Page 120 →Putting John Calhoun to Rest

The Northern Imagination and Experience of a Charleston Slave Mart

Michael Emett

“If it had not been for Mr. Beecher, there would have been no Oceanus voyage,” claimed Stephen M. Griswold, a Brooklyn jeweler and congregant of the Plymouth Church.¹ Writing about the expedition of northerners aboard the steamer Oceanus in April 1865 to attend the return of the American flag to Fort Sumter, Griswold admitted that it was the appointment of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher as the event’s keynote speaker that led him and at least one hundred eighty people to head to Charleston.² The Oceanus travelers constituted only a fraction of the approximately three thousand people who filled the ruined fort to celebrate the flag re-raising.³ Their experiences, however, illuminate the northerners’ experience in the “cradle of secession” immediately after the Civil War. Visiting Charleston made the imagined institution of slavery tangible, even visceral. Using the “History of Experience” approach developed by Robert Boddice and Mark M. Smith, in this essay, I seek to recreate the sensory experiences of the Oceanus passengers as they traveled through war-ravaged Charleston and visited the grave of John C. Calhoun, which some of the travelers defaced.

The History of Experiences approach allows us to weave together the senses and emotions with other facets of historical investigation, including material culture, gender, intellectual and political issues, animal history, and foodstuff. This approach treats historical actors in their own terms and contexts, refraining from presentism epistemologies that impose modern values and sensibilities on past events. Boddice and Smith, scholars of emotions and the senses, respectively, remind us that historical actors are “biocultural historical artifacts” situated in lived experiences, which we should reconstruct as contextually as possible. Analyzing the emotions and senses as these actors understood them becomes the foundation for fleshing out what particular experiences meant to the people who were present.⁴

When the passengers of the Oceanus arrived in Charleston, they experienced a city undergoing a remarkable transformation as the enslaved Black people became free and the wealthy white citizens became impoverished. Page 121 →Slavery was officially gone, but its vestiges remained. For many of these travelers, who were essentially tourists, these remnants of slavery, along with the sensory experiences of the city itself, were defined by their earlier experiences with printed texts and Henry Ward Beecher’s “freedom auctions,” dramatic recreations of slave auctions, which were performed in northern churches and city buildings to advance the abolitionist cause. The fictional and the authentic merged in immediate and emotional ways for the northerners, assuring them that John Calhoun’s ghost, which had haunted the North long after his death, was now safely buried in St. Phillip’s cemetery.

As soon as word reached Washington, DC, that General William T. Sherman’s forces had captured Charleston in February 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton began preparing a celebratory ceremony.⁵ They designed the event to focus on reraising the same American flag that was lowered from Fort Sumter during the evacuation of April 14, 1861, purposefully choosing to hold the ceremony on the four-year anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War.⁶ In New York City, semiretired Brevet Major General Robert Anderson, who endured more than thirty-four hours of severe bombardment at Fort Sumter in 1861, was ordered to reraise that flag he had since secured in a mailbag and bank vault.⁷

Stanton and Lincoln invited northern governors, legislators, Supreme Court justices, military leaders, and prominent individuals, including General Ulysses S. Grant and Vice President Andrew Johnson. Many northern civilians also garnered tickets and passes to attend.⁸ With Lincoln’s selection of Brooklyn-based Reverend Henry Ward Beecher of the congregationalist Plymouth Church, many more northerners desired to go, especially his congregants. Persuading Stanton for more passes, these congregants formed a committee and secured the Oceanus steamship and over one hundred eighty passes. Hundreds of other congregants wished to attend the ceremony but were unable to do so because of limited space.⁹ The committee planned stops in Virginia and North Carolina on their return trip to Brooklyn.¹⁰ The committee also hired a band to provide entertainment. Baptist music composer William Bradbury used his time onboard to test his new song, “Victory at Last!,” which he performed during the flag reraising ceremony.¹¹

