, the symbol of congressional authority, above the fighting men.
These were the representatives of the people Wilson was examining. They questioned whether Black Americans possessed the temperament required for citizenship, yet settled political arguments with insults, fisticuffs, and canes. Wilson recorded what he saw in the “Halls of Legislation”: “Fearful quarrels, brutal fights, cowardly assassinations, bludgeons, knives and pistols.” These, he wrote, had become “the chief arguments used.”
The violence hadn’t entered Congress from some faraway, uncivilized place; it had followed slavery into the Capitol. The men who defended mastery outside the chamber carried its habits inside. The political system built upon the right of one man to command another’s body had begun losing the ability to distinguish argument from force.
By the winter of 1859–60, the House couldn’t even choose a Speaker. Old John Brown had been hanged in Virginia on December 2 and Congress assembled three days later. For nearly two months, its representatives argued over slavery, threatened secession, and blocked one candidate after another. Some even arrived armed. Forty-four ballots were needed before Nee Jersey’s William Pennington received the exact number of votes necessary to organize the House. Wilson’s essay appeared as those men were congratulating themselves for having managed, at last, to elect someone to preside over them.
Above the legislature stood the judiciary.
There, the Black American encountered warrants, marshals, statutes, courtrooms, and judges. An enslaved person who reached free soil could still be seized and returned to slavery; a free Black person accused of being a fugitive could be denied the right to testify in his own defense. Federal commissioners received greater pay for ordering an alleged fugitive into slavery than for freeing him.
Then came Dred Scott. He had lived as a slave in Illinois, where slavery was prohibited, and in Wisconsin Territory, where Congress had barred it under the Missouri Compromise. Scott knew his rights and sued for freedom. In March 1857, in Dred Scott v. Sanford, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney proclaimed the Supreme Court’s judgment. Americans of African descent, whether enslaved or free, couldn’t be citizens of the United States within the meaning of the Constitution. Scott therefore had no standing to sue in federal court. Taney went further. Congress, he ruled, had lacked authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. The high court hadn’t merely denied one man his freedom; it made Black exclusion national and permanent. It placed constitutional authority behind the slaveholder’s claim and opened the federal territories to slavery.
Wilson entered what he called the “Judicial Chamber” and found “instead of laws, wicked codes.” “For justice,” he wrote, “we find injustice; for truth, falsehood; for right, wrong.”He described the mechanism exactly: where law might be interpreted toward right or wrong, justice or injustice, humanity or inhumanity, white judges gave “wrong, injustice and inhumanity the benefit of the doubt.” The government then selected “men without scruple and without conscience” to enforce the decision. Thus, injury converted into law; law converted into duty. And moral revulsion against the result was then treated as the irrational impulse that respectable citizens must overcome. “The people,” Wilson imagined the authorities saying, “must be made to conquer their prejudices and accept these proceedings.”
The prejudice to be conquered was sympathy; the injustice to be accepted was slavery.
Then came the men who proclaimed God had ordained the social order.
Churches rose over American cities and towns, their sanctuaries filled with the pious on Sunday mornings. Ministers opened holy bibles and preached scripture; congregations sang hymns, bowed their heads, and listened beneath high ceilings and polished wood. Outside, men and women were sold like cattle; Inside, ministers adjusted the message.
Wilson watched them “cutting and trimming theological garments to suit their various patrons.” The image revealed an entire institution. The cloth was Christianity; its customer sat in the pew. The pastor’s living depended upon making the garment fit. A passage that threatened the slaveholder could be shortened; a command that disturbed the congregation could be softened; a gospel addressed to the slave could be redirected toward obedience to his master. Biblical patriarchs became slaveholders; the curse of Ham became racial history; Paul’s instruction to servants became a defense of the auction block.
By 1860, slavery divided the country’s largest Protestant denominations: in 1844, after a dispute over a slaveholding bishop, the Methodists separated into northern and southern camps; after southern slaveholders demanded recognition as missionaries, the Baptists divided the following year. The churches didn’t stand outside the national conflict and fail to resolve it; they reorganized themselves around it.
