On 9 February 1825, the outgoing President James Monroe attended a dinner with his successor, president-elect John Quincy Adams – son of the second president – and his defeated rival, a rough frontier general named Andrew Jackson, in honour of the visiting marquis de Lafayette at which Bolívar was toasted as the ‘Washington of South America’. But their toasts to American liberty scarcely concealed the rising tensions between the spirit of continental conquest, Christian mission and the institution of slavery on one hand and the liberal values of American democracy on the other.
The abolitionists of the northern states tried to stop the slave owners of the south from extending slavery into the new states. Between 1820 and 1830, cotton production doubled in the south, requiring more slave labour. The slave trade had been banned, which meant that slaves were no longer worked to death and replaced; slaves lived longer and had children, making the trade less urgent. But the cruelties were no less atrocious as around 875,000 slaves were ‘sold down the river’ (the Mississippi, transported in steamships or coffles on foot) to toil in the cottonfields. But American slaves were inspired by the liberations achieved by Bolívar and Dessalines. Southern slave owners presented themselves as a courtly aristocracy in pillared mansions, but the genteelness was skin-deep, founded on racial violence – rebellions were savagely crushed. At the same time their culture of human ownership diminished their work ethic; they never invested in industry, and thus the enslaved society bore the seeds of its own defeat.
In 1820, a compromise was negotiated by which Maine as a non-slavery and Missouri as a slavery state joined the Union. ‘We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go,’ Jefferson reflected.* ‘Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.’ The compromise, ‘like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union … hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only.’
Lafayette went on to Monticello to see Jefferson, and the two burst into tears as they hugged. Jefferson showed Lafayette around his university of Virginia, which he had designed as an invitation to youth to ‘come and drink of the cup of knowledge’. Yet his remodelled Monticello and his university campus were built by slaves, a fact that made Lafayette uneasy. On 4 July 1826, Jefferson died aged eighty-three, manumitting Madison and Eston, his two younger children with Sally (the two eldest children having already left Monticello) but not formally freeing Sally herself, and leaving catastrophic debts of $100,000 that led not just to the sale of Monticello but to the tragic auctioning of his slaves and the break-up of their families. Patsy, Jefferson’s daughter, allowed Sally to live in Charlottesville with Madison and Eston until she died. The two older Hemings children identified as white, and the younger ones as black, and they vanished into those two communities.
It was the end of a certain sort of America. Yet Lafayette also visited a very different sort of hero – General Jackson, at his Hermitage plantation in Tennessee. He represented the brash aggression of the frontier and the realm of King Cotton who sent his harvests to the Cottonopolis of Britain.
That spirit of liberty was abroad. Even affluent, victorious Britain seemed close to turmoil: protests seethed; armed rebellions were planned in Yorkshire and Shropshire; conspirators devised terrorist atrocities.
ROMANTICS AND THE MODERN NATION: LORD BYRON’S GREEK ADVENTURE AND BEETHOVEN’S NINTH
Lord Liverpool feared a British revolution. Britain was far from a democracy: around 400,000 men, a small proportion of the male population, enjoyed the vote. Grandees owned tiny ‘rotten boroughs’ that selected MPs: one estimate was that, of 515 MPs, 351 were chosen by 177 grandees. A typical rotten constituency, Higham Ferrers, owned by Earl Fitzwilliam, had only one voter, yet sent an MP to Westminster.
The movement for reform was propelled by the growth of the industrial cities. Manchester was the Cottonopolis and a dystopian ‘chimney of the world’. Every human invention has both improved life and endangered humanity and the environment: the factories created a new environment, a harsh, smoking and cruel world of ‘dark satanic mills’ for a new working class. As a visitor later put it, ‘Rich rascals, poor rogues, drunken ragamuffins and prostitutes form the moral; soot made into paste by rain, the physique, and the only view is a long chimney: what a place! The entrance to hell realised.’*