The passengers of the Oceanus included ministers, businessmen, local politicians, churchgoers, and a few military veterans and active-duty officers. Many belonged to the Plymouth Church and were staunch antebellum abolitionists.¹² Beecher, an internationally recognized abolitionist minister known for his dramatic, charismatic oratory, had made Plymouth Church the central hub of New York’s Underground Railroad.¹³ Beecher had endeared Page 122 →himself to Lincoln, first by inviting him to speak in Brooklyn, which played a pivotal role in his 1860 presidential victory, and later for defending the war effort while in England in 1863.¹⁴ The American minister to England, Henry Adams, reported to Lincoln that Beecher’s efforts in important industrial cities, including Liverpool, Manchester, and Edinburgh, had “done more for our cause in England and Scotland than all that has been before said or written.” Lincoln agreed, writing, “If the war was ever fought to a successful issue, there would be but one man—Beecher—to raise the flag at Fort Sumter, for without Beecher in England there might be no flag to raise.”

Adams and Lincoln recognized the role Beecher played in keeping England out of the Civil War. Indeed, tensions between England and the Union had been high since the Trent affair of 1861 when the US Navy boarded a British vessel carrying Confederate statesmen to England. Insulted, Parliament prepared for a vote to respond, even to the point of declaring war on the United States. If not for Prince Albert’s timely cool head prevailing, shortly before his death, England might have intervened at that time. The underlying tension between the two nations, however, remained and became especially high in 1863 when the Union imposed a naval blockade on the South, creating a “cotton famine” that threatened British industrial cities and pushed thousands of workers into unemployment and poverty. According to Applegate, Beecher had originally not wanted to speak on anything political while in England, but threats from detractors, the urging of his British supporters, and the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg prompted him to undertake a series of lectures, which doubtlessly encouraged England to stay out of the war.¹⁵

The Oceanus and its passengers left for Charleston on April 10.¹⁶ Their most profound experiences with the institution of enslavement, however, took place after the April 14 flag ceremony. What they had heard, read, and imagined for years from Beecher and others was now material. They encountered freed slaves on the streets and in gatherings, entered an abandoned slave market, and stood before the resting place of the Father of Secession, John C. Calhoun.

On April 15, Beecher, Oceanus passengers, and many others gathered at Zion’s Presbyterian Church, which stands near the original location of The Citadel, for the “Freedmen Meeting.”¹⁷ Before the war, the white church allowed owners to bring enslaved people to worship and provided a communal space for the city’s freed and enslaved Black populations. With the war over and emancipation ensured, the church became a site of celebration. An estimated three thousand freedmen gathered at the church, spilling Page 123 →over into the nearby grounds of The Citadel, to listen to several speakers, including William Lloyd Garrison, George Thompson, Martin Delaney, General Rufus Saxton, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania Representative Judge William Kelley.¹⁸ About halfway through this celebration, another one formed spontaneously in Citadel Square, drawing away much of the crowd and some of the speakers.¹⁹ According to Beecher’s account and those of the Oceanus passengers, several such meetings took place. Beecher, for example, preached a sermon at the same church the next day.²⁰ With these gatherings, Charleston proper had become an extension of the celebration at Fort Sumter the day before.²¹

During the initial meeting on April 15, Oceanus passenger J. L. Leonard recorded a touching scene with an older gentleman and his family.Seeing “an old negro” about “seventy years of age,” Leonard noticed how the old man “was much too absorbed in the spectacle.”²² As Mr. Leonard tried conversing with him, he noticed his “wooden leg,” and noted, “I went up and inquired how he lost his leg” only to see tears rolling down the man’s face and hearing him exclaim, “‘My God! My God! what a sight’” and “‘Peace! Peace!’” A loud noise, however, interrupted the old man’s excitement: “[H]earing the report of a fire-arm,” he “startled up in alarm, asking ‘What’s that?’ his thoughts going back to former days.”²³ Mr. Leonard, unable to get the man to escape the present moment, was aware that the report of the firearm caused the older man’s mind’s ear to recall the violence of southern slavescapes. He recognized the significance of the report because similar sounds were used at abolition gatherings to inform northern audiences of southern sounds that instilled fear in the enslaved.²⁴