Wilson allowed that some ministers tried to preach the gospel of Christ, but they had been raised within a system in which preaching depended upon “bread” and “places of preferment.” They knew “that something is wrong, that a screw is somewhere loose in the general machinery of society,” yet they stood beside that machinery. They didn’t stop it. “They dare not bind what they find loosed,” Wilson wrote, “and they dare not loosen what they find bound.” Their congregations erected “costly and gorgeous temples.” Inside them, Wilson wrote, they created “engines, for generating prejudice and bitter hate against the oppressed, the outcast, and the lowly.” The buildings testified to wealth; the sermons testified to dependence. “They stand,” Wilson wrote, “a powerless, self-condemned body.”
Outside the churches, the country was separating: section faced sectiIon; North faced South.
In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act which allowed white settlers in the western territories to determine whether slavery would enter with them. The measure repealed the restriction set forth in 1820 by the Missouri Compromise and transformed Kansas into a contest for control. Proslavery Missourians crossed the border to vote in territorial elections; antislavery settlers arrived from the North. Rival governments claimed legitimacy while armed bands spread terror in settlements. Buildings burned as men and boys were dragged from their homes and killed.
Congress had called it popular sovereignty, but Wilson looked across the plains and saw graves: “Go with us over the plains of Kansas,” he wrote, “and witness there the recent death struggle between sections of this people for the supremacy of wrong over right.” But he wouldn’t permit northern readers to locate the entire indictment in Kansas or the slaveholding South. He returned eastward, through the “guilded palaces and gorgeous streets” of the cities and into their “low sickening hovels.” He entered the factories of “cold philosophical New England” and “industrious intellectual Massachusetts.” Textile mills far from the plantations consumed cotton cultivated by enslaved hands; northern banks extended credit secured by enslaved property; merchants insured ships and cargoes; newspapers sold advertising space to slave traders and printed notices for fugitives. Then Wilson turned south: There, he wrote, white people tortured men, assaulted women, gathered up children “as calves for the slaughter,” and sold them to the highest bidder.“Witness all this,” he demanded, “and tell us if these things of this people are not true?”
The indictment crossed sectional lines.
The southern slaveholder stood before the bar, but didn’t stand alone, for beside him were the northern manufacturer, the merchant, the judge, the congressman, the editor, and the clergyman. Their profits came through different channels and their arguments used different vocabularies., but each inhabited a republic in which possession, profit, and power were repeatedly permitted to establish their own legitimacy.
The people responsible for this history continued asking: what should be done with the Negro?
But, what Wilson asked was, what should be done with them?
He asked not because whiteness itself carried some biological defect. Wilson’s evidence lay in the record: the villages destroyed, the lands seized; families sold; treaties broken and principles emptied of meaning; courts converted into instruments of bondage; churches accommodating their gospel to their patrons; and legislators reaching for their guns.
What had produced this bitterness, disunion, violence, and fear?
Wilson’s answer was simple: history. “A long continued, extensive, and almost complete system of wrong-doing.”
He compared white America to a pickpocket who persists until theft ceases to be merely an act but a profession. Repetition produces skill; skill produces habit; habit hardens the offender. “They commenced,” Wilson wrote, “with the plunder of the Indian, theft of the African, followed by the grossest wrongs upon the Africo-American, and broils with their neighbors without, and stripes among themselves within.” Thus, the sequence: indigenous land seized; African people stolen; Black labor converted into property; territory taken through war; then the violence turned inward.
By 1860, white Americans were “grappling each other by the throat for opinion sake.” In parts of the South, a white man who spoke openly against slavery risked exile, assault, or death. Antislavery newspapers were suppressed; mobs attacked speakers; and books disappeared from the mails. Wilson described a society in which “honesty and truth” were tolerated only when they were “of a certain character.” Lies, when it served the established order, marched openly. “We have triumphed!” they cried.
Wilson looked toward the destination: “barbarism.” He didn’t mean the absence of machinery, wealth, literacy, or scientific knowledge, for near the end of the essay, he credited white Americans for their “material progress.” They had built factories, canals, the railroads, cities, churches, and a continental republic. But material progress had increased the reach of the governing habit without correcting it.
A wealthy nation could still be barbarous and a republic could still be barbarous. The measure was what it did with power. Even in New York, where Wilson lived and taught, Black citizenship remained conditional. White men could vote without owning property, yet black men were required to possess real estate worth $250, a barrier most could not overcome, for it was in a state whose laws and customs restricted their economic opportunities. Later in 1860, New York voters would reject a proposal to remove that racial qualification.
