The “Slave Power” Conspiracy

ED: Welcome to the show. I’m Ed Ayers, and I’m here with Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey, Ed.

ED: And Brian Balogh.

BRIAN: Hey there.

ED: In 1864, a man named John Smith Dye published a book called The Adder’s Den. And it was something of a conspiracy theorist manifesto, and it centered on what 19th century Americans called “the slave power.” What Dye, a Northern Republican, meant by “slave power” was this– a conspiracy of Southern slaveholders was controlling the entire US government by blackmail and murder.

JESSE WALKER: So for example, in 1841, William Henry Harrison died. He was the first president to die in office.

ED: This is Jesse Walker, author of a book on conspiracy thinking called The United States of Paranoia.

JESSE WALKER: According to Dye, this happened because he told John Calhoun that he wasn’t sure he was willing to annex Texas, which the Southerners wanted to add to the Union as a slave state. And when he died of pneumonia right after that, Dye says, no, no, no. It was actually arsenic.

ED: That was 1841. Nine years later, another president died in office. That was Zachary Taylor. Like Harrison, Taylor was a Whig. And like Harrison, Taylor resisted the expansion of slavery in the American Southwest. So, Dye concluded, it was only logical that Taylor, like Harrison before him, had been poisoned by the slave power.

Now, this account of the slave power’s machinations got more elaborate from there. For instance, there was this description of the attempt on the life of President-elect James Buchanan.

JESSE WALKER: According to Dye, on February 23, 1857, agents of the slave power poisoned all the bowls containing lump sugar at the National Hotel in Washington, DC.

ED: The idea here was that Northerners drank tea, while Southerners drank coffee. People who drink tea, according to Dye, use lump sugar, while people who drink coffee use pulverized sugar. So by poisoning only the lump sugar, the slave power agents could wipe out the tea-drinking Northerners, including Buchanan, while leaving the coffee-drinking Southerners unharmed.

JESSE WALKER: And so when Buchanan drank the tea and then got very sick and barely survived, Dye wrote that he was intimidated by the attempted assassination, and quote, “Became more than ever the tool of the slave power.”

ED: That was the theory. In fact, Buchanan wasn’t even in DC on the day of the alleged sugar attack. And there’s no evidence that Harrison or Taylor were poisoned either. But still, The Adder’s Den was a huge hit.

JESSE WALKER: The New York Times gave it a good review. The Chicago Tribune excerpted it. Republican papers in a bunch of cities around Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York praised it. Even The Easton Express, which was a Democratic paper in Pennsylvania, called it, quote, “The most powerful book of this century.”

ED: What was the appeal? Dye’s book had tapped a vein of thinking that was already widespread in the North. For decades, Northerners had been speculating that the slave power had set its sights on the White House.

JESSE WALKER: When Lincoln took office as president, he received letters from ordinary citizens telling him, watch what you eat. Watch what you drink. They poisoned Taylor. They poisoned Harrison. They could poison you too.

MALE SPEAKER: Generals Harrison and Taylor came to their sudden and lamentable ends by subtle poisons.

MALE SPEAKER: General Harrison lived but a short time after he was installed in office. General Taylor lived but a short time after he took his seat. You, sir, be careful at the king’s table what meat and drink you take.

ED: Although the facts in the letters were off, their warnings were prescient. Lincoln was ultimately assassinated, and by a Southern, pro-slavery conspiracy. The plan was to restore the Confederacy by killing Lincoln and his successors, decapitating the federal government. After decades of conspiratorial thinking, a real conspiracy had finally come to fruition.

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