The old man then “turned his attention again to his children, and was so completely overcome that it was some time before he could reply” to Leonard’s question. Nevertheless, it was the scene of “intense interest manifested by this poor old man” that made a “strong impression” upon Leonard, who found it “an illustration of the peculiar emotional nature of that race, of which I had often heard, but which I had never before seen.”²⁵ Leonard’s words reveal that his perceptions were shaped by what he had previously heard or read about Blacks’ “emotional nature.” It demonstrates a northern reformist disconnect, innocent or not, toward those they labored to free. Charleston may have offered Leonard his first in-the-flesh experience with a formerly enslaved person. His presuppositions, however, caused him to recognize the profound meaning of the past. The old man, aware of his wooden leg, seemed to recall his slave past only through the sound of the gunshot.²⁶ Still, the present experience of being with family, all now free, awaiting to Page 124 →hear the words of those who helped free them, overpowered the pain of the past and what it took from him. Noticing the man’s “intense interest” for his now-free family, Leonard recognized the future was overwhelming both the past and present. The opportunities now realized generated hope and happiness for the old man.²⁷

On another day, the Oceanus passengers found themselves along Chalmers and State streets, possibly retracing the path of Union war correspondents James Redpath, Charles Coffin, and Kane O’Donnell in February. The group passed several stores, some having reopened with meager supplies, and a few firms. Members of the group claimed that some of those firms owed them money. One was said to “owe us money in sums from one thousand to eleven thousand dollars,” while another firm located on Broad Street owed a member of the group “over a thousand dollars!”²⁸ These comments demonstrate the financial connections between North and South, especially for New Yorkers. It was, however, “the slave-mart that attracted the most attention, especially, “the veritable slave pens in which families were kept, at the auction block, separated forever.”²⁹ For the visitors standing in the defunct, unnamed mart, the building’s emptiness and silence testified that “the day of traffic in human flesh is past–the dreadful marts are closed, and the wail of their agonized victims will never be heard in the streets of Charleston.”³⁰ Entering the mart’s jail, the travelers noticed the “dark dungeons and instruments of torture” used to perpetuate the “obsolete institution [of slavery] destined to become so throughout every State of the free Republic.”³¹

As we will see, these northerners imagined the slave marts, jails, and auction sites through the experiential machinations of abolitionism. These intersensorial tactics included visual and tactile means found through literature, photography, the oral and aural experiences from lecture halls and speaking circuits given by freed slaves and fugitives, and Beecher’s own dramatic freedom auctions, which were performed from 1848 to 1860 to raise money to emancipate enslaved persons. Collectively, these abolitionist tools provided the multisensory lenses through which many onboard the Oceanus experienced the sights and sounds of Charleston.

Print culture, unsurprisingly, offered northern abolitionists an early and powerful exposure to the South’s long history of enslavement. Abolitionist travelogues of southern journeys, publications from expatriate southerners, and narratives of and by fugitive slaves informed the North that the South was an alien culture. In his history of slave narratives, Michaël Roy argues that, in some ways, these documents were more powerful than the spoken words of the formerly enslaved. The aurality of an authentic voice, Page 125 →he notes, was not enough to “convert” the North into the ideology of abolition.³² Printed words, which involve at least three senses, provided a means for readers to “feel” words internally and thus encouraged a commitment to moral and political reform.³³ Although the sights and sounds of the formerly enslaved and slavery’s attendant artifacts served as powerful representations of the slave South, the ability to see and (re)hear their words and persons while touching covers and pages made what was temporary all the more permanent.³⁴

Many of the travelers seemed to recognize the authority of printed words. One Oceanus passenger, Dr. J. Allen, found in the Charleston library a monograph, “The Philosophy of Kidnapping,” which he kept as a souvenir.³⁵ This work “contains many curious passages of curious interest, as a commentary upon the humanity of the ‘Slave business.’”³⁶ Another passenger obtained several papers “whose dates was [sic] lost,” containing enactments and regulations regarding the treatment of enslaved people. “£740, for the wilful [sic] murder of a slave—£350 for the unintentional murder of the slave in the ordinary process of whipping—£70 fine for putting out the eye, cutting off the ears, pulling out the tongue, and otherwise maiming a slave.”³⁷ William Spicer found a bill of sale for “a slave who was described as ‘a negro fellow named Simon,’” included a chilling but, thankfully, denied promise: “The seller’s name was Mordecai, and the buyer of ‘the sole use of Simon forever,’ was a Mr. Lazarus.”³⁸ These print artifacts fit squarely with abolitionists’ employment of diverse objects, presenting the South as foreign, brutal, and antithetical to American republicanism and liberty. As Roy indicates, they also serve as durable, visceral objects that can both create and sustain the ideology of abolitionism.