The white electorate continued judging whether black men were prepared for political equality while exempting itself from any corresponding examination. Their violence was called government; their conquest called settlement; their acquisitiveness was called enterprise; their theology called Christianity; racial interest was called the national interest. Blackness was made visible as a condition needing investigation; whiteness disappeared into authority.
Wilson brought it back into view.
What, then, should be done?
White colonizationists had insisted that racial conflict necessitated that, for the good of all, free black Americans had to be removed from the republic. The American Colonization Society presented deportation as benevolence: free Black people would leave the land of their birth, settle somewhere in Africa, and solve the contradiction their presence supposedly created. But, the slave was left to his fate.
Wilson applied the same logic to the people who had created the conflict. Perhaps the white people should be removed. They were restless; they disturbed the peace; they demanded land they couldn’t occupy; they fought their neighbors and one another. Their presence became a danger to the republic.
Wilson carried the reversal to that point. Then he stopped. “Plans for the removal of these white people,” he wrote, like the schemes they had devised “for the removal of others out of their midst,” would be “wrong in conception, and prove abortive in attempt.” Even if forcible removal were possible, it shouldn’t be done. “It is their right to stay.”
Wilson granted white Americans the principle they had refused to grant Black Americans: the right to belong. But the sentence continued: they had no right “to jeopard the interest or the peace of the country.” America wasn’t the exclusive possession of one race: Wilson imagined it as a land where people “of every tongue, and clime and hue, should gather” and “perfect their development.” This was not a Black claim to replace white supremacy with another racial monopoly. Wilson placed a limit around his satire. The white people possessed a right to remain, but not a right to make everyone else’s belonging conditional upon their consent.
For generations, Black Americans worked, waited, and endured while white authorities insisted that racial progress required more time. But, Wilson reversed that history. Black people, he wrote, had “labored long and faithfully with little or no remuneration.” They had been “patient, under every trial” while waiting for white Americans “to redeem themselves,” “retrieve their past errors,” and “return to a sense of right.” Black Americans, pressed into a narrow space, had made what life they could within it. But , the white people remained dissatisfied: “Possessing acres by the millions,” Wilson wrote, “yet they would elbow us and all others off of what we possess, to give them room for what they cannot occupy.”
Their demand remained unchanged: “We want this country…for ourselves, and ourselves alone.”
What right, Wilson asked, did they possess to make such a claim? Only the right of might.
He gave them “high credit for their material progress,” and granted that, perhaps, after carrying the arts and sciences to their highest point, they would “make way for a milder and more genial race.” Perhaps they would blend with other peoples until they lost their “peculiar and objectionable characteristics.”
Wilson had already placed those characteristics in evidence: the appetite for land; the conversion of profit into moral authority; use of the law to protect injustice; tailoring Christianity to power; the insistence that possession proved fitness to rule. These were not qualities Wilson found in white blood; they had been produced by a history of conquest and impunity. White Americans had repeated domination until it became habit, then named the habit, civilization.
For generations, they had searched the history of Black people for evidence of unfitness. Wilson searched white history. He cast his gaze toward the continent they had stolen; the people they had enslaved; the Declaration they had hollowed out; the legislature where they fought with weapons; the court that placed slavery under constitutional protection; the churches that altered Christianity to satisfy their white patrons; and the bloodlands of Kansas where they feuded.
Wilson then asked whether the people responsible for this record had shown themselves fit to govern anyone, including themselves. His final question changed the terms of the debate:
“What for the best good of all shall we do with the White people?”
Fourteen months later, Confederate artillery opened fire on Sumter. The “discontent and disaffection” Wilson traced through white history became secession; the threats of dissolution became a new government organized to protect slavery; the canes, bludgeons, knives, and pistols of political argument gave way to armies.
White politicians spent decades searching for the answers to the problem.
What do we do with the slave?
What to do with the free Negro?
Wilson looked at the ones who asked the questions.
And found the crisis there.
Of course, there are no moving images of what what white Southerners used to call, “the way of things down here.” But, that way of life lingered long into the future. Narrated by George Foster and produced by CBS, this short film explores the truemeaning of, “the southern way of life.”
Folks, if you found this history useful, please read more of it on this newsletter and others like it so we can better understand the roots of the black struggle in America and beyond. Please consider a paid or free subscription or share, like, or comment. I greatly appreciate it.
Intellectual Map
Primary Sources
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