Roy also posits that photographs and sketches added greater authenticity to the slave narrative as developed by abolitionists.³⁹ After 1839, when the culture of photographic mementos blossomed, daguerreotypes quickly became infused into abolition tactics. As with print, owning images made a visualized South more permanent. His point has been recently reinforced by Jessie Morgan-Owens, who examines the use of photography by abolitionists, especially the image of seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams.Morgan-Owens demonstrates that southerners used photography to show off prized slaves in ways that concealed cruelty and sexualization and made their institution appear humane and dignified. Northerners understood their tactics and developed their own slave images replete with chains, scars, and bodies commodified as objects. The case study of Mary Mildred Williams demonstrates this point. The image of the biracial child circulated throughout the Page 126 →North and horrified the mind’s eye at the barbary put upon children and helped transform sympathy into action.⁴⁰ As Mark M. Smith notes, such pictorial practices appealed to the “capitalist, humanitarian modernity,” enflaming the North’s righteous indignation toward slavery.⁴¹

The published and spoken words of runaway slaves, including Frederick Douglass’s, also authenticated the southern soundscapes and imagined landscapes. Douglass’s antebellum accounts of hearing the “dreadful sounds” of slavery anticipated the northerners’ experiences in Charleston.⁴² In slave pens and markets, Douglass writes, a “quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chains rattle simultaneously, your ears are saluted with screams …” and “the crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard was from the woman you saw with the babe.”⁴³ For the northern visitors, these sounds reverberated within the walls of markets and plantation landscapes, where they were both ghastly and unnerving. The recreated and published sounds impressed themselves on northerners’ minds, forming the imagined reality of the South.⁴⁴

It was through their ears and eyes that northerners became accustomed to the sounds of the South and learned to detest them. Smith thoroughly analyzes how the North learned to hear and see what made the South un-American to their sensibilities. During meetings, abolitionist speakers not only displayed various shackles and chains but also shook them, echoing the clanking of bondage. During a gathering in Boston, for example, an abolitionist speaker held up chains, “its clankings touched a cord, and the City Hall was thunderous with emotion.”⁴⁵ In print and speech, northerners created a multisensory impression of the South and the institution of slavery. However, the South and slavery were not merely a region of brutal cacophony—they were simultaneously silent and noisy, and chains assisted in this portrayal. The silence of over four million enslaved people “echoed loudly” in northern ears, pressing reformers to maintain a “moral and republican obligation” to combat slavery.⁴⁶

Inside this slave mart, one Oceanus passenger “secured a pair of manacles, which had been in use in one of the slave-pens.”⁴⁷ For him, those devices might very well have held meaning created by abolitionist texts and performance. Manacles and other enslaving implements, including muzzles and collars, helped stoke indignation, dread, and sympathy from northerners when displayed by abolitionists. Typically made of wrought iron, these heavy manacles, placed on various body parts such as necks and ankles, bound multiple enslaved people together to prevent escape. On the body, these devices were rough and burdensome, leaving bruises, scars, and sometimes Page 127 →infections. Although these iron devices were shocking in themselves, lecture circuit speakers used sensorial and sometimes exaggerated methods to further generate within the northern imagination the horrors of slavery.⁴⁸

The chains placed on radical abolitionist John Brown after his failed raid at Harper’s Ferry made rounds throughout the North, becoming a dual symbol of slavery’s potential future effects on all of humankind and of slavery’s demise if abolitionists acted. Some time after the appearance of Brown’s chains in Boston, Henry Ward Beecher wielded them in a heated 1859 sermon, denouncing the South for its institution and the North for its complicity and calling Brown a God-fearing humanitarian martyr for radical abolitionism.⁴⁹ Beecher, “in the frenzy of eloquence,” grabbed the “clanking irons and threw them violently onto the stage” and stamped down on them repeatedly. Reports of the moment claimed this action “awakened a sentiment in his vast audience.”⁵⁰ The sight of slavery’s bindings being crushed by the abolition’s heel became a profound trifecta of the sight, sound, and touch for northern indignation. The presence of shackles that bound a white man possibly presented seductive speculation that many in the crowd viewed the power that shackled John Brown as their future enslavement if the South ultimately prevailed. These powerful sensory experiences encouraged abolitionists to silence the markets, plantations, and the instruments of bondage before the war and later to heal the wounds each caused upon human flesh and the nation.⁵¹

Page 128 →Although artifacts from Charleston’s slave marts invoked provocative experiences of abolitionist culture and imagination, this was not the first time several of Oceanus’s passengers found themselves in such a building. Beecher’s freedom auctions had allowed these travelers to imaginatively enter slave markets and auction blocks. Beecher created these dramatic events from his experiences watching actual slave auctions in northern Kentucky. Congregants participated in these auctions, bidding to secure the freedom of actors representing enslaved people. According to Applegate, for the northern audience, “it was as if they were witnessing a live slave auction, and they were the saviors.”⁵²

Encouraging his flock to imagine an absent enslaved person, Beecher first called for his congregation to see themselves and their neighbors as enslaved. He asked, “Could logic frame an argument strong enough to satisfy you that you ought not to try to escape? Should it not burn in your veins?”⁵³ With these words, Beecher aurally transformed spiritual language into physical sensation. For his Christian audience, his reference to fiery sensation held both negative and positive associations. On the one hand, his words invoked hell’s flames and eternal condemnation. On the other hand, they summoned the sensation of spiritual cleansing and the affirmation of God’s blessing through the spiritual freedom from sin. By imagining themselves as enslaved people, antebellum white congregants now had the fiery feel of those who sought physical freedom; through references to fire, freedom became both spiritual and physical. Beecher next led his congregation to visually imagine an enslaved person having the appearance of a daughter, mother, wife, or sister.⁵⁴ This exercise brought the issue of slavery closer to human perception, as one would hear the sounds and the physical descriptions of a loved one seen not only as property but also as flesh to satisfy the enslavers’ sexual desires and as people placed in perpetual bondage.⁵⁵ Beecher’s aural use of sexually charged language, typically shouted to condemn sins such as lust and adultery inside church buildings, would have shocked the audience’s nineteenth-century sensibilities by loudly expressing subject matter usually shunned by polite classes.⁵⁶ Having brought the issue forth in full force, Beecher ushered in more fantastic emotions and feelings, as his audience now sensorially envisioned enslaving men sexually assaulting loved ones.

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When a formerly enslaved person was present, Beecher heightened his efforts to use sensory experience to bring slavery uncomfortably close to home. In one instance, Beecher pressed his congregation to look into the eyes of an enslaved woman to see if she could “read ‘Liberty’ in your eyes.”⁵⁷ With this instruction, Beecher essentially turned the tables on his congregation, making them feel the gaze of the enslaved person, an experience that reversed the expected power structures. In the antebellum era, the experience of being looked upon, of being captured in someone’s gaze, generated the sensation of being controlled as one imagined the pressing touch of another’s eyes upon them.⁵⁸ By being gazed upon by an enslaved person, the white congregation perceived the sensations of control. For these northern Christians, the evils of slavery were now more than words heard or read and images seen; they were vividly felt, even transformative, sensations. Just as white eyes had gazed on enslaved people to stimulate specific behaviors, especially those of obedience, the gaze of the enslaved now pushed the white congregants to act.⁵⁹

Beecher himself took on a visual and oral–aural role in these performances by replicating the vernacular language, accents, and loud voices of Page 130 →the auctioneers he had witnessed in Kentucky.⁶⁰ He seems to have been a capable actor. Beecher’s son would later write that his father made the freedom auctions so lifelike that he “would have made a capital auctioneer.”⁶¹ More important, his play acting caused a “perfect frenzy” among the audience as his performance became all too real. Beecher created a scene of “sobbing, hysterical women, with shining-eyes,” and “trembling-handed men.”⁶²

The aural, visual, and tactile experiences that Beecher generated made real the printed accounts his congregations would have read. Primary sources from the time of the freedom auctions include the memoirs of runaway slaves and those who were kidnapped into slavery, such as Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup. These writers provided scenes where auctioneers presented “properly trained” slaves before a crowd.⁶³ The invasive physical inspections performed on the enslaved were akin to a “jockey [examining] a horse,” as men and women were stripped, poked, and prodded. Potential buyers often performed private, erotic examinations on women, driving prices higher.⁶⁴ White witness accounts reveal how traders washed, scented, and “oiled” enslaved men and women to improve their appearance and highlight muscle tone, female curvature, and health.⁶⁵ Anne C. Bailey’s recent research supports these accounts. She documents how buyers, often with unwashed hands, would physically touch and grope female slaves, especially their hips, to feel their breeding potential. They also checked mouths for disease and tooth decay.⁶⁶

As he became more experienced with his freedom auctions, Beecher went further with haptics. To strengthen his congregation’s abolitionist convictions, he would shout, “Christ stretched forth his hand and the sick were restored to health; will you stretch forth your hands and give that without which is of little worth? Let the plate be passed and we shall see.”⁶⁷ In reaction, the people hurriedly grabbed cash, banknotes, and jewels. Through the tactile actions of reaching out, grabbing valuables, and putting them into a collection plate, the people physically redeemed the slaves.⁶⁸ Christ, as the New Testament describes, placed his hands on the head or over their eyes, at times using earthy objects such as clay to restore the afflicted from physical and spiritual ailments. The Plymouth Church congregants used their hands and money, like clay, to redeem people, giving political health to those physically ill from slavery and freeing them from the sins of their oppressors. Emancipation was now more than something said and heard in church, secular meetings, or Congress. It was more than what was read in print. It was now something physically enacted through the senses.

Page 131 →Beecher was especially skilled at creating these kinds of powerful experiences. When a congregant threw in her gold ring to help purchase a young girl’s freedom, Beecher placed the ring on the girl’s finger, proclaiming, “With this ring, I wed you to freedom,” and telling her to “remember that this is your freedom ring.”⁶⁹ With this small golden ring, he bound the girl to her eternal “bride-groom”: freedom. Christianity often portrays binding as a sign of a covenant with God, a promise that enables eternal liberty at the end of earthly life. Scholars of touch often view this sort of binding as a mechanism of control that uses both pain and pleasure to ensure spiritual freedom.⁷⁰ Beecher, however, asserted that there was no pain in this binding, only the gentle sensation of freedom. He later commissioned a painting depicting this young girl gazing upon this small binding symbol in a relaxed, thus free, posture and expression. The ring’s golden color and smooth surface contrast the roughness of the large, black shackles. The ring feels comforting and tender, and its color and texture promise peace and safety.⁷¹

Not everyone approved of Beecher’s auctions. Newspapers, especially those with antiabolitionist leanings, accused him of insincerity and claimed he used the freedom auctions to foment war between the states. Modern scholarship has also critiqued Beecher, arguing that the auctions created a theatrics of northern white supremacy. For these scholars, Beecher and his congregation offered just another version of slave markets because they appropriated Black bodies for profit. There was no actual freedom for those auctioned in the Plymouth Church, only a new form of white oppression. Others have noted that Beecher reinforced racist associations of skin color and human value, pointing out that most of the actors portraying enslaved people in the church were biracial and looked more white than Black. Applegate responds to these critiques by stating that Beecher used people with white features to appeal to the sensibilities of his congregation. To persuade even his fellow abolitionists to feel genuine kinship with the enslaved, Beecher first had to make them familiar. Only then could his congregants recognize Black people as fellow citizens.⁷²

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These critiques notwithstanding, Beecher’s freedom auctions were moving and effective. They caused audiences not only to donate money but also to cry and clap. These actions, as well as the physical space of the Plymouth Church, enhanced the congregants’ experiential religious perceptions and the meanings they drew from them. Churches are, of course, designed as places for spiritual salvation through physical gatherings. The freedom auctions extended this role and made Plymouth Church a place for a new kind of experienced redemption.⁷³ Enthusiastic clapping and the church’s vibrant acoustics created thunderous booms, seemingly from heaven. In the Bible, thunder carries multiple meanings. It signals destruction; reveals God’s wrath; announces a cleansing rain; and, along with angelic trumpets, Page 133 →proclaims the coming of Christ. During the freedom auctions, the clapping-thunders also created multiple associations. It indicated God’s wrath for the sin of slavery, pushing the nation to free itself from divine displeasure. It also suggested God’s pleasure as the congregations freed another person from bondage and cleansed the nation in preparation of Christ’s reign.⁷⁴

Crying, too, has multifaceted meanings within Christianity. It can signify sincerity, grief, celebration, angst, and the catharsis of spiritual redemption. Churchgoers at Beecher’s freedom auctions cried out in grief and indignation when they saw an enslaved person, especially when Beecher invited them to see their female loved ones in an enslaved woman. They also cried in shame at the very existence of slavery. During a successful auction, their tears transformed into tears of celebration, happiness, and cleansing. Newspapers tellingly described the tears and the clapping as “rapturous.”⁷⁵ The theologically charged language invokes the culmination of God’s wrath upon earth to destroy sin and the redemption of believers rewarded with a sinfree world.⁷⁶

Several historians have recently connected sensory experience, especially smell and sight, to the slave trade. In his haunting investigation of slave markets, Walter Johnson notes how auctioneers rubbed “sweet oil” over enslaved faces as they prepared them for sale. Scent, cleanliness, and appearance, Johnson argues, played critical roles in the purchasing decisions of enslavers who saw the clean, healthy, proper looking, and smelling enslaved individuals as fitting representations of their plantations.⁷⁷ Andrew Kettler sees the control of an enslaved person’s odor as a way of asserting white paternal rights over the enslaved body by disguising signs of disease and falsely presenting a clean, bright body ready for labor.⁷⁸ Slave traders and auctioneers played to their customers biases and expectations. In her examination into the largest slave auction in American history, held in the Georgia Sea Islands in 1859, Anne C. Bailey records how the auctioneer had to “repeatedly reassure the boisterous buyers that there was no attempt at subterfuge,” regarding concerns raised over the possibility of a sick enslaved presented as healthy.⁷⁹ These modern studies—as well as Mark M. Smith’s investigation of the southern soundscape of bells, shackles, noise ordinances and whistling, and Erin Dwyer’s timely book on slavery and fear—all shed light on how Beecher’s performances influenced the imaginations of Plymouth Church’s congregants and defined the Charleston that the Oceanus passengers discovered in 1865.⁸⁰

Even six years after the last freedom auction, Beecher’s imagined slave mart ingrained an experiential bias in the postbellum visitors to Charleston. Only now, the pens were empty of enslaved bodies, the instruments of Page 134 →torture and control lay useless, even dead, and the imagined echoes of suffering had faded away. As with Charleston, so went the South and the nation. The manacles taken north clanked hollowly before becoming encased in museum displays to teach future generations that abolitionists and the Union army had defeated slavery. In the empty slave mart, the passengers of the Oceanus found their abolitionist work validated. Reading the Oceanus account, one discovers that their imaginative antebellum experiences of slavery’s selling place determined their perceptions inside a real one. It was as if they had already entered such spaces, fighting against their inhuman purposes. They could now carry home evidence of their years-long struggle.

For some visitors, John Calhoun’s vandalized tomb became the primary symbol of slavery’s legacy. Quoting from a fellow passenger, Reverend Theodore Cuyler offered a summation of visiting the grave site. Beecher, William Lloyd Garrison, British abolitionist George H. Thompson, and others gathered around the grave in St. Philip’s cemetery, which Cuyler describes as “a plain brick oblong tomb, covered with a marble slab, and bearing the single word ‘Calhoun.’”⁸¹ Garrison remarked that the name, synonymous with slavery, “is decayed worse than his moldering body; the one may have a resurrection, the other never!” Noticing that several Union shells had burst around the tomb, Garrison added, “Did none of the bones in the sepulcher rattle” on hearing the shells explode “at the grave’s mouth?”⁸² Garrison envisioned the demise of Calhoun’s body, once standing loud and bold, now shaking in its grave because of northern armaments.⁸³ Beecher declared the marble slab as “the record of the rebellion,” bearing the “great crop of war” from “the dragon-toothed doctrines that were sown by the hands of that dangerous man.” He recalled how Calhoun’s words held significant “effect upon the minds of young men.”⁸⁴

Some northerners, however, did more than philosophize over the tomb’s meanings. They wished to take the marble slab. When doing so proved impractical, they desecrated the grave marker by chipping away fragments that they kept as mementos. K. Stephen Prince argues that these actions provide an apt metaphor for the South’s demise, a point he supports by citing northern journalist Sidney Andrews: “‘Down in the churchyard … is a grave which every stranger is curious to see’”; this grave “‘of the father of the Rebellion,” Andrews notes, “had seen better days.’” A site guarded during the war and considered a “holy spot” now, like the city, lay in ruins. “Scavengers had even broken off pieces of the great statesman’s grave for keepsakes.”⁸⁵ For Prince, the grave “damaged and desecrated … once a revered monument to the intellectual champion of slavery and state’s rights—lay in ruin.”⁸⁶

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The destruction of Calhoun’s grave did not please Theodore Tilton and Henry Ward Beecher. Tilton found it disturbing. Instead of damaging the stone further, he chose to pluck “some clover growing near the ruins of Institute Hall.”⁸⁷ Beecher offered his opinion on why people wanted a piece of the grave site. Standing before Calhoun’s “monument, brooding over his dust,” he called the marble a “record of rebellion,” pointing to the South’s vain hope of preserving the Confederacy and Calhoun by chiseling his name into stone, resulting in “a ruined, shattered city, demoralized and destroyed.” Now the tomb resembled the city as “vandal hands were beginning to chip off the marble to bring back as memorials.”⁸⁸ These actions puzzled Beecher: “What on earth should a man want a memorial of Calhoun for? And if one wanted it, what must be the measure of that want that would lead him to desecrate a grave, and break down gravestones, that he might have something to put on his mantle-piece, or on his cabinet shelf?” Beecher answered his own question: it was so these northern vandals could say, “‘I stole that from the grave of Calhoun.’”⁸⁹ Beecher felt that the desecration fulfilled a petty, prideful, and consumerist need to show off an unnecessary souvenir. The end of slavery and the destruction of Charleston should have been enough.⁹⁰

Page 136 →It may also be that the northern hands that chipped these pieces away saw in this action the experiential memory of reclaiming their power from Calhoun, tangibly proving that they no longer had to fear him. The northerners reconstructed the lost sense of order destroyed by—ironically—breaking down Calhoun’s grave, placing the power it represented tangibly under their control, and making the feared past a harmless display that announced the presence of a freer postbellum stability and order.

A performance of mirthful music blossomed before the eyes and ears of Garrison, Tilton, Beecher, and Thompson, ending these discussions at Calhoun’s grave. As Carl Schulz notes, the sight and sound of Black children singing “‘John Brown’s Body’ within earshot” of the remains “perfectly encapsulated” Calhoun’s South as “dead and gone.”⁹¹ The marble fragments, representative of slavery’s intellectual champion, became artifacts that could be handled, shared, and preserved in a private home or museum. Like the manacles, the fragments provided physical, tactile evidence that slavery sat dead and silent before them. Those who took them could see and feel the demise of slavery, just as Beecher and his companions could hear and see it in the children’s song. Slavery and Calhoun had been encased in polished white marble, the gravesite symbolizing the imagined grandeur of the South’s institution even after its creator’s death. Now chipped away and defenseless, transformed into rough, shapeless pieces, it mocked the man, his institution, and the South, allowing Calhoun’s opponents to officially pronounce slavery as “dead and gone,” as its most fervent advocate. Calhoun’s ghost no longer loomed over them.⁹²

Michael Emett is a full-time lecturer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is the author of several book reviews and has presented internationally on topics ranging from special treasury agents in Port Royal, South Carolina, to Robert Anderson and catharsis over Fort Sumter. Focusing on the history of the United States up to 1877, he specializes in the History of Experiences. He also volunteers at Fort Sumter National Park.